by John Keahey
Charles had used brutal methods, twelve years earlier, to put down a rebellion in Augusta, a city between Catania and Siracusa on Sicily’s southeast coast. “[L]ittle had occurred to erase the images of ferocity and brutality created in those years,” says Dunbabin. And, finally, “Palermo and Messina, the great towns of the past, watched the rise of Naples with jealousy.” Naples represented foreign rule to Sicilians who could not identify with either that city or Italy in general.
More than anything, though, Dunbabin pegs what happened on Easter Monday in 1282 on the crushing tax burden Charles imposed for another foreign war.
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The Church of the Holy Spirit, or Santo Spirito, stands in all its iconic Norman glory in the midst of Palermo’s massive cemetery, Sant’Orsola. Made of volcanic stone, it is not overwrought in its construction as so many churches can be on this island of devoted churchgoers. The ceiling inside is painted wood. The church is not large and, except for morning and noon Mass and funerals, the wooden front doors are generally shuttered; the tiny piazza before those doors is usually empty. The only vehicles allowed are hearses; sometimes several funerals a day are scheduled.
The piazza in front is surrounded by magnificent crypts, some two stories high and topped with Islamic-style domes. There is a memorial in the square, honoring soldiers killed during the northern Italian fight for Unification. Heavy vegetation surrounds the square and infuses the cemetery with an almost woodslike quality. Along one edge is a rank of oleander trees preparing in late March to erupt in white, pink, red, and yellow blossoms.
The air in this third month—this time of year in the southern Mediterranean marks early spring—is comfortably warm, the evenings in Palermo are mild and, away from the heart of the city in this vast cemetery, quietness pervades. As evening approaches, swallows swoop through the darkening air, feasting on insects; the hum from the main road just outside the faraway gate, near where the flower sellers and stone masons operate, is nearly gone.
During a visit, with my son Brad and friend Conchita Vecchio in November 2009, the church was shuttered tightly and we wandered among the gravesites too long. The main gate was locked for the day. The maintenance people don’t seem to mind that we were there; they wait patiently to show us the way out through a tiny gate farther along, obligingly kept open for folks who miss closing time.
I returned in mid-March 2010 with my friend Steve McCurdy, arriving more than seven centuries after an event, on Easter Monday, March 30, 1282, when Sicily’s history took another sharp turn. Then, a crowd had gathered for early-evening vespers at the church that was barely a century old. The piazza so long ago was likely rough and unpaved, but it was large enough to hold those from the neighborhood and visitors from Palermo less than a mile away. These vespers were part of a traditional festival associated with Easter Week.
Historian Runciman reports that a handful of French soldiers also was there, observing the people who were “gossiping and singing” while waiting for vespers to begin. A soldier made what we moderns might call a “pass” at a young, married Sicilian woman. Her husband pulled his knife and stabbed the soldier. The crowd suddenly erupted in support for the act. Angry Sicilians “armed with daggers and swords” and with their burning resentment boiling over against the foreigners who presume to rule over and tax them for foreign wars, grabbed the other soldiers, murdering them on the spot.
At that moment, Santo Spirito’s bells, marking the start of vespers, started ringing. At the sound, “messengers ran through the city calling on the men of Palermo to rise against the oppressor … Every Frenchman that they met was struck down … Sicilian girls who had married Frenchmen perished with their husbands.” None was spared, including the children of the French occupiers. By morning, the rebels controlled the city, and two thousand Frenchmen and their women were dead.
All of this raises the question: Was the incident at Santo Spirito spontaneous? It certainly happened after a Frenchman threatened the honor of a Sicilian woman, something the crowd could not have anticipated. Or was it already in the planning stages and waiting only for a match to ignite the fire that first swept the city and then the entire island?
The answer is uncertain. What is known is that within a week or so, rebel troops had swept across Sicily, toward Trapani on the west coast, Caltanissetta to the south, and Messina on the east.
