Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/225

 and on Christmas Day, 1130, he was crowned and anointed at Palermo, taking henceforth the title "by the grace of God king of Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria, help and shield of the Christians, heir and son of the great Count Roger." What this kingdom was to mean in the history and culture of Europe we shall consider in the next lecture.

Meanwhile, in order to complete our survey of the deeds of the Normans in the south, we must take some notice of the part they played in the Crusades and in the Latin East. A movement which comprised the whole of western Europe, and even made Jerusalem-farers out of their kinsmen of the Scandinavian north, could not help affecting a people such as the Normans, who had already served a long apprenticeship as pilgrims to distant shrines and as soldiers of the cross in Spain and Sicily. Three Norman prelates were present at Clermont in 1095 when Pope Urban fired the Latin world with the cry Dieu le veut, and they carried back to Normandy the council's decrees and the news of the holy war. The crusade does not, however, seem to have had any special preachers in Normandy, where we hear of no such scenes as accompanied the fiery progress of Peter the Hermit through Lorraine and the Rhineland, and of none of the popular movements which sent men to their death under Peter's leadership in the Danube valley and beyond the Bosporus. Pioneers and