Download PDF | Queens of Sicily 1061-1266 (Sicilian Medieval Studies) , By Jacqueline Alio (Author), Trinacria Editions LLC, 2019.
466 Pages
Foreword by the Author
This abridged electronic edition of Queens of Sicily 1061-1266 differs from the original print edition in several ways, but not in any that will detract from your reading experience. Indeed, my objective is to improve your enjoyment in reading about Sicily’s first medieval queens.
While the text of the preface, introduction, afterword (epilogue), timeline (chronology) and chapters has been preserved in its entirety, there are no endnotes/footnotes, which in the print edition numbered over seven hundred, with some running to a page in length. Many of those notes were simple reference citations but some were explanatory while others provided the original Latin text of passages translated into English for the main narrative. In this electronic edition, a few of those notes, such as the one citing (in its entirety) Thomas Becket’s letter to Queen Margaret, have been incorporated into the main text.
The bibliography has been reduced to a concise format mentioning most of the medieval sources consulted, without listing all of the numerous modern (secondary) works, such as monographs and articles. Some of the photographs of the print edition are not present in this one. An example is the picture of the last remaining wall of the castle of San Marco d‘Alunzio.
This ebook is intended for general readers and students, not for hardcore researchers formulating doctoral dissertations to be “defended” or for professors writing arcane academic papers to be delivered at conferences or published in specialized journals. One of the appendices in the first (print) edition consisted of both codices of the Assizes of Ariano in the original Latin, something of little use to the greater number of readers.
Realistically, the majority of readers may not be very interested in an overwhelming amount of supporting information, much of it in Latin or even Sicilian. Because Queens of Sicily 1061-1266 was the very first compendium of biographies of these women — not only in English but in any language — it was necessarily quite lengthy at 740 pages and it had to present certain information of interest to scholars. Readers seeking extensive background details beyond those included in this ebook may wish to read the print edition and its informative supplement, Sicilian Queenship, which also offers some observations regarding the historiography and research methodology involved in writing Queens of Sicily 1061-1266 and Margaret, Queen of Sicily.
Yet the essential maps remain, along with the genealogical tables and those important features one expects to find in the biography of a medieval queen.
The genealogical table for each queen follows the chapter dedicated to her, along with a few photographs, but there is also a separate section of general charts pertaining to Sicily’s first dynasties and a few allied families.
Most of this work reflects original scholarship, such as the first English translation of the Sicilian rite of coronation ever published. It is the result of research conducted over a few years in several countries. Most of Chapter 8 was excerpted from Margaret, Queen of Sicily, of which an abridged electronic edition was published as Queen Margaret of Sicily.
In Sicilian Queenship, I explain how it was many years ago, in 1994, that I first attended an academic conference here in Sicily about our NormanSwabian sovereigns, at which most of the queens were overlooked. For two decades thereafter, I considered writing the biography of Margaret of Navarre, which nobody else had written. Margaret was Sicily’s most important medieval queen, or at least the one about whom the most is known — far more than Constance, the mother of Frederick II, one of our greatest medieval kings. Yet she was ignored even in the lengthy encyclopedic references of important medieval women published by major academic presses in the twenty-first century. Finally, I wrote Margaret's biography and the other stories in this book, not that every other Sicilian countess or queen had been ignored altogether. In fact, there were fine biographies of a few of the others, and Sicilian Queenship has a chapter recognizing that scholarship.
This is the compendium that should have been written at least fifty years ago about the queens and countesses of Sicily.
A great advantage of this electronic edition is its ready availability to libraries which might not normally acquire the printed book. I hope you enjoy this one.
Preface
“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it?
Joan of Arc
They are the semi-forgotten women of history. Some of them are little more than names mentioned in passing in medieval chronicles or charters. Only a few stand out, and only because they were called upon to step into roles more important, more visible, than what was otherwise envisaged for them. In an age when the typical woman could aspire to nothing more grandiose than a convent or a kitchen, queens were very special indeed, destined to confront challenges beyond field and forge. Queens consort, regnant and regent were a breed apart.
To ignore queenhood is to overlook an important part of the history of womanhood.
Queenship always engendered a certain mystique, a quasi-mysticism, and Walter Bagehot famously observed that, “we must not let in daylight upon magic.” Yet the reality of queenly life could be very different from popular perceptions. In the following pages, we shall see how dangerous, indeed fatal, it could be to stand so closely to the seat of power, or even to wield that power.
In widowhood, three of these women actually ruled Sicily as regents: Adelaide del Vasto, Margaret of Navarre, Constance of Hauteville.
We shall seek to discover something of their personalities. Conventional wisdom suggests that women are more inclined than men to use force of argument instead of the argument of force. Was that the case of Sicily’s queens? Sometimes, perhaps, but history tells us that Margaret of Navarre, probably the most powerful of the women profiled here, and one of the most fondly remembered, was willing to imprison criminals and adversaries without batting an eye, even when their guilt was questionable. Indeed, there is credible evidence to suggest that she acted to target a few of her husband's opponents for assassination following a baronial revolt. When Joanna of England learned that her brother, Richard Lionheart, had been killed by an arrow, she had the archer who loosed it tortured to death. Here we find the queen not as shrinking violet but she-wolf.
Sicily’s first queen, Elvira, achieved her reginal status with the coronation of her husband, Roger II, as the first Sicilian king in 1130. Amongst the women whose stories are told here are the three who were wed to Roger I, the father of Roger II. This is why we look to 1061, the signal year the Hauteville brothers of Normandy came to Sicily and the year Roger I married Judith of Evreux, as the beginning of our journey, even though Judith was never a queen.
That path shall take us through Sicily’s Norman period, and thence through the Swabian era of the Hohenstaufens, from the Battle of Messina in 1061 to the Battle of Benevento in 1266, key events in the rise and fall of these dynasties. The polyglot Regnum Siciliae, the Kingdom of Sicily founded by Roger II, encompassed not only the island from which it took its name but most of the Italian peninsula south of Rome, along with Malta and, at times, a chunk of Africa. It was one of Europe's most prosperous realms, and an experiment in multiculturalism.
Queens were all but ignored by Thomas Fazello, author of the first general history of Sicily, a lengthy, post-incunable tome published between 1558 and 1560, where Margaret, as regent for William II, is conceded just a few sparse lines. She is one of only four Sicilian queens before 1266 whose stories have been the subject of detailed biographies worthy of their dignity, the others being Joanna and Isabella “Plantagenet” of England (in 1850) and Helena Angelina of Epirus (in 1791). It is this book's objective to fill a void by bringing to light the others, whose stories have been largely neglected. Along the way, we shall explore some of the intricacies and nuances of queenship into the middle years of the thirteenth century, particularly in the Kingdom of Sicily.
The legacy of these eighteen women is inextricable from the cultural heritage of southern Italy.
None of these women chose to be queen, and in youth few foresaw being crowned, but each rose to face the challenges of complexity, even adversity, that the duties of queenship entailed.
Here we shall celebrate the distinctly feminine virtue of perseverance.
Seven centuries was a long time to wait. Acknowledgments
Writing history is a sacred trust.
The author wishes to thank the cooperative staffs of the Vatican Apostolic Library, the British Library and other libraries and archives where charters, letters and chronicles mentioned in this volume are kept, including repositories at Palermo, Naples, Munich, Pamplona, Zaragoza, Toledo, Barcelona and Kew, which permitted her consultation of these precious documents, of which rather few are available on the internet.
Thanks to the Archdiocese of Palermo for permission to photograph the crown of Constance of Aragon shown on this book's cover, and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for permission to publish the photograph of the pendant of Queen Margaret through the OASC program. The latter is far superior to the photographs taken by the author at The Cloisters, in Manhattan, a few years ago.
Special thanks to Louis Mendola, who generously provided the transcript of his unpublished interview with the late Princess Urraca de Bourbon of the Two Sicilies in Palermo in 1994.
Sincerest gratitude is expressed to the two colleagues who reviewed the manuscript of this monograph prior to publication. Heartfelt thanks to the author’s fans, thousands of readers who constitute a “tribe” that enthusiastically welcomes publication of each of her books. Such a following is a rare phenomenon in the world of academic publishing, where a printing of more than a thousand copies of a work like this one is the exception rather than the rule.
Many thanks to the publisher for making this volume available in paperback at a price affordable to students and underfunded libraries in a market where academic monographs of this length typically sell for two or three times the price of this one and include but a tiny fraction of the number of figures, maps and tables seen in the following pages.
The author alone is responsible for the positions, conclusions, and any errors, present in the pages that follow.
— C. Jacqueline Alio
Pietratagliata, Palermo, November 2018
Introduction
“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.”
— Charlotte Whitton
For too long have the voices of medieval women gone unheard or unheeded. The women whose stories are told in this book deserve to be remembered as something more than footnotes to history. How we remember them is nearly as important as why we remember them. This is a plea not for idolatry but for accuracy.
This work is about the women who stood at the apex of society in the Kingdom of Sicily, and in a few cases actually governed it. It is obvious enough that any study of this era must also consider the history of the society itself, and that includes its kings.
However, this is not an exhaustive history of the Kingdom of Sicily, its kings and institutions, about which many volumes have been written. At best, we can consider these when it is necessary or appropriate. Our focus shall be the queens and the world they knew. True, this era is framed by the battles of Messina (1061) and Benevento (1266), but a book such as this one is not the venue for detailed accounts of such events.
We shall venture into largely uncharted territory, for only a few of our countesses or queens have ever been the subject of a biography.
What is presented in these pages is not intended to be explicitly analytical, anthropological, revisionist or even monarchist. It is, first and foremost, factual, historical and biographical. So much the better if a certain queen's story makes for an interesting narrative.
