It must be emphasized at the outset that the history of this Norman kingdom was brief. It had two rulers of genius, Roger II, 1130–54, and his grandson Frederick II, 1198–1250, separated by the reigns of William the Bad and William the Good,--contemporaries of Henry II of England, and neither so bad nor so good as their names might lead us to suppose,--Tancred of Lecce and his son William III, and Constance, Roger’s daughter and Frederick’s mother, wife of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI. It is usual to consider the Norman period as closing with the deposition of William III in 1194 and to class Constance and Frederick II with the Hohenstaufen. In the case of Constance there seems to be no possible reason for this, for she was as Norman as any of her predecessors and issued documents in her own name throughout the remaining three years of her husband’s life and during the few months of 1197–98 by which she survived him. With their son Frederick II, half Norman and half Hohenstaufen, the question is perhaps even, and the science of genetics has not yet advanced far enough to enable us to classify and trace to their source the dominant and the recessive elements in his inheritance. No one, however, can study him at close range without discovering marked affinities with his Norman predecessors, notably the second Roger, and the whole trend of recent investigation goes to show that, in the field of government as in that of culture, his policy is a continuation of the work of the Norman kings, from whom much of his legislation is directly derived. Half Norman by birth, Frederick was preponderantly Norman in his political heritage. It was in Sicily that he grew up and began to rule, and in Sicily that he did his really constructive work. To judge him as a Hohenstaufen is only less misleading than to judge him as a German king, for the centre and aim of his policy lay in the Mediterranean. In Frederick’s sons, legitimate and illegitimate, the Norman strain is still further attenuated, and as they had no real opportunity to continue their father’s work, it matters little whether we call them Normans or Hohenstaufen. The coming of Charles of Anjou ends this epoch, and his victory at Tagliacozzo in 1268 seals the fate of the dynasty. We may, if we choose, carry the Norman period to this point; for all real purposes it ends with the death of Frederick in 1250. The preceding one hundred and twenty years embrace the real life-history of the Norman kingdom. Brief as this is, it is too long for a single lecture, and we must limit ourselves to Roger and the two Williams, touching on the developments of the thirteenth century only in the most incidental fashion.