Kingdom of Sicily

“ On the ruins of the Greek, Lombard and Saracen power, the Normans feudalised southern Italy so thoroughly that the feudalism of Naples and Sicily long outlasted the more indigenous feudalism of Tuscany or Romagna. Freed from his grasping brother’s tutelage after 1085, Roger ruled over Sicily as count till his death in 1101. We shall see how his son united Sicily with Apulia in a single sovereignty, which has in various shapes endured as the kingdom of Naples or Sicily, until the establishment of a united Italy in our own days. ”

“ To the south lay the independent Lombard duchies, and the possessions which still remained to the Eastern Empire. ♦The Norman kingdom of Sicily not an Imperial fief.♦ These changed in time into the Norman duchy of Apulia and kingdom of Sicily; but that kingdom, held as it was as a fief of the see of Rome, was never incorporated with the Italian kingdom of the Emperors, nor did its kings ever become the men of the Emperor. Particular Emperors in the thirteenth century, in the sixteenth, and in the eighteenth, were also kings of one or both the Sicilian kingdoms ”

“ Two courses were open to him when, after losing Sicily, he saw the loss of his other kingdom and of his throne staring him in the face. One was to go forth like a man at the head of his troops to meet the storm. There had been such a thing as loyalty in the Kingdom of Naples; not loyalty of the highest sort, but still the sentiment had existed. Who knows what might not have been the effect of the presence of their young Sovereign on the broken moral of the Neapolitan soldiers? ”

“ The people of the country were sunk in barbarism. In the cities there was no middle class analogous to that of the more northerly republics. Nevertheless, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies played an important part in the development of Italian literature. While the Mussulmans held sway at Palermo, Sicily was the most refined and enlightened state of Southern Europe. Under the Norman dynasty this Arabic civilisation began to influence North Italy, and during the reign of Frederick II. Naples bade fair to become the city of illumination for the modern world. ”

“ At the beginning of the eleventh century, the island had been wholly lost, while the dominion on the mainland had been greatly enlarged. ♦The Normans in Italy and Sicily.♦ In the course of the eleventh century a new power, the Normans of Apulia, conquered the Italian possessions of the Empire, won Sicily from the Mussulman, and even made conquests from the Empire east of the Hadriatic. Thus arose the Sicilian kingdom, the growth of which will best be traced when we come to the powers which arose out of the breaking-up of the Empire. ”

“ Sicily formed a separate government. Corsica and Sardinia belonged to the exarchate of Africa. The reorganization of the province of Italy into the ex arch ate was forced on the emperors by the Lombard invasion, which began in 568, and their permanent settlement. The Lombards thrust a wedge into Italy. Its base was in Venetia, and its point was advanced to the Tiber. From the early days of the conquest they spread to the south, and established the duchies of Spoletum and Beneventum in the modern kingdom of Naples. ”

“ A revolt in Sicily is put down the following year. Sicily is used as a starting-point for the African wars.
1554 Charles gives his son Philip the title of king of Naples, on Philip’s marriage to Mary of England.
1556 Abdication of Charles V. Philip I (II of Spain) receives the Two Sicilies as part of his dominions. The kingdom becomes merely a Spanish province. Pope Paul IV wishes to drive the Spaniards from Naples and makes a league with Henry II of [670] France for that purpose. Francis, duke of Guise, grandson of René II of Lorraine, plans to obtain the crown of Naples. ”

“ He sought to stamp out loyalty to the old kings by exile and the sword. In Sicily he wrought unutterable woe, such as in the end turned the blood of every islander to fire and his heart to stone, and produced a massacre from which no Frenchman escaped. All the world knows that great act of retribution by the name of the Sicilian Vespers.
But in the meantime Conradin had grown up to tall boyhood, and his heart was already brave enough to rage when he saw his kingdom in the hands of a cruel conqueror, and his own subjects slain and banished because they loved his house. ”

