The creation of the Norman kingdom of Sicily under Roger II of Hauteville (1130-1154) was accompanied by the development of an unparalleled cultural milieu which affected every single aspect of the royal court, combining elements from the Latin West, the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world, in order to create a visual foundation for a brand new State ideology. Palermo and its palaces, in particular, became the setting for a complex process of Arabisation, carefully designed by the king and his courtiers to convey a wide range of political messages to a variegated audience. From royal architecture to epigraphy, from the Arabic documents of Roger's chancery to his diplomatic gifts, the article explores different aspects of a same, visual strategy of communication, explaining why the ubiquitous Islamic veneer of the Norman monarchy was essential to its relations with the other European powers, the Muslim lands of North Africa, the Church and the Sicilian people. Portrayed now as a Byzantine emperor, now as an Islamic prince, Roger II cleverly managed to harmonise the Arab element with the image of a pious king, conciliating the Muslim architectural and decorative tradition with Christian mosaics and the liturgy of kingship; to make this possible, he realised that the Islamicate and the Christian spheres had to be kept neatly distinct in terms of purpose, message and addressee, carefully avoiding any form of light-hearted syncretism and visual eclecticism. Projecting through his artistic patronage a quasi-caliphal image, but aiming at the same time for the Byzantine theocratic authority, Roger II showed an extraordinary political acumen which helped his kingdom to survive and thrive under very delicate circumstances, with the crusades raging in the East, the instability of the Norman domains in North Africa, the open hostility of the Pope and both the Germanic and the Byzantine emperors. The legitimisation of king Roger's status heavily depended on official and ceremonial apparatuses based on Islamic models, which his vizier George of Antioch helped to mould to the social peculiarities of Norman Sicily. In the mosque-like church of Santa Maria de H'Ammi-raglio, for instance, built by George for the Greek- and Arabic-speaking Christian community of Palermo, the multilayered visual principle typical of the Rogerian period is wonderfully distilled into a unique structure, which glorifies God and the king according to both the Islamic and the Byzantine artistic tradition.
