Kingdom of Sicily

The Kingdom of Sicily was a Mediterranean state founded by the Norman ruler Roger II in 1130 and formally ended in 1816. At first it covered both the island of Sicily and southern mainland Italy, and for a time a strip of the North African coast. After 1282 the island and the mainland went separate ways, and the island kingdom spent most of its later history under Aragonese, Spanish, Savoyard, Austrian and Bourbon kings before being merged into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

In the eleventh century Norman mercenaries from northern France carved out lordships in southern Italy. Under Roger I they took Sicily from its Muslim rulers, completing the conquest by 1091. His son Roger II united the island with the Norman lands of Apulia and Calabria and was crowned king on Christmas Day 1130, with the backing of the antipope Anacletus II. Pope Innocent II and the emperor Lothair III opposed him, but in 1139 Roger's forces captured the pope, who then recognised the kingdom by the Treaty of Mignano.

Roger centralised government through laws such as the Assizes of Ariano of 1140, and his admiral George of Antioch seized coastal towns in Ifriqiya, in today's Tunisia; these were lost by 1160, when the Almohads took Mahdia. Sicily became a leading sea power. Norman Sicily was home to Latin and Greek Christians, Muslims and Jews, who traded, intermarried and kept their own courts. William I and William II followed Roger, the latter's reign remembered as two decades of near-continuous peace.

William II died childless in 1189. After a struggle with Tancred of Lecce, the crown passed in 1194 to Roger II's daughter Constance and her husband, the emperor Henry VI of the Hohenstaufen family. Their son Frederick II, who inherited the throne as a child in 1197 and later became Holy Roman Emperor, issued the Constitutions of Melfi in 1231, a code that strengthened royal power and stayed the foundation of Sicilian law until 1819. Hostility between the Hohenstaufen and the Papal States led the pope to offer the crown to Charles of Anjou, who defeated Manfred at Benevento in 1266 and Conradin at Tagliacozzo in 1268.

Resentment of French officials and taxes exploded in the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, and the island invited in Peter III of Aragon. The war that followed ended with the Peace of Caltabellotta in 1302: the island went to the house of Barcelona, while the Angevins kept the mainland, also still called the Kingdom of Sicily but known to historians as the Kingdom of Naples. The island passed permanently to the kings of Aragon after the Compromise of Caspe in 1412, and later to the Spanish monarchy, governed by viceroys while keeping its own parliament. The seventeenth century brought hardship: the 1669 eruption of Etna destroyed Catania, and earthquakes in 1693 killed about five per cent of the population.

After the War of the Spanish Succession, the Treaty of Utrecht gave Sicily to Victor Amadeus II of Savoy in 1713. Spain occupied it in 1718, and by 1720 Savoy had exchanged it with Austria for Sardinia. In 1734 and 1735 a Bourbon prince, Charles, took Naples and then Sicily, beginning a period of reform. When French forces took Naples in 1799, King Ferdinand fled to Sicily under British protection, and the island was under British occupation from 1806 to 1814. A constitution of 1812 created a two-chamber parliament and abolished feudalism.

After Napoleon's defeat, Ferdinand cancelled the reforms and in 1816 merged the island with Naples in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled from Naples. Sicilian revolts in 1820 and 1848 were suppressed, and in 1861 the region became part of a united Italy.

Our 1279, 1300, 1400, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 maps draw the kingdom under the label "Sicily". Since both the island realm and the Angevin mainland realm used the name after 1282, some of these outlines take in parts of the mainland as well as the island.