Download PDF | A companion to medieval Palermo : the history of a Mediterranean city from 600 to 1500 / edited by Annliese Nef ; French and Italian texts translated by Martin Thom, 2015.
561 Pages
Acknowledgements
The articles included in this volume were commissioned with a view to producing a coherent synthesis regarding the Medieval History of Palermo. The idea was to make available in English the latest research on the subject, which is often written in French or, above all, in Italian. It is never easy to make accessible research which is being profoundly renewed and is still in progress. All of the authors deserve therefore to be thanked for their efforts at clarity.
In this process, Martin Thom was a patient translator from Italian and French into English, and I would like to thank him for his commitment to this demanding task. The choice was made not to ask the authors to write directly in a language which is not their mother tongue, but rather to have their texts translated. This decision has a cost, and without a generous contribution by the Institut Universitaire de France it would not have been possible to make this scientific and linguistic choice
List of Contributors
Alessandra Bagnera is a specialist in Islamic archaeology and is at present co-director of “The Thermal Baths of Cefalà (Palermo)” project (Ecole Française de Rome). She has published on Islamic Archaeology, in particular on Islamic Sicily. She curated the exhibition Archeologia dell’Islam in Sicilia (Gibellina, 2012) and edited the catalogue. Gian Luca Borghese, Ph.D, is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Medieval Institutions and Societies (CRISM) in Turin. His publications focus on the thirteenth-century Mediterranean and include Carlo I d’Angiò e il Mediterraneo. Politica, diplomazia e commercio internazionale prima dei Vespri (Rome, 2008). Henri Bresc, is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the University of Paris Ouest (Nanterre). He has published Un Monde méditerranéen: économie et société en Sicile (1300–1460) (Rome-Palermo, 1986), as well as a large number of books and articles on Medieval Sicily and on Mediterranean history. Sulamith Brodbeck is Maître de Conférences at the University of Paris 1-Panthéon. She is a specialist in Byzantine Art history, in particular in the South of Italy. She has published Les saints de la cathédrale de Monreale en Sicile. Iconographie, hagiographie et pouvoir royal à la fin du XIIe siècle (Rome, 2010).
Mirella Cassarino is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Catania. Her main research interests are adab prose, the representation of the other in Arabic literature and Middle Siculo Arabic. Rosa Di Liberto is an Architect. M.A. “History of architecture and Restoration” (1992), Rome, “La Sapienza” University; Ph.D (1998), the University of Palermo. She studies Roman and Medieval architecture in collaboration with various Universities and cultural institutions. She has published many articles on Norman architecture in Sicily. Benoît Grévin, Ph.D (2005), is a researcher at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), in Paris. He has published numerous monographs and articles on the linguistic cultures of medieval Italy, with a focus on the late medieval Mezzogiorno.
Giuseppe Mandalà is researcher in Cultural Transmission and History of Arabic, Greek and Hebrew Texts at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid. His main field of interest is the study of Arabic and Hebrew languages, literature and the history of Sicily. E. Igor Mineo is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Palermo. Among his numerous works on the social and institutional history of Italy in the late Middle Ages (especially relating to social distinction, political ideologies and identities, the institutional structure of communities and cities): Nobiltà di stato. Famiglie e identità aristocratiche nel tardo medioevo. La Sicilia (Rome, 2001). Annliese Nef is Maître de Conférences at the University Paris 1-Panthéon. She has published on Norman Sicily (Conquérir et gouverner la Sicile islamique aux XIe et XIIe siècles, BEFAR, 2011) and works currently on Islamic Sicily.
Elena Pezzini (Museo Archeologico di Palermo) is an archaeologist with a specialist interest in Medieval Sicily, and in particular in medieval Palermo. She dedicated her Ph.D and numerous articles to various aspects of this latter city’s history. Vivien Prigent, Ph.D, CNRS-France, is a research fellow of the Centre d’histoire et de civilisation de Byzance, Paris, and a former Research fellow of the Ecole française de Rome and of Wolson College, Oxford. He specializes in Byzantine sigillography and numismatics. Laura Sciascia has been until recently a researcher in Medieval History at the University of Palermo. The history of the aristocratic families, of the cities and of the smaller centres of Medieval Sicily, but also the writing of history as a mirror of the wider society, are the themes of her research.
Fabrizio Titone Ph.D, LMS, is Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the Universidad del País Vasco. His field of expertise is the urban history of the Crown of Aragon. Among his publications is Governments of the universitates. Urban communities of Sicily in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Brepols, 2009).
