Dawn Marie Hayes has written a highly original and thought-provoking book about Roger ii and his world. As an early footnote admits, there are plenty of biographies of Roger, and a new one appeared soon after Hayes's book, by Glauco Cantarella (Rome 2020). But Hayes eschews the narrative approach that has dominated past accounts of the reign to consider Roger's links to Spain, Byzantium and other trans-Mediterranean neighbours. She lays emphasis on Roger's marriage alliances, for he was thrice married. His marriage to Elvira, the daughter of Alfonso vi of Léon-Castile, is interpreted not as the joining together of two kingdoms characterised by the presence of three religions and a shared policy of convivencia, but as a successful operation in diplomatic outreach: Roger's assumption of a royal title was rejected by the Byzantine and German emperors, and the search for allies was rendered more urgent by the need to claim legitimacy. Hayes explores a whole series of connections that may have counted here, for instance the ties between Léon-Castile and the Cluniac movement. Inevitably some of her arguments are based on probability, and the words ‘likely’ and probably’ often appear. Her approach does mean that we lose sight of Roger for many pages, with too much space devoted to Alfonso vi's career; but it is valuable to learn something about the background of Queen Elvira of Sicily.

Much the same applies to her thoughtful study of Roger's marriage in c.1151 to Beatrice of Rethel, where she identifies a renewed attempt to capitalise on political difficulties within the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Roger had eyed Jerusalem earlier in his reign – his widowed mother Adelasia was for a time queen of Jerusalem, and according to William of Tyre her eventual repudiation by King Baldwin i after she had arrived loaded with great wealth led Roger to refuse to give any support to the Latin Kingdom. Here again there is new literature that has appeared simultaneously (Paula Hailstone, Recalcitrant crusaders, Abingdon 2020), but what is distinctive about Hayes's approach is her sensitivity to the dynastic connections linking great European families to the Latin East, into which the Hautevilles of Sicily were seeking to insert themselves. Without attempting to apply vacuous ideas from ‘network theory’, Hayes is able to illuminate a complex spider's web of family and political connections that enabled Roger to promote his interests in the principality of Antioch (founded by his Norman relative Bohemond) as well as the Latin Kingdom. These plans, she shows, petered out when Roger lost his naval commanders George of Antioch and Philip of Mahdia (who was executed as a Muslim renegade), while he himself survived not much longer. In any case, Sicilian dominion in what is now Tunisia was by this point under strong pressure from the Almohad Berbers. Still, what this adds up to is a pan-Mediterranean policy on Roger's part which (Hayes might have argued) was revived by later rulers of Sicily: William ii, Henry vi, Frederick ii, Charles i of Anjou – and ultimately by Alfonso the Magnanimous in the fifteenth century.

These themes account for part i, ‘Family’. In part ii Hayes moves to ‘Faith’. One chapter is devoted to the cult of St Nicholas of Myra at Bari, and it is not entirely clear how it fits into a book on Roger ii, except as a record of the links between that cult and Roger's Norman predecessors; the subsequent chapter, however, does home in on Roger ii's devotion to St Nicholas, protector of mariners, and contains very interesting material on the religious dimension to Roger's interest in the sea. This was supposedly evinced in the foundation of Cefalù Cathedral following a storm at sea in which the king had been caught. Here, and in two Palermo churches (the Cappella Palatina and Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio), Hayes singles out mosaic images of St Nicholas, though it has to be said that he appears with plenty of other saints, and she pushes at the limits when she argues that he is a principal focus of attention among them. Hayes's delight in speculation emerges again, but that is one of the very attractive features of her book, and she is honest about what is known and what is guesswork.

The third section, on ‘Empire’, looks mainly at the image of Roger and his apparel in the church of Santa Mara dell'Ammiraglio. This has often been discussed from a Byzantine perspective, but much less from the French perspective that she adopts. Here much depends on the identification of the decoration of king's outer garment, his loros, with French fleur-de-lys rather than golden crosses or miniature eagles. That the king is shown wearing a type of Byzantine imperial costume is generally agreed, though the surviving royal robes, now in the Vienna Schatzkammer also have Islamic and western motifs, and the costume shown in the mosaic was somewhat out of fashion in Constantinople by the 1140s. Hayes argues that Roger was keen to emphasise his links to France, not just because of his Norman ancestry and his marriage to Sibylla of Burgundy, a descendant of Hugh Capet, but because he aimed to draw Louis vii away from friendship with Manuel Komnenos, the Byzantine emperor, during the Second Crusade. A coded message may have been that the supposed French descendants of the Trojans were returning to wreak their revenge on the dastardly Greeks, claiming the empire for themselves.

Dawn Marie Hayes has reconfigured the history of Norman Sicily in enticing ways, skilfully combining written sources with art-historical evidence. Even if, as she readily admits, some of her evidence for trans-Mediterranean connections is circumstantial, her book will be essential reading alongside the more traditional biographies – the old ones by Caspar and Curtis, or the new ones by Houben, Aubé and Cantarella.