Download PDF | Alex Metcalfe - Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily_ Arabic-Speakers and the End of Islam-Routledge (2011).
305 Pages
The social, religious and linguistic history of medieval Sicily is both intriguing and complex. For several centuries prior to the Muslim invasion of 827, the Christian islanders had spoken dialects of either Latin or Greek. On the arrival of the ‘Normans’ around 1060, Arabic was the dominant language and Islam the dominant religion, but by 1250 Sicily was again almost exclusively Christian with the Romance dialects of more recent settlers in evidence everywhere. Of particular importance was the formative period of Norman control (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 fundamental shifts and provides an authoritative framework for establishing the conventional thinking on the subject.
Alex Metcalfe is a British Academy post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Leeds.
CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST Series Editor Ian R. Netton
University of Leeds
This series studies the Middle East through the twin foci of its diverse cultures and civilizations. Comprising original monographs as well as scholarly surveys, it covers topics in the fields of Middle Eastern literature, archaeology, law, history, philosophy, science, folklore, art, architecture and language. While there is a plurality of views, the series presents serious scholarship in a lucid and stimulating fashion.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are a number of people and institutions to whom I would like to express my most grateful thanks. First of all, to the supervisors of my doctoral thesis, Drs Jeremy Johns and Dionisius Agius, who have selflessly shared their expert knowledge with me over what is now quite a number of years. To the British Academy for their generous funding of my doctorate from October 1996 to October 1999 and for their financial help in making a study visit to Sicily in April 1998.
More recently, I have reason to thank the British Academy for their award of a three-year post-doctoral Research Fellowship, which I have held at the Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at Leeds University since September 2001. My thanks are also due to Drs Graham Loud and Michael Brett as well as to Professors Ian R. Netton, Adalgisa De Simone, Vera von Falkenhausen and Hubert Houben for their ideas, advice and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank Dr Ferdinando Maurici and Lalla Pagano for their hospitality and help in and around Palermo, and my parents for their loyal support throughout.
INTRODUCTION
From the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, the island of Sicily was subject to two distinct linguistic shifts that were roughly concurrent with demographic, social, administrative and religious changes to the island. The first transition followed the Muslim invasion of 827, when the islanders are thought to have spoken mainly Greek or Italo-Greek dialects. By around the end of the tenth century, the standard view is that Sicily was an essentially Arabic-speaking Muslim island with the exception of the north-eastern Val Demone, closest to mainland Italy, where dialects of the pre-Muslim era persisted amongst the remaining Christians who lived there. The second major social and linguistic shift was relatively swift, but irreversible. Within 250 years of the arrival of Norman-led Christian forces in 1061, the transition from an Arabic-speaking Muslim island to an essentially ‘Latin’-speaking Christian one was all but complete. However, accounting for this transition remains one of the key issues of the twelfth century in Sicily.
There can be no doubt as to the importance of language and religion to the history of the Norman period in Sicily. Indeed, there is no major work on the history of the island that does not address these issues at some point. That said, none tackles these fundamental questions directly. Nor, for that matter, can there be any doubt that their interpretation is contingent on our understanding of the history which underpins it. This volume deals with both these fields and makes no apologies for ultimately involving historians with what some may have previously regarded as the preserve of Arabists and vice versa. Thus, the work comprises of two overlapping and interdependent strands, one socio-historical and the other linguistic. Although the kingdom of Sicily at its brief and spectacular height extended to the mainland peninsula of Italy and as far as North Africa, this research concentrates on the Arabic-speaking communities, in particular the Muslims, found in insular Sicily, between c.1090 and c.1190, but particularly after 1130.
The earlier sections deal with the background issues in the lead-up to the ‘Norman’ conquest of 1061, as well as the questions that concern the status of the Muslim communities, including the key issue of how changes to the religious and demographic base of the island affected the social and linguistic composition of its population, and how widely known or used Arabic was among the ruling elite, the Sicilian kings and their administrative staff. This leads into an assessment of the changing fate of Arabic as an instrument of the fiscal administration and thus provides an introduction to the case study of the boundary definitions produced in the royal chancery that were issued to the newly-founded church of Monreale.