The medieval history of Palermo in a new light Annliese Nef The city of Palermo, more than most perhaps, gives rise to dreams and is invested with images and descriptions both negative and positive, where the present and the past often collide.1 Located in the centre of the Mediterranean, it sits within a sheltered harbour on the north-west coast of Sicily, an island whose contours delimit two crucial spaces in the east-west navigation of that sea (the Sicilian channel and the straits of Messina).
The original urban core, oriented NE-SW,2 was established on a promontory delimited by two water courses: to the north, the Papireto, and to the south, the Kemonia, both of which flowed into the sea. Surrounded by the fertile plain with its many gardens known as the “Conca d’Oro,” Palermo is encircled by mountains, among them the famous Monte Pellegrino, which is 600 metres at its summit. From the Islamic period onwards, the urban fabric exceeded the limits of the first fortified urban core, but this latter continued to be the heart of the city throughout the whole of the medieval period.
From the Capital of an Imperial Province (6th–11th Century) to the Capital of a Kingdom (11th–15th Century) At first a city and bishopric of middling importance within the rich Byzantine province of Sicily (6th–9th century),3 Palermo became in the 9th century the Emiral capital of Islamic Sicily. Being drawn from the time of its conquest in 831 into the orbit of the Aghlabids (800–909), who were themselves representatives of the Abbassids in Ifrīqiya, and then—between 909 and the first third of the 11th century—into that of the Fatimids,4 it was entrusted by the latter to the powerful family of the Kalbids, who governed the island in their name. The island was subsequently administered by a council, after the break-up of the Emirate (c. 1040).
Finally, in 1072, Sicily was conquered by troops from the mainland led by the Hauteville. A new chapter then began for Palermo, which saw it become the capital of the kingdom of Sicily, in 1130, under the new dynasty, which was Norman in origin, a status it retained until the end of the Middle Ages, even if the island would over time be integrated by turns into a number of different political dispensations, though no longer enjoying within them the primacy that it had known in the 12th century in the south of Italy.5 Reattached to the empire of the Hohenstaufen from 1194,6 the island became embroiled in the confrontation between Guelphs and Ghibellines, which crystallized as a long-lasting dispute between the Papacy and the Empire. After a decade of war, Sicily was subsumed in 1265–1266 into the Angevin kingdom.
In actual fact, the brother of the king of France, Charles of Anjou, count of Anjou, of Maine, and of Provence, the Pope’s ally, having been vested with power over Sicily by the latter, seized it and became its king, though not without Ghibelline resistance. In 1282, the famous Sicilian Vespers,7 a revolt unleashed by the Palermitans against the French, brought the Angevin interlude8 to a close, when the kingdom re-entered the Aragonese orbit,9 under the rule of Peter III of Aragon.
This date also marks Sicily’s definitive exit from the southern Italian context which had been its chief point of reference since 1130.10 The rejection of the agreement reached in 1295 between the Papacy and the Angevins on the one hand and James II of Aragon, son of Peter III, on the other—a settlement which ceded Sicily to the former in exchange for the investiture of Sardinia and Corsica to the king of Aragon—led the kingdom of Sicily to proclaim itself independent under the rule of Frederick III, brother of James and the latter’s lieutenant in Sicily.
This situation then left the island facing an alliance consisting of the Papacy, the Angevins and the Aragonese. In 1302, the peace of Caltabellotta, while recognising the three-cornered kingdom and the rule of Frederick III, stipulated that at his death the island should come under pontifical authority. The dawning century was marked on the one hand by the war pitting the Angevins of Naples against the Aragonese branch of Sicily, and on the other by an internal conflict between the “Catalan party,” identified with this latter, which established the island’s capital in Catania in 1353, and the “Latin party,” embodied by the Chiaromonte, a powerful family from Palermo aligned with the Ghibellines. After the death of Frederick IV, in 1377, there emerged from a period of anarchy a quadruple vicariate which pretended to administer the island in the name of the infant Maria, who ruled only in name and was abducted by the king of Aragon so that she might be married to the infant Martin in 1379.
