The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms

The Struggle for Dominion, 1200-1500

David S H Abulafia, David Bates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317897408
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

A pioneering account of the dynastic struggle between the kings of Aragon and the Angevin kings of Naples, which shaped the commercial as well as the political map of the Mediterranean and had a profound effect on the futures of Spain, France, Italy and Sicily. David Abulafia does it full justice, reclaiming from undeserved neglect one of the formative themes in the history of the Middle Ages.

Part I
Thirteenth-Century Challenges

Chapter 1
The Origins of the Sicilian Kingdom

The Lure of the South

The Norman Kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy, founded in 1130, is usually regarded as one of the strongest and as probably the wealthiest of the monarchies of twelfth-century Europe; as early as the thirteenth century, legislators and insurgents in the south of Italy appealed to the good old law of King William II (d. 1189) as the embodiment of wise government. The impression that the former Norman territories were a source of enormous wealth and military resources remained strong in the minds of late medieval conquerors such as the French invaders Charles of Anjou, who was crowned king of Sicily in 1266, and Charles VIII of Valois, who added the Neapolitan crown to that of France in 1494-95. 'A land flowing with milk and honey' had attracted the first Norman invaders in the eleventh century, to quote their biblically-conscious chroniclers; these writers were only the first to draw a comparison between the wealth of southern Italy and that of the ancient land of Israel, for Frederick II (d. 1250) is also supposed to have drawn a direct comparison, saying that his Sicilian kingdom would have provided a more luxurious home for the Children of Israel than had the Promised Land of Canaan. Such persistence in the historical sources that southern Italy was wealthy and flourishing raises two important questions: how far the reputation of southern Italy acted as a magnet for would-be conquerors; and how far this reputation was based in solid reality.

The great Italian liberal historian, Benedetto Croce, tried in 1924 to disentangle some of the contradictions presented by the history of southern Italy. Here was a region whose princes, lawyers and philosophers were held in the highest esteem by earlier writers; a kingdom which was seen as the precocious instigator of the ideal of an 'absolute secular and enlightened monarchy'.¹ Croce recalled the words of the Swiss historian of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt: at the court of Frederick II, in thirteenth-century Naples, first appears the notion of the state and its government as 'a work of art'.² Yet Croce was keenly conscious that southern Italy had fallen far from this peak of glory, even supposing such past achievements were not mythical. What had been praised by Venetian merchants of the twelfth century as the realm of peace, free of brigands, in later centuries had an almost opposite reputation; and the efficient, impartial administrators of Norman and Hohenstaufen days gave way to venal, wayward government by the fifteenth century. Croce pointed to the lack of national unity in the south of Italy; there existed indeed one political entity, ruled from a capital at Naples, but under its control a great variety of regional interests - towns aspiring to autonomy, warlords trying to build great estates, and also geographical and ethnic diversity. Perhaps in the twelfth century there were some rulers who maintained a benign interest in the good government of the many peoples in their domain, but by the fourteenth century the princes and their bureaucracy stood much further from the population, separated to some degree by the powerful territorial and governmental claims of a large feudal baronage:

no people, no nation came to birth; there was not even a name which fitted all the various stocks, for Sicilians, Apulians, Longobards, Neapolitans were all appellations of a purely local character; the burghers and the common people did not impose their will, and the feudal lords did so only in a highly anarchistic manner which did not further the good of the state . . . The parliaments, called together at long intervals, served only for the proclamation of laws or the levy of moneys to meet some financial emergency; there is no record of either give-and-take with the king or legal opposition to him.³

Croce wrote in a spirit of political idealism; but it remains difficult to escape from some of the problems he posed: above all, the decline from the well-articulated system of rule historians have identified in Norman Sicily and southern Italy, in the twelfth century, to the disorder of Angevin Italy only two centuries later, when much of the Norman fabric of government crumbled. So too the wealthy kings of the twelfth century, whose display certainly aroused much envy, were succeeded by relatively impoverished rulers who tided over their financial problems by taking massive loans from foreign bankers. Such contrasts are easily over-drawn, and it should not be supposed that southern Italian kings lost their well-established influence in Italian and Mediterranean politics; they made many attempts to maintain past glories, often on an ever greater scale. But to do so cost money; and, amid the strains of government crises and rebellions, it was less easy to live as a magnificent monarch in the thirteenth than in the twelfth century.