“Narrative is the lifeblood of history,’ declared Barbara Tuchman in Practicing History. “To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read. To discard the unnecessary requires courage and also extra work”
Whilst a historical work may have “entertainment value,’ most of us read history out of curiosity, to learn something from it. Ideally, it should be interesting, even enlightening, and perhaps inspiring, avoiding the semantic and the pedantic. Some works are purely pedagogical.
Medieval biography should be treated as a subfield of medieval history. Many scholarly histories published nowadays include commentary regarding historiography, such as earlier scholars’ observations about, for example, the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Since very little has ever been published about most of the women whose stories appear here, the author has elected, for the most part, to place such commentary and references in the endnotes rather than the main narrative text, where tangential or parenthetical remarks about sources or prior research might prove distracting to the reader more immediately interested in reginal biography than scholarship and methodology. Such an approach differs somewhat from that of the typical dissertation-cum-monograph because this work is intended for consultation by thousands of scholars, reginaphiles and Siculophiles rather than perusal by a doctoral committee of three or four professors followed by a few dozen more who may read it over the next decade.
In keeping with that modus operandi, these prefatory pages, rather than those in the numbered chapters, consider a few concepts germane to this work, either as integral components of medieval Sicilian history or our means of studying it. The commonality of these otherwise disparate topics is their relevance to the status and place, and even the historiography and sociology, of medieval Sicilian reginal biography.
The Journey
Historical biography, by its nature, breathes life into what otherwise would be a scattering of cold facts and details about the personal experience of somebody who is not here to tell her own story. In this noble endeavor the remote past, most often, is less cooperative than the recent past, rendering the biographical treatment of Queen Cleopatra more intrinsically challenging than one about Queen Victoria. Sometimes, of course, it is the very abundance of information that complicates the task of writing a biography, just as sorting through an entire deck of cards to find the queen of diamonds is harder than selecting a random card from a stack of five or six.
In a perfect world, a biography would be more than the sum of the parts of a womans life. It would express something of her personality. Unfortunately, that is not always possible.
Despite the challenges inherent in unearthing the story of a medieval queen, this author's experience does not support the theory, espoused by twentieth-century historians such as Kenneth Bruce McFarlane, that a meaningful biography of a medieval figure is impossible to write. Nowadays medieval studies are increasingly multidisciplinary, involving such traditional fields as art and literature but also newer ones like forensic genetic (DNA) analysis, historical climatology and phylogeography, to mention just three.
Much is unsaid or understated. Sometimes, however, the existing record vouchsafes us a touch of emotion, telling us that Isabella of England, whilst riding in a cortege along a winding street to meet her future husband, pulled back the hood of her cloak to reveal her stunning beauty to a cheering crowd of onlookers clamoring to see her face, or that Margaret of Navarre shed a tear of disappointment when unjustifiably reproved by a nasty kinsman.
One may take solace in the fact that these biographies of women were written by a woman, but all of our principal contemporaneous sources are the work of men, many of them monks. To this implicitly patriarchal fraternity, the young aristocratic woman was an ethereal creature, a swan among crows, unless she was called upon to govern a kingdom. Thenceforth, depending on the sycophancy of the chronicler or annalist, she might be subjected to the same harsh criticism as a king, almost as if she assumed male gender by stepping into a role usually filled by a man.
Yet there was still a “double standard,” articulating one norm for men and another for women. Rumor mongers dared to “slut shame” Queen Margaret for an imagined sexual liaison simply because she smiled at a certain man, who was her cousin. No contemporary Sicilian chronicler criticized Sicily’s kings in this manner, despite the numerous bastards spawned by them.
It falls to the biographer to separate likely fact from likely fiction surrounding the life of her subject. Even the simplest facts and their implications might be viewed differently by two or three biographers writing about the same historical figure. In interpreting essential facts, the biographer should consider such factors as historical context with an eye to making presentation of her subject's experience clear, understandable, readable. But nothing must ever be embellished to the point that it becomes historical fiction. Jumping to conclusions means jumping into an abyss.
One such abyss is a queen's “private life,” the modern phrase often being a euphemism for references to sexual activity or sometimes even gender identity. Like any other aspect of the subject's life, this must be based on fact and context rather than speculation. It is not always easy to glean personal details from what were essentially public sources.
A veil of mystery shrouds much about life in the Middle Ages. For better or worse, perceptions of some important queens have been shaped in the public mind by erroneous “facts” or even fictional accounts. If just a few of the women whose stories are told in these pages have fallen victim to this phenomenon it is only because so little has been written about most of them at length, in detail, or in English.
A woman writing about another woman may bring a sympathetic, sisterly perspective to her telling of the story. That being the case, objectivity must not be subverted by passion, for biography’s noblest purpose is the expression of truth.
The modern study of queenship inevitably dovetails with the most essential tenets of what we now call feminism, an ideal of equality between men and women, and it is inextricably linked to our efforts to evince the unencumbered female spirit. Feminism should not be defined by woman's oppression but by her triumphs. It should not be equivocal or ambivalent. The fact that a book about queens is read by far more women than men tells us that we still have far to travel in achieving a more balanced equilibrium between sisters and brothers, wives and husbands, queens and kings.
We shall know our queens by mononyms: Elvira, Margaret, Joanna.
Was Sicilian queenship a movement or just a moment?
It was, at the very least, a lingering moment, but if we think of a woman's leadership style as an art, even as an embodiment of self, it transcends facile definition. It is unique to each woman who assumes it, whether she is Margaret of Navarre or Margaret Thatcher. It is cause for contemplation, if not celebration.
Sicily, of course, had many queens after the Hauteville and Hohenstaufen reigns, but only a few of them lived on the island and fewer still actually governed the kingdom as regents.
Points of View
Objectivity is an elusive holy grail of historiography.
There is no sole “arbiter” of history. History is not religion. Like science, it has experts but no “authorities.”
Historicity is sometimes difficult to establish. In historiography, the aphorism, favored by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan, that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” is occasionally appropriate where prosopography or context strongly support a thesis under discussion but for which a res ipsa loquitur evidentiary model is lacking. This is relevant where, for example, a particular charter or letter refers to an earlier one that has not been preserved for posterity; we may reasonably presume the first letter’s existence.
In general, the author has sought to avoid overzealous speculation of the kind one sometimes encounters in academic papers (in social science), where a theory may be built upon a supposition in turn based on a speculative presupposition, leaving us with a fragile house of cards lacking a supporting foundation. An academic paper may wander into a subtle existentialism when a scholar feels compelled to find a neoteric angle in a historical subject; consequently, some topics have been studied to death yet much that is written about them lacks perspicuity. Moreover, medieval Sicily has become a rather popular academic theme, yielding a plethora of dissertations, ranging from the recondite to the pedestrian, during the present century. This could lead one to conclude that past scholarship has been surpassed by recent papers; it has not, for most of the work of long- deceased scholars like the distinguished Evelyn Jamison (1877-1972) has withstood the test of time. The same could be said of the work of scholars like her student, Marjorie Chibnall (1915-2012).
Unlike Jamison, who had to travel to Italian archives and libraries to consult certain sources, many scholars working outside southern Italy today have not spent sufficient time in the regions that comprised the Kingdom of Sicily to write about it very adroitly; this is clear from a review of their work, which may lack a clear sense of the most rudimentary ethnography. For example, although the language of the Sicilian School of poetry that enjoyed the patronage of Frederick II has changed over time (and has local dialects), listening to its modern form, which is still spoken by some Sicilians, affords the researcher insight into the nuances of this tongue.
Beyond the investigation of ethnography, on-site investigation offers advantages in many aspects of research, such as gauging the distance, and hence travel time, between the locations mentioned in chronicles and letters. It also facilitates the accurate identification of certain places, which sometimes proves elusive even in the efforts of seasoned scholars. A sense of space is also important, providing us with (for example) an idea of the vertical distance traversed by the arrow that killed a son of Queen Margaret during a revolt outside Palermos royal palace or the area covered by Monreale’s mosaics. For the historian, the altitude and terrain of the mountains crowned by the castles of Taormina and Troina is something that should be seen firsthand. (Although it could be argued that no medieval European society was truly isolated, one may well justify a highly localized emphasis if a study’s focus were, for example, the women of a specific city; of course, most of our queens traveled around the kingdom and their lives were influenced by events that occurred far beyond its borders.)
In other words, experiencing the places known to her subject(s) is one of many things that inform a biographer’s knowledge and point of view. Biography must be more than a chimeric concept. There cannot be a foreground without a background.
Biography is not physics. It offers us few unifying theories beyond the essential realities of birth, conflict, struggle and death. If the queens of Sicily were united by a single ideology or “world view,” it was simply raw grit and daily survival. The Sicilian court was unique but it was never Camelot.
We need not be obsessed with “established” or “conventional” views of a series of women about whom, with two or three exceptions, too little has been published to form the basis for rigid opinions. In that regard, more has been written about the kings than the queens, with much of the traditional criticism of the Hauteville and Hohenstaufen (Staufen) monarchs emanating from a certain city on the Tiber.
Papal interference in Sicilian affairs, though by no means unknown during the Norman era, intensified under Swabian rule after 1198 with the looming possibility that Frederick II, the young King of Sicily likely to become Holy Roman Emperor, might end up ruling most of the Italian peninsula, effectively surrounding the territory controlled directly by pontiffs for centuries. By 1220 Frederick's Sicilian and Imperial dominions did indeed encircle the Papal State. Yet beyond its immediate political considerations, papal policy influenced longstanding attitudes in what is now Italy. Some of those attitudes survived into the twentieth century.
The Battle of Benevento of 1266 was a turning point, its outcome merely confirmed by the ultimate demise of Hohenstaufen power at the Battle of Tagliacozzo two years later. These losses left the defeated Hohenstaufens and their Ghibelline supporters disparaged by the Angevins and Guelphs. In succeeding generations, the popular work of Dante, himself a Guelph, and contemporaries like Boccaccio ensured that this egregiously slanted point of view became ingrained in Italian culture, indeed shaping much of its ethos.
