Sicily

 Sicily is the island that forms the football off the toe of Italy's boot.

Because it is as far from Rome or from the big industrial/financial centers like Milan or Turin as you can go and still be in Italy, it can be overlooked (though it is often evoked as a cradle of the New York Mafia).  But in the Middle Ages it was an important crossroads, where different cultures met.  It is a good indication that medieval Europe was not simply the white Catholic land it is often portrayed to be.

During antiquity, Sicily was home to Phoenician colonies, succeeded by Greek colonies, and it still has many excellent Greek temples.  The Romans conquered it and made it part of their empire, concerned because it was halfway between Rome and Carthage, home of Rome's arch-rivals.  In the early centuries AD Sicily was Christianized along with the rest of the Roman Empire.  But then in the seventh century, with the rise of Islam, it became the home of many Muslims.  (On the map you will notice what a short distance it is from Sicily to Muslim North Africa.)  In the Middle Ages, three major civilizations met in Sicily, Byzantine Greek, Latin west, and Muslim.  Plus a solid Jewish minority.  All had to get along, at least some of the time.

But the Byzantines fought a fairly continuous low-level war against Muslims in the Mediterranean, including in Sicily.  In the first half of the eleventh century they invited some fighters from Normandy to come fight as mercenaries in Sicily.  Even before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, then, Normans were heading off to conquer places.  Fairly quickly the Sicilian Normans decided that rather than fight for the Byzantines it made more sense to fight for themselves.  Soon the leader declared himself duke of Sicily.

The Sicilians gained the support of the popes, who were fighting the German kings (Roman emperors) and needed allies.  In return, the popes put up no fuss when in the twelfth century the dukes decided they were actually kings of Italy.  They conquered most of the foot part of the Italian boot over the following decades, declaring their whole territory the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

The dukes and kings of Sicily were active in the Crusading movement.  Indeed, the First Crusade in 1095 began when the Byzantine emperor asked the pope for some more mercenaries like those Sicilian Normans, to help fight the Muslims, and got a whole lot more than he bargained for.

In the 1180s, Constance, daughter of the king of Sicily, married Henry VI, heir to the Holy Roman Empire, which he took over in 1190 on the death of his father, Frederick Barbarossa.  She was the daughter of the king of Sicily's third wife and had plenty of brothers and nephews.  But after they all died for one reason or another, she became queen of Sicily in 1194.  In that year she also gave birth to a son, future Frederick II, heir both to the Empire and to Sicily, thus squeezing the popes from both sides (the Holy Roman Empire officially included the northern half of Italy).

Although the Holy Roman Emperors usually were centered in Germany, Frederick made Sicily his home.  Popes hated him, and he wasn't much of a favorite with other European leaders.  After his death, all his sons and grandsons were hunted down, and Sicily was given to a younger brother of Louis IX of France.  But he was overthrown in 1282 with the so-called Sicilian Vespers, and title to Sicily went to the crown of Aragon (Spain) who (more or less) held onto it through the rest of the Middle Ages.

(For more on some of the people mentioned above, follow the links.)

A good book on medieval Sicily is by Sarah Davis-Secord, Where Three Worlds Meet (Cornell University Press, 2017).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval Italy, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.