When Croce talked of 'decline' he did not mean decline in international significance: the rulers of southern Italy in the thirteenth century were actively involved in imperial politics in Germany and northern Italy, even after the death of Frederick II, in plans to reconquer the Empire of Constantinople, in crusades to recover the Kingdom of Jerusalem, to establish and uphold supremacy in northern Italy, whether in alliance with or as opponents of the papacy and its Guelf allies. Frederick II issued his Constitutions of Melfi for the kingdom of Sicily, but the law code glories in his titles of Roman Emperor, king of Jerusalem, king of Aries. Charles I of Anjou, when he died in 1285, bore among his titles those of King of Jerusalem, King of Sicily, King of Albania, Count of Provence, Count of Piedmont.⁴ But it was to his conquest of the Kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy that Charles and his heirs owed much of their influence in the Mediterranean. It is necessary to look at the origins and resources of their south Italian state.

Land and People

The lands the Normans and their successors conquered possessed neither geographical nor political unity. Long sea coasts provided the best means for moving from region to region. Large areas of southern Italy are mountainous and there are no extensive internal plateaux. Inland there are few important towns, though Melfi and Venosa were significant exceptions, as was the papal enclave of Benevento. The coasts are where the centres of settlement have always lain: the plain around Naples owes its fertility to the part benign, part destructive lava flows of Vesuvius. By 1300 Naples was one of the larger towns in Italy, much the most important focus of population in southern Italy; Palermo too was a large town by European standards, soaking up a significant part of the food supply of Sicily. Both may have had populations of very roughly 25,000; only a select few north Italian cities - notably Florence, Genoa, Milan and Venice - can have greatly exceeded this figure in the years around 1300. Down the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea ancient merchant settlements at Gaeta, Amalfi, Salerno and other centres also contributed to the importance of this relatively small region. But rocky Calabria, the toe of Italy, was thinly settled and had no big coastal towns to rival the bay of Naples. On the east coast of southern Italy lay long, low plains, a source of wine, grain and olive oil, stretching from the Apennine foothills down to the sea; and along the sea existed a long line of towns, some of them famous as centres of shipping, especially pilgrim traffic: Bari, Barletta, Trani. Significant inland centres included Frederick II's administrative headquarters at Foggia, and the Muslim settlement at Lucera, itself a Byzantine foundation; in the early thirteenth century the hinterland of this region (known as the Capitanata) was emerging as a major source of good quality grain for the export market. The northernmost part of this coastline was, however, less well populated and bordered on the wild Abruzzi and Molise regions, the haunt of bears and wolves still. The thirteenth-century new town of L'Aquila, meaning 'the eagle', expressed the sensitive role of the region as a frontier defence zone. The papal town of Rieti stood not far off, and the authority of the bishops of Rieti actually straddled the frontier of the south Italian kingdom.⁵ Finally, the island of Sicily, rich in grain-productive uplands, especially in the west of the island, still preserved even in the late Middle Ages some of the exotic character it had possessed as an Arabic island. The coastline was known for its luscious gardens; sugar-cane and other 'oriental' foodstuffs were grown in the Norman period, but were less visible under Frederick II: he tried to revive their production, but in reality it only recovered in the fifteenth century. In the north-east of Sicily, around Messina, the economy was more diverse, with extensive wine production and local textile industries.⁶

The conquerors of southern Italy were attracted more by the reputation of the lands they coveted than by exact knowledge of their condition. They knew that the rulers of Sicily and south Italy were exceptionally wealthy; they may have heard that the sources of wealth lay partly in taxes on trade, partly in the export of grain from royal estates, partly in the efficiency with which the royal government was able to collect the taxes it actually claimed. But it is more likely that would-be conquerors were attracted by the sight of Sicilian gold and silk or by news of the size of Palermo and Naples (and therefore, they might assume, their wealth) than by tales of sacks of grain. If they won their wars, it was through experience of government that they learned the realities of south Italian geography and resources.