The earthshaking event that took the rebellion beyond Sicily and turned it into a major European event was that the emergency halted in their tracks the plans of Angevin King Charles I to attack Constantinople. This, of course, was much to the relief of the Byzantine emperor. Some reports indicate he hurriedly provided gold to support the rebellious Sicilians. Meanwhile, French soldiers were dispatched from the Italian ports where they had been gathering for the assault on Constantinople and sent to the Strait of Messina.
Battles, particularly over the city of Messina, took up much of that summer. Eventually, the Sicilians, despite their early successes in routing the French, came to realize they could not go it alone against the much larger and better equipped army.
Here is where a Spanish king, Peter of Aragon, enters the picture. Aragon, a self-proclaimed kingdom in northeastern Spain, was ruled by Peter and Queen Constance. She happened to be from the House of Hohenstaufen, the dynasty that once ruled Sicily through Henry VI and his son, Frederick II. This tie was enough for the Sicilians to seek the couple’s help.
“The Sicilians had been unwilling at first to substitute the rule of one foreign potentate for that of another,” Runciman tells us. “But they could not stand alone.” A group of Sicilians met with Peter and agreed that his queen, Constance, “was their lawful queen to whom the crown should be given, and after her to her sons, the Infants of Aragon.” Eventually, Peter agreed to “place his wife upon the throne of her ancestors” and become, as her husband, king of Sicily.
He organized his army and sailed to the west-coast city of Trapani, landing there on August 30, 1282, just five months after the incident at Santo Spirito. Peter began his march across the island, first toward Palermo, where on September 4 he was declared king of Sicily. Then he led the army on a slog through the center of the island to Randazzo and across the north slope of Etna toward Messina to confront the bulk of the French army. He was victorious in keeping the French off the island.
The act of Peter being named king of Sicily demolished what Roger II had accomplished more than 150 years earlier: the unifying of southern Italy and Sicily. All that was left to the French were the Kingdom of Naples and portions of the peninsula’s southern end.
Runciman gives the Sicilians credit for fighting unaided for so long. The arrival of the Aragonese allowed them to take the island under their control. It wasn’t until the 1440s, when Sicily and Naples were reunited under Spanish rule, that this part of the Mediterranean world became known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
But first, a comedy had to play itself out. The two kings, Peter and Charles, in 1283, challenged each other to a duel. A site in Bordeaux in France was chosen. The date was set, but not the hour of the day. Peter showed up with his retinue early in the morning; no one was there. He left, saying he won by default since his opponent was a coward and hadn’t showed up. Charles arrived sometime later, found the field empty, and made the same declaration. Each man claimed victory.
Charles I of Anjou, onetime king of Sicily and Naples, “died a failure,” writes Runciman. In Foggia, on Italy’s Adriatic coast, he died in 1285 and his body was carried to Naples for burial. His successors, including his son Charles II, were not up to the challenge, even with the support of the king of France and the pope, and Charles I’s great ambition to dominate the Mediterranean world came to an end.
The result of all this is that for the next four centuries, Sicily was under the thumb of Spain. Messina had been the favored city on the island under the French; now Palermo once again, and for the last time, became the capital.
The new king, Peter, may have treated
Sicily as a kingdom separate from Aragon, but the Spanish aristocracy started to acquire estates on the island in exchange for military service. When Peter died in 1285, just ten months after his mortal enemy, Charles I of Anjou, Peter’s son Alphonso took over the crown of Aragon and second oldest James was given Sicily. Alphonso died, James succeeded him and named third oldest brother Frederick as governor in Sicily.
Then James, beleaguered by a spate of internal problems and outside threats, gave Sicily to the church, which was going to turn it back over to the French Angevins. The Sicilian Parliament could not stomach being returned to the French they had chased out in 1282 and so found a friend in Frederick, who challenged his brother’s supremacy on the island. With Parliament’s blessing, he was elevated in 1296 to the crown of Sicily as King Frederick III.
