Robert Guiscard (c. 1015–1085)

Norman adventurer and duke of Apulia. Robert, also known as ‘the Wizard’, carved out a fiefdom centred on Apulia in southern Italy, of which he became duke in 1059. By 1071 he had expelled the Byzantines from southern Italy and the Arabs from Sicily, establishing his younger brother Roger as count and laying the foundations for the Norman kingdom of Sicily. He imposed a centralized feudal state over an ethnically diverse realm, and was a great patron of the Catholic Church.

Robert was the son of an obscure Norman, Tancred de Hauteville, and from c. 1047 he helped his family in its struggles with the Byzantines, ejecting them from Calabria and defeating the Byzantine-Lombard-Papal army at Civitate 1053, where he briefly took Pope Leo IX prisoner. He benefited from the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches 1054, because his success against the Byzantines and his plan to rid Sicily of Arabs brought him back into papal favour. One result was his investiture with the duchy of Apulia and lordship of Calabria and Sicily 1059. Incursions into papal territory earned him excommunication 1075, and the following year he defeated the Pope's Lombard allies and captured Salerno, which he made his capital. Amicable relations with Pope Gregory VII were restored 1080, allowing him to wage war against the Byzantines along the Adriatic coast 1081–82. After a pause to prevent Gregory VII falling to Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV 1083, he returned to his Illyrian campaigns, dying at the siege of Cephalonia, in Greece.