Normans in Sicily books by John Julius Norwich (#1, #2)
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Overview: John Julius Norwich was born in 1929. He joined the British Foreign Service after studying French and Russian at Oxford, and left the service in 1964 to become a writer. He has also worked extensively in radio and television, hosting the popular BBC radio panel game My Word! for several years, and writing and presenting historical documentaries. His many books include an acclaimed Byzantium trilogy.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Educational
#1 The Normans in the South, 1016-1130
This book is about the ‘other’ Norman Conquest. It is the story of Robert Guiscard, perhaps the most extraordinary European adventurer between Caesar and Napoleon. In one year, 1084, he had both the Eastern and Western Emperors retreating before him and one of the most formidable of medieval Popes in his power. It is also the story of his brother Roger, thanks to whom he conquered Sicily from the Saracens; and of Roger’s descendants, notably his son Roger 11, who converted his father’s achievement into a cosmopolitan and cultivated kingdom whose surviving monuments still dazzle us today.
The Normans in the South is the first of two volumes that recount the dazzling story of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. The second volume The Kingdom of the Sun is also being reissued in Faber Finds.
‘Diligence, narrative skill, and a scholarship fired by enthusiasm’ Lord Kinross, Sunday Telegraph
‘I found the book very enjoyable indeed. It is beautifully written.’ Nancy Mitford
#2 The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130-1194
There were two Norman Conquests. John Julius Norwich is the consummate historian of the ‘other’ one: the conquest of Sicily.
When on Christmas Day 1130 Roger de Hauteville was crowned first King of Sicily, the island entered a golden age. Norman and Italian, Greek and Arab, Lombard, Englishman and Jew all contributed to a culture that was as brilliant as it was cosmopolitan; and to an atmosphere of racial and religious toleration unparalleled in Europe. But sixty-four years later, to the day, the sun set on the Sicilian Kingdom. In this second volume of his history (The Normans in the South 1016-1130 is also in Faber Finds) Norwich describes the reigns of the grotesquely misnamed William the Bad and the Good and the bastard Tancred. We read, too, of St Bernard, magnetic but insufferable; of Adrian IV, the only English Pope; of Richard the Lionheart (behaving abominably in Messina); and other notables.
This scintillating narrative history is also a superb traveller’s guide, listing every Norman building extant on Sicily.
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