The final act of this timeline runs from 1101 to 1130, and it belongs to one man: Roger II of Sicily. His father Roger I died in 1101 with the Norman conquests still divided among cousins — a duchy of Apulia, a principality of Capua, a county of Sicily, rebellious cities like Bari under their own Lombard princes. Over three decades Roger II gathered every piece: Duke of Apulia in 1127, confirmed by the pope in 1128, master of rebellious Bari by 1129. Meanwhile the wider world churned — emperor deposed emperor in Germany, popes fled Rome and died in exile, the Guelf-Ghibelline conflict was born, and earthquakes, famines, and…

The 11th century AD is the century of the Normans. It opens with the old order intact — a Byzantine Catapan at Bari, Lombard princes in Capua, Benevento, and Salerno, Kalbid emirs in Sicily — and closes with nearly all of it in the hands of a single family of Norman adventurers, the Hautevilles. What began as bands of pilgrims and mercenaries hiring out to Lombard rebels became, step by step, a state: Aversa (1030), Melfi (1041), the crushing of a papal army at Civitate (1053), the papal investiture of Robert Guiscard at Melfi (1059), the fall of Bari in 1071 — ending Byzantine power in Italy after five centuries…

The 10th century AD redrew the balance of power in Italy yet again. On the mainland, the Battle of the Garigliano (915) saw a grand Christian league — papacy, Byzantines, and the squabbling southern states together for once — destroy the Saracen strongholds of central Italy. But in Sicily the conquest completed itself: Rametta, the last Byzantine holdout, fell in 965, and the island passed to the Kalbid emirs, who promptly turned their raids back on Calabria and Apulia. Rome sank into the era of Marozia and Alberic II, when popes were made and unmade by a single family. Then came the Germans: Otto I was crowned Holy Roman Emperor…

The 9th century AD belonged to the invaders. In 827 the Aghlabid Saracens of Tunisia landed at Mazara, and over the following decades they took Sicily piece by piece — Palermo in 831, Messina in 842, Enna in 859 after a thirty-year siege, and finally Syracuse in 878, its great cathedral converted into a mosque. On the mainland, a Saracen emirate held Bari for a quarter century, raiders sacked the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul outside Rome, and the monastery of Monte Cassino was destroyed. Meanwhile the Carolingian empire of Charlemagne’s heirs divided, reunited, and dissolved into civil war, and the Lombard south splintered — Benevento against Salerno,…

The 8th century AD broke the old order in Italy. Byzantine power in the north collapsed when the Lombards conquered the Exarchate of Ravenna for the final time in 751, ending the line of Exarchs altogether. The Emperor’s ban on religious images — iconoclasm — opened a bitter rift between Constantinople and the papacy, and in retaliation the Empire stripped the popes of their income-producing estates in Sicily and southern Italy. Into this vacuum stepped the Franks. Pepin the Short’s donation of 754 created the Papal States, his son Charlemagne destroyed the Lombard kingdom in 774, and on Christmas Day 800 Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor in Rome. Meanwhile the…