Nobody could prophesy this in the thirteenth century. It is one of the reasons, but (as we shall see) not the only one, for the absence of substantial biographies of the queens of Sicily’s Norman-Swabian era.
Reginal Culture in the Kingdom of Sicily
Despite some striking similarities between one kingdom and another, and extensive contact between certain courts, European queenship was inseparable from local culture, social norms and law. Joanna of England may have encouraged the veneration of Thomas Becket in Sicily, but Monreale, the Sicilian cathedral where the saint's earliest public image was rendered in mosaic as an icon, is unlike anything she could have known in England or Normandy. Whatever could be said of Joanna’ father, Henry II, his court did not have a harem guarded by eunuchs. Clearly, certain things were different in the Kingdom of Sicily, which seems to have been far wealthier than any realm from whence her foreign queens came.
Even if it is not our chief focus, a consideration of queenly life as it existed elsewhere is at least tangentially relevant to our studies because most of our queens’ marriages were “exogamous.’ With few exceptions, these women hailed from lands far beyond the Italian peninsula. Among our queens, the most obvious example of a life spent in several countries is Constance of Aragon; though born in Portugal she was raised in Spain, and she wed the King of Hungary before marrying Frederick. She knew life at three courts.
As we shall see, the Italian realms known to our countesses and queens underwent much change between 1061 and 1266. What began as a patchwork of duchies and counties became a multicultural kingdom in 1130, yet by the end of Norman-Swabian rule in 1266 it was well on its way to becoming a monocultural European state with its own language. The Arabs, Byzantines and Jews contributed greatly to this, but the Sicilian, Apulian and Neapolitan cultures that we have inherited, clearly manifested in the southern Italian kingdoms that existed into the nineteenth century, were born of Norman and Swabian rule.
Apart from art, architecture, chattels and charters, a few subtle traces of the Norman presence remain, some more evident than others, in the people themselves. There are the genetic haplogroups, of course, along with obvious physical traits like red hair and rosacea. The Sicilian language has a few words from Norman French, along with others from Greek, Arabic and German.
The Norman-Swabian era coincided with what we now call the “age of chivalry,” itself part of what has been termed a “twelfth-century renaissance.” Sicily’s queens witnessed this European movement firsthand. As a patron of the island’s greatest monastery, with its striking Norman, Fatimid, Comnenian and Provencal influences, Queen Margaret actively, purposefully fostered it. Her daughter-in-law, Joanna of England, learned about chivalric culture at her mother’s court in Poitiers.
True, her sexuality, and especially the ability to produce heirs, ensured a noblewomans place in society, but it was her inner strength that sustained her. Courtly chivalry was expressed in Sicily in the Contrasto of Cielo of Alcamo, a poem he may have intended as something of a parody of what already existed elsewhere. Cielos contemporary, Giacomo of Lentini, in daily life a royal notary, is credited with inventing the sonnet.
Literary chivalry was much romanticized, reflecting, among other things, a conventional, masculine, cisgendered view that gave rise to the enduring, if often deceptive, image of the damsel as a submissive, albeit beguiling, object of desire endowed with great beauty and charm but little intellect of her own. Like so many other clichés of the Middle Ages, this one is largely divorced from reality. Even for the woman who became a queen, life was often precarious and difficult. The role of Constance of Aragon, who oversaw matters in Sicily during her husband’s absence, was not very different from that of a baroness managing a feudal estate whilst her spouse was away fighting.
Chivalry’s jousts, tournaments and pageantry glamorized the cult of the mounted warrior, but unlike knights, nobles and kings, men charged with the dirty business of sustaining the tenuous status quo, troubadours and minstrels sold dreams. They were entertainers, expressing lofty ideals in a cruel, unforgiving, imperfect world. Romantic love itself was little more than a myth where it presupposed that courtship culminated in a wedding; marriages within every social class were arranged by parental consent, or in any case could not be contracted without it. The eloquent knight courting a lady was as rare as the marriage arranged on the basis of love rather than expedience.
When they weren't kow-towing to the king or coercing serfs, knights were killing, raping and pillaging. Morality was the purview of churchmen, who were known to engage in some occasional mischief of their own.
Until around 1200, the vernacular language of the Sicilian court was Norman French, even though some courtiers spoke Arabic or Greek as their mother tongue. German made inroads during the brief Sicilian reign of Henry VI, father of Frederick II. By the second or third decade of Frederick's reign, the earliest form of the Sicilian language was in common use in everyday speech. This was the tongue of poets like Cielo of Alcamo and Giacomo of Lentini, and Frederick himself composed a few poems in Middle Sicilian.
Cielo’s Contrasto (which appears in translation in this book) is the lengthiest surviving poem written in Sicilian. The oldest extant copy of it, like much early poetry of the Sicilian School that flourished at Frederick's court, bears the linguistic influence of later copyists, hence its similarity to Tuscan. For Middle Sicilian in its purest form we must look to a later work.
Written around 1290, the account of the War of the Vespers of 1282 from the point of view of John of Procida, onetime chancellor of King Manfred and a planner of the revolt, is the oldest surviving narrative work written in an Italian language, yet it appeared in English only during the twenty-first century; few scholars outside Italy have ever heard of it.
The memoir of John of Procida, Lu Rebellamentu di Sichilia contra Re Carlu, brings us such words as these, addressed to Peter III of Aragon and referring to Constance Hohenstaufen (“your consort, our sovereign lady”), Manfred’s daughter:
“Ricomandamunj a la vostra signuria et a la signura vostra muglerj, la quali é la nostra donna a ccui nuj divimu purtari liancza, mandamuvj prigandu chi vui ni digiatj liberari e trayri et livari di li manu di nostri et di li vostri nimichi, si comu liberau Moises lu populu di li mani di Faraguni, actali chi nuj poczamu tiniri li vostri figloli per signurj et divinjari di li perfidi lupi malvasi devoraturj.”
Which is to say:
“We wish to submit our fealty to your authority and that of your consort, our sovereign lady, to whom we dutifully convey our homage, praying that you may deign to free us of our enemies just as Moses delivered his people from the hands of the Pharaoh, so that we may ensure our children’s future, secure from the deceitful, devouring wolves.”
Not everything of length written in Middle Sicilian deals with conflict, and here a good example is the Contrasto, mentioned earlier. The focus of most poetry of the Sicilian School was love. Dante recognized the significance of the Middle Sicilian language expressed in Cielos poem, though he discerned in it no particular beauty: Et dicimus quod, si vulgare sicilianum accipere volumus secundum quod prodit a terrigenis mediocribus, ex ore quorum iudicium eliciendum videtur, prelationis honore minime dignum est, quia non sine quodam tempore profertur, ut puta ibi: Tragemi deste focora, se teste a boluntate.
After 1282, the island of Sicily was separated from the peninsula politically, if occasionally united with it through dynastic marriages, and its society was essentially monocultural. By 1300, Italy’s last Muslim communities, at places like Lucera in Apulia, were little more than a memory. In truth, this latinization was a gradual but real process of acculturation that had begun the moment the Normans conquered Palermo, but the “Latin” culture one identifies with southern Italy today is rooted in the society that existed by the dawn of the fourteenth century, when the Aragonese ruled Sicily and the Angevins ruled the southern part of the peninsula. Nevertheless, the society that emerged in southern Italy was more portmanteau than palimpsest, for it reflected the influence of the cultures present here during Norman and Swabian rule.
One of the things that distinguished the Hauteville and Hohenstaufen reigns was the population itself. There was diversity in faith, language and thought. Science and philosophy thrived. Sicily’s queens were familiar with this world; those who governed as regents actively promoted it.
It is this eclectic mix that characterized, and perhaps even defined, the Sicilian environment during the Norman and Swabian eras. Such diversitude is generally appreciated more in our time than it was in times past; Salvadore Morso and Michele Amari, whose earliest treatises appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century, were Sicily’s first modern Arabists of note.
In these pages, we are concerned with the Kingdom of Sicily in its European and Mediterranean contexts. If any of the queens whose stories are told here referred to “Italy” it was in purely geographical terms. Often, the so-called “Lombards” were simply peninsular Italians of the landed nobility, despite the gentilic originally being intended to identify those descended from the Longobards who established Italy’s first medieval monarchies.
Sources and Scholarship
As we shall see, the study of Sicilian medieval queenship straddles several fields and disciplines. Unfortunately, a good deal of what little, until the present century, has been published about Sicily’s first few queens is simply incorrect.
A review of the existing research (secondary literature) is important in this kind of work. However, this book is not an appropriate forum in which to rebut other scholars’ flawed research findings or the increasingly hypothetical, whimsical theories advanced in the papers presented at academic conferences and in specialized journals. Some studies blatantly violate the heuristic principle of lex parsimoniae advocated by William of Ockham that the simplest explanation of an event about which little is known is usually the most likely one.
For various reasons, many papers and monographs published today, even when peer-reviewed, focus on what is sometimes called “microhistory,’ resulting in the verbose study of a single charter, icon, object, chattel, church or localized event. In this volume such topics are presented in the appendices and notes.
It is not this monograph’s purpose to focus on etiology or prolix analyses for their own sake.
The reasoning behind this is simple. Some weeds blossom into wildflowers, but others remain mere weeds, serving no greater purpose than to occupy space in an otherwise virtuous flower bed. The author has sought to bring you an orderly garden, not an untamed jungle. Let us leave the weeds to thrive someplace else.
At all events, the author's research was based overwhelmingly, nay almost entirely, on contemporary “primary” sources (chronicles, charters, letters, architecture) rather than secondary literature. This is amply set forth in the bibliography and appendices.
The chronicle of Hugh Falcandus was published in the sixteenth century, that of Romuald of Salerno in the eighteenth. A few sources sometimes cited by historians, such as the chronicle attributed to “Matthew Spinelli of Giovinazzo” and the Arabic letters “discovered” by the abbot Giuseppe Vella, are forgeries; this problem also plagues the diplomatic record, where we occasionally find apocryphal or unauthorized charters.
