Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The king also mints the first European coins to use the Hindu-Arabic numeral system." [Lyons: House of Wisdom, p. xii] Sicily was conquered by Muslims in 827 and Normans in 1072. [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 39] "The outcome of the encounter between the Norman Christians and the Muslims of Sicily—Sicily, too, had been an Islamic polity since the eighth-century expansion that had created al-Andalus—is in its own way a parable for the complex shift of power and the cultural absorption of the times. In 1072, after thirty-four years of effort, Palermo, the capital of Islamic Sicily, fell to the invaders and became the center of the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Yet over the course of the subsequent century and a half, the Arabized Normans ended by becoming near-captives of the culture they had conquered. This case speaks volumes about the complicated and often paradoxical relationship between politics, ideology, and military history on the one hand and culture on the other." [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 41-2]