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.

Frederick II

In an earlier post on the Holy Roman Empire, I noted that, from the middle of the tenth century on, the kings of Germany were also crowned Roman Emperor.  (Some might find this ironic, given that Germanic peoples are supposed to have overthrown the original Roman Empire.  They really didn't, as discussed more here, though the establishment of Roman Emperors in Germany--with another Roman Emperor in Constantinople--is an interesting story.)

Today I want to discuss one of the most interesting of the Holy Roman emperors, Frederick II (1194-1250).  He was grandson of Frederick Barbarossa, son of Emperor Henry VI and of Constance of Sicily.  His mother was queen of Sicily, although at the time she and Henry married it had not been expected that she would take the throne.  But several male relatives died within a short time, and she took over.

This meant that baby Frederick II was heir to two kingdoms, Germany and Sicily, with Italy sort of squeezed in between--especially disturbing to the pope.  The popes had been fighting on and off with the German kings/Roman emperors for over a century when Frederick was born, and were understandably concerned.

Constance had a slightly different concern--that her son be accepted by the Sicilians.  She was forty when she became pregnant, and in order to avoid any question of whether the baby was really hers, she had the bishop of Palermo be present when she gave birth--as the story went, in a tent in the middle of the main piazza.

Frederick's father died when he was very young.  The pope of his youth, Innocent III (1198-1216), thought he had won the papacy's long conflict with the emperors.  Young Frederick seemed a pliant boy who promised to give up Sicily in return for being crowned emperor, and who did the equivalent of telling him, "I'll do whatever you want, Uncle Innocent!"  (He had his fingers crossed.)

In practice Frederick had no interest in giving up Sicily, where he grew up and which he considered home.  He went to Germany just long enough to be crowned king and to grant the great dukes and princes pretty much freedom to do whatever they wanted, which worked for them (and was the beginning of the disintegration of Germany into small principalities, not to be reunited until the late nineteenth century).

Though Innocent died without realizing what a problem Frederick was going to be, his successors as pope found out all too well.  Frederick promised to go on Crusade, then didn't because he said was sick.  The pope excommunicated him.  Then, saying he felt better, he took off for the East, and got excommunicated a second time, because you weren't supposed to go on Crusade while excommunicate.  Then he got to the East, had a nice chat with the sultan rather than fighting, and got excommunicated a third time for doing Crusading wrong, even though he came home calling himself the King of Latin Jerusalem.

He was very interested in science and learning and had Arabic scholars at his court as well as speaking Arabic himself--he also knew Greek.  Muslims served in his court and in his army, enough that he was accused of being a secret Muslim himself.  He dabbled in alchemy enough to be considered a magician.  He had a zoo with giraffes and an elephant.  He established a university in Naples.

He drew up law codes for Sicily, with, big surprise, the king in charge, supported by an efficient bureaucracy and good record keeping.  Interested in the effect of exercise on digestion, he had (it was said) two condemned criminals given a nice big meal, had one run around and the other sit still, then had them both cut open to see how digestion was going (scientific method in action).  He ordered that some infants be brought up not hearing any human speech, to see if they would speak Hebrew (the supposed first language) or the language of their parents; the experiment failed, because the children did not speak at all.  He wrote a manual on falconry, how to train falcons, which is still used today.

At the time he was called "Stupor Mundi," the wonder of the world, for his learning, his wide interests, and power (the king of Sicily controlled the bottom half of Italy, not only the island).

When he died in 1250, the popes decided that enough was enough and hunted down and had killed all his sons and grandsons, legitimate and illegitimate.  It took a few years, but at the end the popes felt they had finally won the pope-emperor wars, that at this point had been going on for close to two centuries.

They had however lost a great deal of moral authority in the meantime, but that's another story.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more about medieval monarchs, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval.