Download PDF | (New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys) Alex Metcalfe - The Muslims of Medieval Italy (New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys)-Edinburgh University Press (2009).
337 Pages
Introduction
This book traces a history of consequence: repeated invasions that triggered the collapse and reconfiguration of age-old frontiers between the continents of Africa and Europe; the advent of new states, laws and systems of governance; the exchange of religious beliefs between Islam and Christianity; the transformation of arts, culture, science and learning; and fundamental shifts in the social and economic dynamics of the central Mediterranean. Above all, this is a study of people and power.
The primary focus is the pivotal role that Muslims played in Sicily and parts of south Italy during a tripartite shift from Byzantine Greek to Arab-Muslim to Latin Christian. These were periods and places in a state of constant, and often violent, flux. Very little survived unscathed by the changes wrought by competing factions, whose ambitions successive Sicilian rulers struggled to limit. Irrespective of religion, the most ruthlessly determined of all were the island’s conquerors themselves, each of whom sought an essentially different form of recognised authority to justify their status, conduct and actions.
This is a history largely devoid of heroes: by the end of Muslim rule, Byzantine Greek culture had been all but obliterated. Thereafter, Latin Christian rule all but obliterated Arab-Muslim culture. The high points in the Islamicisation of Sicily followed by its ‘Europeanisation’ are rare and worth treasuring. Those precious moments are well remembered, especially when they are understood as evidence for tolerance and interfaith harmony. The best remaining examples can be found in the Arab-Norman art and architecture, along with their multilingual court and administrative offices. These, however, were hybrid products of a curious, deceptive and experimental kingship; co-operation and goodwill between a select few occurred in a context of tension and insecurity for many others.
The geographical and chronological reach of this book extends across and beyond the south Italian peninsula between 800 and 1300, with particular emphasis on the island of Sicily during the central 300 years of that period. Rich, diverse and widely recognised as this history is, it remains relatively unexplored, particularly so for questions of Muslim power and society. It is not as familiar as the Iberian peninsula or Syria-Palestine, but is it sufficiently compact to make a more coherent regional study than Spain, and is far better furnished with surviving charter materials than the Crusader states.
For the most part, works on medieval Sicily up to 1300 tend to begin with the Norman conquest and then make chronological divisions according to dynastic eras: Norman; Staufen; and Angevin. This approach has unfortunate consequences for the Italian Muslims. Even if Muslim rule was limited to a mere 250 years prior to the Normans, Muslim settlement extended for almost five centuries across all these periods. Such a split correspondingly marginalises the importance of the Muslims to the extent that, in some accounts, they make only cameo appearances. This work seeks to link the political and social history of these periods through the medium of Arab-Muslim colonisation, institutions, culture and communities. The intention, therefore, is to offer a fresh, integrated perspective which may be read as both a survey and a monograph.
For much of this history, we are at the limited mercy of the sources, and not all the surviving Latin, Greek and Arabic documentary sources have been accurately transcribed, translated and indexed in modern, scholarly editions. In recent years, new materials have come to light, and more of these may do so in future. In the meantime, archaeologists have barely scratched the surface of an island stacked with Greek, Punic and Roman sites as well as medieval ones. For the Islamic period, the annalistic chronicles are almost all distant in time and place from that which they describe, although some were able to draw on much older, and apparently well-informed, material. Even so, the sources quickly become confused when recounting the bare events of the long Muslim conquests or relating the transition of the island’s governors in colourless prose. The histories can, however, be supplemented from a fragmented range of other written media, largely in Arabic and Greek. These include geographical descriptions, travelogues, merchants’ letters, biographical dictionaries, poetry, legal opinions (fatwas), and saints’ lives. For the Islamic period especially, it is these sources which breathe life into the history.
From the Norman period, Latin sources begin to come to the fore. Apart from the period of 1100-30, we are furnished with details from an array of materials including charters, archaeology and art history. Indeed, most aspects of the Norman and Staufen kingdoms in Italy not only have been well-researched, but are also supplied with ample secondary literature. The same can be said of the wider Mediterranean. My approach, therefore, has not been to retell the intricate dynamics of south Italian politics, the north Italian maritime states, the papacy, Byzantine and German empires, but instead to give sufficient background information in order to contextualise the relevant points under discussion. The same course is adopted when introducing the complexities of Arab-Muslim north Africa.
The reader is otherwise exposed to the earliest and most reliable source materials as far as is sensible or feasible, rather than become embroiled in modern historiographical debates. While it would have been useful to give more extensive footnotes to illuminate historiographical trends, it is simply not possible to do justice to the body of literature in the interrelated fields which a study of Sicily necessitates. As such, attention has been drawn to a selection of seminal and up to date works in which readers will find extensive bibliographical references. Wherever possible, I have pointed to translations of the Arabic, Greek and Latin sources, giving equivalents rendered into more commonly known languages, particularly English and French. Even with the resurgence of interest in this subject in recent years, the nineteenth-century works of Michele Amari, and his translations of the Arabic sources into Italian, remain indispensable for non-Arabists.
For certain sections of this work, I have drawn heavily on anumber of articles and monographs produced by the current generation of scholars. Indeed, the list of those who have shaped my understanding of Sicily and the medieval Mediterranean is now considerable; I have been especially influenced by the scholarship and diverse knowledge of David Abulafia, Dionisius Agius, Henri Bresc, Michael Brett, Adalgisa De Simone, Vera von Falkenhausen, Graham Loud, Annliese Nef and Ferdinando Maurici. All of these I have had the pleasure of meeting and I am grateful for their kind thoughts and encouragement. I have also spent many hours in fruitful conversation with talented emerging scholars, such as Ewan Johnson, Paul Oldfield and Giuseppe Mandala. Particularly evident in this book — and it is perhaps no surprise — is the influence of my former supervisor, Jeremy Johns, whose outputs on art history and the Arabic administration of Sicily and Calabria continue to redefine the subject area.
