With the passing of Robert Guiscard the half-century of Norman conquest is practically at an end, to be followed by another half-century of rivalry and consolidation, until Roger II united all the Norman conquests under a single ruler and took the title of king in 1130, just a hundred years after the foundation of the first Norman principality at Aversa. Guiscard’s lands and title of duke passed to his son Roger, generally called Roger Borsa to distinguish him from his uncle and cousin of the same name. The Norman possessions in Calabria and the recent acquisitions in Sicily remained in the hands of Guiscard’s brother Count Roger, nominally a vassal of the duke of Apulia, while the northern principality of Capua kept its independence, to be subsequently exchanged for feudal vassalage. Roger of Apulia, however, was a weak ruler, in spite of the good will of the church and his uncle’s support, and the revolt of his brother Bohemond and the Apulian barons threatened the land with feudal disintegration. Want of governance was likewise writ large over the reign of his son William, who succeeded as duke in 1111 and ruled till 1127. Guiscard’s real successor as a political and military leader was his brother Roger, conqueror and organizer of Sicily and founder of a state which his more famous son turned into a kingdom. Once master of Calabria, Count Roger had begun to cast longing eyes beyond the Straits of Messina at the rich island which has in all ages proved a temptation to the rulers of the south. No member of the house of Hauteville, their panegyrist tells us, ever saw a neighbor’s lands without wanting them for himself, and in this case there was profit for the soul as well as for the body if the count could “win back to the worship of the true God a land given over to infidelity, and administer temporally for the divine service the fruits and rents usurped by a race unmindful of God.”[65] The language is that of Geoffrey Malaterra; the excuse meets us throughout the world’s history--six centuries earlier when Clovis bore it ill that the Arian Visigoths should possess a fair portion of Gaul which might become his, six centuries later when Emmanuel Downing thought it sin to tolerate the devil-worship of the Narragansetts “if upon a Just warre the Lord should deliver them” to be exchanged for the “gaynefull pilladge” of negro slaves;[66] nor is the doctrine without advocates in our own day. We may think of the conquest of Sicily as a sort of crusade before the Crusades, decreed by no church council and spread abroad by no preaching or privileges, but conceived and executed by Norman enterprise and daring. Like the greater crusades in the East, it profited by the disunion of the Moslem; like them, too, it did not scruple to make alliances with the infidel and to leave him in peaceful cultivation of his lands when all was over.