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He entered Jerusalem on the 18th of February, 1229, and was crowned king one month later on the 18th of March. His wife had been the legitimate queen, but she had died. Ignoring that fact, he claimed the throne for himself, and took it from the Muslims. For his troubles, he was excommunicated by the Pope... but that's besides the point.
That was a symbolic turning point, I think, as it was somewhere around the time of Frederick when Sicily became majority-Catholic for the first time. Before that, it had always been Greek-speaking and mostly Orthodox, and yet here it was, with the Sicilian flag of a Catholic (in theory, more of an atheist in practice) king waving in the Holy Land.
Was the Norman conquest and the subsequent conversion of the Sicilian populace to Catholicism better or worse for Sicily?
On the one hand, we may have never been liberated from Arab rule and may have wound up converting to Islam like the Albanians and Bosnians later did... but then again, on the other hand, during Arab rule, Palermo was one of the richest, and most populated cities in the world, and a major center of science and art.
If the Norman crusade didn't happen, would Sicily have been able to hold on to its Greek culture, or when the Byzantine Empire fell, would the entire island have become Arabized? It's not as though the Sicilian dialect of Arabic didn't have many speakers - the modern version is still the official language of Malta.
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