Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean

by John Keahey

  M. I. Finley, author of the classic A History of Sicily to the Arab Conquest, set the scene:

  [In A.D. 827] an elite army of more than 10,000 men—Arabs and Berbers from Africa, other Moslems from Spain—landed at Mazara, and the conquest of Sicily had begun. All previous assaults were piratical raids; now the Arabs set out to take the island and colonize it.

  The Muslim army had trouble taking Siracusa, but they eventually prevailed after being reinforced by an armada carrying Muslim reinforcements from Spain. Gradually, they gained the upper hand—it took seventy-five years to subdue the entire island—despite being racked by squabbles within their ranks.

  This series of events shows clearly how twists of fate determine momentous outcomes. If the naval commander had remained loyal to the Byzantine ruler in Constantinople and not sought Sicily for his own, the Arabs may have never considered conquering the island. (He was eventually executed by the Byzantine defenders when the invaders tried to take the city of Enna.)

  The twist-of-fate scenario continued: An invited foreign power steps in and, instead of accepting the gratitude of the person requesting the favor, takes over. It happened when the Normans were invited by one Muslim emir to help conquer two competing emirs 250 years later, and it happened again when Sicilian rebels asked for Spain’s help in routing the French in the war of the Sicilian Vespers a few hundred years after Muslim rule.

  Under the Arabs, the island, Chiarelli tells us, became “politically and culturally part of the territory of what is today Tunisia”—a land just ninety miles from the island’s southwest coast across the Strait of Sicily. Throughout their time ruling the island, however, the Muslims, like their successors the Normans, were regularly beset with discord: assassinations, executions of rebel ringleaders, and civil wars between the Sicilian people and the central and provincial governments.

  Sicily, beset by competing Muslim dynasties, became a stew of simmering divisions, but through it all, North Africans moved to the island by the thousands. Chiarelli writes:

  Many of the immigrants settled in the western half of the country, but later established themselves throughout Sicily. Most of the Muslim elite and ruling class were composed of Arabs, but the Berbers formed a substantial part of the population.… The Berbers consistently challenged Arab authority, which often led to strife, such as the civil wars [of A.D. 886 and 898] when the Berbers attacked the mostly Arab-led [army].

  The Berbers at this time were urban dwellers, farmers, and herdsmen indigenous to North Africa. Many converted to Islam when the Arabs from the Middle East arrived on that continent.

  Conflicts between Sicilians and the various levels of government that controlled their daily lives now continued, but this time these conflicts were broken up by periods relatively free of strife.

  At one point, around 1020, when an independent Arab Sicilian dynasty known as the Kalbites was facing financial difficulties, the Kalbite emir posed a question to a group of Muslim Sicilian leaders: Should he expel one particular group who shared in the country’s wealth in order to absorb their funds? The answer was telling. The Muslim Sicilians advised that, through intermarriage, the islanders were one people. At least some of the island’s inhabitants saw no difference in the various groups that, long ago, had settled the island. Says Chiarelli:

  It is evident that two hundred years of immigrant settlement from the Muslim world caused an evolution in the ethnic composition of the island, causing the development of a new Sicilian identity. Intermarriage with the native [Greco-] Christian population, as well as large-scale conversions to Islam, not only formed a new ethnic group that bound the immigrants to the island, but also the establishment of a new Islamic society, not unlike that of Spain.

  This societal cohesiveness, punctuated by occasional episodes of internal strife, held fast until 1052. That’s when a Muslim emir sought the aid of a contingent of Norman knights based in southern Italy to help him overthrow two other emirs. Eventually, a significant portion of the island fell to the Normans, who had effectively displaced the emir’s troops and dominated the campaign. But it took the Norman leader, Roger I, until January 1072 to take Palermo, effectively ending Muslim rule in Sicily. It took another eighteen years for the Normans to defeat the last holdout, the southeastern city of Noto, which finally fell in 1090.

  In summing up the aftermath and Muslim life under accommodating Norman rule, Chiarelli writes: “The loss of a national government in Palermo, however, did not end the Muslim presence in Sicily. With [many] of the inhabitants Islamicized, it would take another two hundred years to bring the population of the whole island within the sphere of Christian Europe.”

