The kingdom of Sicily was created by the coronation of its first ruler, the former Count Roger II of Sicily, in Palermo cathedral on Christmas Day 1130. The kingdom that was born then lasted, despite many vicissitudes, and even some lengthy periods of division, until the creation of modern Italy in 1860. The papal bull that sanctioned the creation of this new kingdom recorded that this was proper since God had granted Roger ‘greater wisdom and power’ than other princes, and in recognition of the loyal service to the papacy of his parents and himself. The pope, Anacletus II, was obviously seeking justification for his action, and the reasons for such a grant were in fact considerably more complex, and will be discussed in a later part of this book (below, chapter 3). Yet as Roger's own contemporary biographer noted, without mentioning the papal role in the conferment of the new royal title at all, it was appropriate that one who ‘ruled so many provinces, Sicily, Calabria and Apulia and other regions stretching almost to Rome, … ought to be distinguished by the honour of kingship’. After raising a spurious and unhistorical, if attractive, theory that Sicily had once, in ancient times, been a kingdom, he concluded: