Normans capture Palermo

1072

After a siege of several months, Robert Guiscard and Roger de Hauteville took the Sicilian capital from its Kalbid emirs. Palermo, one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean, with five hundred thousand people and a skyline of minarets, became the jewel of a strange new Norman-Arab-Greek kingdom. The conquerors retained the existing Arabic bureaucracy, a pragmatic decision that made Sicily uniquely cosmopolitan among Christian realms.