at Salerno. The cosmopolitan nature of the kingdom is also revealed in its monuments: from the palace chapel at Palermo with its Arabic-influenced ceiling to the mausoleum of Bohemond at Canosa di Puglia built like the tomb of a Muslim holy man; from the great Greek Pantokrator in the apse of the cathedral at Cefalù to the Church of St Nicholas of Bari built under the direction of the Italian Abbot Elias of La Cava with distinctly Lombard features.
It has been argued that the logical culmination of Norman expansion would have been the conquest of the Byzantine Empire, but although the Sicilians consistently raided the shores of the Balkans (on one notorious occasion in 1147 they kidnapped the silk craftsmen of the city of Thebes in Greece) and had, of course, incurred the lasting hostility of the Byzantines for their seizure of the southern Italian land of the empire, there is no real evidence to suggest that they planned a fullscale onslaught on the empire. Nor did they take an active part in the crusades against the Muslim powers of the Near East. They preferred to reap the lucrative profits of buoyant luxury trade with the great ports of North Africa and Egypt and thus kept on friendly terms with neighbouring Arab powers. They successfully balanced general support for the papacy with periodic gestures of friendship towards the empire and cultivated relations with other European powers by marriage alliances with Castile, Navarre, and even England. But it was this policy of diplomacy on an international scale which precipitated the fall of the Norman dynasty in Sicily. King William II, having no legitimate male heirs, married his aunt Constance to Henry, son of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, a move disliked by many of the old Norman families and which led to a civil war on William's death in 1189. Henry VI marched south to claim his wife's inheritance and, after bitter fighting, was crowned king of Sicily in Palermo in 1194. The kingdom's riches were now used to finance the Hohenstaufen struggle to maintain imperial power and it became a pawn in the international political game being played out between pope and emperor.
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