The history of the late medieval Mediterranean was moulded in significant ways by events in the south of Italy during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Before ad 1000, the south of Italy was divided many ways: there were local dynasties, who exercised authority over a primarily Latin Christian, Italian-speaking population in the small but wealthy commercial centres of Campania such as Amalfi and Gaeta, and in the Duchy of Naples; extensive tracts of the interior were under the control of princes descended from Lombard conquerors of the early Middle Ages; all these occasionally owed allegiance to the Byzantine emperor, far away in Constantinople, whose power was remote enough to prompt little worry about a serious recovery of Byzantine control in all of southern Italy.⁷ Nevertheless, the south-east, Apulia, was controlled by Byzantine governors, as was occasionally the toe of Italy (Calabria), and both areas retained a substantial Greek-speaking population throughout the Middle Ages, although only tiny Greek remnants survive now.⁸ Apulia and indeed virtually all south Italian towns were also home to a Jewish community that may have numbered 5 per cent of the overall population, and which was well integrated into wider society, being heavily engaged in textile production.⁹

In the island of Sicily, by contrast, there were many Greeks, maybe 40 per cent of the entire population around ad 1000, and significant numbers of Jews, but almost no Latins or 'Italians'; the majority was an Arabic-speaking population of Muslims, some of them descendants of the ancient population who had converted to Islam after the Muslim invasions of the ninth century, some descendants of Arabs and Berbers from north Africa, some very recent settlers from as far afield as Persia and Yemen, who took advantage of the island's prosperity astride the key trade routes of the Islamic world to take up residence in such great cities as Balarm (Palermo), more generally known to the Arabic-speakers as simply Madinat Siqilliyah, 'the city of Sicily'.

The Norman State

The conquest of these areas by the Normans was not the result of a master plan to subdue the region and transform into into a single kingdom. The region would, indeed, for long retain its diversity in language, religion and social structure. The Norman conquest in the eleventh century reveals, rather, how a small group of foreign mercenaries who first arrived at the start of the century could make themselves so valuable to the warring parties in southern Italy - Byzantine and Lombard - that they inserted themselves into the command structure as territorial lords rewarded for their sterling services. In time, under the leadership of Robert Guiscard (d. 1085) they acquired control of the Byzantine province of Apulia, and began to consolidate their hold on southern Italy; by the 1060s they felt able to respond to appeals from Sicily to help sort out factional strife on the island, seizing control of the island for themselves under the vigorous leadership of Robert Guiscard's brother Roger I, Great Count of Sicily. Guiscard, for his part, concentrated heavily on the defence of his interests in Apulia against the Byzantine emperor, whose rights in the area he had usurped; Guiscard led vigorous campaigns into the Balkans, attacking Durazzo (Dyrrachium) in what is now Albania and the Greek island of Corfu.¹⁰

At the start of the twelfth century there existed, in fact, three major Norman political units in the Italian south: Apulia and contiguous lands under the rule of Guiscard's heirs; Sicily and Calabria, notionally dependent on Apulia but flourishing under the rule of Roger I and his heirs; and a third statelet, the Principality of Capua, which lay under the rule of another group of Normans entirely. Having failed to secure the recognition of either the Byzantine emperor (not surprisingly) or the German emperor (who had his own powerful ambitions in Italy), Guiscard and Roger I built close ties to the third of the claimants to universal authority, the pope, who was glad to accept the vassalage of Robert Guiscard in 1059. The Normans proved unruly vassals, but they also provided valuable protection to the papacy at dangerous moments, such as Gregory VIIs bitter quarrel with the German king Henry IV (though their hospitality to Gregory in 1084 was cruelly marred by the sacking of Rome at the same time). Later, without compromising the formal dependence of the count of Sicily on the Norman duke of Apulia, Pope Urban II in 1098 appears to have conferred special status on Roger I of Sicily, allowing him effective day-to-day control of the Church on the island, in the hope that the Normans would organise the first Latin Church structure on the island, and hold this frontier area against the danger of an Islamic resurgence.¹¹ The rights of the papacy in southern Italy and Sicily can thus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Genealogical Tables
• Editor's Preface
• Author's Preface
• Part One Thirteenth-Century Challenges
• Part Two Fourteenth-Century Crises
• Part Three Fifteenth-Century Victories
• Further Reading
• Maps
• Genealogical Tables
• Index