Muslim Sicily

For about two and a half centuries, from a North African landing in 827 to the surrender of the last Muslim-held towns in 1091, Sicily was governed by Muslim rulers. Known in Arabic as Siqilliya and ruled from Palermo, the island passed from the Aghlabids to the Fatimids and then to the Kalbid emirs. Its mix of Arab, Berber, Greek, Latin and Jewish communities left a lasting mark.

Sicily was a western province of the Byzantine Empire when raiders from North Africa first struck it in 652. Later raids, including a brief capture of Syracuse in 740, brought no lasting occupation. The opening came in 826, when Euphemius, commander of the Byzantine fleet on the island, rebelled and, once driven out, offered Sicily to Ziyadat Allah, the Aghlabid emir of Ifriqiya in present-day Tunisia. An expedition led by the elderly judge Asad ibn al-Furat landed at Mazara and won its first battle in July 827.

The conquest took three generations. Plague killed Asad and many of his men outside Syracuse, but reinforcements arrived in 830, and Palermo fell in 831 after a year-long siege and became the Muslim capital. Messina was taken in 842 or 843, Syracuse in 878 and Taormina in 902. Rometta in the far north-east held out until 965.

In 909 the Shia Fatimid Caliphate overthrew the Aghlabids and inherited the island, but its governors faced stubborn resistance from Sicily's mainly Sunni Muslims, with revolts between 912 and 917 and again from 937 to 941. In 948 the caliph al-Mansur made al-Hasan ibn Ali al-Kalbi governor. His family, the Kalbids, ruled for roughly a century, formally on the Fatimids' behalf but in practice as hereditary emirs once the caliphs had moved to Egypt in 972–973. In 982 Kalbid forces defeated the German emperor Otto II at Stilo in Calabria, though Emir Abu'l-Qasim was killed in the battle.

The emir, seated in Palermo, controlled the army, justice and treasury and appointed city governors and judges. The island was divided into three districts: the Val di Mazara in the west, the Val Demone in the north-east and the Val di Noto in the south-east. The west was heavily settled by Arabs and Berbers, while the north-east stayed largely Greek-speaking and Christian. Christians and Jews were tolerated as protected subjects who paid a poll tax and a land tax. The breakup of large estates and new irrigation brought crops such as citrus fruit, sugar cane and pistachios. Palermo grew into a great city, though estimates of its eleventh-century population range from about 60,000 to 350,000.

Dynastic quarrels weakened the emirate in the early eleventh century, and a Byzantine army briefly retook eastern towns in 1038–1040. From the 1040s the island broke into rival local lordships. One of their rulers, Ibn al-Thumna, allied himself with Norman adventurers from southern Italy, and Roger de Hauteville and his brother Robert Guiscard seized the chance. Norman victories at Cerami in 1063 and Misilmeri in 1068 sent the Zirid troops back to Africa. Palermo fell in January 1072, Syracuse in 1086, and Noto and Butera in 1091, completing this part of the wider Norman conquest of southern Italy.

Under the Norman counts and kings, Muslims kept a large role in Sicily's crafts, trade and administration, and Arabic remained a language of government for at least a century. Pressure on them grew from the 1160s, and after 1189 attacks on Muslim communities spread. A Muslim revolt in the west was crushed by Frederick II, who from 1223 deported the survivors to Lucera in Apulia; the resettlement was largely complete by 1240. Arabic left its mark on Sicilian vocabulary and place names, on farming and cooking, and above all on the language of Malta, which grew out of Siculo-Arabic.

Shown on our maps as the Emirate of Sicily, the island appears on the 900 map opposite the Aghlabid lands of North Africa and Byzantine southern Italy. On the 1000 map, under the Kalbids, it sits between the Fatimid realm and the Byzantine mainland; for the island's later history, see Italy.