Normans in Sicily

It has been a long time since my last visit to the Cloisters in NY. It is an oasis of medieval history, strangely out of place on the northern end of Manhattan. The money of John D. Rockefeller, architecture of Charles Collens, and the medieval artifacts of sculptor, collector George Bernard create a unique setting. There is a romance of childhood stories of knights and kings and a contemplative setting of nature and a reconstructed monastery. Tapestries on the walls include this one of King Arthur from a series of Nine Heroes.

King Arthur (detail from Nine Heroes Tapestries) circa 1400 South Netherlandish

My coin today is a small AE follaro which is interesting also for its juxtaposition of languages and cultures. It is a coin of a Norman King, from northwestern France, in Sicily with both Latin and Arabic legends. It even has a connection to Richard the Lionheart and King Arthur.

"By the time that the Normans began to arrive, the Muslims had controlled Sicily for nearly two centuries. Sicily was, in fact, a thoroughly Muslim island, with a spoken language much like the Semitic tongue of Malta."
-Fitzwilliam Museum

The Normans were Viking settlers in 911, allowed by the French king to settle in exchange for protection from other invaders. The words "Norman" and "Normandy" both deriving from "Northmen". The English and Normans were joined by marriage when Æthelred the Unready married Emma of Normandy. When I was in Normandy in 2019, along with the beaches, war memorials and war museums, I visited the Bayeaux Museum which displays a long tapestry depicting the Norman conquest of England by the Duke of Normandy (aka William the Conqueror).

Another conquering Norman nobleman, Roger I, headed to Italy and formed the Kingdom of Sicily from Apulia, Sicily and Malta. His great, great, grandson was Tancred - king of Sicily which takes us to my unassuming coin for today:

Tancred, King of Sicily, reigned 1189-1194, Æ Follaro

Obv: +ROGERIVS:; in center, REX; dots above and below

Rev: Arabic (Kufic) legend on two lines - المالك تنقرير (al-malik Tanqrir; the King, Tancred)

Note: there are a lot of Roger's in this story - the one mentioned on the reverse of this coin is the Roger, son of Tancred who was co-ruler with Tancred and king Roger III 1192 to 24-Dec-1193.

Tancred has quite a story, that starts as the bastard son of Duke Roger of Apulia with mistress Emma of Lecce (or perhaps her sister), and from there I'll only offer a brief glimpse. Tancred was indeed “small but fierce,” and his enemies made the most of the former while his surviving acts testify to the latter. He wrestled legitimacy from a stacked deck, kept Sicily independent for five hard years in the face of Angevin, French, and Imperial pressure. And then there is the tale of Arthur's sword, Excalibur....

Bastard Son of Duke Roger of Apulia

Born around 1138, Tancred was the illegitimate grandson of Roger II, the monarch who welded a multicultural Mediterranean empire out of Sicily and southern Italy. His illegitimacy mattered politically; yet he belonged to the Hauteville bloodline and to the Lecce comital house through his mother’s family. A royal charter of May 1190 shows at minimum a close maternal tie to the Lecce clan and leaving open whether Emma herself or her sister bore him.

Chalandon states that legends surrounding King Tancred's mother, in which she is variously called "Blanche, Béatrice et Sibille", were first fabricated in the mid-16th century.  Hugo Falcandus records that "Tancred and William, the sons of Duke Roger" were born "by a nobly born mother".  Her correct parentage is confirmed by a charter dated May 1190 under which her son "Tancredus…rex Sicilie, ducatus Apulie" transferred Casale Surbo near Lecce to "Emma…abbatissa monasterii Sancti Iohannis monialium Liceii dilecte matertera…nostra", which suggests that his mother was Emma´s sister and so the daughter of Accardo Conte di Lecce.
-Charles Cawley, 2006-2021, FMG, C. Kings of Sicily 1130-1198

Tancred with Sibylla of Acerra, had two sons and four daughters:

• Roger (duke of Apulia; co‑king 1192 until he died 24 Dec 1193).

• William III (king in 1194).

• Albiria (also found as Elvira/Albinia/Albidia/Blanche), Tancred’s eldest daughter; married Walter III of Brienne; later remarriages attested.

• Constance, m. Pietro Ziani, doge of Venice.

• Valdrada, m. Jacopo Tiepolo, doge of Venice.

• Medania (also “Mandonia” in some sources), documented in Venetian records (e.g., mentioned as contessa in 1253; made a will in 1256).

A Palace Uprising

He first steps onto the political stage in 1161, when he joined his uncle Simon in a violent palace rising in Palermo against King William I (The Bad). The revolt collapsed; Tancred accepted exile (later writers place him at Constantinople, but contemporary sources simply imply banishment). He was back in favor under William II (The Good) and by the 1170s-80s was a key military leader.

Two coins of William II "The Good":

Italian States, Sicilia (Sicily, Kingdom). William II Æ Follaro. Messina mint, 1166-1185. (Right photo) Kufic legend in three lines: 'al-malik Ghulyālim al-thani' (King William the Second); Kufic legend in margin: 'duriba bi-amr al-malik al-mu'azzam al-musta'izz billah' (was minted by order of the king, glorious and powerful through God) /(left photo) ⧾ OPERATA IN VRBE MESSANE, • REX W SCOS in three lines. NCS 366; MEC 401-9; MIR 38; Spahr 117.

