Pope Urban II - Urban II and Sicily

Urban II and Sicily

Far more subtle than the Crusades, but far more successful over the long run, was Urban II's program of bringing Campania and Sicily firmly into the Catholic sphere after generations of control under the Byzantine Empire and the Aghlabid and Fatimid emirs. His agent in the Sicilian borderlands was the Norman ruler Roger I. In 1098, after a meeting at the Siege of Capua, Urban II bestowed extraordinary prerogatives on Roger, some of the very same rights that were being withheld from temporal sovereigns elsewhere in Europe. Roger was to be free to appoint bishops as a right of ("lay investiture"), free to collect Church revenues and forward them to the papacy (always a lucrative middle position), and free to sit in judgment on ecclesiastical questions. Roger I was to be virtually a legate of the Pope within Sicily. In re-Christianizing Sicily, seats of new dioceses needed to be established, and the boundaries of sees established, with a church hierarchy re-established after centuries of Muslim domination.

Roger's consort Adelaide brought settlers from the valley of the Po River to colonize eastern Sicily. Roger as a secular ruler seemed a reliable ally, since he was merely a vassal of his kinsman the Count of Apulia, himself a vassal of Rome, so it seemed safe at the time for Urban to give him these extraordinary powers, which were later to lead to bitter confrontations with Roger I's Hohenstaufen heirs.