A chance meeting at a Puglian pilgrimage shrine, in the year 1016, began one of the strangest episodes in mediaeval history. This led to the creation and brief flowering, over the following two centuries, of a multicultural, multiethnic kingdom at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, at a time when the rest of Europe was riven by internal quarrels, and seemingly hellbent on waging external war. The experiment ultimately failed, but it has left us a splendid visual legacy.

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