Kingdom of Sicily, William II, "the Good", 1166-1189, Trifollaro (Bronze, 24mm, 9.08g, 12h), Second Coinage, Messina

Obv: Lion's mask facing slightly to left

Rev: Palm tree with dates

War with Alexandria

Sicily’s navy made brief war on Alexandria in 1174, retreating within days - an opportunistic thrust during the fluid politics of Ayyubid Egypt. Scholarly syntheses document the operation; attributions of personal command to Tancred circulate in later narratives, often pairing him with Admiral Margaritus of Brindisi, but the safest claim is that a Sicilian armada struck and quickly withdrew.

A Contested Succession

When William II died heir-less in 1189, the crown should, by strict legitimacy, have passed to Constance (Roger II’s daughter) and her husband Henry VI. Sicilian officials instead raised Tancred, a seasoned magnate with deep local support, and he was crowned early 1190. Calling this a “coup” oversimplifies it; it was a classic twelfth‑century contested succession, pitting a locally backed candidate against a dynastic heir with imperial muscle.

The Third Crusade in Sicily

In October 1190, Richard I seized the Messina to force terms, while Philip II glowered alongside. The resulting diplomacy, the October 1190 settlement, and subsequently a definitive Treaty of Messina in March 1191, saw Richard and Philip recognize Tancred as king. Joan, Richard’s sister and William II’s widow, received compensation for her dower; Richard proclaimed Arthur of Brittany his heir and agreed that Arthur would marry one of Tancred’s daughters when of age. Relations, though born of coercion, warmed.

Excalibur

It’s in this context that the famous sword appears. Roger of Howden records that Richard I the "Lionheart" (8 September 1157 - 6 April 1199) gave King Arthur's sword, Caliburn (Excalibur), to Tancred. Archer’s early twentieth‑century anthology of third‑crusade texts transmits the scene and adds that Tancred reciprocated; the exchange fits the political logic of 1191, formal recognition sealed by conspicuous gifts.

"On the other hand the king of England gave Tancred that best of swords which the Britons call Caliburne (or Excalibur, as it is called in the "Idylls of the King"), formerly the sword of Arthur, once the noble king of England. Moreover king Tancred gave the king of England four great ships that they call ursers and fifteen galleys; and when the king of England was departing he brought him on his way as far as Taormina, two stages from Catania."
- The Crusades of Richard I: 1189-92, Thomas Andrew Archer, 1912, p.48

Separately, Glastonbury Abbey announced in 1191 that it had recovered the remains of Arthur and Guinevere. Giraldus Cambrensis and others describe bones and a lead cross bearing an inscription linking Arthur to Avalon. Crucially, those accounts do not mention a sword.

The memory of Arthur, the renowned king of the Britons, is not to be suppressed...But his body, which tales had fashioned as almost phantasmal at the end, as though borne by spirits to far‑off places and not subject to death, in our own days was found at Glastonbury, between two pyramidal stones once set up in the sacred cemetery, buried deeper in the earth in a hollowed oak, and marked by wondrous, one might say miraculous, signs.
- Giraldus Cambrensis (1146?-1223?) De instructione principum : Libri III

The passage goes on to describe a lead cross, on which was engraved: "Here lies buried the illustrious King Arthur with Wennevereia [Guinevere], his second wife, on the Isle of Avalon." There was also a "tress of a woman’s hair", blond, with its original freshness and color; but when a certain monk eagerly seized it with his hand and lifted it, it at once crumbled entirely into dust.

The popular connection of Richard’s gift to the Glastonbury find is a later inference, likely fueled by the abbey’s well‑documented need to raise funds after its catastrophic 1184 fire. Any link between the Glastonbury findings and the sword remains unproven.

Last Years

Peter of Eboli wrote a pangyric for Henry VI to justify his conquest of Sicily, the Liber ad honorem Augusti (1194-97) and delegitimize the cornation of Tancredi. He ridicules the Tancredi in Particula VII: Spuriosa unctio regni.

Pietro da Eboli : "Alas, how many perjuries he committed on that day when the unlucky count was anointed in the city! O new pageant of deceit, new form of wicked fraud - do you not scruple to hand your kingdom to a dwarf? Behold the ancient monster, nature’s crime, an abortion; behold an ape is crowned, a base man!"

The rest of Tancred’s short reign (5 years) was spent holding off Henry VI. In 1191-1192, his forces captured Empress Constance at Salerno, an extraordinary coup, though she was released under papal pressure. Tancred died in Palermo on 20 February 1194, about age 56, and within months Henry returned, toppled the Lecce regime, and folded the kingdom into the Hohenstaufen orbit.

As for Excalibur’s fate? After 1191 there is no further secure medieval trace. The last solid notice is Roger of Howden (Gesta regis Henrici; Chronica p.159) recording Richard’s gift.

Rex autem Angliae dedit ei gladium optimum Arcturi, nobilis quondam regis Britonum, quem Britones vocaverunt Caliburnum. Praeterea Tancredus dedit regi Anglise quatuor magnas naves quas vocant Ursers, et quindecim galeas.

But the King of England gave him the finest sword of Arthur, the once-noble king of the Britons, which the Britons called Caliburn. Moreover, Tancred gave the King of England four great ships, which they call Ursers, and fifteen galleys.

References:

• The Normans in Sicily Project

• The Crusades of Richard I: 1189-92, Thomas Andrew Archer, 1912

• Two Treaties of Messina 1190–1191: Crusading Diplomacy of Richard I

• Wikipedia: Hauteville, The Cloisters, Tancred, Norman Conquest of England...

• https://clasmerdin.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-lost-tomb-of-king-arthur-at.html

• Note: this post originally published in Dec 2020 was revised 9/14/2025