Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies joined Sicily and the southern Italian mainland under a branch of the Bourbon dynasty from 1816 until 1861. Ruled from Naples, it was the largest Italian state before unification, by both area and population, covering nearly everything south of the Papal States. Its absolutist kings survived two waves of revolution before Garibaldi's invasion of 1860 brought the south into the new Kingdom of Italy.

The name looks back to the medieval Kingdom of Sicily created by Norman rulers, who had taken the island and the mainland south in the wake of the Norman conquest of southern Italy; Roger II took the royal title in 1130. After the Sicilian Vespers revolt of 1282, the island passed to the Crown of Aragon while the mainland remained under the Angevin kings in Naples. Both rulers kept calling their realm the Kingdom of Sicily, so when the two were finally merged the result was a kingdom of two Sicilies.

From the early sixteenth century both kingdoms belonged to the Spanish Habsburgs, and after the War of the Spanish Succession they passed through Austrian and Savoyard hands. In 1734 Spanish forces won at Bitonto, and the Bourbon prince Charles became the first king in over two centuries to live in and govern Naples and Sicily in person. He rebuilt Naples, began the great palace at Caserta and introduced reforms limiting the power of the Church. When he left to become King of Spain in 1759, his younger son Ferdinand took the two thrones.

Ferdinand's war against revolutionary France went badly. In December 1798 he fled from Naples to Palermo, and in 1799 the French set up a short-lived Parthenopaean Republic before a clergy-led peasant rising restored him. In 1806 Napoleon made his brother Joseph king of Naples, replacing him two years later with Joachim Murat, while Ferdinand held on in Sicily under British protection. After the Austrians beat Murat at Tolentino in 1815, Ferdinand returned to Naples.

In 1816 Ferdinand abolished Sicily's constitution of 1812 and merged his two realms into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, reigning as Ferdinand I. Backed by Austria under the settlement of the Congress of Vienna, he was forced to grant a constitution after a revolution in 1820, but revoked it in 1821 as Austrian troops marched on Naples. Ferdinand II, who came to the throne in 1830, cut taxes and opened a railway from Naples to Portici in 1839, but a cholera epidemic in 1836 reportedly killed 65,000 people in Sicily alone, and secret societies such as the Carbonari kept liberal opposition alive.

The Revolutions of 1848 began in Palermo in January of that year. Ferdinand appointed a liberal prime minister, then turned his army, including Swiss mercenaries, on the rebels, recapturing Palermo in May 1849. Harsh treatment of political prisoners drew international criticism: the British statesman Gladstone condemned the regime after visiting Naples, and in 1856 Britain and France broke off relations. Naples, with over 400,000 inhabitants, was Italy's largest city, but the economy remained largely agricultural and protected by high tariffs.

In 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in Sicily with the Expedition of the Thousand, conquered the island, crossed to the mainland and won the battle of the Volturno. King Francis II held out in the fortress of Gaeta until he surrendered in February 1861. After a plebiscite the south was annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia, which became the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, completing the first phase of the unification of Italy.

Our 1783, 1800 and 1815 maps use the name Kingdom of the Two Sicilies for southern Italy and Sicily, with the Papal States to the north. The formal kingdom dates from 1816; in the earlier years the region was two kingdoms, Naples and Sicily, linked under one Bourbon king.