Few chronicles written in the Kingdom of Sicily were published in English translation until the twenty-first century. Much of what is affirmed in chronicles is attested in charters as to persons, places and dates, if not other details, thus bringing us a certain concordance. Like the synoptic gospels, different chronicles sometimes offer us slightly varying accounts of the same events; this is the case of the descriptions of the deeds of Richard I of England and Philip II of France at Messina in 1190, when Queen Joanna was released from captivity.
The author's archival research was augmented by visits to the places where some of our queens were raised, such as certain localities in England, France and Spain, as well as Italy.
Only a few original manuscript sources were available for digital download; two rare examples are the invaluable Historia Bizantina (or “Synopsis of Histories”) of John Skylitzes, copied in Greek in Palermo during the middle of the twelfth century and kept in the Biblioteca Nacional de Espana in Madrid, and the Liber ad Honorem Augusti of Peter of Eboli, written in Latin verse at the royal court and retained at the Burgerbibliothek in Berne. These codices are unique, each existing in its entirety in only one precious copy.
The general scarcity of detailed information about medieval queens can be attributed to the rather obvious nature of the available sources. Unless a queen ruled in her own right, became a regent, or somehow played a prominent role in a historical event, there was little need to mention her in a chronicle or charter. Under most circumstances, the birth of a king's daughter was less likely to be recorded than the birth of the same king’s son, who inherited a place of precedence in the line of succession under the principles of Salic Law. In most cases, royal daughters (princesses) are not mentioned explicitly, by name, until their betrothals, which made these women “newsworthy” in the eyes of the men writing about them.
In rarer cases, a few of a queens letters survive. Enough of the correspondence of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) is conserved to offer us a clear impression of her opinions, and Anna Comnena (1083-1153) wrote a history expressing, amongst many other things, her thoughts about the Normans who reached the Byzantine Empire, not that queens were the only women writing anything during the twelfth century.
Greater information is available when a woman like Adelaide, Margaret or Constance was a regent. These women also issued charters (decrees), of which some survive, and a small photographic sampling appears in this volume. Several fine compilations of reginal charters and decrees have been published. Noteworthy among these is Theo Kélzer’s Urkunden und Kanzlei der Kaiserin Konstanze, Konigin von Sizilien 1195-1198 in the fine Monumenta Germaniae Historica series.
Most of the extant charters issued by Sicily’s regents fall into either of two broad categories. Some deal with the rights of monasteries while others concern such matters as feudal rights (manors, privileges, serfs). Charters are informative, but only to a certain degree, for they do not typically concern sweeping issues or major events. The chronicles provide us with far more information, even in those cases, such as that of Hugh Falcandus, where the chronology of events is occasionally inexact.
Veracity is the most important element in this kind of research. Being our chief sources, chronicles, letters and charters should, in a perfect world, corroborate presumed facts. In some cases a fact or conclusion is attested by more than one source. Where slightly contradictory accounts exist regarding such details as dates, these are rarely matters of great import. Of far greater concern are those particulars that involve events, especially where there is little or no corroboration.
Certain sources have become known to us rather recently. A series of letters between Frederick II and his heir, Conrad, was rediscovered in a library during the present century and published in 2017. The Assizes of Ariano (1140) and the Ferraris Chronicle (1228) were found during the nineteenth century. Yet historians already suspected that such manuscripts likely existed; the onetime existence of the letters was surmised from other sources, the Assizes were sometimes alluded to over the centuries as “Roger's laws,’ and part of the Ferraris Chronicle was extracted from a lost (complete) version of the chronicle of Falco of Benevento, of which contemporaneous copies survive.
So solid is the framework of sources supporting our knowledge of Sicilian history into the thirteenth century that no hypothetical discovery of long-lost documentation is likely to alter it significantly. That having been said, it would be encouraging to find information about the regents Adelaide and Constance beyond what we already have.
We know the most about Margaret, hence the exceptional breadth and depth of the chapter dedicated to her. The comparatively extensive information known about Margaret lends to her story a quasi-literary “narrative arc” that makes it especially interesting.
In such exhaustive detail is Margaret's regency chronicled that for this reason alone her story overshadows all the others. It may be stated, arguendo, that much more is known about Margaret than any other European queen regent of her century, making the fact that her first biography was written only a few years ago all the more astounding.
In recent years, much has been written about Leonor (Eleanor) of England, Joanna's sister, who wed Alfonso VIII of Castile, and while little of that work seems to shed new light on her life, it is far more voluminous than what has been published about Joanna.
The significance of much that is presented in this volume transcends Sicilian history. The documents relative to Joannas betrothal are a rare treasure, and an object lesson in how reginal marriages, dowries and dowers were conceived and formulated during the twelfth century.
Another interesting case is Joannas niece, Isabella of England, about whom we know something beyond the typical facts thanks to certain records kept about her as a maiden during the reign of her brother, Henry III. Here is the perfect example of the attestation of statements by chroniclers like Roger of Wendover in such resources as the Close Rolls and Patent Rolls preserved in Britain.
Much is made of the biased tone of chroniclers like Hugh Falcandus and perhaps Matthew Paris, yet it is remarkable that they are so accurate so much of the time. This reflects more than serendipity in the case of Falcandus, who was actually present at the royal court in Palermo.
The dates of death of some queens were drawn from necrologies compiled at monasteries or elsewhere. It should be noted, however, that certain medieval sources, such as annals, occasionally recorded incorrect dates.
An obvious — if isolated — case of a solution to the problem posed by missing documentary records is the epitaph over Margaret's tomb in Monreale, which offers us a fine example of the importance of researching in situ instead of relying exclusively on works consulted in a library or on the internet. As stated earlier, visiting the places known in youth to the women destined to become Sicily’s queens has taken the author across western Europe. As queens, most of these women resided principally in Palermo, the kingdom’ capital. Anybody seeking to gain more than a_ superficial knowledge of them owes it to herself to discover this fascinating city. Palermo boasts more surviving churches, chapels and castles from the twelfth century than any other city in Europe; for information on these the reader is commended to the author's concise guide Norman-Arab-Byzantine Palermo, Monreale and Cefalu (available as an ebook as well as a print edition).
For an informed comparison, the more curious reader (or serious scholar) is also advised to visit certain regions of northern and southern Spain, specifically Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia and Andalusia, whose multicultural medieval history is rather similar to what one finds in Sicily. With good reason, medieval writers sometimes compared Norman-Arab Bal’harm (Palermo) to the cities of Andalusia; Malaga has a similar geographic situation along rivers running through a valley encircled by mountains near a coast, while Granada, Cordoba and even Seville had a rather similar layout and architecture. Some of the gardens and pools at the Alhambra (Granada) and the Alcazar (Seville) evoke something of the atmosphere of those that once existed in Palermo, especially in the parks surrounding the Zisa and Cuba palaces. Except for a particularly arid part of Andalusia’s Almeria province near Tabernas, the topography and agriculture of these Spanish regions is strikingly similar to what one finds in southern Italy.
Compared to her more refined sister cities in Spain, modern Palermo, the city as we see it today, is a diamond in the rough, crude and unpolished. The Sicilian capital is noisy and chaotic, but unlike her Iberian siblings she still has her tenth-century souk, now an unkempt street market called Ballaro.
Although we must work with whatever information, however limited or limiting, is available to us (hence the brevity of some biographies that appear in these pages), a womans life is worth more than a few words on a piece of parchment. The diplomatic record may be sufficient in the writing of a prosaic academic paper or even in formulating a dissertation suitable for eventual incarnation as a monograph, yet an accurate, insightful biography necessitates work far beyond the consultation and study, however diligent, of chronicles and chartularies. This is even truer when writing a collection of biographies.
With one or two exceptions, most obviously Elisabeth of Bavaria, all of these women shared the experience of living in southern Italy, and some died here.
Visiting the places in countries, besides Italy, where Sicily’s countesses and queens lived in girlhood was highly informative to the writing of this book, but even more useful is a familiarity with the most important localities of the Regnum Siciliae known to these women as adults. Naturally, this includes Palermo, as we have seen, but also Salerno, Bari, Messina, Catania and Naples as well as Potenza, Brindisi, Acerra, Andria and San Marco dAlunzio, amongst many others. A knowledge of the kingdom's hinterland — its castles, abbeys, towns, mountains, forests, fields and agriculture — is also highly advantageous: Cava, Caccamo, Cosenza, Gerace, Lecce, Lucera, Stilo, Sicignano, Melfi, Maniace, Mussomeli and countless others.
It is a very honest, pragmatic, human approach to biography to learn as much as possible about how the subject lived, what she saw, what she ate, the people and places she knew. Even costume, regalia, iconography, mosaicry, numismatics and heraldry are relevant. This is nothing less than the context that transforms a name on the page into a person about whom we want to learn more.
The physical appearance of some queens is known to us, if only in a very general way, from how they are depicted in contemporary illuminations or otherwise described; Joanna “Plantagenet” of England had blonde hair and Constance Hauteville had reddish hair. The entombed remains of some queens shed light on their physical nature. Constance of Aragon seems to have been reasonably slender; the same can be said of Margaret of Navarre if the image of her engraved on a pendant is accurate, most of what was left of her body being destroyed in a fire, along with the porphyry tomb that preserved her until a fateful bolt of lightning struck Monreale’s splendid church in 1811.
Among the secondary literature of greatest value were studies on very specialized topics, such as a particular chronicle or the monastery endowed by Queen Margaret at Maniace. A rare treasure is the detailed biographical study of Helena Angelina of Epirus published at Naples in 1791. In Italy, biographies of any women other than saints were all but unknown until the twentieth century.
The research strategies and methods that resulted in this volume are conventional and transparent enough. This work reflects no “agenda” or “mission” apart from the author's intent to present accurate history in a rigorous manner.