  * * *

  Once they were Vikings, Nortmanni, or northmen. Eventually, in the early 900s, at about the same time the ruling Arab dynasty took command of Sicily from another set of Arab rulers, these northmen settled in France and, with the complicity of the French king, they stayed and flourished, becoming Christians and Frenchmen. At some point, the appellation “Norman” took over.

  Fast-forward one hundred years. In 1016, as legend has it, a group of Norman pilgrims traveled to the Italian peninsula to visit a Christian shrine. Much of southern Italy at this time was ruled by the Byzantines, whose church, based in Constantinople, had been at odds with the Roman Church for centuries. Lombards, descendants of the Germanic people who occupied portions of northern Italy, also controlled large areas of the South.

  A nobleman from Bari reputedly approached the Norman pilgrims. He asked their help in driving out the Byzantines so southern Italy could be once again united with the church in Rome. The pilgrims agreed and returned with an army the following year, 1017, and joined with a faction of southern Lombardi. Despite some defeats, the Norman presence grew as their knights and foot soldiers began occupying a significant portion of the South.

  By 1035, the Norman mercenary army was selling its services to the highest bidder. At one point, it even shifted its allegiance to the Byzantine Greeks, the people they originally were asked to help subdue. Here’s where Sicily comes into the picture. Byzantium wanted to retake the island, which it had lost 250 years earlier to the Arabs. The time was ripe. Muslim district rulers there were in disarray, squabbling among one another.

  The Normans agreed to help. In 1038, the Byzantines, with an assortment of mercenaries that included a Norman contingent, landed on the island and within two years occupied thirteen towns and cities. But quarrels ensued among the invaders. The Greek leader was recalled to Constantinople and thrown into prison; the Normans were disgruntled about their share of the spoils, and they left the island. In 1040, the Arabs regained control of the lands lost to the Byzantines in that eastern half.

  The years passed. Norman-Lombard-Byzantine intrigue in southern Italy played out in various battles, some involving the forces loyal to the pope in Rome. In 1060, the Byzantines set sail for Constantinople, ending Greek rule in Calabria. Through all of this turmoil, Norman leaders Roger Guiscard and his brother, Robert, kept their eyes on Sicily.

  Then the emir, Siracusa-based Ibn Thumnah, who shared control of Sicily with two others, showed up on Roger’s doorstep in early 1061. He wanted help getting rid of his two colleagues so he could take control of their shares of the island. In exchange, he would give Roger the eastern half and access to the entire coastline facing the Italian peninsula. According to Norman chroniclers, Roger put together an army of several dozen knights and, along with Thumnah’s forces, took Messina easily. Within a decade, the Normans had dominated their Arab allies as well as conquering their Arab opponents. Not satisfied with taking just the eastern half, Roger rode into Palermo in early 1072.

  By 1094, Roger at age sixty-three and known as Great Count Roger I, had won complete control. He even sent an army to Malta to ensure that the tiny island barely sixty miles south of Sicily would never be used as a base of operations against him.

  The Normans kept Sicily’s agricultural milieu the same as it was under the Muslims but int
roduced a new element into island life: feudalism.

  Great Count Roger I died in 1101 at age seventy. Romance-language Professor Joseph F. Privitera, who wrote Sicily: An Illustrated History, said that Roger had spent

  [f]orty-four of those years … in the south, and forty had been largely devoted to the island of Sicily … by the time of his death, though still only a count, he was generally reckoned as one of the foremost princes of Europe. He had transformed Sicily.… it had become a political entity … in which four races and three religions were living side by side in mutual respect and concord.

  Roger I’s son Simon succeeded him, but died four years later, giving the throne to Simon’s younger brother, also a Roger, who at age five became Count of Sicily; his mother, Adelaide del Vasto, served as regent. At age sixteen, he became King Roger II when he combined the Norman presence in southern Italy with Sicily. He pushed aside other family members who had ruled the duchies of Apulia and Calabria in the far south of the Italian peninsula, and the Duchy of Capua, an area north of Naples. Roger II eventually took control of the Duchy of Naples as well.