He continued to battle the Naples-based French Angevins as the war of the Sicilian Vespers was still being fought. The French often landed on the island, burning crops, uprooting orchards, destroying forests, and disrupting commerce. Because of these incursions, the island’s Muslim-built irrigation system was destroyed, famine killed peasants by the thousands, and “Sicily had fallen prey to greed and ambition, and had become an island of hollow, frightened, and starving people,” according to historian Runciman.
Finally, in 1302, Naples, tiring of these decades-old battles, demanded that for Sicilians to remain independent, Frederick III must pay an annual tribute to the pope and call himself king of Trinacria, after the island’s ancient name, instead of king of Sicily. He was to marry a daughter of the French royalty in Naples and, at his death, the island would revert back to the French. This became the Treaty of Caltabellotta, signed in that south Sicily village in August 1302.
Frederick died in 1337. His son Peter II took over, but he died in 1342, and the treaty’s requirement that Sicily revert back to the Angevins was ignored. The Kingdom of Sicily was reunited eventually with the Spanish Kingdom of Aragon. For the following four centuries the rulers of Sicily never lived on the island. Instead, viceroys managed baron-controlled commerce, and peasants, as usual, suffered the most on the famine-wracked island.
Between the viceroys and the barons, corruption reigned and Spanish rule nearly destroyed Sicily’s economy. The island had to contribute to all of Spain’s wars, providing taxes and men for the army. Eventually, revolts broke out in Sicily’s largest cities.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Spain’s time in Sicily was nearing a shift in power. King Charles II, who ruled from 1677 to 1700, had no son. When his will was read, “Spain and Sicily found themselves bequeathed to Phillip V, the Bourbon grandson of [French] King Louis XIV.” But before Phillip could take over, the island was bequeathed, by members of an international congress, to Vittorio Amadeo di Savoia, in Piedmonte, northern Italy.
Sicily was ruled by Vittorio for five years, by the Austrians for fourteen years, and then, beginning in 1719, by the Spanish Bourbon ruler in Naples.
Identifying the Bourbons can be a complex matter. The current king of Spain, Juan Carlos I, descends from the Bourbon line, an ancient dynasty that had its beginnings in the early thirteenth century where its lord was a vassal of the king of France. Its members, over the centuries, spread across western Europe, often through intermarriages with other lines. Eventually some of the Bourbons became rulers of significant portions of the Western world, primarily in France and Spain, some specializing in the possessions, like the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, of those countries.
Again, these rulers were interested only in getting as much money out of Sicily as possible. And again, the kings did not live there. The Spanish tried, periodically, to regain control, but failed after the Austrians, who held on to the island until 1734, took control.
Eventually, the Spanish Bourbons reentered the fray. Phillip V of Spain sent his son, Charles of Bourbon, to retake Naples and Sicily, and in 1734, Charles became Charles III, king of the reunited Two Sicilies. As the Bourbons held sway, Sicily’s fortunes ebbed and flowed. A plot to replace the viceroy with a republican government was uncovered in 1797, and its leader was beheaded. Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia wrote a novel about this period, The Council of Egypt.
One of the successor kings held two titles. In Naples, he was known as King Ferdinand IV. In Sicily, he was King Ferdinand III. When he brought the two kingdoms under one command—once again to be called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies—he renumbered his name to become Ferdinand I.
His rule, including that of his progeny, kicked off four revolts between 1820 and 1860. The first two, if they had succeeded, might have created an independent Sicilian nation. The last two called for unification with Italy. Ferdinand died in 1825 in the midst of all the nationalistic turmoil. He was followed by son Francesco I, then by Ferdinand II, who died in 1859, on the eve of the Giuseppe Garibaldi–led northern Italian invasion of Sicily and southern Italy.
Early in 1860, revolts broke out in Palermo, Trapani, Marsala, Messina, Corleone, Cefalù, Misilmeri, Caltanissetta, and Agrigento. News of these events had convinced Garibaldi that the time was ripe for the invasion by his Red Shirts of northern volunteers called the One Thousand (the actual number was 1,070). The reign of Ferdinand I’s successor, Francesco II, while housed in Naples, says historian Privitera, “barely got under way before he had to flee the Garibaldi forces.”
