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 Pope Urban II in 1098 for himself and his heirs the dignity of apostolic legate in Sicily, so that other legates were excluded and the Pope could treat with the Sicilian church only through the count. This extraordinary privilege, the foundation of the so-called 'Sicilian monarchy' in ecclesiastical matters, was the occasion of ever-recurring disputes in later times, but the success of Roger's crusade against the infidel seemed at the moment to justify so unusual a concession.

At his death in 1101 Roger I left behind him two sons, Simon and Roger, under the regency of their mother Adelaide. Four years later Simon died, leaving as the undisputed heir of the Sicilian and Calabrian dominions the ten-year-old Roger II, who at the age of sixteen took personal control of the government. During the regency the capital had crossed the Straits of Messina from the old Norman headquarters in the Calabrian hills at Mileto, where Roger I lay buried; henceforth it was fixed at Palermo, fit centre for a Mediterranean state. When his cousin William died, Roger II was quick to seize the Apulian inheritance, which he had to vindicate in the field not only against the revolted barons but against the Pope, anxious to prevent at all cost the consolidation of the Norman possessions in the hands of a single ruler. Securing his investiture with Apulia from Pope Honorius II in 1128, Roger two years later took advantage of the disputed election to the Papacy to obtain from Anacletus II the dignity of king;