Young men who start as little more than brigands and produce, in just over a century, a dynasty of Kings

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 248.

Gradually I began to piece together the story I so longed to write: the story of a bunch of footloose young Normans, passing through South Italy in 1015 on their way back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, being accosted by a Lombard separatist and invited to help his compatriots kick out the Byzantines, who were occupying Lombard lands. The Normans agree, and over the next half-century increasing numbers of their friends and relations ride south from Normandy to join them. By the 1050s they are powerful enough to defeat a papal army in pitched battle, capturing the Pope in person; and in 1061 they invade Sicily. Their leaders are five of the ten sons of a rather dim Norman knight of the Cotentin peninsula named Tancred de Hauteville; and one of these sons, Roger, establishes a Sicilian state which his son, Roger II, converts in 1130 into a Kingdom.

Already we have a superb rags-to-riches story—of a few hundred young men who start as little more than brigands and produce, in just over a century, a dynasty of Kings; but there is more to it than this. Sicily, originally Greek, was invaded and partially occupied in the ninth century by Arabs from North Africa. The Normans added a third ingredient to the brew, and it was their task to weld these three radically different communities into a single nation. They achieved it triumphantly. They made no attempt to impose themselves as a sort of Herrenvolk; theirs was a multilingual, multiracial, multiconfessional society. Under a Norman King the Greeks, who had seamanship in their blood, ran the all-important navy; the state finances, meanwhile, were in the hands of the Arabs, whose mathematics were always better than anyone else’s. Norman French, Latin, Greek, and Arabic were all official languages. To take but one example, in the Palatine Chapel in Palermo you find a western European ground plan (nave, two side aisles, chancel), walls entirely covered with Byzantine mosaics as fine as anything to be found in Constantinople, and—most astonishing of all—a painted stalactite roof in purest Arabic style, more reminiscent of Cordova or Damascus than of any Christian state. And then you remember that all this happened less than a hundred years after the Great Schism between the Eastern and the Western Churches, and actually during the period of the Crusades—while, in one island in the middle of the Mediterranean, all three peoples and religions, everywhere else at each other’s throats, came together in harmony to provide an example of cooperation and toleration which has never been repeated.