Queenship and Identity
Beyond its historical lessons, important as they are, how relevant is medieval queenhood? In a society dominated by men, women were long viewed not only as the weaker sex but the less intelligent, less motivated one. In view of serious research, those perceptions have gradually fallen by the wayside.
Much of it has to do with personhood and what is now called “female agency, the natural right of a woman to entertain her own views and to shape her own destiny. This empowerment is feminism in its purist form.
Medieval womens roles were highly defined by female bodies, and there werent many choices. Depending on the social stratum into which she was born, a woman might be valued chiefly for bearing children, working on a farm, performing household chores, or having sex. What was normal was not usually regarded as particularly humiliating, for societal norms were — and still are — overwhelming. Rare was the woman who felt free enough to bridle at the duties imposed upon her, or the way she was exploited.
In passing, we may note that such conditions were not much different in the Muslim world than in Christian dominions.
The fact that a woman encumbered by such conditions, indeed defined by them, might be a great thinker had little to do with it. In short, it was a mans world, and few women escaped its rigid limitations. In this patriarchy, the woman who achieved her intrinsic social or intellectual potential was the uncommon exception, and typically she was an aristocrat or a nun (or both).
Yet Sicily seems to have been slightly more enlightened than other realms where fundamental women’s rights were concerned. Under Arab influence, there was somewhat higher literacy among girls than what one encountered in northern Europe, and by around 1140 the Normans had codified a law making rape a serious crime, though principally for assaults on nuns. Despite the enduring historical image of chivalrous knights, sexual predation was fairly frequent in every social class.
How does a woman separate her true self from the conditions thrust upon her? Even a queen, a woman of society's most privileged caste, might be forced to compromise.
Queens, being one of the very few classes of medieval women afforded the opportunity to reach their intellectual and social potential as thinkers and doers, offer us a great deal to study.
Significantly, queenship was the only role of the medieval European woman defined chiefly by its public function.
Only one of the queens in our elite sorority was born in Sicily. Most often, the princess who married a foreign king left her natal family and homeland, never to see them again. Crowned in a far country, she embraced its people, culture and traditions as her own.
The medieval concept of monarchy was inextricably linked to a rudimentary precursor of what today would be called national identity, even ethnicity. This involves, among other things, a distinct culture and language associated with a certain place, and here an example similar to Sicily is Catalonia; during the fourteenth century both were part of the “Crown of Aragon, and the modern Sicilian language bears distinct traces of Catalan. Today both regions, though belonging to larger nations, enjoy a fair degree of political autonomy, a fact that recognizes their medieval heritage. Normally subdued, the Sicilians’ sense of independence rises from the ashes every now and then, if discreetly.
In medieval monarchies, queens and kings were the symbolic embodiment of nationhood, a status nurtured in Sicily by the Normans and then the Swabians.
In a perfect world, it would be gratifying to learn something about the wives of Sicily’s emirs, especially the consorts of the local Kalbids. Alas, we know very little about them.
As an emirate, Sicily was part of the Fatimid Empire. As a kingdom, it was a sovereign country. The emirate knew prosperity, the kingdom knew greatness. That greatness owed more than a little to a few stout-hearted queens.
The fact remains that we can learn and know only so much about them, much less their emotions and motivations.
Were any of these women even more than an archetypal she-wolf, perhaps attaining the character of a natural leader, an “alpha” female? Clearly, the regents rose to face adversity, and Joanna showed great strength following her husband's death. Only Constance, the daughter of Roger I], was a true heiress, and her self-confidence is obvious enough from her actions. The personality of her namesake and successor, Constance of Aragon, also seems to have been a strong one, certainly by the time she wed Frederick II.
Here one is reminded of the overzealous, misdirected attempt by Ernst Kantorowicz to paint Frederick as a “modern” monarch, an idea that later had to be debunked by more judicious scholars.
Though surely exceptional in some ways, most of our queens were nothing more or less than women of their time. Looking back across the dense mists of centuries, many aspects of day-to-day life were very different from what we experience today. Even prosperous Sicily was essentially an agrarian society. Although the Arabs and Templars devised an early form of the check, coins were the chief currency, with barter the preferred method of exchange for many everyday transactions. Life spans were generally shorter. Disease was rife and efficacious treatments rare. Girls could be married at the age of fourteen and were expected to bear children by twenty. Childbirth was often fatal to the mother, even (as we shall see) when she was a queen. Infant mortality rates were high, with superstition governing what usually passed for the practice of medicine. Children born outside marriage were stigmatized and persons having physical impairments were mocked. The class into which a woman was born marked her for life, with a clear social line drawn between noble damsels and common wenches. (For the reader less than conversant with the realities of European medieval life, the author suggests Morris Bishop's book, The Middle Ages, as a suitable primer.)
Objectives
This work is not a general disquisition on queenship or the role of women in medieval society, important as both topics are, although it provides source material for scholars writing about these subjects. Nor is it intended as a detailed study of peripheral topics such as the endowment of a specific monastery by a Sicilian queen or the political reasons, real or imaginary, behind this or that royal marriage, subjects more suited to a concise paper, article or chapter than a tiresome treatise or a whole book. The marriage of Isabella of England to Frederick II was certainly part of a strategy by both her brother and her husband to curtail the ambitions of the King of France, and this was widely known at the time, but few of us are inclined to dedicate an entire dissertation or monograph to such a subject.
While the nature of queenship, with special reference to the queens of Sicily in the context of Norman and Swabian tradition, is considered from time to time, this volume is essentially a biographical reference work. Though queenship, feminism and gender identity are certainly, immediately pertinent to our study, and must not be overlooked, they are not, as an object of exhaustive analysis, the central focus of this work.
More generally, the study of queenship as a social or anthropological phenomenon sometimes sits uneasily with traditional biography, adding to it an unnecessary layer of conjecture or hypothesis.
Geographically, the essential orientation is southern Italy. By necessity, much is presented about this region and the characteristics that distinguish it from others, both socially and geographically. Because such context is important, the Kingdom of Sicily might be considered a silent, omnipresent “character” or a unifying, underlying theme in the story of these queens.
Whereas the author's Margaret, Queen of Sicily was presented in a narrative style more akin to storytelling, a format likely to garner criticism in academic circles, this book, by comparison, makes for slightly less engaging, if no less interesting, reading. Like Margaret, however, it presents reginal biographical information never before published, not even in Italian.
It is our intent to focus on queens without being myopic or misandric. By necessity, many facts about their husbands’ reigns are considered, but an effort has been made to avoid such details overshadowing the stories of the queens themselves. Here one obvious example amongst many is the complex relationship of Sicily’s kings with the popes, a subject about which volumes have been written, works to which the reader is referred for further elucidation. The alternative to this, and something that the author has eschewed, would have been lengthy forays into complex topics which, though peripherally relevant, could prove distracting in a biography. Entire treatises have been dedicated to the implications and effects of the apostolic legateship granted to the rulers of Sicily; for our purposes a succinct explanation suffices.
Biography presents certain challenges not always encountered in other forms of history writing. It is human nature for different people to perceive dissimilar qualities in the same person, most often (in daily life) based on that person's relationship to them as parent, spouse, child, sibling, friend, mentor or colleague. Naturally, it is possible for biographers to diverge in their views of the same historical figure. Indeed, it could be argued that this is sometimes preferable so that one biographer’s account is not “flat,” and identical to another's, and therefore lacking in individuality. The major biographies of Frederick II written during the twentieth century (Kantorowicz, Van Cleve, Abulafia) by historians born and educated in different countries (Germany, the United States, Great Britain) clearly reflect differences in thesis, emphasis and tone. Language sometimes accounts for part of this, especially where a translator seeks to capture not only the literal meaning but the actual, intended sense or tenor of an author’s words. The biographer’s personal background and world view also come into play, informed by the era in which she lives. Her knowledge of the subject's social and physical environment is required if some sense of reality and empathy is to be conveyed, lending accuracy and verisimilitude to the writing. The present work could not have been undertaken competently without a knowledge of, for example, particular faiths, languages, customs and places.
These challenges are not indifferent, and each biographer confronts them in her own way. In writing the following eighteen biographies, which vary greatly in length and detail, the author has sought to avoid excessive psychological or anthropological speculation about why a woman did (or did not do) something, seeking instead to concentrate on the known facts, context and circumstances without arbitrarily ascribing a modern personality or mentality to somebody living in a multiethnic, medieval Mediterranean monarchy.
Feminism and Multiculturalism
The most obviously feminist element in our study is, quite simply, the empowerment of a few women in an age of entrenched patriarchy. In that respect, Sicily’s queens were hardly unique for women of their special rank and status, as there are many contemporaneous examples of strong regents and consorts in the Norman, Iberian, German and Byzantine spheres, all of which touched Sicily. Studies published during the last few decades have revealed such realities, even if this is the first one to do it for Sicilian queens collectively.
Sicily’s queens regent navigated this environment with the help of familiares (trusted counsellors), prelates and indeed an array of advisors and various experts.
Until now, what was missing, in view of the dearth of serious reginal studies (explained later), was solid support for the thesis that, based on her actions and importance, one Sicilian queen may have stood above the others. Modern scholars are sometimes reluctant to declare a single figure of a certain era to stand out from her peers, but in certain cases the evidence speaks for itself.
After years of study, it is the author’s contention that in the NormanSwabian Kingdom of Sicily the evidence constrains us to recognize Margaret of Navarre as the realms most distinguished queen, with Constance Hauteville, who was likely her protégée, as a close second.
Be it agreed that a paradigm of feminism is intrinsic to a proper study of Sicilian queens, multiculturalism (or diversity) is equally relevant in any study involving medieval Sicily.