“ He is still there, and the Sicilians silently sigh over their inability against the superior force of Naples. The people are of a nobler type than the Neapolitans and regard themselves as of a nobler race, they are also more industrious and earnest, and still greater lovers of freedom. But the want of independence breeds in the cities frivolity and immorality, especially in Palermo, and that amongst all classes. Sicily is still rich and beautiful, as in ancient times, and is still worthy to be called the gem of the Mediterranean. ”

“ Thus at last a single man put the period to the island’s troubled history, ended definitely her ambitions for individual greatness and made her an important part of a greater and more powerful whole.
So it is clear that there has never been a Sicilian nation, nor has there ever been even a Sicilian language; but every great race that dwells about the Mediterranean at some time has had a part in Sicily’s story, and each race in its turn has left an indelible imprint upon language and customs, upon architecture and people. Here one sees a pure Greek face of classic beauty ”

“ By consulting the map you see that the triangle—with an area of some ten thousand square miles—is not only in the center of the Mediterranean from East to West, but that it is also a great stepping-stone between Europe and Africa. In ancient days, when all the civilized world bordered the Mediterranean, the geographical position of Sicily gave the island an especial political character and importance. And naturally, while it remained the very center of the civilized world, it was a rich prize to be fought for by each Nation which rose to power. ”

“ When that occurs, Sicily may again raise its desponding head, and, by seeking the protection of England, whose remembrance is indelibly stamped on the hearts of its inhabitants, it would soon be regenerated, and, with a liberal government and free trade, might once more become the rich and happy Sicily, the garden of Europe. ”

“ In the later mapping out of the empire into purely military divisions, the theme (thema) of Sicily took in both the island and the nearest peninsula of the mainland, the oldest Italy. The island itself was divided for financial purposes, almost as in the older times, into the two divisions of Syracuse and Lilybaeum. The revolutions of Italy hardly touched a land which looked steadily to the eastern Rome as its head. The Lombard and Frankish masters of the peninsula never fixed themselves in the island. ”

“ There has never been a Sicilian nation. Perhaps that is the reason the story of the island is so hard to follow, it’s all snarled up with the history of first one, then another nation. The most obvious way of learning something about Sicily is to read what historians have to say about it; a pleasanter way is to listen to what the poets from Homer to Goethe have sung of it, paying special heed to Theocritus—he knew Sicily better than anybody else before his time or since! ”

“ Many an army had marched and camped and fought among these hills and vales, and the powdery dust of the milk-white roads had puffed up from the feet of Elymian and Phœnician, Greek and Roman legions. But never before had a victory meant so much to civilization as the success of the badly armed but desperately determined and immortal Thousand who followed the gray-haired sailor-hero. And history repeated itself yet again when Garibaldi, like Timoleon, refused everything for himself, counting it honor enough to serve Sicily so well. ”

“ The name of Sicily is illustrious in history. If the reputation of a people had for sole foundation and measure the number of inhabitants, the extent of its territory, the duration of its influence, the Sicilians, impoverished by continual revolutions, decimated by sucessive tyrannies, more isolated from the general progress by their internal organisation, than from the mainland by their geographical position, would hold, perhaps, in the annals of the world, no more room than their island occupies on the map of Europe. ”

“ They stayed a long time, but with the crumbling of the Roman Empire there came a change in Sicily, the first Roman province, and for a time the Goths and the Byzantines ruled her. Then came the Saracens. They destroyed Syracuse and made a new capital, Palermo, that from their time to ours has remained the chief city of the island. After the Saracens came the Normans—the same generation of men that subdued England under William the Conqueror,—and gave to Sicily a second period of greatness; for if the Greeks gave Sicily her Golden Age, the Norman age at least was Silver Gilt. ”

“ Simultaneously with Rome the south of Italy had entered into the movement so characteristic of the year 1848. The scenes of 1820 and 1821 were repeated." The Sicilians again demanded independence; expelled the Neapolitan garrison from Palermo; refused to accept a constitution proffered by King Ferdinand II., which created a united parliament for Naples and Sicily; voted in a Sicilian parliament the perpetual exclusion of the Bourbon dynasty from the throne, and offered the crown of Sicily to a son of the king of Sardinia, who declined the gift. ”

