The Deeds of Robert Guiscard By William of Apulia

[haralampopoulosjc]

This poem, one of our principal contemporary sources for the Norman Conquest of
Italy, was composed between 1096 and 1099. The reference in the prologue to Urban II
gives a terminus ante quem, for the pope died in July 1099, and a later reference, in Book
III, to ‘the Gallic race [who] wanted to open the roads to the Holy Sepulchre’ shows that
William must be writing after the beginning of the First Crusade, called by Urban in
November 1095.