Norman-Fatimid-Byzantine-Swabian Sicily was nothing if not a multicultural society, albeit more so at its apogee than during its senescence. The author co-wrote a book introducing it, The Peoples of Sicily: A Multicultural Legacy. Among the many facts presented in that volume intended for a general readership, mention is made of the Arabs’ introduction of Hindu-Arabic numerals and paper, the former from India and the latter from China, probably via the Silk Road. Both developments, incidentally, facilitated education at a rate greater in Sicily and Spain than in most other parts of Europe.
The Sicilians themselves were diverse in faith, customs, language, law and even cuisine. Medieval Sicily was influenced by Africa and Asia as well as Europe.
Woe betide the queen who failed to grasp the complexities of this polyglot milieu.
In no other part of Europe, not even in the Iberian lands, do we see such a rich tapestry woven of such varied threads existing in the same society. We must look to contemporary Jerusalem (until 1187) to find something recognizably similar to Palermo’s twelfth-century multicultural mosaic; the stout Romanesque architecture of the Holy Sepulchre Church, a vestige of that era, vaguely resembles the syncretic Norman-Arab ecclesial style seen in Sicily.
As we have said, the greater number of women in Norman-Swabian Sicily were afforded more rights and opportunities than the majority of their sisters elsewhere in Europe because Muslim society fostered a higher rate of literacy among girls, while the legal codes (of 1140 and 1231) addressed the rights of women in some measure.
The lessons of Sicily’s multicultural experiment transcend Eurocentrism, touching a place in the human spirit where what unites us is far greater than whatever might divide us. One need not be a European Christian, or even a woman, to appreciate the stories of Sicily’s queens.
Gender identity, or our view of it, has become ever more complex, at some times recognizing equality but at others celebrating the differences between the sexes. This is reflected in language. In English, a tongue generally lacking gendered nouns, “neutral” words such as actor, following the format of doctor, are making actress, adulteress and directress obsolete, even in British usage. These words, of course, are rooted in Latin, whose structure is retained in dominatrix and testatrix. Words like emperor and empress have not vanished, and in Italian we still find dottoressa, studentessa and senatrice. King and queen, re and regina, kénig and kénigin remain unchanged.
Beyond gender, medieval society has left its mark on language in such words as peasant, bastard, jester and rogue. That the literal meanings of these terms are so often overlooked in our times can make it difficult for the modern reader to appreciate some of the situations and facts presented in a work such as this one.
But feminism and equality have always been about much more than language.
Certain medieval queens, particularly the regents, exemplified a kind of protofeminism. Some degree of intersectionality, the multifaceted identity of a queen as woman, wife, mother, leader and symbol, was inherent in her status, and in these pages an effort has been made to present Sicily’s countesses and queens with an eye to describing these various roles. There may have been other facets; Margaret, for example, was the de facto protector of the kingdom’s religious minorities, the Muslims and Jews. More than a reflection of one or another form of feminist theory, these biographies, considered collectively, are a simple expression of women’s history. Little of this is truly “revisionist,” for one cannot revise histories that, for the most part, had not yet been written in much detail. At all events, it is always important to view each woman in the context of her era, not ours.
It is equally important to recognize what each woman actually did. Following the death of Roger I, his widow, Adelaide, continued his policies. As regent, Margaret, who had to govern a much larger territory than Adelaide, clearly supported some policies at variance to those of her husband, William I. The regency of Constance Hauteville was too brief to offer us much insight into her divergence from the policies of her husband, Henry VI, with whom she seems to have differed occasionally. Each regent was assisted by competent, if sometimes controversial, courtiers.
We know more about irrepressible Joanna's life after the death of her first husband, William II, than during his reign, but she was never a regent. Joannas niece, Isabella, also seems to have had a rather independent spirit, and we know something of her life in England before marrying Frederick II. In the veins of both ladies coursed the blood of Eleanor of Aquitaine who, as it happened, visited Sicily twice.
Movements
Reginal biography is hardly new, but today it is much more than it ever was, its rapid evolution an outgrowth of the “second wave” of feminism that arrived around 1960. This was the women’s movement expressed through the pioneering work of such figures as Betty Friedan (1921-2006) and, in popular culture, the late Mary Tyler Moore (1936-2017). Here in Italy, the movement's essential ideology was echoed by proponents such as Carla Lonzi (1931-1982) and Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006).
In academe, the movement supported the advent of “social history” to complement, even supplant, the exclusively “political history” that had dominated historiography until that era. We may well debate the degree to which reginal biography could or should be considered part of a historiographical trend that sought to draw attention to the experience of “ordinary, and theretofore overlooked, people rather than “great women” and momentous events. However, the subfield of reginal biography has derived some stimulus from the wider field of womens history, certainly in nations where social history has prevailed as a pragmatic means for examining our past.
Retrospect permits us to discern a division or transition of sorts. Speaking broadly, the writings of historians such as Charles Haskins (18701937) about the Norman Kingdom of Sicily virtually ignored its queens, while those of John Julius Norwich (1929-2018) at least considered their influence. Today, works such as this book seek to approach history with an eye to both its political and social contexts, without choosing one over the other, instead viewing them as two sides of the same coin or perhaps two facets of a multifaceted gemstone. Not only are we concerned with a queen's public persona expressed in charters and decrees (the political history), but with the everyday situations and challenges she faced, as well as the culture, art and religion that colored her life (the social history), which were exceptionally sophisticated in the polyglot Kingdom of Sicily.
The wider effects of second-wave feminism as a social phenomenon and shaper of attitudes are the subject of analysis, criticism and even deconstruction, some of it rather complex; here the author is simply recognizing the movement's beneficial impact in prompting historians to research and publish more about medieval women. Ideally, the study of queens and other prominent women would be seamlessly integrated into the general study of history.
Through biography we can come to know the suppressed, forgotten voices seeking to be heard, not as a doctrine or manifesto but as an expression of the unsung women who were always among us, even when we did not see them. Apart from feminism, the writing of reginal biography has been influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by literary movements such as modernism (Virginia Woolf) and narrative journalism (Tom Wolfe).
As perspectives about independent, single women have evolved over time, so have our views of queens, especially regents. Largely gone are the tautology, atavism and condescension that characterized many of the biographies of medieval queens written (usually by men) before the middle of the twentieth century. Nowadays, these historical women, and studies about them, are more often accorded the gravitas they deserve, with proper attention paid to the facts and implications of the gender disparity that typified medieval life.
The last few decades have seen the flowering of insightful, sophisticated scholarship of a kind that reveals the true nature of European medieval queens as figures far more powerful, influential and multidimensional than what was formerly presented in print. Rather than offering us a strictly revisionist paradigm, the diverse corpus of work (much of which is published firstly in English) emerging from such study affords us the opportunity to complete or complement prior research, which tended to overlook the importance of women generally. Viewed in that context, books like this one are part of a wider trend.
Despite such progress, the fact remains that very few studies or biographies of value have been published (even here in Italy) which do justice to the women whose stories are told in this volume. Contrarily, overstatement can be a risk. In cases where scarcely enough is known about a queen to write even a brief chapter, qui nimis probat nihil probat, “she who proves too much actually proves nothing.”
To reiterate an earlier observation, if few Sicilian queens were overtly glorified or disparaged by historians, it is because most were ignored altogether. By contrast, scholarly compendia such as Alison Weir's recent Queens of the Conquest bring us biographies that revise some longstanding perceptions regarding England’s Norman queens, about whom much has been published over the centuries, an earlier example being Agnes Strickland’s epic series Lives of the Queens of England of 1840.
Our field touches several areas: Sicilian studies, womens studies, monarchical studies, multiculturalism, and more. Although our focus is queens, the more general status of all women into the middle decades of the thirteenth century merits our attention. This is not simply “gender politics” or “identity politics,” nor can it be defined merely as a dialectic reaction to the centuries-long views that instinctively and automatically glorified patriarchy, usually at the expense of the female half of the population.
If a case can be advanced that the populations of parts of what is now Italy boasted higher general literacy in the twelfth century than in the nineteenth, one could likewise be postulated that many of the women (besides queens) in these places had greater personal rights in the middle of the thirteenth century than they did in the middle of the twentieth. As the existing medieval evidence for this is, by its very nature, exiguous, such a thesis, however tenable, is never easy to quantify or prove.
Certainly, the rights of Italian women into the twentieth century were abysmal compared to those enjoyed in an earlier age when females were accepted to Salernos distinguished medical school (Trota), protected in law by the Constitutions of Melfi, commanded troops (Sichelgaita), governed nations (Margaret), oversaw construction projects (Judith), and could bring cases for divorce and rape.
That chess, a game introduced in Sicily by the Arabs, finds the queen as the most versatile piece on the board seems appropriately emblematic of the significance of the reginal role. Yet for centuries historians generally overlooked the function of queens, even regents, in medieval society.
Pitfalls
Because our study involves the queens of a specific part of Europe, a few words about past studies in this unique place are in order, just as they would be if our focus were England or anywhere else. The difference is that the essential character of English historiography is generally known, whereas the idiosyncrasies encountered in Sicilian historical studies are little known outside Italy.
Only a few readers — mostly Sicilians — need to consider these observations at length.
In this volume we shall avoid the “Sicilianist” views that taint many works published (in Italian) by scholars here in Sicily. A_ single, commonplace example is sufficient to illustrate the effects of this kind of provincialism, which is hardly unique to a single part of the world.
Local historians like to refer to the curiae generales called by Roger II in 1130 as Sicily’s first “parliament,” in this way claiming antiquity over the English parliament established during the next century. Lacking legislative authority, these early “great councils” of Sicilian barons were, in reality, nothing like true parliaments.
In former times, such a meeting of barons was sometimes referred to colloquially as a parlamentu, a Middle Sicilian word which in its most common parlance was synonymous with conversation (compare pinsamentu, meaning an idea or plan).
