Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily

Arabic-Speakers and the End of Islam

Dr Alexander Metcalfe, Alex Metcalfe, Alexander Metcalfe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317829249
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

The social and linguistic history of medieval Sicily is both intriguing and complex. Before the Muslim invasion of 827, the islanders spoke dialects of either Greek or Latin or both. On the arrival of the Normans around 1060 Arabic was the dominant language, but by 1250 Sicily was an almost exclusively Christian island, with Romance dialects in evidence everywhere. Of particular importance to the development of Sicily was the formative period of Norman rule (1061 1194), when most of the key transitions from an Arabic-speaking Muslim island to a 'Latin'-speaking Christian one were made. This work sets out the evidence for those changes and provides an authoritative approach that re-defines the conventional thinking on the subject.

1

SICILY BEFORE 1100

Popular perceptions and issues

Given the confusion and divisions that have distinguished southern Italian society and politics for much of the modern period, one might wonder how such a situation could ever have come about in one of the leading nations of Europe. Arguably the least dispassionate subject of all popular debate in Italy is the questione meridionale or ‘southern question’. The broader discussion areas which underpin this, such as the economy, political reform, social justice and so on would be on the agenda in most other modern European countries. But in the context of southern Italy, these questions are coloured by perceptions of a deep north-south divide, criminality, corruption, regional autonomy, bureaucratic confusion, political extremism and judicial chaos. Related as many of these points may be, the complex arguments that surround them are often articulated froman accusatory perspective and rely on negatively stereotypical views, not all of which are uninformative. Indeed, even debates about the advantages and disadvantages of car licence plates which reveal the area from where it was registered, or which region has the best food and football team, or the pride taken in the incomprehensibility of one's own dialect can almost be considered as interrelated issues and reveal layer upon layer of fragmented allegiances, indeterminable local boundary lines and ancient prejudices that lend a parochial touch to many such issues, including those of provincial, national and even international importance.¹ On occasions, opposing views do find common ground, but where the ability to block is almost as important as the mandate to govern, genuine change – to date – has been rare. Among potential remedies, time and again the idea that desperate situations require desperate measures resurfaces. Otherwise, the option to put one's trust in a more ‘remote’ control has been a perennial favourite, both for those who see the opportunities this affords local powers and for those who have little faith in them. But while much of the society appears to yearn for change of some sort, in other respects it remains profoundly conservative, resistant to reformand tied to its variously perceived traditional values. Of the peculiar difficulties of reformin Sicily, the aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa claimed that it is

like firing into cotton wool; the little hole made at that moment is covered after a few seconds by thousands of tiny fibres and all remain as before, the only additions being the cost of the powder, ridicule at useless effort and deterioration of material.²

Tomasi was speaking of post-Risorgimento Sicily from the perspective of the post-war era, but his point remains pertinent in spite of the changes that had occurred even before the depressing National Geographic article from 1976 entitled ‘Sicily, Where All The Songs Are Sad’.³ The opening photograph shows a singer in a crowded market place lamenting the death of a donkey which now keeps his peasant owner from his only source of income. We then learn that ‘today's Sicily with its abandoned farms, depopulated villages and chronic unemployment is consistent with its melancholic past’. But one wonders whether the situation in the mid-1970s could ever have been as bad as western Sicily in the mid-thirteenth century and to which scenario this quote more aptly applies? As for the medieval period in Sicily, it can hardly be said that this is the usual starting point for popular discussion of the southern question. Nonetheless, it is remarkable how many debates delve into age-old concepts, events and their consequences and it is striking how much more relevant the twelfth century is perceived to be to modern Sicily than the same period is to virtually anywhere else in the rest of modern Europe. Indeed, whatever one's views, few would disagree that, of the Middle Ages, the Norman and Swabian periods were of the most fundamental importance to the development of the society, economics, religion, politics and dialects of the southern Italian peninsula.

Research into the high Middle Ages is rarely straightforward, especially in southern Italy, and in his introduction to ‘The Norman Kingdom of Sicily’, Donald Matthew elicited a few of the seemingly endless obstacles that stand between the student and the history of Sicily for that period. These mainly concern the problems that arise from source material written in Latin, Greek and Arabic, much of which has not been properly edited and some of which still cannot be consulted at all, even in the twenty-first century. Besides this, there exists only a relatively small body of secondary literature, not all of which is reliable and of which only a small fraction is in English. This volume attempts to fill that void, at least in part, with an introduction to the language and society of Sicily fromc.1050–c.1250 with particular reference to its Arabic speakers and the fate of Islamin the southern Italian peninsula, and is aimed at a range of readers from a range of disciplines.

