the East and of the West, he had begun three years earlier a series of campaigns against the Greek empire, seizing the ports of Avlona and Durazzo which were then as now the keys to the Adriatic, and battling with the Venetians by sea and the Greeks by land until his troops penetrated as far as Thessaly. He finally succumbed to illness on the island of Cephalonia at the age of seventy, and was buried in his Apulian monastery of Venosa, where Norman monks sang the chants of Saint-Évroul over a tomb which commemorated him as "the terror of the world":—
Hic terror mundi Guiscardus; hic expulit Urbe
Quem Ligures regem, Roma, Lemannus habent.
Parthus, Arabs, Macedumque phalanx non texit Alexin.
At fuga; sed Venetum nec fuga nec pelagus.[1]
With the passing of Robert Guiscard the half-century of Norman conquest is practically at an end, to be followed by another half-century of rivalry and consolidation, until Roger II united all the Norman conquests under a single ruler and took the title of king in 1130, just a hundred years after the foundation of the first Norman principality at Aversa. Guiscard's lands and title of duke passed to his son Roger, generally called Roger Borsa to distinguish him from his uncle and cousin of the same name. The Norman possessions in Calabria and the recent acquisitions in Sicily remained in the hands of Guiscard's brother Count Roger, nomi-
- ↑ William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, p. 332.