Muslim expansion into the central Mediterranean
From the fall of Rome to the rise of Muslim Africa
At the height of Rome’s power, long after the great enemy of Carthage had been absorbed into vast imperial provinces, their ancient rivalry reduced to mere legend, it was still attractive to imagine that the origins of empire were intimately bound up with the fate of Africa. In Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid such dim historical memory found literary expression in the figures of the resolute colonist Aeneas, and his smitten and spurned lover Dido, the queen of Carthage, driven to suicide by divine conspiracy. As in the Aeneid, the island of Sicily was the stepping-stone from Africa to Italy, but by Virgil’s day it was something of a rural backwater in the middle of the Mediterranean, far from the empire’s frontiers. Links to non-Latin African elements persisted in Sicily, but they did so at only a minor cultural level, visible in the decoration of funerary steles and audible in the neo-Punic dialects of its western ports like Lilybaeum (Marsala). The island’s strategic importance to the Italian peninsula had also faded with the Romans’ domination over a sea they had grown accustomed to call their own.
In the fifth century, when this control was partially undermined by the incursions of Vandal fleets, the challenge to the central Mediterranean islands and Italian mainland originated from the same coasts of north Africa. The riposte of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian (d. 565) and his illustrious general, Belisarius, was to break Vandal power in Africa. This allowed the Byzantines a platform for victories over the Ostrogoths in Sicily, and from there to make their own advance north into the Italian peninsula. The Eastern Empire’s gains were famously short-lived and, in the face of Lombard and Frankish expansion southwards, a montage of statelets emerged, which constantly reconfigured Italy’s amorphous political geography throughout the early medieval period. In amongst these states, Byzantine power was concentrated mainly around Ravenna in the north-east, across Apulia and Calabria in the the far south and on the islands of Sardinia and Sicily.
When Arab-Muslim armies expanded into Byzantine Syria and Egypt from the 630s and across north Africa from the 640s, the first raid against Sicily was launched from the new Arab province of Syria, probably in the year 652, only twenty years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. In Constantinople, the rise of Muslim power and early incursions against south Italy were catalysts for a tactical redeployment. Against a background of political machinations at court, the risk of further Byzantine losses and only fragile truces with the Arabs, Emperor Constans II transferred his residence to Syracuse in 663, to where he also contemplated shifting the political hub of the empire. But if Sicily had been intended as central to the geopolitical defence of the region, its role was curtailed by Constans’ assassination five years later and the partial reversal of naval policy under his successors. More lasting arrangements, however, were implemented in response to the contraction of the empire’s borders. Towards the end of the 600s, probably in response to the fall of Carthage in 698, the theme (8éu10) of Sicily was created as part of a wider social, defensive and administrative reorganisation of the provinces in which civil and military authority were combined and placed in the hands of a governor (strategos)."
The potential risk to Constantinople of further territorial loss on the western border represented a serious threat. Initially, the Arabs in Africa were concerned with the consolidation of the continent and, later, expansion into the Iberian peninsula, but they now securely held the launch-pad of the old Roman province of Africa — or Ifrigiya as it was renamed in Arabic. If Sicily and south Italy were to fall to forces bent on destroying Byzantium, there was little to prevent a domino effect across the Adriatic into Dalmatia and through the Balkans to the metropolis of Constantinople itself.” Indeed, this was exactly the route adopted by the Normans in the eleventh century under Robert Guiscard, who died in Greece at the head of a south Italian army. Muslim consolidation of Ifriqiya thus affected the dimension and distribution of power in the central Mediterranean for which control over the Ifriqiya—Sicily-south Italy axis was essential.
From the late-seventh century, the south Italian themes, and particularly the main urban centre of Syracuse, were receivers and transmitters of cultural, literary and religious influence, spearheaded by Hellenised, Greek-speaking civil and military officials, bishops and literati. Connections to the Byzantine east were strengthened when the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Calabria and Sicily was transferred under Leo III from Rome to the Patriarch of Constantinople in the mid-eighth century, nourishing a monastic and eremitic tradition that produced Sicilian-born saints, popes and religious scholars, who helped fashion early medieval Christian thought and doctrine. However, Byzantine Sicily’s assets were not evenly spread around the island. Culturally and politically, its orientation was towards the Italian mainland and beyond to the eastern Mediterranean. Correspondingly, power and wealth tended to be more concentrated in the eastern parts of the island, partly reflected in the distribution of its population and the towns which were the seats of its bishoprics. To the east were Messina, Taormina, Syracuse, Leontini (Lentini), Catania, Tindari, Lipari, Mylai (Milazzo) and Malta; in the west were Thermai (Termini), Palermo, Lilybaeum, Trokalis (Triocala) and Agrigento.*
Early medieval Sicily was home to vast, rural imperial and ecclesiastic estates (latifundia) dotted with small, undefended hamlets. However, the island had also maintained a number of its ancient urban centres, most of which could already trace their origins back a thousand years. Many worship sites had been transformed from pagan sanctuaries into churches which retained their external appearance as ancient temples. Alongside these, larger settlements had preserved elements of their classical architecture, including their defensive walls. The conjecture of al-Qazwini in the 1200s that Sicily was depopulated until it was resettled with displaced peoples from the Muslim invasion of Ifriqiya was only half right on both counts.° There were a few refugees from north Africa, but not enough to make a significant impact overall. On the other hand, the population of the Sicilian towns had sharply declined in number, but had not collapsed, since the heyday of the classical period.°
Both Sicily and Sardinia were targets for Muslim raids. Not all the dates given by the various (and late) sources for attacks are secure, and there is a genuine risk of conflating some accounts. From around 704, each island was plundered numerous times, particularly during the 730s, culminating in an aborted invasion of Sicily in 739-40, to which we shall return shortly.” Later, in 752-3, both islands seem to have made a large tribute payment, referred to in Arabic sources as the jizya. For its part, Sardinia had been very peripheral to the Byzantine exarchate of Africa and, like Sicily, both were considered safe havens for those fleeing north since the days of the Vandal attacks. This may account for the choice of Cégliari on the southern coast as a site for the translation of the body of Saint Augustine, who had died during the Vandal siege of Hippo Regius (later called Bana, now ‘Annaba). Long before the fall of Rome, the island was considered a remote place: at the centre of the Mediterranean, yet in the back of beyond. However, by the time of the Muslim raids, C4gliari was not thought remote enough for Augustine, prompting another translation to Pavia in northern Italy between 721 and 726 when the saint’s relics were purchased by the Lombard king, Liudprand.®
One poorly attested effect of the Muslim raids may have been to cause the coastal population of Sardinia to contract towards the mountainous centre. If it did, then it is likely to have introduced a conclusive phase of Christianisation in the semi-pagan hinterland that had so greatly concerned Gregory the Great. Otherwise, Sardinia’s ports were relatively few and were always more parochial targets than Sicily’s. Anecdotes of Muslim raids in Arabic sources share this view, telling how the hostile and crafty locals buried their treasure beneath the sea or hid it in church rafters before discovery could be made: there was booty in Sardinia, but it was hard to come by. The added perception that the island was difficult to reach safely from Africa was supported by an initially successful mission which was wrecked on its return leg in 816-17. Sicily, on the other hand, lay on the ‘Sicilian channel’ and ships sailing from Ifriqiya never passed out of sight of land.? It not only offered a relatively safe passage and an accessible target, but the island was also richer and more populated than Sardinia. Once the invasion of Sicily had begun in 827, Sardinia was rarely raided thereafter, and remained unexploited and sparsely populated until it became the object of Muslim—Christian rivalry again in the eleventh century.
Historical background to the conquest of Sicily
During the course of the eighth century, a distinctive pattern emerged in which Muslim expeditions in the central Mediterranean were conditioned, if not determined, by the situation in north Africa. On the one hand, the need to find new slave resources, together with the success of previous missions, impelled further raids. On the other hand, overseas operations were distracted when simmering discontent at home broke out into open revolt.
The grievances of the local populations stemmed from the Arab conquests of north Africa in the seventh century. Disparate and pagan tribesmen, who were spread over vast and varied regions, were referred to pejoratively by the Arabs — like the Romans had before them — as ‘Berbers’. Their initial subjugation resulted in their provision of tribute rendered in terms of slaves. Thereafter, large numbers of Berbers had been willingly recruited for the conquest of the western regions of north Africa (the Maghrib) and Spain.'® However, the vital roles they played in the Arab armies, and their conversion to Islam did not redress their inequitable status after the conquests. Rather than submitting themselves to the leadership of Arab governors appointed by the caliph and sent into north Africa from the east, the Berbers used their adopted religious identity as the vehicle to seek power by selecting a leader considered the best among the Muslim community as a whole. Resistance to the Arab governors and army commanders was led by the sectarian movements of the Berber Sufri-s (‘the Yellows’) and the Ibadi-s (‘the Whites’), and was thus articulated in both ethnic and politico-religious terms. To their Arab enemies, these Berber rebels were called ‘Kharijites’ (‘outlaws’), a label with profoundly negative connotations for those associated with it. Indeed, in Arab-Muslim historiography, the term ‘Berber’ was so closely linked to ideas of rebelliousness that it can sometimes be taken to refer to a behavioural category as much as an ethnic affiliation.
In 740, Arab-Berber antagonism erupted in the western Maghrib where local tribes, led by their own ‘caliph’ Maysara al-Matghart, rebelled against the Arab governor, ‘Ubayd Allah ibn al-Habhab, who had attempted to tax the Muslim Berbers by rigidly enforcing the original terms of their capitulation, pressing them into service as if they had been slaves or conquered pagans. The Maysara rebellion helped to initiate a generation of violent conflicts which spread east, threatening the basis of Arab rule and even the city of Qayrawan itself in 742. As for Sicily, the recall of troops scuppered their first bid to invade the island, complete with cavalry, during which — an Arabic source retrospectively imagined — the Muslim commander had made his mark on the besieged gate of Syracuse by hammering on it with his sword before retiring.’’ Indeed, a similar redeployment from Sicily had to be made in 752-3 to quell another Berber revolt which, as the Arabic chroniclers noted, allowed sufficient respite for the Byzantines to fortify defensive hilltop sites across Sicily.’? For over half a century few Muslim raids were launched into the central Mediterranean.
In Sicily, there is a limited amount of archaeological evidence for at least some defensive restructuring during this period of calm, most notably a Greek inscription commemorating fortifications built by the strategos of Sicily, Constantine, at Castelmola overlooking Taormina."? There are, however, doubts about the extent and effectiveness of the defences, particularly on the western side of the island. At the ancient and medieval site of Selinunte, for example, there can be seen the remains of hastily constructed ramparts (see fig. r on p. 138). These may not have been intended to withstand sustained attacks from a determined enemy, but were instead designed to shelter the community from an initial onslaught, allowing them time to negotiate surrender terms. More complete, and not dissimilar, structures can be seen at Byzantine Sbeitla in Ifriqiya, which had fallen two centuries earlier. The measures taken by the Sicilian theme remain open to question, but its organisation into smaller units may also have partially reversed the ruralisation of the preceding centuries and begun to fragment the great estates. At the same time, empowerment and effective organisation at a local level ensured that any future invasion was likely to be a time-consuming series of assaults conducted against one stronghold after another.
The turmoil in the Muslim west coincided with a wider political reconfiguration of the Islamic world as the Umayyad empire collapsed in the mid-eighth century after the civil war (fitna), which escalated following the violent death of the caliph, Walid II. The subsequent defeat and dissolution of the dynasty, and eastward shift in the centre of political gravity from Syria to Iraq under the Abbasids, loosened the bonds of control between the core and the peripheries of the new-found empire. In the extreme west, across the Iberian peninsula (al-Andalus), an independent, breakaway dynasty of Umayyad amirs emerged by 756. After a generation of insurrection across north Africa, during which the Berber revolts had failed to establish any widespread authority, their sects were dispersed to the oases and towns on the desert fringe. Politically marginalised as these peripheries were, they were connected into, and accommodated by, lucrative, trans-Saharan trade routes which formed key links in the transportation of slaves and gold, feeding the burgeoning demands from towns further north.*4
A further consequence of the Berber revolts, combined with the Abbasids’ attempts to restore stability, was the emergence of powerful, new and increasingly independent commanders in Ifriqiya with strongly anti-Berber perspectives. Rising to prominence, first as governor of the strategically important Zab region in what is now central-eastern Algeria, was Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab. Like most of the army (jund) in late eighth-century Ifriqiya, the Bana |-Aghlab were originally Arabs from the eastern province of Khurasan (in modern Iran), a region favoured by the Abbasids for its political and military support, and one which had been instrumental in bringing about the downfall of the Umayyads. Professional soldiers of Arab and Persian Khurasani origin formed the trusted core of the early Abbasid armies, and under the caliph al-Mansir (d. 775), large detachments had been sent west to Ifriqiya in 772. From a position of power in the military and as a key provincial governor, Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab built on his authority, putting down a revolt in 799 and, having assumed control of Qayrawan, was invested the next year as amir of Ifriqiya by the Abbasid caliph, Hariin al-Rashid. In return, Ibn al-Aghlab recognised the caliph’s authority and agreed, in theory, to make tribute payments. In practice, he ruled as he saw fit and passed on his own dynastic power without further recourse to Baghdad."