The first Sicilian parliament, facilitating the baronial election of Frederick of Aragon as King of Sicily, began in late 1295. Aside from developments like the Magna Carta (in 1215), the inception of an effective parliament in England is generally dated to 1258; interestingly, it was prompted by baronial opposition to the support of a proposed papalsponsored invasion of Sicily by King Henry III, whose late sister, Isabella, had been a Sicilian queen.
It must be said, in the interest of fairness, that we Sicilians are not alone in accepting erroneous “facts” about medieval history. Historical clichés abound in many populations.
It falls to the historian, using an evidentiary model based on sound epistemology, to correctly revise the more serious, widespread errors, which may be rooted in ethnocentrism, nationalism or sexism. It is logic, not blind iconoclasm, that should guide these efforts.
Dearth of Sicilian Reginal Studies Explained
That there is a dearth of reliable biographical work published about Sicily’s medieval queens is an inconvenient truth. A few specialized papers published in Italy during the last century focus on such things as the monasteries endowed by Sicily’s regents. The first scholarly biography of Roger II was published in English only in 2002.
In English, the first detailed biographies of Joanna and Isabella “Plantagenet” were published in the middle of the nineteenth century. The author's biography of Joannas mother-in-law, Margaret of Navarre, is the first book (in any language) written about that queen regent. The first substantial biography written in Italian about a Sicilian queen was Domenico Forges Davanzati’s eighteenth-century study of Helena Angelina of Epirus and her children.
A few reasons for the absence of a Sicilian reginal canon are worth mentioning, pro forma and succinctly, because the reader deserves at least a perfunctory explanation for why there are so many biographies about Margaret's contemporary and consuocera (co-mother-in-law), Eleanor of Aquitaine, yet only one book on the woman who was, arguably, Sicily’s most important queen.
As we have seen, the greatest impetus for reginal studies derived from the more general women’s movement that blossomed in the years after 1960 in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, with early effects in Scandinavia. This initial wave of social, economic and intellectual change arrived with some delay in Italy, where it was little more than a ripple. Consequentially, a few decades passed before the scholarly study of queens, or of any Italian women, gained much momentum in this country.
There are, however, other reasons for the absence, some rooted in phenomena that occurred a century before the birth of the women’s movement that began around 1960.
With the unification of the Italian peninsula, along with Sicily and Sardinia, into a nation in 1860, histories of most of the former kingdoms that comprised the new state were suppressed in the public mind in an attempt to focus on Italy as a whole. This subtle but real censorship discouraged the publication of modern biographies of monarchs like Roger II and his grandson Frederick II. The trend, which only worsened under Fascism, was aggravated by a development mentioned earlier.
As we have seen, the Norman-Swabian Kingdom of Sicily was the subject of warped historiography long before the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the successful efforts of the Guelphs in disparaging Frederick, and to a lesser degree even his Norman grandfather, the two greatest medieval monarchs in what is now Italy, resulted in problematical, if unforeseen, consequences. Most obviously, the pertinacious defamation of these kings that festered for centuries left the hapless Italians without a credible medieval hero when unification finally arrived. Spain embraced El Cid, France had Louis IX and Joan of Arc (and Hugh Capet and Charles Martel), Germany claimed Charlemagne and then Frederick II. Conversely, the Italian unificationists’ feeble attempts to elevate a few medieval Savoys to this illustrious pantheon met with dismal failure, for none of those rustic counts could rival the intellectual and political stature of Roger and Frederick, whose achievements in Europe and the Mediterranean eclipsed anything that could be mustered by other Italian rulers of the Middle Ages.
Roger and Frederick were both “native sons” born in Italy, yet the chief biographies about them published in Italian before the present century are translations of works from German, French and English.
Freedom of expression finally arrived in Sicily in 1943 with the Allies, who granted Italian women the right to vote just in time for the referendum that ousted the monarchy three years later.
In succeeding decades it became possible, for the first time since national unification, to publish books and papers about Sicily’s medieval golden age as a sovereign kingdom without risking the censorship that poisoned intellectual life in the erstwhile dictatorship. A conference was held on Frederick II in 1950, followed by one on Roger II in 1954, both in Palermo.
At that postwar juncture, however, other beasts reared their ugly heads to threaten the field of reginal studies. The Italian academy was never very meritocratic. Sadly, raccomandazioni (preferments), nepotism, cronyism and plagiarism are still commonplace, prompting many of the nation’s best minds to seek academic careers abroad, where they find greater opportunities.
In tandem with these conditions, a lingering misogyny prevails, hence the paucity of women professors until recently. Of the twenty-four papers presented in December 1972 at the first truly international conference held in Palermo on the Normans in medieval Sicily, exactly one was authored by a woman. By comparison, the British academy already boasted female medievalists specialized in the Norman era of the calibre and renown of Evelyn Jamison and Marjorie Chibnall. That fields such as Women’s Studies are all but unknown in Italian universities reflects the wider status of women in Italy.
Equally disquieting is the ubiquitous survival of bizarre “Italian” views of history unduly influenced by Catholicism on the one hand and rather extreme political movements, from left to right, on the other. One also sees this in the distorted reporting of international events by the Italian press.
Because conformity is the rule among Italian academics, these various phenomena transcend the field of medieval royal biography. Understandably, teachers and professors, being employees of the Italian state, are reluctant to contradict what has long been taught as “fact,” even where it is a vestige of Fascist propaganda.
The endogamy of Sicily’s professoriate nourishes a complaisance bordering on sycophancy, ensuring a long life for tired clichés like the “parliament of 1130,” which one hears parroted by teachers and tour guides.
We need not wade into deeper waters than these. The author shall leave that to others.
Clearly, however, all of these factors influence historiography, determining whether monographs about certain subjects are published in Italy. The cumulative effect of this situation is that very little of legitimate scholarly value has been written by Italians about Sicily’s first few medieval queens.
This is anomalous, for we expect the first, lengthiest, most significant biography of a historical queen to be written at a reasonably early date in the country where she was crowned. Would it not seem strange to us if the first biography of Elizabeth I of England, who died in 1603, were written in Italian and published four centuries later?
Whatever its causes, for the biographer the dearth of previous biographies is at once daunting and liberating, for while it obviates the need for an exhaustive study of the sketchy secondary literature about the queens’ lives, it imposes upon the historian the responsibility of defining how these womens stories should be evaluated and presented, setting the stage for subsequent work on the topic by others. Future biographers may choose to embrace the outline of a first biography or to deconstruct it, but they cannot ignore it.
Until now, the absence of a compendium such as this one meant that any reader interested in learning about these women collectively had to consult numerous works or rely on the (often inaccurate) information available on the internet.
Lost Kingdom
As we have said, the Kingdom of Sicily was politically divided in 1282, despite some later monarchs who ruled the peninsular part of it (which became the Kingdom of Naples) in successive centuries continuing to call themselves kings or queens of Sicily, whether they actually controlled the island or not. Yet the twin crowns were sometimes borne on the same royal head in what historians call a “personal union,” and in 1816, under the House of Bourbon, both realms were united to form the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, its very name a reminder that in the thirteenth century rival monarchs in Palermo and Naples claimed the Mediterranean’s largest island. It was the Bourbons who were displaced by the Savoys in 1860.
In reading about the queens of a country that has long lacked a monarchy, one risks losing a sense of historical continuity because there is no living point of reference to link the past to the present.
Has anybody in living memory actually met a Queen of Sicily? Yes, and this volume includes an interview with a princess of Sicily’s last royal dynasty. The appendix on Queen Maria Sophia, who died in 1925, is an unusual excursus relevant to the continuity of a very general concept of queenship in Sicily over the centuries, and also to the fact of the kingdom itself surviving almost until our times. That a woman of her dynasty had become Queen of Sicily in 1250 lends a certain conjunction to this. Unexpected in a book about medieval queens, Maria Sophia's story is a reminder that for many centuries monarchy was thoroughly woven into the social fabric of Sicily, much as it was elsewhere in Europe. She was the last woman in a long continuum.
Ultimately, it was the cataclysm of the Second World War that brought an end to monarchy in Italy, beginning with catastrophic military defeats in Africa and Russia but soon reaching the very doorsteps of ordinary Italian citizens. That discourse lies beyond the scope of this work, but for its dire consequences one need only consider that the first major Allied bombing run over Palermo, in February 1943, destroyed most of the structures behind Piazza Magione, in the process killing nearly a hundred civilians and severely damaging a splendid church erected during the twelfth century. Many deaths followed as the carpet bombing continued for months.
As a sobering footnote, in 1947 her misadventures earned dystopic Italy the dubious distinction of becoming the first nation to admit committing crimes against humanity (in places like Ethiopia). The atrocities perpetrated at home and abroad in the name of Italy's monarch assured the beggared kingdoms descent into the darkest depths of infamy.
By 1950, a new wave of Italians was emigrating, seeking a chance at a better life in the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Australia. Sixty years later, there were more Italian-born Italians in greater London than in the city of Bologna.
Amidst postwar misery and bitter memories, few Italians were openly nostalgic for the monarchy, and for the next two generations most schools avoided the subject of Fascism altogether, teaching about Italian history as it unfolded up to 1920 but no further. In view of eclectic political currents, antipathy toward the very institution of monarchy did little to encourage the study of royalty here in Italy throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. Yet the last two decades have witnessed a growing interest in the history of the House of the Two Sicilies as well as our earlier dynasties.
That royalty, monarchy and aristocracy are becoming anachronistic concepts need not concern us except where this makes it difficult for readers of later generations to appreciate the social subtleties intrinsic in such institutions. Understandably, ideas like “legitimacy” are scarcely even marginal in modern society, with its births-outside-marriage and even the redefining of marriage, along with anonymous gamete donation and other developments unimagined by our medieval forebears.
Two of the Sicilian kings mentioned in this volume, Tancred and Manfred, were born “illegitimately.’