  His father’s reign had sustained the great prosperity earlier fostered by the Muslim rulers. There are no known images of Roger I, and only two known contemporary portraits exist of Roger II—both in Palermo and both likely created by Muslim and Byzantine artists. In the Palatine Chapel, a carving on a large candle holder shows Roger holding up the throne of Christ. A mosaic showing Christ anointing the new, bearded king is on a wall inside the Church of Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio. This church also is known as San Nicolò dei Greci and is commonly called the Martorana.

  Sometimes people born into power become truly great rulers, as King Roger II did. He started out in good stead with the pope (in exchange for annual payments of one hundred sixty ounces of gold to Rome). From his coronation in Palermo’s cathedral on Christmas Day 1130 to his death in 1154, Roger II ruled with a fair hand and embraced many different cultures.

  He, and two of his successors—son William I and grandson William II—maintained their courts in a multicultural manner. William I, nicknamed “The Bad,” had to deal with overarching barons eager to expand their political clout who saw him as weak. (It was the barons, not the Sicilian people, who considered William I “bad.”) There were riots in Palermo, and Muslims faced racial intolerance at the barons’ hands. He died young, in 1166, and his son, at age thirteen, took over.

  Affairs settled down, and historian Privitera writes that throughout his reign

  William II [nicknamed “The Good” because he favored the barons’ demands] lived like an oriental sovereign. He had Muslim concubines and kept a bodyguard of Negro slaves; he patronized Arab poets.… [Muslims] dominated the finance department, there were still mosques in Palermo … Even the Christian women in Palermo were said to have assumed the secluded habits and the dress of Arab women, while the king himself was known to have worn Moorish costumes.

  Essentially, four generations of Normans had ruled Sicily: Great Count Roger I, sons Simon and Roger II, William I, and William II. But all this began to shift in 1189 when William II died at age thirty-six. His aunt, Roger II’s daughter Constance, was in line and ruled for four years. She traveled north and married German King Henry VI, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope upon the death of his father, Frederick I Barbarossa (Red Beard). With Constance as his wife, Henry VI eventually added the island and southern Italy to his realm.

  Before Henry could move south to take the throne, and because the southerners disliked the idea of a German king, the crown briefly passed to Tancred, an illegitimate son of Roger II’s eldest son, also Roger, Duke of Apulia. When Henry reached Naples, he left Constance there and moved to meet Tancred on the battlefield. But these events, which seem to pile up quickly on the written page, in fact happened very slowly. It wasn’t until three years later, in 1194, that he resumed the march south.

  Conveniently, Tancred died early that year; his successor was his infant son, William III. The baby’s mother was offered favorable terms to surrender the crown to Henry. She agreed. The terms were broken. She and her son went into hiding in the south Sicily village of Caltabellotta. She was found, however, and, according to historian Steven Runciman: “She was imprisoned, and many of her supporters were cruelly put to death; and the child-king disappeared into obscurity.”

  So Sicily and southern Italy were basically handed off to German control. On Christmas Day 1194, the ever-popular day for coronations at Palermo’s cathedral, Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI was crowned king. Meanwhile, a very pregnant Constance, Henry’s link to the Norman heritage, was traveling from where she had been taken to a place of safety, north of the Alps, down the length of the Italian peninsula to attend the crowning. She was forced to stop and give birth, on December 26, in a tent hastily put up in the square of the small village of Jesi, near Ancona on the Adriatic coast. Born that day was the future ruler, Frederick II.

  Newly crowned Henry wasted no time. He emptied the Sicilian treasury and sent it to Germany. The relative calm that had swept the island during the four generations of Norman rule ended. Sicilians revolted against Henry, a rebellion he put down easily and with great brutality. Fortunately for Sicilians and southern Italians, this anxious young German from the House of Hohenstaufen did not last long. He died at age thirty-two after three rough years on the throne. His son, Frederick II—the one born in a tent in Jesi—became king at age three and ended up being one of the greatest sovereigns the island ever had.

