126 The Norman Conquest
granted to Robert Guiscard the title of duke of Apulia
and Calabria, but on condition that Robert do him hom-
age and hold his dukedom of him upon a strictly feudal
basis. In 1064, Pope Alexander II. sent a consecrated
banner to Roger, Robert Guiscard's youngest brother,
who was engaged in the conquest of Mohammedan Sic-
ily. It was looked on as something in the nature of a
crusade against the infidel, and, as the conquest of Sicily
had been vaguely taken into account in the negotiations
of 1059, there was an expectation on the part of the pope
of holding the whole of south Italy and Sicily, the future
kingdom of Naples or the Two Sicilies, as a vassal state.
Here were Norman adventurers who won for themselves
a powerful state, with no shadow of legal right save what
may be thought derivable from papal grant and sanction,
and who then became vassals of the church. It seemed
natural for Norman rulers to come into this personal rela-
tion with the papacy, for Normandy stood for very
advanced ideas in church reform.1 When, therefore,
at this very time, the duke of Normandy proposed to
conquer England, a country over whose church the
papacy had almost no control and from whose chief
archbishopric the Norman Robert of Jumieges had been
recently and uncanonically driven, it is no wonder that
Hildebrand was interested, and looked on William's
undertaking as a parallel on a grander scale of that of
the Norman Roger in Sicily.
The word Crusade was not yet heard in the Christian world,
nor was it to be heard till near thirty years later . . . but a"
virtual crusade was preached against Harold and his adherents,
and all Europe knew that when William's shipbuilding should
be ended and he should be ready to sail, his troops would
march to battle under the protection of a banner consecrated
by the successor of St. Peter.2
1 See above, pp. 84, 85.
3 Hodgkin, The History of England from ike Earliest Times to the Norman
Conguest, p. 476.