The changing political landscape across north Africa is particularly important for understanding how and why certain socio-political, military and ethnic tensions were transferred into the central Mediterranean with the Aghlabid conquest of Sicily and parts of south Italy. For their part, the amirs doubtless wished to avoid any repetition of unrest in Iftiqiya. Thus, as a product of ninthcentury Aghlabid political thought, the colony of Sicily was probably intended to be fashioned in its rulers’ own image from the outset: Arabic-speaking; Muslim; nominally Abbasid; anti-Berber; and run by dependable governors (wili-s), loyal to the dynasty and reliant on those families of the military (jund) considered faithful. As conquest commanders, the Aghlabids were effectively the dividers of the spoils and counted heavily upon support from trusted factions within the army, who expected to be rewarded with the proceeds of expansion into zones already famed for their spoils. The development of Aghlabid Sicily for the entire period of the ninth century was, therefore, driven by the restrictive demands of a ‘booty economy’ and remained closely tied to the wants and needs of the military and the colony’s governors.
The Aghlabids’ reliance on their sources of power in Iftiqiya was not always secure, and the decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Sicily in 827 was informed by particular pressures they faced from within the army itself and from opposition articulated through the medium of religious scholars. Their problems were exacerbated by economic concerns. From the time of the Arab conquests, certain sectors of the rural economy in Ifriqiya had depended on low-cost labour as slaves had been put to work on large estates in the hands of the governors and local strongmen of the Arab jund.'° By the beginning of the ninth century, parts of that economy were weakened, and the slave supply, once gained by conquest, was now limited. The pressing need to open up new slave resources was, therefore, an important motive for expansion northward into the central Mediterranean.
The jund’s privileged status was itself a cause of simmering tension, resentment and shifting regional allegiances — all the more so because different towns hosted particular garrisons of soldiers, each loyal to their own commander. Revolts of the jund at Tiinis in 802 and 809 were put down successfully, but the insurrection instigated from 824 by the governor of Tripoli, Mansi al-Tunbudhi, a local strongman with his own fortress outside Tanis, was not. This revolt was so widespread that it was not quashed until two years later. Tacitly anti-Aghlabid support was lent by religious scholars of the Hanafi and particularly the Maliki ‘schools’ (madhhabs) of Islamic law from their base in the holy city of Qayrawan, the most important focus of religious scholarship in the Muslim west. In their capacity as legal experts, the jurists wielded both moral and political power, condemning the Aghlabids for their worldly pursuits and dissolute lifestyles in an attempt to undermine the authority of secular leaders who presumed to rule over the Muslim faithful. In addition to their support for rebel factions within the jund, the jurists also sided with popular opinion against the levying of ‘illegal’ taxes with the introduction of fixed, rather than proportional, taxes on produce. The possibility of conquering Sicily in 827 thus offered the Aghlabids great opportunities and pretexts. By undertaking a jihad to expand the frontiers of Islam at the expense of the infidels by conquest — the first major undertaking since the invasion of the Iberian peninsula from 711 — they could silence the criticism of the jurists. At the same time, they could redirect the destructive energies of a restless jund across the Ifriqiyan—Sicilian channel to secure new sources of manpower and wealth.
The annexation of western Sicily (827-59)
As the legendary turncoat Count Julian was to Visigothic Spain in the eighth century, so Euphemios — a rebel divisional officer in charge of the fleet — was to the theme of Sicily in the ninth: both allegedly offered invitations to Muslim forces to invade. In 826, Euphemios rose up and killed the island’s strategos, Constantine, pronouncing himself ruler at Syracuse where he possibly even claimed imperial powers.'? His motives are not clear. They may have been purely personal or perhaps opportunistic in attempting to seize power after the unavenged loss of Byzantine Crete to rebel Andalusi Muslims in the same year. The situation was also said by Ibn al-Athir to have arisen in the wake of a naval attack he had led against the Ifriqiyan coast, again in the same year. However, Euphemios’ position within the theme was undermined by a counterattack led by a subordinate officer whom he had initially favoured. This character was known in Arabic as Balata, a name which perhaps recalls the Byzantine honorific title kuropalatés or master of the palace. The little that can be said of him is that he was acting in league with the governor of Palermo. Euphemios’ struggle to overcome internal opposition suggests that his subsequent appeal to the Aghlabids aimed only at raising auxiliary forces. Indeed, his personal presence in Ifriqiya immediately prior to the Muslim conquest implies that he may even have lost control in Sicily.
The dilemma whether or not to invade and colonise Sicily, rather than simply raid it, prompted great debate among the jurists, generals and leading families at Qayrawan. With the wisdom of hindsight, qualms about the legal and geopolitical pitfalls of an invasion were articulated in a set-piece debate, recorded (with variations) most fully in the eleventh-century Riyad al-Nufis.'® Towards the end of the discussion, as reported in al-Nuwayri’s much later version, a wise jurist was made to enquire about the distance between the island and the Italian mainland compared with its distance from Ifriqiya. On hearing the response in terms of days’ travel, he replied, ‘If I were a bird, I wouldn’t fly over there.’ Raiding Sicily from overseas was not the same as holding it as a colony from Ifrigiya: control could be maintained only so long as forces in southern Italy were weak and disunited. Until the mid-eleventh century, they were precisely that.
Had the Aghlabids looked to the conquest of Sicily to solve several of their own internal problems simultaneously, the expedition’s overall command was not to be placed in their hands. From the time of the earliest Arab-Muslim conquests, regulating the just distribution of spoils had proved a perilously divisive issue. The early raids on Sicily had been no exception. In Arabic sources, sorties were remembered for the fabulous booty and slaves that could be ferried away by the army and its commanders, but they had already provoked an unusual variant of the spoils’ controversy. Saintly Byzantine icons had been shipped to India via Basra by the Syrian governor and soon-to-be Umayyad caliph, Mu‘awiya. As al-Biraini and others critically noted, the sale of effigies to idol worshippers could only promote polytheism and was hardly befitting for God’s self-proclaimed deputy on earth. So, to ensure that all the delicate tasks of conquest, both spiritual and mundane, were undertaken in accordance with the emerging body of legal opinion, the most respected religious authority in the Muslim west, Asad ibn al-Furat, was put in charge of the Aghlabid invasion force. As qddi (magistrate) of Qayrawan and author of an eponymous treatise, the Asadiyya, his legal credentials were impeccable: a lifetime of study across the Islamic world included instruction from Malik ibn Anas himself while in Medina. This enormous experience was reflected in his advanced age, for at the time of the invasion he was already in his late sixties.