  Frederick’s reign got off to a slow start. When he became the toddler king, his mother, Constance, was regent. A year later, when he was four, she died, and the pope became his protector. In 1212, he went to Germany, returning eight years later at age sixteen as Holy Roman Emperor as well as king of Sicily and assorted other areas of the Mediterranean world.

  Sicily, during Frederick’s toddlership and later his absence, had become a land of banditry, and ambitious nobles pretty much had their way with things. When he returned from Germany, young Frederick brought the nobles into line by ordering the destruction of many of their castles.

  While still a man of his times whose authority was absolute—heads could roll off the shoulders of those who displeased him—Frederick led Sicily and southern Italy into a new era. He created a university in Naples and developed a code of law that treated everyone—Lombards, Greeks, Arabs, and Franks—the same; under the Normans, each of these groups had been governed by their own separate laws and customs.

  While he protected law-abiding Muslims, he could not tolerate efforts by members of the surviving Islamic communities to be independent. He deported many, sending them to Apulia on the Adriatic coast at the heel of the Italian boot.

  Privitera maintains that Frederick did this “because they were rebels, not because of their religion.” Differences in religion certainly didn’t seem to concern him. As a Catholic, he battled throughout his reign with different popes and was repeatedly excommunicated for keeping Sicily separate and not a fiefdom of the church. He made ecclesiastics pay taxes like everyone else.

  Historian Steven Runciman writes:

  But to Sicilians it was not the same as in Norman times. Then Sicily had been the heart of a self-contained kingdom. It was from Palermo that the mainland provinces had been governed; and the Norman kings, for all their ambition, had remained essentially kings of Sicily. Now the king of Sicily was also the emperor of northern Italy. Even in the Sicilian kingdom he did not seem to favour the island more than the mainland.

  Runciman also points out the biggest influences on the island, through the century of Norman rule, remained Greek and Muslim. “But in spite of the diversity, a Sicilian national consciousness was arising.…” It was this tiny spark of national consciousness that would smolder for a few more decades and erupt into one of the most significant events in Sicilian history: an ill-fated rebellion, perhaps the only time that Sicilians had a real shot at establishing control over their own destinies. Thi
s became known as the Sicilian Vespers.

  Frederick II died in 1250. Over the next fifteen years, civil discord rocked the island. Most of Frederick’s children and grandchildren were killed outright or imprisoned. Sicilian cities, much like the Greek model of ancient times, warred against one another. Messina fought battles with Taormina; Palermo rose up against Cefalù. Bandits plundered the countryside. Briefly, an English king’s eight-year-old son, Edmund of Lancaster, who was favored by the pope, ruled as king of Sicily. Then a successor pope, a Frenchman, got the youngster deposed.

  Here, the history gets a bit muddled; kings came and went with great frequency. A bastard son of Frederick’s, Manfred, was crowned in 1258, but in 1266, the French pope had his way and got a Frenchman crowned, Charles of Anjou, who then proceeded to get rid of Manfred. That happened after a pitched battle on the mainland where Manfred was killed. Next in his line of succession would have been his fourteen-year-old nephew, but Charles had him imprisoned and then beheaded. It was often tough being a child born into royalty in those brutal days.

  This, in 1266, put Charles and the House of Anjou, its members known as the Angevins, in control of the island of Sicily and much of southern Italy, especially Calabria, from Naples southward. It would be another two centuries before this combination, under a different ruler, would become officially known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

  Sicilians, by this time, were used to being controlled by foreign kings who maintained their courts on the island. They were dismayed that their new French king preferred Naples to Palermo. In fact, Charles visited the island briefly only once. It was this apparent lack of interest in the island, Charles’s oppressive rule, and his heavy taxation to fund an expedition he was planning to launch against the Byzantines in Constantinople that frustrated Sicilians.

  Add to this a growing sense of nationalism among Greek and Muslim Sicilians that led, sixteen short years after his takeover, to an outpouring of rage against the occupying Angevin French. Historian Jean Dunbabin also points out that by 1282, “Angevin rule was not as well established in Sicily as in southern Italy.”