Kingdom of Sicily

The Kingdom of Sicily was founded in 1130 when the Norman ruler Roger II, who had already united Norman conquests across the island of Sicily and much of southern Italy, was crowned king, creating one of the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan states in medieval Europe, governed from Palermo and noted for a court that blended Norman, Byzantine, Arab and Lombard influences. Rule passed from the Norman Hauteville dynasty to the Hohenstaufen dynasty through marriage in 1194, and the kingdom later passed to the House of Anjou after Charles of Anjou's conquest in 1266, though a popular revolt known as the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 split the island of Sicily away from the Angevin-ruled mainland territories, which continued to be called the Kingdom of Sicily even after the island itself passed to the Crown of Aragon. The mainland portion became known informally as the Kingdom of Naples, while the island retained the Kingdom of Sicily name, and the two crowns were reunited under Alfonso V of Aragon in 1442 and again permanently in 1816 as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. That final union, formed under the restored Bourbon monarchy after the Napoleonic Wars, was itself conquered by Giuseppe Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand in 1860 and absorbed into the new Kingdom of Italy in 1861.