In mid-June 827, a large force of infantry and mounted soldiers was launched from Sousse and landed at Mazara in western Sicily. After initial, local plundering operations, the army set off across the island, probably following the old Roman road through the Val di Noto, to besiege the capital Syracuse. There, the resistance of the defenders (helped by the arrival of a Byzantine fleet), combined with an outbreak of disease among the Muslims and the death of Asad, brought the expedition to the brink of disaster. The conquest of Sicily was to be quite unlike the rapid collapse of Visigothic Spain, and at no point did the Byzantines risk all by putting a massed army into the field.
One of the striking characteristics of the invasion was how slow and disjointed it became. The conquest sequences, sketchily recorded in very much later sources, do not resolve neatly into defined campaigns according to either region or period. Rather, after the ignominious retreat west from Syracuse, and coming close to destruction at Mineo where they were besieged, the Aghlabids concentrated their operations on gaining control of the western third of Sicily — the Val di Mazara. The forces which did so were a coalition, comprising the Aghlabid Arab jund, the Saqdliba (slaves of central European/Balkan origin, after whom the largest quarter in tenth-century Palermo would be named), as well as contingents of non-Arab Ifrigiyans, troops from sub-Saharan Africa, and an Andalusi force from Tortosa led by a Berber adventurer, Asbagh ibn Wakil, nicknamed Farghaliish, who arrived to relieve the Muslims when they were besieged at Mineo. From the year 859, if not from the first engagements, a party of Cretan Muslims also joined the fray. These had originally been anti- Umayyad rebels expelled first from Cérdoba and then from Alexandria in Egypt, but who had taken to seaborne conquests, capturing Crete in 826.'9
Of the Christian forces allied with the Aghlabids through Euphemios, precious little is known. The stereotypical characterisation of Euphemios in the Arabic sources as an unreliable figure distorts his relationship with the Muslims, whose help was required to defeat Balata in western Sicily after which the latter fled to Castrogiovanni (modern Enna), and from there on to the mainland where he was killed. The military input of Euphemios into the earliest phases of the conquest, such as at Mineo and Agrigento in 828, is reported in the Arabic sources, but appears undervalued. No mention was made of his expertise as a guide or his provision of local knowledge and support. Moreover, his forces offer evidence of early Christian co-operation until his death in 829 at Castrogiovanni where the local Christians seemed unsure which side to support. It is not known whether the forces with him dispersed thereafter or continued to fight alongside their Muslim allies.
By September 831, the coalition forces had brought about the capitulation of Palermo after a debilitating siege lasting almost a year, during which, according to Ibn al-Athir, the indigenous population was dramatically reduced from 70,000 to barely 3,000. The figures are impressionistic, but there is little evidence for the widespread continuity of Christian institutions at Palermo thereafter. Indeed, when the city fell to the Normans in 1072, the Greek archbishop they found was operating in a small church not even within the city walls. Known to the new locals as al-Madina (‘the city’), Palermo was repopulated and blossomed for over four centuries as one of the wealthiest and largest cities in what is now considered part of modern Europe. As such, Palermo is easily the greatest surviving legacy of Muslim rule in Sicily. It soon came to assume the role of the colony’s political and cultural centre and was overseen by the robust presence of leading Arab-Muslim families from the Aghlabid jund, after whom some of its quarters were named. It had never been Byzantine Sicily’s foremost town, but under Aghlabid leadership its political, religious and cultural life were steered strongly towards their preferred models of governance. Material evidence for change was quick to appear: the first coinage with the Arabic legend Siqilliyya were struck at the siege of Castrogiovanni as early as 829 and, within four years of the fall of Palermo, the first coins bearing the name of its governor are attested.
By the early 840s, with the surrender of inland strongholds such as Platani, Caltabellotta and Corleone, as well as the port of Trapani, the wider region of the Val di Mazara could be carved up by the Aghlabids as their own personal estates and benefices (qata’i') allocated to the leading families of the jund. This, at least, is the assumption, although an almost total absence of evidence obscures the dynamics of any such arrangement, for example, whether taxes and/or obligations were, or were not, to be rendered. The size of these allocations is also unknown. However, the Aghlabids may have considered that reproducing the large, landed estates of Ifriqiya was neither desirable nor practicable. Instead, evidence from later periods indicates that they had encouraged the intensification of farming, concentrated in smaller estates on which settlers from Ifriqiya were added to those among the local population who had not fled or been taken captive. The fertile lands in the west and south-west thus came to be the earliest sites of Muslim settlement in Sicily.
Outside the Val di Mazara, Aghlabid successes in the early phases of conquest were more scattered and sporadic. Messina had fallen as early as 842-3 in an attack co-ordinated with forces from Naples, but the Muslims made few inroads into the mountainous, north-eastern section of the island — the Val Démone. On the other hand, the south-eastern third of the island — the Val di Noto — saw significant incursions with the fall of Médica, Lentini and Ragusa between 845 and 849, although many of the key strongholds in the east, such as Taormina, Catania and Syracuse, remained firmly in Greek hands.
Most of Byzantine Sicily was taken piecemeal and not as a result of open, pitched battles. Frequently, such as at Cefald in 838 and several times at Castrogiovanni, the preliminary assaults failed and a considerable passage of time elapsed before they could be brought under Muslim control. When a citadel did not fall, it was the surrounding villages and countryside which were noted in the sources to have borne the brunt of summer raids (sa@’ifas). The campaigns under the leadership of Palermo’s talented governor and army commander, al-‘Abbas ibn al-Fadl (r. 851-61) in the early 850s, particularly in the eastern parts of the island around Taormina, Catania and Syracuse, resulted in the fall of the strategically important fort of Caltavuturo in 852 and a five-month siege of Butera the following year, in which large numbers of Christian prisoners were taken as part of a peace accord.”° Similar expeditions and annual summer sorties were organised and led, for the most part, by the Aghlabid rulers of Sicily themselves. The campaigns around this time are significant because of the details given about the army’s conduct which, apart from widespread burning and destruction, suggests that they were sometimes less interested in payment as a form of negotiated settlement than taking captives. At Qasr al-Jadid, in the following year, the army turned down an offer of 15,000 dinars in return for peace. Cash and the generation of wealth from ransoming prisoners may therefore have been only one consideration: finding a source of labour was another. If so, then apart from their transportation overseas, we might cautiously infer that some Christians were put to work on estates in western and central Sicily with its burgeoning rural economy and recent Ifrigiyan colonists.
