18 min listen
Episode 12 - Rise of a King
FromNorman Centuries | A Norman History Podcast by Lars Brownworth
ratings:
Length:
26 minutes
Released:
May 15, 2011
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Roger II was never supposed to inherit his father's possessions. He was the youngest of 18 children, and only five when the Great Count died. The nobility dutifully pledged their allegiance but there seemed little chance that his mother - an Italian foreigner in the Norman court - could hold the regency until he matured. And yet, against the odds Roger II emerged from his uncertain childhood as the most forceful personality on the Mediterranean stage. Under him Norman rule in southern Italy blossomed into its most brilliant flower. Join Lars Brownworth as he looks at the rise of Roger II, Sicily's first and greatest king.
Released:
May 15, 2011
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (20)
Episode 1 - Rollo and the Viking Age: They were the great success story of the Middle Ages, a footloose band of individual adventurers who appeared out of nowhere to blaze across the face of Dark Age Europe. In the course of two centuries the Normans launched a series of extraordinary conquests, transforming Anglo-Saxon England into Great Britain, setting up a powerful Crusader state in Antioch, and turning Palermo into the dazzling cultural and economic capital of the western Mediterranean. Their story, however, begins rather humbly in the fierce Viking Age, when a group of Scandinavian raiders came crashing into Charlemagne's empire. Join Lars Brownworth as he follows the ferocious warrior Rollo, the first Norman, who began life as a simple raider and ended it as a great lord of the West. by Norman Centuries | A Norman History Podcast by Lars Brownworth