At his death in 1101 Roger I left behind him two sons, Simon and Roger, under the regency of their mother Adelaide. Four years later Simon died, leaving as the undisputed heir of the Sicilian and Calabrian dominions the ten-year-old Roger II, who at the age of sixteen took personal control of the government. During the regency the capital had crossed the Straits of Messina from the old Norman headquarters in the Calabrian hills at Mileto, where Roger I lay buried; henceforth it was fixed at Palermo, fit centre for a Mediterranean state. When his cousin William died, Roger II was quick to seize the Apulian inheritance, which he had to vindicate in the field not only against the revolted barons but against the Pope, anxious to prevent at all cost the consolidation of the Norman possessions in the hands of a single ruler. Securing his investiture with Apulia from Pope Honorius II in 1128, Roger two years later took advantage of the disputed election to the Papacy to obtain from Anacletus II the dignity of king; and on Christmas Day, 1130, he was crowned and anointed at Palermo, taking henceforth the title “by the grace of God king of Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria, help and shield of the Christians, heir and son of the great Count Roger.” What this kingdom was to mean in the history and culture of Europe we shall consider in the next lecture. * * * * * Meanwhile, in order to complete our survey of the deeds of the Normans in the south, we must take some notice of the part they played in the Crusades and in the Latin East. A movement which comprised the whole of western Europe, and even made Jerusalem-farers out of their kinsmen of the Scandinavian north, could not help affecting a people such as the Normans, who had already served a long apprenticeship as pilgrims to distant shrines and as soldiers of the cross in Spain and Sicily. Three Norman prelates were present at Clermont in 1095 when Pope Urban fired the Latin world with the cry _Dieu le veut_, and they carried back to Normandy the council’s decrees and the news of the holy war. The crusade does not, however, seem to have had any special preachers in Normandy, where we hear of no such scenes as accompanied the fiery progress of Peter the Hermit through Lorraine and the Rhineland, and of none of the popular movements which sent men to their death under Peter’s leadership in the Danube valley and beyond the Bosporus. Pioneers and men-at-arms rather than enthusiasts and martyrs, the Normans kept their heads when Europe was seething with the new adventure, and the combined band of Normans, Bretons, and English which set forth in September, 1096, does not appear to have been very large. At its head, however, rode the duke of Normandy, Robert Curthose, called by his contemporaries ‘the soft duke,’ knightly, kind-hearted, and easy-going, incapable of refusing a favor to any one, under whom the good peace of the Conqueror’s time had given way to general