He was the youngest son of Michel Etienne Turgot, "provost of the merchants" of Paris, and Madeleine Frangoise Martineau, and came of an old Norman family.
His marriage with the heiress of the old Norman kings had made him master of Sicily and the duchy of Apulia and Calabria, and he succeeded in conquering and retaining almost, all the remainder of the peninsula.
Lastly, and perhaps most of all, there is the old Norman bloodfeud with Constantinople, as old as the old Norse seeking for Micklegarth, and keen and deadly ever since the Norman conquest of the Greek themes in South Italy (1041 onwards).
The Norman line of Sicilian kings might be extinct; their policy lived after them in their Hohenstaufen successors, and that policy, as it had helped to divert the Fourth Crusade to the old Norman objective of Constantinople, helped still more to give the Sixth Crusade its secular, diplomatic, non-religious aspect.