In particular, this deals with the production of chancery registers of villeins written in Arabic and Greek or Arabic and Latin and the complex questions that arise from these. As far as the linguistic evidence is concerned, a range of source material is available although not all provides the same quality or type of evidence. Unlike medieval Spain, no Sicilian Arabic poetry composed in the vernacular has survived and the few remaining literary works are all written in higher registers and/or strictly stylized forms. Some significant works survive as do several fragmentary pieces, but none yields anything of dialect forms. Furthermore, many twelfth-century ‘Sicilian’ authors who wrote in Arabic actually hailed from Ifrı¯qiya, Spain or Egypt.
Other written media include a number of inscriptions in Arabic, but these are few, short and almost all were based on models of a high Arabic register. However, historians and linguists have inherited a unique and valuable legacy from the Norman period. After a prolonged period of piecemeal conquest (c.1060–c.92), the new Christian rulers began to issue registers of lands and men that were conceded to landlords. Many of these and later registers were bilingual (Arabic-Greek or Arabic-Latin) as were almost all of the villein registers issued by the royal Norman chancery after c.1140 which yield almost 6,000 names.
While these sources have been known to researchers for some time, they have received only sporadic and limited academic attention. Of exceptional historical importance, the registers offer explicit evidence for the ways in which the ‘Normans’ came to impose an essentially ‘feudal’ system over a largely Muslim population. In addition, the names of thousands of villeins recorded in Arabic and Greek suggest professions, place names, tribal names and religious persuasion. Some names are a peculiar combination of Arabic and Greek/Latin elements and appear to indicate the ever-frayed edges of Sicilian society. Administratively, the registers show the extent to which the royal fiscal administration had modelled itself on the practices of contemporary Arab-Islamic chanceries, particularly those of Fatimid Egypt.
The extensive boundary definitions, especially those of Monreale, cover most of western Sicily and are a fundamental source for reconstructing the toponymy of these areas which were in the most dense zone of Sicilian Muslim settlement and which today remain some of the more interesting areas of the island, not least in social and political terms. From a linguistic perspective, as these registers of villeins were transcribed from Arabic (consonants only) into Greek (with full vocalization) they even offer the rare possibility of inferring and recovering traces of a dialect used over 700 years ago. Besides this, the presence of many loan words, interferences and loan translations holds the key to understanding the complex relationships between the island’s languages as well as offering fascinating insights into the formation of more modern dialects in Sicily. In addition to the bilingual registers, there were many privately-issued documents that deal mainly with sales, purchases, legal agreements, inquests, donations, foundations and claims.
Of these, few were ever written in more than one language and none among them can match the size and relative consistency of the chancery documents. Very few of these have been well-edited, although they are now in the process of being properly produced in a new series with accompanying English translations and historical commentaries. Although references are made to the private and to non-fiscal chancery documents, it is the various discussions and analyses of the bilingual registers that form a central part of this volume. As this book was going to press, another was about to be published which has an important bearing on this work.
The volume in question is the long-awaited work by Jeremy Johns entitled The Royal Dı¯wa¯n: Arabic Administration and Norman Kingship in Sicily. Although I have not had time to consult this significant work, as co-supervisor for my doctoral thesis, I have had numerous opportunities to consult the author personally and have had access to an early version of the text. Dr Johns has also read a prototype of this book and made many suggestions for which I am extremely grateful. At the time of writing, however, I hope to be able to indicate the many relevant sections in his forthcoming work, which will not only be of benefit to the reader, but also enhance the usefulness of this present volume. Rather like the old joke about waiting for a bus which does not come, then two arrive at once, the year 2003 will see two monographs in English which directly concern the social and administrative history of the island, in particular, the impact and decline of its Arab-Muslim population.
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