In the case of Cefalu, where its defence had been aided by the rare appearance of a Byzantine fleet, it would be another twenty years before it yielded to Muslim rule. Its capitulation paved the way for another attack against the fortress at Castrogiovanni which, until that point, had proved impregnable. After the fall of Palermo, the Byzantines had raised Castrogiovanni’s strategic and political importance to rank alongside that of Syracuse, thus pinning their hopes on the defence of the island’s centre. Without bringing it under their control, the Muslims were not able to capture and consolidate towns further to the east without the risk of losing their gains in counteroffensives. During the 830s and 840s, five assaults against the town were recorded, and, although its outer defences were sometimes breached and booty taken, the Muslim forces did not manage to capture the stronghold itself. Its fall, followed by its comprehensive sacking and the slaughter of its defenders on 24 January 859 was thus, in military terms, the crowning achievement of the early Aghlabids in Sicily since the fall of Palermo, and was celebrated by the immediate construction of a mosque (or the conversion of a church into one). A counteroffensive of minor revolts across western Sicily, spurred by the arrival of Byzantine ships sent to Syracuse the following year, amounted to little and, by the early part of the 860s, the Muslim commanders had consolidated all their early gains and won strategic control over the centre of the island too. They were also now in a position to attack targets in the eastern part of the island without having to fall back to safer positions in western Sicily.
The transmission of authority
For the ninth century, we are furnished with details from later Arabic annalistic histories about the transmission of authority between governors. In this respect, a preferred pattern emerged from the death of Asad in the field when a new commander had been appointed on the spot. We frequently find the phrase in the chroniclers that, ‘the people (ahl) chose for themselves as governor...’. An appointment, or in some cases, a removal, was retrospectively confirmed by Ifriqiya. To imagine ‘the people’ in any modern sense is mistaken: the term refers only to ‘the people who mattered’. The celebrated Sicilianist, Michele Amari, first hypothesised that this deliberation among the leading families presupposes the existence of an ancient institution, the jamda‘a, which has continued in various forms in north Africa into the modern period.?" As a traditional, informal assembly or council of notables, the jama‘a was convened to decide on key areas of civil, political and sometimes judicial affairs, and a late reference to it is to be found in Ibn al-Athir, who mentioned that the Bani |-Tabari were a dominant force in the Palermitan jamd‘a in the mid-tenth century.”* Amari’s assumption, however, is problematic because this institution was a tribal Berber one — an unlikely governing mechanism of choice by the Arab jund. Some further illumination may be found in the Cairo Geniza documents in which reference was made to a Palermitan shiira (‘council’) during the rooos. This may relate to a similar, or even the same, institution. However, along with the late reference to the supposed jamd‘a, this was probably the most convenient way of describing some ad hoc mode of government in the absence of anything more bureaucratically organised.”3 In the case of the Geniza, the reference pertains to Palermo in the mid-eleventh century when whatever central authority existed, had, by then, collapsed.
Otherwise, the city’s ‘elites’ or ‘notables’ were occasionally attested as the khassa or a‘yan in Arabic sources, but the terms are far too vague to be of help in establishing their relationships with any constitutional framework. That said, the degree of self-determination which can be seen in the decision-making processes at Palermo accounts for the origins of tension that interdependence fostered between centre and periphery, colony and mainland, and between the emerging new force of ‘the people of Sicily’ and those in and from Ifriqiya. The immediate appointment of governors locally, later to be confirmed centrally, had an important practical dimension because it guaranteed at least a stop-gap solution to the problem of continuity of authority, thus tempering any notions that this might be interpreted as evidence for incipient autonomy in Sicily in this very early period. Rather, it was in the interests of both Sicily and Ifriqiya to appoint quickly and locally in the first instance, thereby stifling the hopes of would-be usurpers tempted to exploit any, even temporary, power vacuum.
The Muslims on the south Italian mainland (832-71)
The first half-century of invasion was a disjointed and poorly recorded affair, and no less so than operations launched against the south Italian mainland. Sometimes known in Arabic as ‘The Big Land’ (al-’ard al-kabira), the Italian peninsula and especially its southern parts were otherwise referred to as Qillawriya, Qalawriya or Qaliiriya, after the name of the Greek theme, Kalavria (Calabria), where the Christian population had maintained close contacts with their Sicilian co-religionists. The allure of the mainland had attracted Muslim raiders from the 830s, in part because only five kilometres of sea across the Straits of Messina separate it from the north-eastern tip of Sicily. In addition, south Italy was itself in political turmoil, susceptible to attack and open to outside interference. For adventurers, it also offered the possibility of operating beyond the control of the Aghlabid commanders whose ambitions on the Italian mainland were at times stymied by setbacks on the island. However, there was to be no sustained or systematic attempt to consolidate territory in Calabria or to establish defensible bridgeheads which would have facilitated a wider invasion. Instead, Muslim raids tended to fulfil the immediate aims of acquiring quick booty or to act as a distraction for the disaffected among their ranks. Occasionally, loose alliances were formed with local factions but, with the exception of settlements at Bari, Taranto and later at the mouth of the Garigliano river, bases were limited and campaigns scattered. The devastation they wrought on the population and rural economy was not recorded in detail by the Arabic chroniclers, but it was etched into the minds of the local peoples fearful of enslavement, and remembered with bitterness by Greek and Latin sources.
At the time of the Muslims’ arrival in Sicily, the dominant (albeit unstable) political unit on the south Italian mainland was the duchy of Benevento, which had emerged in the wake of the Lombard invasion of the peninsula from the north in the latter half of the 500s. Within a century, its succession of dukes had come to be the most powerful force in the region, but they had never conquered Rome or all the Byzantine areas to the south. Greek rule in Apulia and on the tip of Calabria was thus pressed from the north, while in Campania and along the Tyrrhenian coast to the north and west, the three maritime duchies of Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta were only nominally considered part of the empire by the early ninth century. These maintained frequent contacts with the Muslims, notably via a mutual interest in overseas commerce and the need to form alliances due to their weakness relative to the power of the Lombard princes inland.*4 For similar motives, they had found it convenient from time to time to seek support from the Byzantines.
