Who ruled Palermo?

Palermo lies on a wide bay on the north-western coast of Sicily, backed by a fertile plain called the Conca d'Oro, the "golden shell", and ringed by mountains. Its sheltered harbour gave the city its Greek name, Panormos, meaning "all harbour". Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Germans, French, Spaniards and Bourbons all ruled here, and its churches and palaces still mix their styles. Its golden age came between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, when it was among the richest cities of the Mediterranean.

Stone Age engravings of human figures survive in the Addaura caves on nearby Monte Pellegrino. The city itself was founded by Phoenician traders around the eighth or seventh century BCE; they called it Ziz, "flower". It became one of the main strongholds of Carthage in western Sicily, facing the Greek cities of the east. During the First Punic War a Roman fleet and army captured it in 254 BCE. As Panormus it was a prosperous provincial town that shipped grain to Rome.

As the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the Vandals sacked the city in the 440s and the Ostrogoths later ruled it. The Byzantine general Belisarius took it in 535 for Justinian, and Palermo remained part of the Byzantine Empire for nearly three centuries.

Arab and Berber forces sent by the Aghlabid rulers of Tunisia landed in Sicily in 827 and took Palermo in 831 after a long siege. Under the Emirate of Sicily, Palermo (Balarm in Arabic) replaced Syracuse as the island's capital and grew into a great Islamic city of mosques, markets and gardens, irrigated by new water systems and planted with citrus and sugar cane. It was one of the largest cities in Europe, though estimates of its population vary widely.

Norman adventurers from southern Italy, led by Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger, captured Palermo in 1072. In 1130 Roger's son, Roger II, was crowned king of Sicily in the cathedral, and Palermo became the capital of a wealthy kingdom whose court employed Arab, Greek and Latin officials and scholars. The Palatine Chapel and the cathedral of nearby Monreale, with their Byzantine mosaics and Islamic-style ceilings, date from this era. In 1194 the kingdom passed by marriage to the German Hohenstaufen dynasty; Emperor Frederick II, who grew up in Palermo, made it a centre of learning and of the first poetry written in an Italian vernacular. The Muslim population, however, was deported to the mainland from the 1220s onwards.

The French house of Anjou conquered Sicily in 1266, but on Easter Monday 1282 a riot outside a Palermo church, the Sicilian Vespers, set off a revolt that brought the island under the Crown of Aragon. From the early fifteenth century Sicily was ruled from Spain by viceroys based in Palermo, and the Spanish Empire held it until 1713. After brief periods under Savoy and Austria, the Bourbons took the island in 1734; from 1816 it formed part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled from Naples. The city rose in revolt in 1820 and again in January 1848, but the Bourbons returned each time.

Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Thousand took Palermo in May 1860, and Sicily joined the new Kingdom of Italy during the unification of Italy. Around 1900 the architect Ernesto Basile gave the city Art Nouveau villas and completed the Teatro Massimo. Allied bombing in 1943 devastated the harbour districts and the old centre. After the war, uncontrolled building in the 1950s and 1960s, much of it linked to the Mafia, covered the Conca d'Oro with concrete, while the historic core decayed. The killings of the anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 provoked a public revolt against organised crime. Palermo today is the capital of the autonomous region of Sicily, with about 630,000 inhabitants.