Alexander of Telese’s Encomium of Capua and the Formation of the Kingdom of Sicily

Having been promoted to royal status in 1130, Roger II of Sicily sought to bind a set of disparate territories into one kingdom covering mainland southern Italy and Sicily. Scholarship has devoted much space to identifying Roger's royal strategy in its embryonic and contested state of the 1130s – with views ranging from tyrannical authoritarianism to control via negotiation and consensus – and also to pinpointing some of the major turning points which led to the creation of the Sicilian monarchy. This article aims to contribute to this body of scholarship by examining an undervalued passage in the Ystoria Rogerii Regis Sicilie Calabrie atque Apulie of Abbot Alexander of Telese, a contemporary work of indispensable value for any understanding of the formation of a monarchy that changed the shape of South Italian history thereafter. The passage in question, an encomium of Capua, points towards Roger's capture of that city in the summer of 1134 as a controversial and pivotal event in the political and ideological formation of the new kingdom. In Alexander of Telese's important construction it was at Capua that Roger truly began acting as a king.