There is much to be said for beginning an account of the history of language and society of the Norman period as far back as ancient Antiquity, if for no other reason than to show how Sicily lay between the orbits of North Africa and the powers of the Italian mainland and was the subject of repeated invasion and settlement from both these power-bases. Thus, the Arab-Muslims' conflict with the Normans could be regarded, albeit in a somewhat abstract way, as the last great cultural collision of its type, preceded by the Muslims and the Byzantine Greeks; the Vandals and Byzantines; the Carthaginians and Romans and, in early Classical times, the Phoenicians and Greeks. Although the ‘Norman’ conquest of the late eleventh century cannot be said to have given rise to permanent political or socio-economic stability for the island, it irreversibly set Sicily under the sway of powers not from North Africa but from mainland Europe, under whose influence it has remained for the past 1,000 years. Indeed, outlining these transitions is one of the principal aims of this opening chapter for which considerations focus on changes to the religious and demographic base of the island, above all in the tenth and eleventh centuries, although some general indications of the underlying social and linguistic situation can be recovered from much earlier periods with regard to regions both within and around Sicily. However, compressing the best part of 2,000 years of history into a single chapter naturally comes at the expense of detail. As such, this opening chapter necessarily remains a selective account and should not be read as exhaustive, with the examples cited intended as either illustrative or, in some cases, significant as exceptional.

Early invasions and settlement

As mentioned, the geographical location of Sicily, poised between the Italian peninsula and North Africa, contributed significantly towards the social and linguistic circumstances of the island in the ancient and medieval periods. Much of its early history in Antiquity saw migrant waves of Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans ebb and flow over its shores. It is not a matter of controversy that these changing social, administrative and demographic influences were reflected by a characteristic multilingual base of the island. However, evidence suggests that the population was neither entirely transformed nor transposed with each successive invading wave or change of administration.

Colonization is attested from the mid-eighth century BCE, as settlers and traders in Sicily began to arrive from the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Initially, the very early Greek colonists tended to settle in the eastern parts of the island, while communities of North African origin mainly arrived and stayed in the west.⁴ According to Thucydides, Sicily was inhabited by two rival peoples – the Sicanians and the Sicels.⁵ He related that the former were war-like, of Iberian extraction, and lived in the western parts, even in his day. The Sicels, on the other hand, had crossed over from the Italian mainland and had occupied the north, central and eastern parts. In addition, there were the Elymi, whose cities were originally Eryx (Erice) and Segesta and who were said to be descendants from refugees after the fall of Troy. Archaeological finds would suggest a slightly wider distribution of ‘Elymi’ to the hinterland south and south-west of these towns.⁶ These peoples, Thucydides claimed, were in addition to, and distinct from, the Phoenicians and Greeks, and could be described as ‘non-Hellenic’, yet the differences between them remain largely unknown to us. On the other hand, the city-based, political dynamics of the island appear to have transcended most cultural ties or tribal allegiances, particularly after the battle of Himera in 480, which saw the defeat of ‘Carthaginian’ elements and the subsequent political ascendancy of Syracuse under a series of ‘tyrants’. In spite of a number of minor civil wars, the considerable degree of intercultural exchange between different social and linguistic groups appears to have continued, and an unusual inscription in a north African dialect carved in a mix of Greek with some Libyan letters dating from the fourth century BCE from the island's western interior testifies to a blend of languages and cultures.⁷ Siculo-Phoenician influence appears to have remained marginally more concentrated in the west of the island, particularly around the city of Lilybaeum (modern Marsala), founded by Carthaginian settlers at the beginning of the fourth century. There is some evidence to suggest that Neo-Punic had a long spoken history, especially in the remoter western parts, and a short Neo-Punic inscription from the second century BCE on the outlying island of Favignara implies it was still spoken there around that time.⁸ However, no Neo-Punic inscription postdates the first century BCE and only traces of such influence on Sicilian culture, language, toponomy or religion otherwise survive, relative to the vast body of evidence for the impact of Greco-Roman culture.⁹ The Greco-Punic cult of Astarte-Aphrodite at Eryx (Erice) is an exceptional example for the fact that it continued into the early part of the first century SE.¹⁰ This stands in contrast to North Africa where Neo-Punic inscriptions continued long after the fall of Carthage in 146 BCE, as did the religious cults of Baal and Ceres which were incorporated into the wider Roman pantheon.¹¹ Of the numerous groups that may be discerned to varying extents within the broader spectrum of classical Sicilian society, the Jewish communities were notable for having survived into the medieval period with their religious identity largely in tact. Although affected greatly by immigration, they would remain in Sicily until their expulsion at the end of the fifteenth century. Indeed, a small, but important, number of early inscriptions of theirs in Greek and Latin survive from Antiquity, as well as a larger corpus from the Middle Ages.¹²