Of the intermittent raids and poorly documented events of the 800s, three episodes stand out as having made a significant impact on the development of Muslim—Christian relations in the south Italian peninsula and which also serve to epitomise its political and military modalities. First, the role that Muslim forces played in the split of Benevento, secondly, the economic, political and propagandist effects of their raiding activities, which included naval attacks on Rome and thirdly, the foundation of Muslim amirates at Bari and Taranto.
As early as 832, Naples, when besieged by the Beneventan prince, Sicard, had appealed to the Muslims for help, leading to the first of several alliances. Three years later, a combined Muslim and Neapolitan force attacked Brindisi. In the 870s and 880s, such political fraternising resulted in the excommunication of its bishop-prince, Athanasius; but the amount of gold and gold coinage found in the Amalfitan port towns reveals the high level of commercial exchange from this period and strengthens the perception that Muslim—Christian relations were not exclusively hostile.”5
One of the most important events in which the Muslims came to be involved, and one with lasting consequences, was the decade of civil war and division of the duchy of Benevento into two (later, three) parts. Latin sources recorded how, in 839, Sicard was murdered by his treasurer, Radelchis, leading to a fiercely fought civil war between himself and the prince’s brother, Siconulf. During the 840s, Radelchis maintained a power base at Benevento and was said to have employed north African Muslims; Siconulf’s support centred on Salerno where he initially sought the help of Andalusi Muslims, possibly Cretans. With a couple of exceptions, the Arabic sources are silent about these warlords, so it is through the medium of hostile Latin sources, such as Erchempert, a ninthcentury chronicler from Montecassino, and the anonymous tenth-century sources of the Chronica Sancti Benedicti Casinensis and Chronicon Salernitanum, that most of our information is drawn.
A handful of names have come down to us relating to the leading Muslim actors in the split of Benevento, insufficient to gain any clear ideas of their personalities, but enough to infer something of their motives, their relationships with the Lombard princes and their (dis)connection with the Aghlabids in Palermo and Qayrawan. From the Latin sources, we learn of a certain ‘Apolaffar’ or ‘Apoiaffar’ at Taranto. His name appears to be a Latinised version of the name Abi Ja‘far. First attested in 843, he allied himself, initially at least, with Siconulf against Radelchis. In addition to Abi Ja‘far, we find ‘Massar’ (possibly a Latinised rendition of Abi Ma'shar, a relatively common medieval Arabic nickname which might be loosely translated as ‘group leader’), who was in league with Radelchis and had troops under his command at Benevento. The Latin sources imply that these mercenaries had, at times, close relations with their paymasters, as shown by the levels of hospitality offered them, although this did not preclude double-dealing and treachery.
In addition to raids and mercenary deployments came a serious attack on Rome in August 846, when a Muslim expeditionary force sailed up the Tiber to sack the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul where they were said to have carried off the altarpiece above the tomb.”° The Rome raid was no worse than raids elsewhere, but the attacks on the holy city were carried forward into later memory, whereas similar ones on Capua, Bari or Réggio never fired Christian imaginations in quite the same enduringly bitter way. At Rome itself a defensive circuit of the Leonine wall was constructed, named after Pope Leo IV (847-55), and within three months of the raid an appeal was issued ‘to fight the enemies of Christ — Saracens and Moors’.?? Hence, an army of Frankish, Burgundian and Provengal soldiers under the command of Carolingian Emperor Lothar I’s son, Louis II (d. 875), set out for Benevento ‘without pillaging the Christian population’ on the dubious pretext that the Muslims were about to invade a great part of Italy. The main achievement of this campaign was more political than military in that it eased the separation of Benevento into two. For his part, Louis II would become a major player in south Italian politics, launching two more expeditions in 852 and 860, and eventually destroying the Muslim amirate at Bari in 871.
Rome was again threatened in 849 in a naval encounter, which would be recalled by Raphael’s famous fresco from 1514-15 of the battle at Ostia in which a Muslim fleet, possibly operating from Sardinia, was defeated and scattered by a combined naval force from Rome, Naples and Gaeta. In the same year, a treaty was signed which formalised the split of Benevento. Significantly, the agreement bound the parties to expel Muslim mercenaries and not to employ them in future. While not suggesting that the mercenaries were the cause of the conflict, their expulsion was seen at the time as a necessary ingredient for a peaceful and lasting solution. For their part, the Byzantines had played only minor roles in halting the Muslims, who within a few years of their arrival, had become ensnared in south Italian politics along with a number of other, often rival, players in the continual reshaping of alliances. It was clear to medieval Latin chroniclers that the military leverage which the Muslim warlords provided, and which both sides sought, served to aggravate wider instability and, more specifically, to exacerbate the conflict in Benevento. However, before the signing of the separation and the bilateral agreement to terminate their employment, the Muslims had already found footholds in Apulia and Calabria which would lead to the establishment of powerful strongholds.
The amirate of Bari (847-71)
Concurrent with the Aghlabid invasion of Sicily and further raids on the mainland, was the establishment of Muslim control at Bari, a major port formerly under Byzantine control on the Adriatic coast. The principal source for the ‘amirate of Bari’ is the Muslim chronicler, al-Baladhuri (d. c. 892) whose Kitab Futuh al-buldan (‘Book of the conquests of lands’) is not only a valuable and rich history of the early Muslim conquests, but also makes rare mention of the campaigns on the Italian mainland in what was, to his contemporary Muslim audience, an extremely minor episode in the wider scheme of early Islamic history.?° Many of the details about Bari then found their way, sometimes verbatim, into Ibn al-Athir’s history. Minimal as the sources are for the occupation of Bari, they make for a fuller history than that of Taranto, which was under Muslim control by 846 when it was taken for a second time, and from when some presence was maintained until 880.
