The Saljuqs were now established as the champions and defenders of the Baghdad Khalifate. Under Tughril’s successor, Alp Arslan, they came into direct conflict with both the Fatimids and the Greeks. By 457 (= A.D. 1068) they were in possession of Georgia and Armenia, and had become a very serious and pressing menace to the Byzantine Empire. A few years later the Emperor Romanus IV. was totally defeated by them in 460 (= A.D. 1071), and all Asia Minor lay open to the Turks, though the Saljuq position there was insecure until they took Antioch from the Greeks. Alp Arslan was succeeded by Malah Shah who, in the course of 467-477 (= A.D. 1074-1084) established the Saljuq power in Asia Minor, and in 469 conquered Jerusalem from the Fatimids, so that practically the Saljuq Sultan, theoretically the Commander-in-Chief serving under the Khalif of Baghdad, was the master of all Western Asia. This brings us to the close of the second period and to the end of the golden age of the Fatimids. Meanwhile in the West the Normans, destined to be the protagonists of the Saljuq Turks, were becoming a leading power in another way. In 1038 we find them serving in Sicily, in 1040 they were conquering Apulia, and soon afterwards they began minor encroachments on the Byzantine Empire. Their chief settlement, Normandy, dates from 911, and it is significant that this was one year after the foundation of the Abbey of Cluny, from which proceeded a religious reformation which found its warmest supporters in the Normans. When Pope Leo IX. made an expedition against the Normans in Apulia and was defeated by them, his greatest surprise came in finding his victorious enemies ready to pay him a reverent loyalty far beyond anything he had previously experienced. The recently converted Normans were no less definite in their orthodoxy as Christians than the recently converted Saljuqs in their orthodoxy as Muslims.