In the year 1184, Ibn Jubayr, an Andalusian returning from the Meccan pilgrimage, was shipwrecked in Sicily. At the time he arrived, the Normans, who had seized control of the island from the Muslims, had been in power for a little more than a century. The great Norman king Roger II had ruled and died; his son William I had ruled and died. The current Sicilian monarch, William II, welcomed the travelers to Sicily in person, and paid the landing fee for the Muslims on Ibn Jubayr’s ship. In his account of his visit to Sicily, which forms one chapter...

For a long time, no one remembered who had built the pleasure palaces of Norman Sicily. The syncretic culture of the era had faded from memory, and neither scholars nor the general public had reason to believe that the buildings, with their “Oriental” architectural motifs and their calligraphic inscriptions in Arabic, had been produced at the command of Christian monarchs from northern Europe. Some Norman monumental architecture, of course, announced its provenance unmistakably, despite its use of Arabic inscriptions and architectural conventions: the palace complex in Palermo; the churches in Palermo and Monreale and Cefalù. But by the nineteenth century,...

The last two Norman monarchs of Sicily of any longevity were known, respectively, as William the Bad and William the Good. A second nickname might be awarded the second of the two Williams given the public outcry that followed his death: William the Lamented (fig. 5). His death on November 18, 1189 plunged Sicily into chaos and confusion, as two opposed camps—the Norman barons, and the Hohenstaufen emperor Henry VI—contended for the Sicilian throne. A number of contemporary historical sources remember William most vividly for the storm of mourning that followed his death. The echoes of this tradition...

A remarkably charismatic leader, Frederick II dramatized the tensions of his era and of the kingdom he ruled in his biography and in his very personality. His contests with the pope—his excommunications; his crusading victory in Jerusalem, so equivocally received in Rome—and his somewhat shady public image illustrate the cultural and political difficulties he faced with regard to contemporary Christian orthodoxy. At the same time, Frederick’s political, economic, and cultural successes in Sicily and abroad made him a figure to be celebrated and admired by contemporary intellectuals. Consider, for instance, Dante’s divergent responses to Frederick. In the context...

The authors of the earliest modern studies of Sicilian Romance poetry found the poets’ most unique contribution in the poetry that they wrote in the voice of a woman. These literary historians deemed the majority of the Sicilians’ works to be derivative, following the trends established by earlier French and, in particular, Occitan poets. But a unique freshness, immediacy, and vivacity characterized the poetry in the voice of a woman, they argued. And they asserted that these poems derived their vitality from their proximity to the spoken language, that when the Sicilians abandoned the lofty register of their more learned...

This Sicilian riddle, recorded by twentieth-century novelist Leonardo Sciascia, rephrases one of the most famous texts in the history of the Italian language: the Indovinello Veronese, or Veronese riddle.² The Indovinello is a marginal inscription recorded in an early ninth-century Italian hand on an Iberian liturgical text produced around the year 700. Today, it is accepted as the first Italian vernacular text, the first known documentation of the steps the spoken language took away from Latin and in the direction of the vernacular on the Italian peninsula. The manuscript in which the riddle is recorded is generally referred to as...