RUGGERO I, count of Calabria and SICILIA. - The youngest son of Tancredi di Altavilla, he arrived in Italy when his brother Roberto was already count of Puglia; the latter sent him to wage war in Calabria, where he completed the occupation with the capture of Reggio in 1060 and claimed part of it as a fief (1062), when the conquest of Sicily had already begun. This undertaking might have appeared as a cru-
sade, but it was dictated by military, political, and economic necessities.
Roberto il Guiscardo (v.), who had promoted it, took part only at certain moments and invested R. with the lands occupied and to be occupied, with the title of count of Calabria and Sicily. The complete occupation of the Island, however, required another twenty years of continuous struggle, because the surviving Muslim groups, reinforced by elements continually arriving from Africa, defended themselves fiercely, sometimes even taking the offensive; it could be said to have ended only in 1099 with the capture of Noto. Averse to hazardous ventures, R. did not take part in the First Crusade; but, by obtaining from the weak successors of Roberto il Guiscardo the Calabrian and Sicilian territories which he had reserved for himself, in exchange for the assistance provided against rebellious subjects, he consolidated his Sicilian-Calabrian lordship and devoted himself to organizing it, making use of Norman and indigenous, Latin, Greek, or Muslim elements.
The conquest of Sicily entailed the necessity of arranging ecclesiastical relations on the Island, which the Muslim conquest had profoundly disturbed, and of making them correspond to the conditions created by the new circumstances. R. therefore turned to the Holy See. It was, however, still preoccupied with the struggles against Emperor Enrico IV; consequently, on 5 July 1098 Urbano II granted R. the authority to proceed with the settlement as apostolic legate. This was the beginning of the institution that Sicilian monarchy (v.) and endured even after the circumstances that had created it no longer existed.
He died at Mileto on 22 June 1101. Recent research shows that, while respecting existing private property, he reserved for the royal demesne the greater part of the lands which under the Muslims had belonged to the fisc, reducing feudal grants to a minimum; meanwhile, the regular functioning of his sovereign authority caused those germs of autonomous government in the cities, which had manifested themselves in the final period of Muslim rule, to languish and disappear.