This latter landed on the island at the head of an army in 1392, in order to regain control of it, which he did in 1398. After the death of Martin, without an heir, in 1409,and then that of his father, Martin II, who had succeeded him, a dynastic crisis in Catalonia led to a Catalan viceroy assuming control of the island from 1412, despite some resistance. The king of Aragon, Alfonso V the Magnanimous (1416–1458), used the island, subject to harsh taxation but enjoying a degree of political autonomy, as a base for his conquest of the kingdom of Naples, completed in 1443. He had to confront the revolt of Palermo in 1450. At his death, his brother, John II (1458–1479), succeeded him. Ferdinand, the second son of John II and latterly—after the death of his half brother, in 1461—his heir, married the future Isabella I of Castile in 1469. From 1474 he was therefore king of Castile and Leon, ruling under the name of Ferdinand V. In 1479 he became sovereign of both Aragon and Sicily. In 1504 he would lay hands upon the kingdom of Naples, held up until then by his cousin. Ferdinand the Catholic, whose reign therefore opened a new phase in the history of Sicily. He was also responsible, together with his wife Isabella, for the introduction of the Spanish Inquisition into Palermo in 1487, and for the expulsion of the Jews from Sicily in 1492. Throughout this long timespan the history of Palermo is unevenly documented in the sources, which also vary markedly in quantity and quality from period to period.11 No archival documents were preserved for the Byzantine and Islamic periods; one has therefore to draw upon data derived from literary sources or from epigraphy, sigillography (for Byzantium), numismatics and archaeology.
A further regional characteristic, of the twelfth century documentation above all, is the preservation of notarial acts written in Arabic and in Greek in ecclesiastical records conserved in the Archivio di Stato di Palermo. As for subsequent periods, written sources are more varied, although the paucity of communal archival records compared with Northern Italian cities, a natural consequence of differences in the respective institutional frameworks, has been emphasised. The archives of the central administrative offices are thus fundamental for the medieval history of Palermo. Prior to the fourteenth century, Latin notarial registers are likewise almost non-existent (the documents preserved are in the ecclesiastical records). Finally, note should be taken of the paucity of the documentation for the thirteenth century,a dearth due in particular to the destruction suffered by the archives in Naples during World War II. Taking into account these specificities, the contributors to the present volume have set out to recast the medieval history of Palermo. For a New History of Medieval Palermo In the light of this brief chronological resumé, one can readily understand why the medieval history of Palermo is too often described as a sequence of periods of foreign domination that both gave rise to a rich cultural synthesis and led to a sort of eternal urban subjection to a monarchical power, whose frame of reference was usually extra-insular, all the more so given that the emblem of political modernity, the medieval Italian commune, is presumed never to have existed there. Cultural diversity and a lack of political maturity would seem to have gone hand in hand, according to this widely accepted viewpoint. Such stereotyped images have been undermined by the recent historiography, and histories of Palermo are indeed not rare;12 high quality syntheses13 have been published recently in Italian.14 Rather than imitate them, we have attempted something quite different. The more innovatory works on Palermo are predominantly concerned with the second half of the Middle Ages and place the emphasis above all on social, institutional and political logics, precisely in order to rectify the misleading notions summarised in the preceding paragraph. By taking into account research in progress, we have endeavoured to prolong this historiographical renewal by extending it to other as yet neglected domains. Thus, to begin with, we have deliberately accorded the same importance to the different periods succeeding one another during the Middle Ages: traditionally, in fact, far less attention has been paid to the five first centuries (6th–mid-11th century) than to the last (mid-11th–15th century).
We have therefore allotted the former more space than is usually the case,and this is particularly true for the Islamic period,15 which saw Palermo become the island’s capital in place of Syracuse. Furthermore, in order not to refer time and time again to the same dynastic divisions, which in certain spheres are anyway not relevant, use has been made of transversal thematic approaches, analysing a particular aspect over several centuries, so as to follow developments across the very long term. Without excluding economic, political and social questions,16 which have been successfully tackled in the past,17 considerable scope has been given to cultural18 and religious19 history, areas neglected in recent years in the Palermitan context.
The religious development of Palermo in the Middle Ages has still in fact been little studied20 and cultural history at once clings to outmoded myths and neglects discoveries that indicate a veritable dynamism, so much at odds is it with the stereotyped image purveyed in vast swathes of the secondary literature.21 Likewise, if the history of architecture and art is for its part rarely forgotten when the city is evoked,22 though without always taking into account the most recent contributions, that of the knowledge of languages and of texts is less often in the place of honour, and recent syntheses are lacking.
Furthermore, even though the history of the urban topography of Palermo has a venerable pedigree,23 and though this approach has been sustained uninterruptedly across so many centuries,24 it is still more often employed by archaeologists than by other researchers, and in publications that are scattered and difficult for non-specialists to find. We have therefore sought to take stock of this dimension, at any rate for the periods that are most striking from this point of view (Islamic domination25 and the rule of the Hauteville).
It was a question not only of retracing a sustained architectural policy,26 but also of bringing the materiality of the city into full view.27 Finally, we have sought to open up a more general perspective as regards the cities of Sicily by emphasising the degree to which, notwithstanding what has already been said on this theme, Sicilian townsmen and citizens have loomed larger in the political and institutional life of these latter than historians have tended to suppose.28
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