Romanization and the ‘Siculi trilingues’

Although Sicily had become a Roman province as early as 227BCE, western Greek dialects are believed to have retained their status as the island's main spoken medium. Only after the granting of Latin rights early in the first century CE and later in the third, are Latin dialects thought to have become increasingly prominent as a language of the ruling elite. Given the prestigious status of Latin as an administrative language and the cultural standing of Greek in the eyes of educated Romans, it is thought that Latin-Greek bilingualismwas necessary for social and political advancement in Roman Sicily.¹³ Even so, Cicero claimed that Sicily was no place for the educated to improve their classical languages, claiming, ‘si letteras Graecas Athenis non Lilybaei, Latinas Romae non in Sicilia didicisses’.¹⁴ The contrast of Athens and Lilybaeumin particular as the best and worst places to learn Greek faintly suggests that the west of the island was still perceived to have been less Greek in character than the east. In contrast, Moses Finley remarked that, at the end of the Roman Republic, ‘the linguistic dividing line has to be drawn between social classes, not geographically. The bulk of the population remained Greek-speaking, while the administrative and educated classes were Latin-speaking, or, more correctly, bilingual’.¹⁵ While the general truth of this conclusion is not in question, levels of bilingualism have proved notoriously difficult to gauge as has the issue of whether a comparison of relative numbers of inscriptions genuinely reveals language differences according to area. Nonetheless, most scholars now accept that bilingualism was common and there are many signs of merger at both linguistic and social levels. Indeed, this is hardly a controversial conclusion and perfectly consistent with the long history of social and cultural assimilation that was a characteristic of early Sicilian society. More than two centuries after Cicero, Apuleius could speak of the Siculi trilingues by which he presumably meant that there were still three linguistic communities in Sicily, namely Latin, Greek and Punic, rather than that all Sicilians were trilingual.¹⁶ As Apuleius was from North Africa and even described himself, perhaps tautologically to Roman ears, as ‘half Numidian, half Gaetulian’, he qualifies as a well-informed contemporary commentator.¹⁷ The classical reference to ‘three-tongued Sicilians’ is also significant in that it was picked up again in twelfth-century Latin sources.

The questions of social integration and signs of bilingualismare relevant for the corresponding debates in the medieval period in two ways. First, they offer evidence for Sicily's long history of mixed languages and cultures. Second and more specifically, is that much of the onomastic and linguistic evidence offered in the Classical periods is similar to that provided by more copious sources in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Illustrative examples that imply cultural and linguistic intermingling in Antiquity include the use of paired inscriptions, code-switching between Latin and Greek scripts, personal names that were half-Greek, half-Roman, and orthographic errors that show interference fromone language to the other. Thus, we find Greek inscriptions to Artemis and Aphrodite matched by Latin ones to Diana and Venus. FromMarsala, a brick found in an otherwise fourth-century wall reads: M. ABIETIS [and] N. CEKONΓOY. Here, the first element is a Latin transliteration of a Greek name. The second is the Greek transliteration (with a Greek inflection) of the Latin secundus.¹⁸ Even if this is a linguistic joke, could it be funny...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Culture and Civilization in the Middle East
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Transliteration schemes
• Map of Sicily
• Introduction
• 1 Sicily before 1100
• 2 The Muslim Community: Language, Religion and Status
• 3 ‘Normans’, ‘Lombards’, ‘Greeks’, ‘Arabs’, ‘Berbers’ and Jews
• 4 At the margins of the Arabic-speaking communities
• 5 Communication around the royal palaces and Arabic as a language of the ruling elite
• 6 Defining the land: the Monreale register of boundaries from 1182
• 7 Arabic into Latin: the mechanics of the translation process
• 8 Arabic into Greek: an introduction to the evidence
• 9 From Arab-Muslim to Latin-Christian: a model for change?
• Appendix A: Index of the Monreale estates
• Appendix B: Salvatore Cusa's I diplomi greci ed arabi
• Appendix C: The varying treatment of professional names
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index