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.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem is an unusual city.  For starters, it's the only major city in the world not built on a body of water (lake, river, ocean).  This is because it had its start as a religious center, whereas all other major cities had their start as commercial centers, and until very recently transportation of goods required easy water access, to say nothing of the necessity of drinking and washing water for a large population.

Jerusalem is also a holy city to three different religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  They are all Abrahamic religions, sharing some version of what the Christians call the Old Testament as a crucial text, all monotheistic, believing in only one god—in fact the same God.  So from the point of view of, say, Buddhism they may look fairly similar.  But these three religions all consider followers of the others infidels, which understandably leads to tensions.  There are plenty of other holy cities, such as Mecca for Muslims or Rome (or at least Vatican City) for Catholics, but no others where three religions vie for dominance.

Jerusalem was founded roughly 1000 BC, traditionally by King David, and was important as a religious center.  Its original Temple, supposedly built by David's son King Solomon, claimed to have the Ark of the Covenant, a symbolic representation of Noah's Ark and the agreement that God reached with Noah not to flood the earth again.  It was a small city, maybe a few thousand people at most (in even smaller footprint than what is now the Old City), but very important as a religious and cultural center.  When the Persian Cyrus the Great of Babylon defeated the Jews and captured Jerusalem in the sixth century BC, the Jews could hardly wait to get back and rebuild the Temple.  When the Romans drove most of the Jews out of Jerusalem  in 70 AD, they spent over 1800 years hoping to get back soon.  When the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948, with only a small slice of Jerusalem as part of the new country, they could hardly wait to capture it all, as they did in 1967.

Jerusalem has great symbolic value.  The New Jerusalem is a biblical metaphor taken now to mean heaven.  Even today, Jews at Passover promise, "Next year in Jerusalem," an old call to return to the Holy City, which is now interpreted to mean establishment of peace and prosperity for Jews.

Meanwhile of course Jerusalem also became a Christian holy city when Jesus was crucified there around 30 AD.  It was from there that the Christian religion originally spread, and it was thoroughly Christian under the late Roman Empire until it was conquered by Muslims in the seventh century AD.  Christians (and a few Jews) continued to live there, but Islam became the dominant religion both in Jerusalem itself and in the broader region the Romans had called Palestine.  Especially important for Islam was the mosque known as Dome of the Rock, built on top of the ruins of the second Jewish Temple, and containing the rock that was supposedly both the altar on which Abraham was going to obey God and sacrifice his son Isaac and the place from which Mohammad miraculously ascended into heaven.

For medieval Christians, Jerusalem continued to be a holy city.  Churches were oriented toward the east, symbolizing pointing toward Jerusalem.  Throughout the Middle Ages people made pilgrimages to Jerusalem to see all the holy sites, like the Church of the Sepulcher or the Mount of Olives, and to walk "on the ground where Christ's feet trod" as they put it.

In 1095, when the Byzantine patriarch needed some assistance in fighting the Turks and called on the pope for help, he got to his surprise not some companies of soldiers to help him as he'd hoped, but a whole army that intended to capture Jerusalem from the Muslims.  Much to everyone's shock, including their own, this First Crusade succeeded, and the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was established in 1100.  This included not just the city but much of the Holy Land.

It lasted however only about three generations, being constantly attacked by Muslims who wanted back what they considered their country.  After steadily losing territory, the city of Jerusalem itself fell in 1187 to Saladin, ending Christian rule but not Crusades, which continued throughout the Middle Ages though with increasingly less success.

Modern Jerusalem, or at least the Old City in Jerusalem, is one of the richest archaeological sites in the world.  It has remains of buildings, streets, water courses, and human habitation going back to the Canaanite civilization pre-David, and remains from the era of the Hebrew kings, and on top of that Persian ruins, a lot of Roman and Byzantine-era buildings, Muslim structures, Crusader fortifications and churches, and Turkish remains—and that's just the pre-1500 material.  The December 2019 issue of National Geographic has a big article on "Jerusalem underground."  As you can imagine in a city already divided by three antagonistic faiths, archaeology itself is a fraught subject.

For that matter, the Christians can't all agree.  The Church of the Sepulcher is divided up between different Christian denominations, and no one is supposed to touch anyone else's spot.  It was a great scandal when it was discovered that a stepladder had been moved, a few years back.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.