Roger II of Sicily

Roger II (Mileto, Calabria 22 December 1095 – Palermo, Sicily 26 February 1154) was King of Sicily, son of Roger I of Sicily and successor to his brother Simon. He began his rule as Count of Sicily in 1105, became Duke of Apulia and Calabria in 1127, and then King of Sicily in 1130. By the time of his death at the age of 58, Roger had succeeded in uniting all the Norman conquests in Italy into one kingdom with a strong centralized government.

Background

By 999, Norman adventurers had arrived in southern Italy. By 1016, they were involved in the complex local politics where Lombards were fighting against the Byzantine Empire. These mercenaries fought the enemies of the Italian city-states, but in the following century they gradually became the rulers of the major polities south of Rome.

Roger I ruled the County of Sicily at the time of the birth of his youngest son, Roger, at Mileto, Calabria, in 1095. Roger I's nephew, Roger Borsa, was the Duke of Apulia and Calabria, and his great nephew, Richard II of Capua, was the Prince of Capua. Alongside these three major rulers were a large number of minor counts, who effectively exercised sovereign power in their own localities. These counts at least nominally owed allegiance to one of these three Norman rulers, but such allegiance was usually weak and often ignored.

Roger

Roger is an English male given name and surname, from the Anglo-Norman French Roger, Rogier, which is itself derived from Germanic words (hroth, hruod and ger) meaning respectively "fame" and "spear". In Anglo-Saxon sources the name is first recorded, in the Dark Age epic poem Beowulf, as Hroðgar ("glorious spear-bearer").

The name is also found in the Netherlands in the form Rutger, and in German as Rüdiger. The Latin form, as used by a few medieval figures, is Rogerius. A Welsh variation is the family name Rosser.

Slang

Roger is also a short version of the term "Jolly Roger", which refers to a black flag with white skull and crossbones, formerly used by sea pirates since as early as 1723.

From c.1650 to c.1870, Roger was slang for the word "penis", probably due to the origin of the name involving fame with a spear. Subsequently, "to roger" became a slang verb form meaning "to have sex with"/"to penetrate".

In 19th century England, Roger was slang for the cloud of toxic green gas that swept through the chlorine bleach factories periodically.

Tabula Rogeriana

The Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi'khtirāq al-āfāq (Arabic: نزهة المشتاق في اختراق الآفاق‎, lit. "the book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands"), most often known as the Tabula Rogeriana (lit. "The Book of Roger" in Latin), is a description of the world and world map created by the Arab geographer, Muhammad al-Idrisi, in 1154. Al-Idrisi worked on the commentaries and illustrations of the map for fifteen years at the court of the Norman King Roger II of Sicily, who commissioned the work around 1138.

The book, written in Arabic, is divided into seven climate zones (in keeping with the established Ptolemaic system), each of which is sub-divided into ten sections, and contains maps showing the Eurasian continent in its entirety, but only the northern part of the African continent. The map is oriented with the North at the bottom. It remained the most accurate world map for the next three centuries. The text incorporates exhaustive descriptions of the physical, cultural, political and socioeconomic conditions of each region and each of the seventy sections has a corresponding map.