“ Carven slabs from the temple friezes—what a story they tell of the primitive and ardent culture of the early Greeks perched upon their twin hills at Selinus, beside the sounding deep! One whole hall is lined with them, arranged symmetrically in series, speaking even to-day with the voice of that mystic lore which, to understand, reveals ancient Sicily. And though individual carvings excel them in precision and beauty, as a series denoting the exact progress of Greek Sicilian art from its crudest to its most perfected form, the metopes are unsurpassed. ”

“ Sicily then, comparatively near to Africa, but much nearer to Europe, has been a European land, but one specially open to invasion and settlement from Africa. It has been a part of western Europe, but a part which has had specially close relations with eastern Europe. It has stood at various times in close connexion with Greece, Africa and Spain; but its closest connexion has been with Italy. Still the history of Sicily should never be looked on as simply part of the history of Italy. Lying thus between Europe and Africa, Sicily has been the battle-field of Europe and Africa. ”

“ Sicily now stands out as a main centre of European politics. But the land has lost its character; it is becoming the plaything of powers, instead of the meeting-place of nations. The tale, true or false, that Frenchmen and Provencals were known from the natives by being unable to frame the Italian sound of c shows how thoroughly the Lombard tongue had overcome the other tongues of the island. In Palermo, once city of threefold speech, a Greek, a Saracen, a Norman who spoke his own tongue must have died with the strangers. ”

“ It may be false and foolish, it may be noble and chivalrous, whatever it is, they say, it has such a firm growth among them because the history of Sicily is the history of an island which has for centuries been misgoverned by foreigners, and the people have lost any faith they may ever have had in professional justice. ”

“ And though the Phœnicians have passed completely from the entire earth, and the Greeks remain a great Nation, this city which the Phœnicians founded is still Sicily’s most beautiful and prosperous center, while the wonderful Greek metropoli of Akragas and Syracuse have dried up like mummies within the battered outlines of their once splendid shells. ”

“ Istria, Venice, and the cities on the Dalmatian coast, still acknowledged the supremacy of the empire. ... In the centre of Italy, the exarchate of Ravenna still held Rome in subjection, but the people of Italy were entirely alienated. ... The cities of Gaëta, Naples, Amalfi, and Sorento, the district of Otranto, and the peninsula to the south of the ancient Sybaris, now called Calabria, were the only parts [of southern Italy] which remained under the Byzantine government. Sicily, though it had begun to suffer from the incursions of the Saracens, was still populous and wealthy. ”

“ AROUND THE ISLAND FASCINATION and Palermo are synonymous; the subtle charm of the city works into one’s very blood. Day after day and week after week roll by, until with a start of surprise that is akin to consternation one realizes that unless he has a year to devote to the island he must seek fresh vistas soon or leave Sicily, having seen nothing but the capital. Regretting is as vain as it is foolish. ”

“ That domain is regularly let out to farmers by the censors. There are two federate cities, whose tenths are not put up to auction; the city of the Mamertines and Taurominium. Besides these, there are five cities without any treaty, free and enfranchised; Centuripa, Halesa, Segesta, Halicya, and Panormus. All the land of the other states of Sicily is subject to the payment of tenths; and was so, before the sovereignty of the Roman people, by the will and laws of the Sicilians themselves. ”

“ Already I behold the swarms of angry barbarians; our opulent cities, the places flourishing in a long peace, are shaken with fear, desolated by slaughter, consumed by rapine, and polluted by intemperance and lust. I see the massacre or captivity of our citizens, the rapes of our virgins and matrons. In this extremity (he interrogates a friend) how must the Sicilians act? By the unanimous election of a king of valour and experience, Sicily and Calabria might yet be preserved; for in the levity of the Apulians, ever eager for new revolutions, I can repose neither confidence nor hope. ”