Bari had been the target of an unsuccessful attack in 840 but, once established there seven years later, the Muslims were able to launch a number of attacks across and beyond Apulia. In 841, Capua was sacked and, under Bari’s three amirs, raids were attested around Naples during 856; Conza was attacked twice in 858 and 862, Ascoli and the abbey of San Vincenzo al Volturno were raided in 861, the following year Venafro was sacked, while the abbeys of Montecassino and San Vincenzo were each required to pay 3,000 gold coins to the raiders.”? Arguably, by unlocking wealth from the vaults of great abbeys such as Montecassino and by not exporting the wealth, this redistribution contributed to an increased circulation of resources in the south. Even if this is accepted only with caution, any economic benefit was compensated by the negative effects of crop burning, unproductive warfare and depopulation by slave-taking, which more typically characterised the Muslims’ presence in south Italy. Without exception, the non-Arabic sources were hostile to ‘the Saracens’. The letters of Pope John VIII (872-82) routinely associated the ‘wicked Muslims’ (impii Sarraceni) with ‘wicked Christians’, while other sources referred to the Muslims as a ‘most devious people’ or ‘the wicked people of the Hagarenes’. In spite of this, there is no clear sense that the Muslims were much different from any other type of threat to physical or spiritual well-being at that time. Terms of reference in Latin and Greek sources such as ‘Saracen’ and ‘Hagarene’ were standard usages drawn from a medieval repertoire of appellations derived from Biblical narratives in Genesis in which there appear Sarah (Abraham’s wife) and Hagar (his concubine and the mother of Ishmael).
The first attack on Bari was conducted by a ‘client’ (mawla) of al-Aghlab with the unlikely name of Habla.3° However, it was under the rule of three amirs that we are better informed. The first of these to emerge was Khalfiin al-Barbari (‘the Berber’), known in the Latin sources as Kalfon, who conquered Bari and ruled over it for five years until 852. He was said by al-Baladhurt to have been another ‘client’, this time attached to the Arab tribe of the Rabi‘a. The minor and sniping details of Khalfiin’s presumed ethnicity and social status were also applied to subsequent rulers of Bari, supporting the notion that these warlord adventurers were originally attached to, but were not acting in accordance with, Aghlabid forces on Sicily itself.
Khalfiin’s tactics and rapport with other local forces are supplied by Latin sources, but again they mark him out as a mercenary continuing disruptive raids and forming fragile alliances. Thus, for example, in 848, he was in alliance with Radelchis and Beneventan forces in an attack against Capua. Muslim control of Bari also allowed considerable influence to be exerted over Apulia by forming a permanent and defensible base in a strategically important location on the Adriatic, although there was never any attempt to form a political axis between Bari and Palermo. Baladhuri appeared to be only dimly aware that the Muslims were now coming into contact with different peoples and stated specifically, but incorrectly, that the people of Bari were not Byzantine Greeks (al-Riim). It is presumed that the local Christians became part of a tribute-paying population theoretically living under Islamic law, but there seems to have been very little tangibly Islamic infrastructure. Any administrative business that was done in Bari appears to have been conducted on an ad hoc basis in which tribute payments were exacted from particular towns in line with what would be expected in a booty economy reliant on conquest and plunder rather than trade or regular forms of taxation for its continued survival.
By the time of the second amir, al-Mufarraj bin Sallam (r. 853-6), some twenty-four forts (husiin) were under Muslim control. A level of wider politicoreligious awareness and a greater level of ambition and diplomatic sophistication was shown by a request submitted to the communications and intelligence chief (sahib al-barid) in Egypt to the effect that neither he, nor any of the Muslims with him, could expect to receive benefit from prayer unless he were confirmed governor of the region, and therefore not considered an unlawful usurper. Having built a congregational mosque, Mufarraj was killed when his comrades rose up against him for reasons about which we are ill-informed. Unlike another breakaway Muslim amirate of this period, Crete, where the rulers came with their wives and families, hereditary rule was not established at Bari. Indeed, the actions of the rulers there appear to be those of single, male soldiers as scions from the Muslim army. Nor were they free of internal instability, which is shown in the successful and violent revolt by his comrades leading to Mufarraj’s death and the rise of a third and final ruler. It is tempting to link the fall of one with the rise of the other.
The last amir of Bari held sway between 857 and 865 and was the bearer of another unusual name: Sawdan. In Latin sources, he is known as ‘Seodan’ or ‘Saugdan’.3’ His name was rendered in different forms, but there is an implication in it that he was originally from sub-Saharan Africa. A problematic reference to him in an unedited text, which can be read as ‘Sawdan al-Mawr?’ (‘the Moor’, ultimately from the Greek, mavros, ‘black’), again suggests that, like the previous commanders of the Muslim forces in Bari, they were not Arab Aghlabid commanders, but their ‘clients’. If the term ‘moor’ was applied to him, then it was most likely a Latin or Greek loan word, and was thus probably acquired while in Italy. An alternative reading would give ‘al-Mazar?’, indicating a Sicilian provenance.?? Sawdan continued the strategy of regional plundering and at least five major raids were conducted, including those against the abbeys of Montecassino and San Vincenzo al Volturno. However, it was also under his leadership that a request for recognition was made directly to the caliph al-Mutawakkil in Baghdad. The demand was recorded by al-Baladhuri, who was a well-known figure at the court of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, so it is possible that his information relating to the Bari amirs came from the emissary himself or from a source who had been close by. Although the request was eventually granted, Baladhuri’s emphasis of their Berber associations perhaps reflected a grudging attitude toward the caliph’s investiture of a warlord at the end of the earth. The timing of the request was unfortunate in that the emissary was unable to leave before the caliph was murdered in December 86r. He may have received confirmation of his legitimacy only shortly before Bari was retaken by Louis II in February 871, after which Sawdan was taken as a prisoner to Benevento, where he remained for four years until his release with the help of the Muslims at Taranto.
After the fall of Bari in February 871, the appointment of two governors was announced by Aghlabid Qayrawan: one to rule over Sicily, the other to oversee “The Big Land’. This appears to be an attempt by the Aghlabids to fill the void left by the Bari amirs and may explain the motive for a twelve-month siege of Salerno, which began late in the same year. The siege failed, but it was a clear attempt by the Aghlabids to flex their muscles on the mainland. What is unclear is whether a powerful Muslim fort at the mouth of the Garigliano river was instigated by the Aghlabids or by another band of breakaway soldiers, operating on their own account. Throughout the obscure events of the early Aghlabid period, Sicily and parts of the mainland were unable to escape the region’s characteristically haphazard dynamics, now exacerbated by raiding, conquest and the processes of colonisation. The Italian continent continued to attract those in search of a quick profit, but a full generation after the launch of the invasion, the piecemeal Muslim conquest of Sicily was far from complete.
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