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Italy today, with Sicily, Sardinia, and southern Italy under its control, is a relatively new nation at a mere 150 years old. Garibaldi landed at Marsala on May 11, 1860. A day later, at the inland town of Salemi, he proclaimed himself dictator and began the process of routing Bourbon troops throughout western Sicily. He took Palermo on May 25. By July 20, the island was his, and the Sicilian people loved him for his efforts. He crossed the Strait of Messina and, on October 1, it was all over in the South. Garibaldi had routed the Bourbons, driving them out of Naples, where he issued a decree “ordering the incorporation of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies into the Italian realm” under the rule of King Vittorio Emanuele II of Piedmonte.
Also that month, a vote was taken in Sicily on whether to go with the new nation with the promise of Sicilian autonomy. It passed, of course—the rigged “unanimous” vote is clearly shown in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Visconti’s film of that magnificent novel—but many Sicilians had wanted Garibaldi as their leader. Now they were under the thumb of one more monarchy, this one made up of northern Italians. To get their vote of support, they had been promised self-government, but their new northern leaders, who declared creation of the Kingdom of Italy early the next year, 1861, reneged.
It was a tough situation. As Privitera tells it, “[King Vittorio Emanuele] and his fellow Piedmontese saw themselves as coming to deliver Sicily from bondage whereas Sicilian opinion was that … they themselves had launched the liberation of Italy.”
These northern overseers found a culture in Sicily and the South that was foreign to their own. They found Sicilians, not Italians. The people spoke a different language and resisted the requirement that they learn Italian. The island, as was true so many times in the past three thousand years, was once again drained by taxation; its young men were drafted into the Italian army, and over the next several decades were used as cannon fodder in a number of senseless wars. Small landowners went broke; food and political riots were common.
Things got so bad that in 1866, says Privitara, “a major revolt in Palermo was put down by the shelling of the city by the Italian navy and by the arrival of forty thousand troops. But unlike 1860, no Garibaldi arrived to support the revolt.” The northern Italians declared martial law that lasted for several years. Many Sicilian insurgents were summarily executed.
Again, as happened so many times in Sicilian history under brutal invaders, these were incredibly tough times. Only now it was driven by northerners, Piedmontese, attempting to paint Sicilians as “Italians.”
Martial law was again declared in 1894. Privitera continues: “By the end
of the century, Sicily was no better off than it had been under the Bourbons. The island was under-educated, overtaxed, neglected, and impoverished.” It was in this era of post-Unification that the Mafia got its pincers sunk deep into the soul of the island.
What all this did was start one of the greatest movements of people from one nation to another. The great diaspora of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took millions of disenchanted, hungry Sicilians and southern Italians to North and South America.
Eventually, after World War II, Sicily, along with Sardinia and a few other regions in northern Italy, was given regional autonomy. But in Sicily’s case, it was only done to stop that growing separatist movement that hadn’t gone away after the North reneged on that 1861 promise of self-government. This political solution succeeded, keeping the island under the Italian flag.
Today, Sicilians remain Sicilians in their hearts, souls, and culture. The talk of secession is debated, quietly and in confidence, sub rosa, among friends.
NINE
A Mother’s Rage
I had imagined myself standing on Demeter’s Rock and looking down onto the shores of the lake, watching Persephone, sharing Demeter’s moment of distraction and the horrible clutching of her bowels as she turns her gaze back and Persephone is no longer there.
—Mary Taylor Simeti, On Persephone’s Island (1986)
IT’S A Sunday in March. The days are warm, and the almond petals, five to each pink bud that just a month earlier ignited the trees in the countryside around nearby Agrigento, are fluttering in the breezes of early spring. Racalmuto is quiet following the feast day of San Giuseppe a few days earlier. The brass band that followed the processions is silenced. Pounding drums that announce everything traditional in this tiny village of nearly ten thousand souls are put away until the next festival.