Louis Mendola - Time Traveler’s Guide to Norman-Arab-Byzantine Palermo, Monreale and Cefalù

By Jacqueline Alio

Margaret, Queen of Sicily

Queens of Sicily

1061-1266

Women of Sicily

Saints, Queens and Rebels

Sicilian Food and Wine

The Cognoscentes Guide

(with Francesca Lombardo)

By Louis Mendola

The Kingdom of Sicily

1130-1860

Sicilian Genealogy and Heraldry

Manfred of Hohenstaufen, King of Sicily

Sicilys Rebellion against King Charles

The Story of the Sicilian Vespers

Frederick, Conrad and Manfred of Hohenstaufen, Kings of Sicily

The Chronicle of Nicholas of Jamsilla

By Jacqueline Alio and Louis Mendola

The Peoples of Sicily

A Multicultural Legacy

Copyright 2017 Louis Mendola. All rights reserved.

Published by Trinacria Editions, New York.

This book may not be reproduced by any means whatsoever, in whole or in part, including illustrations, photographs and maps, in any form beyond the fair-use copying permitted by the United States Copyright Law and the Berne Convention, except by reviewers for the public press (magazines, newspapers and their websites), without written permission from the copyright holder.

The right of Calogera Jacqueline Alio and Louis Andr Mendola to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988 (UK).

Legal Deposit: Library of Congress, British Library (and Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library, Trinity College Library, National Libraries of Scotland and Wales), Italian National Libraries (Rome, Florence), Sicilian Regional Library (Palermo).

All translations contained herein are by the authors. Illustrations, photographs, maps and cover design by Louis Mendola. The title of this book was assigned a Library of Congress Control Number on 18 May 2017. Some text contained herein was previously published in The Peoples of Sicily: A Multicultural Legacy, 2014 Louis Mendola (US Copyright registration TXu001902927) and is used by permission.

ORCID identifier Calogera Jacqueline Alio: 0000-0003-1134-1217

ORCID identifier Louis Andr Mendola: 0000-0002-1965-6072

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

ISBN 9781943639274

Library of Congress Control Number 2017908105

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Do we define culture, or does culture define us?

No single culture could define something as magical as Sicilys golden age. For a few decades of the twelfth century, polyglot Palermo found itself the largest, wealthiest city of Europe ruled by a Christian monarch. Its population of Christians, Muslims and Jews was among the most literate in Europe. The same century saw the opulent royal capital governed by powerful queens acting as regents for their young sons. This meant that, anomalously, a large Muslim population was ruled by a woman for a few years at a stretch, so we find Adelaide, the widow of Roger I, Margaret, the widow of William I, and Constance, the daughter of Roger II.

Nobody planned it, or ever could have, but by 1130, when the Kingdom of Sicily was founded, Sicilian society was a cacophony of cultures: Arab, Byzantine, Norman, Lombard, Judaic.

It was more than a rainbow. For the most part, the Kingdom of Sicily, which included the island itself and most of the Italian peninsula south of Rome, along with Malta and a piece of Africa, enjoyed a certain social harmony, with few conflicts among its sophisticated diversitude of peoples.

Traces of this civilization are still visible today, from muqarnas to mosaics. Palermo was not alone. Pluralistic societies similar to Sicilys flourished elsewhere, in places like the Holy Land and Spain.

What brought this enlightened era to an end?

With the demise of the ruling Hohenstaufen dynasty in 1266, power shifted from Palermo to Naples. Popular poets like Dante and Boccaccio disparaged the defeated, and subsequent generations of Italians embraced what was, in effect, slanted propaganda that painted southern Italy in a negative light.

This trend overlooked the fact that the multicultural Kingdom of Sicily boasted two enlightened legal codes, the Assizes of Ariano and the Constitutions of Melfi, which guaranteed personal rights. An example was the statute making rape a crime; following the Middle Ages the Italians did not criminalize this heinous form of assault until the twentieth century. Divorce was regulated; it was later legalized again in modern Italy only in 1970.

In 1282, the Sicilians themselves rebelled against rule from the peninsula. Looking to lend a tenuous dynastic legitimacy to their bloody rebellion, the War of the Vespers, the people elected as their monarch the Aragonese king married to the daughter of the last Hohenstaufen. For the next few centuries Sicily found itself under the influence of Aragon and then the united Spain.

By 1300, with the conversion of the islands Muslims and the Greek Christians to Catholicism, and the widespread use of a common Sicilian language, a Latin monoculture had come to dominate the island and its people. The last Jews were converted or expelled in 1493, and the newly-arrived Albanian refugees fleeing Ottoman expansionism in the Balkans were forced under the ecclesiastical umbrella of Rome even as they were allowed to retain their Greek Orthodox liturgical rite. In such an environment, literacy declined precipitously.

This complex story was recounted in the first major history of Sicily, published in 1558. Nevertheless, the serendipity that made medieval Palermo the capital of emirs and kings was little studied in schools before the second half of the twentieth century, leaving most Sicilians ignorant of their own history until recent times.

Why was so little written about Sicilys fascinating multicultural history until the last few decades? Here a few perfunctory observations about modern realities are inescapable.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Italy was little more than a geographical expression. With the unification of the peninsula, along with Sicily and Sardinia, into a nation in 1861, the individual histories of most of the regions that comprised the new state were suppressed in the public mind in an attempt to focus on Italy as a whole. This encouraged a subtle censorship, and to this day a lingering Italocentrism colors Italian school curricula, with their emphasis on the Roman Empire and the Renaissance whilst all but ignoring the medieval cultures of the Byzantines, Muslims, Jews and everybody else.

Until unification, Naples and Palermo were wealthier, and more industrialized, than Milan and Turin, and there was far more emigration from the north than the south. With unification, investment in industry was directed to the north of the country. The south suffered economically but also socially; for example, the use of languages like Sicilian and Neapolitan was officially discouraged.

Like other nations, Italy succumbed to a rabid nationalism. Long forgotten was the inspiring message, implicit in Sicilys medieval multiculturalism, that what unites us is far greater than whatever might divide us.