Queens and queenship are essential to the indelible identity, indeed the dignity, of a kingdom, or even an ex-kingdom, and its people past and present. Everything about the first queens of Sicily is indispensable to the cultural heritage of southern Italy. Queenship, with its mystique and customs and trappings, is one of the elements that makes the place and its people unique. The same principle would be just as valid were we considering the consorts of the high kings of Ireland or the emperors of Japan, not only because being the highest-ranking woman in a hereditary monarchy entails special responsibilities but because each place has its own historical norms, ideas that make it Sicilian, Irish or Japanese. Or Ethiopian or Russian or Chinese. It may be a special coronation rite or a certain kind of crown, or the national language. This is what makes each society something unto itself and not identical to others. Its medieval queens, or our remembrance of them, is one of the things that makes southern Italy Sicilian or Neapolitan, and not simply, generically “Italian” or “European” Our queens are part of us.
Though southern Italy is no longer a sovereign kingdom, the legacy of our queens is a subtle but real element of what contemporary anthropologists sometimes call “cultural sovereignty,’ the prerogative of a people to explicate its own cultural identity based on its communal historical knowledge and patrimony accrued over many generations. Reflecting, in its most rudimentary form, the intrinsic right of a population to define itself rather than to let outsiders define it, this need not lead to political discord. In its essence, it is simply the God-given right of each of us to tell our own story.
Through the following pages this Sicilian legacy endures.
Definitions
The usage of certain terms brings us medieval connotations, some unique to the Kingdom of Sicily.
A dower was land given to a bride by her husband (for our queens this was Mount Saint Angelo in Apulia), whereas a dowry was held by the bride as a gift from her father and perhaps given to her husband at marriage.
A monastery was a community of monks, while an abbey was a larger monastery overseen by an abbot or (for nuns) an abbess. A cathedral, for which Italians sometimes prefer the word duomo, was the seat of a bishop, while a basilica was a church (though not necessarily a large cathedral) having a certain status in canon law; Palermo’s Magione is a basilica even though it is not very large.
Under Roger I the island of Sicily was a “great county.” In theory, a principality or duchy encompassed numerous counties consisting of baronies composed of manors. In fact, certain principalities and duchies established by the Byzantines or Lombards before the Norman era (Amalfi, Capua, Gaeta), though smaller than the Normans’ Duchy of Apulia, were prosperous and at times sovereign. By the twelfth century, some counties were larger than certain duchies. Duke finds its origin in the Latin dux, but the Longobards introduced the title of gastald.
The holder of a manor (or “fief”) within a barony was typically an enfeoffed knight; in the Kingdom of Sicily the chief feudal roll was the Catalogus Baronum. The military (crusading) knightly orders founded in the twelfth century were also present, having preceptories and commanderies where knights lived like monks. The feudal norms of the Regnum Siciliae were based on two distinct traditions.
Aside from the fact that royal (or “demesnial” or “crown’) lands belonged to the king, whilst feudal (“manorial”) estates were held “in fee” by a baron, knight, bishop or abbot, two parallel systems existed, namely the Frankish system (inheritance of an estate by a baron’s eldest son) favored by the Normans, versus the Longobard system (inheritance by all the sons of a baron) which left estates divided into moieties. A manor such as a barony was administered by a baron or enfeoffed knight, whereas a royal town was governed by a bailiff (or governor); barons and bailiffs both answered to the king. In Sicily, feudal estates usually had at least some serfs, while certain royal lands did not.
Titles like familiaris (royal counsellor), for which Sicily’s Greeks preferred archon, as well as the Arabic caid (chiefly a title of respect), had specific meanings. For familiaris the author uses familiare. Though it may share the same root, an amiratus was much more than an admiral.
At times the queens of Sicily found themselves involved with dominions having other customs and therefore different titles and ranks. We shall use the local nomenclature so that Greek despots and Arab emirs retain their native dignity. The Holy Roman Empire also had its own hierarchy and ranks.
A distinction is drawn between serfs, who were tied to the land, and other members of the peasantry.
Almost all of our contemporaneous sources are to be found in Latin, Arabic or Greek, those in Norman French or Middle Sicilian being rare. Certain Latin terms are open to interpretation depending upon context, where castrum may be a remote castle or a fortified town. We find the term comes (count) more often than baronis (baron), with the latter sometimes inferred from context (though seigneur is used in French) when it refers to a landed noble who had several knights under his feudal authority. The word miles, sometimes milites refers to a knight. In this volume baronage usually refers to landed nobles collectively, regardless of their rank as counts, barons or enfeoffed knights.
Ecclesiastical terms such as archimandrite have specific meanings in the Orthodox Church (the eastern church after 1054).
An attempt has been made to avoid the errors of past historians. Walter “of the Mill” owes his Anglice nickname to the belief that he was English (he was actually Norman) and that offamilias, which denoted his status as a familiare, referred to a mill. He became Primate of Sicily.
The tari was a small gold coin introduced by the Arabs. The ducat was a silver coin introduced by Roger II at Ariano in 1140. The augustale was a gold coin inaugurated by Frederick II with the Constitutions of Melfi in 1231. The various weights of the follaris, or follis, were copper.
In a few cases, Sicilian refers not only to the islanders but to all the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Sicily, though this potentially confusing usagehas generally been avoided. Sicily, rather than terms like Regnum Siciliae, usually denotes the island alone.
Translations
Except where it is otherwise noted, all of the translations in this volume are the work of the author. In a few instances, they are the first translations of certain passages ever published in English.
Translating these sometimes gives birth to ideas. The author’s translation of the Ferraris Chronicle made it possible for her to advance the theory of that codex being the first history of the Kingdom of Sicily, and not merely a chronicle or annal.
Dissemination
One never knows the precise extent to which a [printed] book will be distributed, especially in an age that finds electronic editions [such as this one] supplanting paper volumes in some quarters. Public and university libraries are by no means “obligated” to purchase works such as this one, and the publisher made an effort to keep the paperback edition’s price affordable to students, the ebook even more so.
As some readers may know, there was initially no digital preview of this volume on the internet and no immediate publication of an ebook.
Discovery
Some remarks about the structure of this work are appropriate.
The chapters of this book are chronological as well as topical because it is important to mention the major events that occurred during each woman's lifetime. Therefore, the conquest of Messina in 1061 is found in the chapter on Judith, and some observations about queenship and coronations are presented in the chapter on Elvira, Sicily’s first queen.
The monographic biography of a single personage lends itself to the simple flow of history (what historians sometimes call its “chronology”), whereas in a book such as this one it is often necessary to revisit events already mentioned or to allude to those yet to occur at a future point in the narrative'’s natural chronology.
In other words, there are some instances of a certain queen's story overlapping that of her predecessor or successor. (See the chart following this introduction. )
The stories of Beatrice of Rethel and Joanna of England necessarily encompass their time as queen mother (Beatrice) or queen dowager (Joanna) because as young widows both lived long after their formal “reigns” (queenhood) ended, surviving into the reigns of their successors. For that reason, Beatrice’s chapter inevitably deals with certain events that occurred after her tenure as queen consort because she lived into the reign of her contemporary and successor, Margaret. Beatrice, queen consort until 1154, died in 1185; Margaret, queen consort and then regent until 1171, died in 1183. At all events, an attempt was made to avoid excessive redundancy.
Because the genealogical charts are intended to show ancestry, kinship and marriage as simply as possible, such details as birth dates and even birth order are not always indicated. For visual clarity (and to avoid drawing lines that confusingly cross over other lines), an elder sibling may occasionally be placed where the reader would normally expect to find a younger one, or a first spouse positioned where the reader might reasonably presume to see a second one.
Some of the genealogical tables include coats of arms even where these were assumed after the lifetime of the countess or queen indicated. As the use of armorial heraldry in most of western Europe arrived in the second half of the twelfth century, it is clear that Elvira of Castile never saw the coat of arms later associated with her dynasty. The Hautevilles did not make use of a coat of arms or heraldic insignia as we understand the term; the blazon azure a bend checky argent and gules is apocryphal.
The section of the bibliography dedicated to secondary literature [in the print edition] lists works consulted which were found informative or at least relevant and therefore worthy of mention; it does not reflect an attempt to list every monograph or paper, whether useful or not. Hard-copy (printed) papers and studies were generally given precedence over those available exclusively in digital (electronic) format via websites.
Amongst the topics treated rather fleetingly is cuisine. The author’s book Sicilian Queenship has a chapter on Sicily’s medieval culinary history.
The crown shown on the title page is an adaptation of those worn by Elvira, Beatrice and Constance in the illuminated chronicle of Peter of Eboli completed early in the thirteenth century.
Some passages of text published in the following pages previously appeared in books or articles the author wrote and for which she holds the exclusive copyright. Likewise, a few maps, genealogical tables and photographs presented in this volume were first published in the author's Margaret, Queen of Sicily or The Ferraris Chronicle. Several previously appeared in The Peoples of Sicily or Sicilian Studies. While one seeks to publish completely original work at every turn, in certain instances there is no need to “reinvent the wheel” As this work is the result of years of research by the author into the history of medieval Sicily, it is logical that a few parts of it have already been published elsewhere in some form.
Most of the photographs that appear in this book were taken by the author during her numerous research trips around Europe.
Except for scholarly citations, the opinions and positions expressed in this book are those of the author.
In consulting a reference work such as this one, the reader is entitled to know something of the author's background, which may inform views and biases. The author resides in Sicily and her ancestral roots are unabashedly Sicilian. She is not affiliated with any political party or organized movement. Like the queens, she is Roman Catholic. The costs (such as travel expenses) entailed in the research necessary to complete this monograph were borne by the author herself, not being defrayed by the publisher, a university, a foundation or any other source of funding.
As we have said, it is impossible to understand much about the lives lived by Sicily’s queens without knowing something of Sicily itself. Let us meet the queens of the first Sicilian monarchy. First, let us visit the lands that became the Kingdom of Sicily, the Regnum Siciliae.
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