Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean

by John Keahey

  Robert Leighton, in his book Sicily Before History, writes:

  Despite being surrounded by sea, Sicily has often seemed to archaeologists and historians to be the least island-like of all the Mediterranean islands, being at once too big, too close to the centre of the Mediterranean and to the Italian mainland to have experienced isolation for prolonged periods.

  In the same vein, historian David Abulafia, in his introduction to The Mediterranean in History, writes: “It may be a cliché to describe islands such as Sicily as ‘stepping stones’ between the different cultures of the Mediterranean world, but it is nevertheless true.”

  Of the people for whom we have a recorded history, the Sicani may have been among the earliest. They likely came to the island from the west coast of Italy, perhaps around 2000 to 1600 B.C., settling in the western and central regions.

  A more mysterious people, the Elymians, came a bit later, establishing cities by 1100 B.C. in northwestern Sicily and eventually displacing the Sicani by pushing them more into the island’s central region. These Elymians are thought to have come from as far away as Asia Minor, today’s Turkey, via North Africa. They are given credit for first settling Erice, a small, exquisite ancient village on a hilltop near Trapani. They also were likely the first to occupy Segesta to the southeast, today the site of a Greek temple mysteriously left unfinished, along with a theater carved out of a hillside.

  The last known group to occupy Sicily before the arrival of the Phoenicians and, later, the Greeks, was the Sicels, or Siculi. They showed up, probably from Liguria in western Italy, around 1200 to 1000 B.C. They seem to have been left alone by the Elymians and the Sicani, settling primarily in the eastern portion of the island.

  The Phoenicians, from the land known today as Lebanon, predated the Greeks by perhaps a century or so. They arrived in Sicily between the eighth and sixth centuries and created ports along the northwest coast, including Panormos, today’s Palermo; Motya, today’s Mozia; and Soluntum, nearly eleven miles to the east, near today’s Bagheria.

  Panormos, while Greek in name, was never a Greek city. The Phoenicians generally kept to themselves on the west coast when the first Greeks arrived in the east. They held on through much of that colonization before giving way to their more aggressive cousins, the Carthaginians from North Africa, who were descendants of early Phoenician traders.

  Through all of this Greek colonization and assimilation in the east and south, the Carthaginians began in the sixth century to dominate the Phoenician cities in Sicily from their base in North Africa, near the modern city of Tunis. This was part of their master plan to maintain control of Mediterranean islands, from Cyprus and Sicily to the Balearics, an archipelago to the far west off the east coast of Spain.

  Braudel calls it the “Sicily-Balearic bridge.” Sicily was important as a source for wheat and its strategic proximity to Carthage.

  Eventually, Braudel writes, around 409 B.C., Carthage took advantage of the “weakness of Athens, following the failure of the Athenian expedition against Siracusa. Immediately the Carthaginians “began to wage war ferociously against the Greek Sicilians, attacking their towns, capturing the inhabitants, and thus acquiring a slave-labor force which was to transform the economy of [Carthage] itself.”

  The Carthaginians swept eastward, laying waste to Selinous—Selinunte in modern Italian—and Himera and then Akragas, today’s Agrigento. Pressing on, they attacked Gela and Kamarina, towns along the southeast coast. Dionysius, the tyrant of Siracusa, stepped in and was routed. He sued for peace. Carthage agreed and retained control of this sweep of south-coast cities, including much of the island’s western half. This left Siracusa to the Greek-Sicilians. Other cities, including Messina to the far northeast, also retained their independence.

  Joseph F. Privitera, in his wonderfully concise outline for travelers, Sicily: An Illustrated History, sums it up nicely: “More than half of Sicily was now under Carthaginian domination; several of the island’s cities had perished, and a tyrant [Dionysius] was established in the finest of its cities. The fifth century B.C., after its years of freedom and prosperity, ended in darkness.”

  Dionysius extended his influence onto the toe of the Italian boot and, as an ally of Sparta, all the way into Greece. He and his successors, along with rulers established in other Greek-Sicilian cities, continued to clash with Carthage and with one another. And while all this squabbling was going on, a movement was taking place in the Italian peninsula that one day would have an immense impact on these divisive players in the Sicilian arena.

  It came in the aftermath of the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. Braudel tells us that while Alexander’s successors were fighting one another in far-flung Mediterranean theaters well to the east, and because the Greeks and Carthaginians “were at each other’s throats in Sicily,” Rome, now a republic, was able to conquer Italy, almost out of sight of these other peoples who were wrapped up in their local squabbles.

  While Romans were living in mud huts on the Palatine Hill when Greece was in its glory, they slowly, progressively grew in might throughout the third and second centuries B.C., moving out from their consolidated city on those seven hills.

  As Rome gained power over its part of the Mediterranean world, it eventually began to covet Sicily as a breadbasket for its growing republic and as a key to the rest of the region. It successfully fought Carthage in three Punic wars, effectively removing forever the Carthaginians from the island and eliminating them as any kind of threat in the Mediterranean. The great sea thus became a Roman lake instead of a Carthaginian lake. (I often wonder how Western history would be different if Carthage had prevailed.) The island’s Greek-Sicilian cities came under the thumb of the Republic, as did the cities of Magna Graecia in southern Italy.

  Rome did little for the island, which became its first province, beyond exploiting its agricultural prowess for wheat. We know something about it during this time by reading Cicero, the statesman who served the Roman government on the island. Some years later, in 70 B.C., he was asked by Sicilians to prosecute the Roman overseer there, Gaius Verres. This overseer, in a period of three years, “laid waste to the province of Sicily,” Cicero wrote in his Verrine Orations.

  He “plundered Sicilian communities, stripped bare Sicilian homes, and pillaged Sicilian temples.” Verres, seeing his outcome as dire, absconded, but Cicero’s orations are ripe with descriptions of Sicily and her people under the Romans that he gleaned during his time there.

  He writes at one point, “They [Sicilians] are an unduly shrewd and suspicious race.” Farther along, he writes, “The Sicilians are, all of them, a far from contemptible race, if only our magistrates would leave them alone; they are really quite fine fellows, thoroughly honest and well-behaved.”

  More interestingly, Cicero lets us know that Sicilians, despite their rule by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Romans, remained essentially Greek in outlook. A Sicilian document he cites still used Greek terminology centuries after Rome assumed control.

  However, as it did everywhere else, Rome’s influence transferred to the east, and the Western Empire crumbled. Vandals for a short period controlled the island from their perch at the ruined North African capital Carthage. They were supplanted by Goths, but by A.D. 551, the Goths in turn were driven out of Italy. The Byzantine government, new rulers of Rome’s former empire and ensconced at Ravenna on Italy’s east coast, took over for the next three hundred years, setting the stage for the arrival of the Arabs, a conquest to which many Sicilians today trace their heritage and much of their culture.

  * * *

  One of my more enjoyable walks around modern Palermo is through the Kalsa district, which dates back to Arab and Muslim times. Then, it was a walled palace compound called Khālisa, and it adjoined Balarm, the Arabic name for the city itself.

  It is hard to imagine, in this bustling, noisy modern city, what it was like more than a thousand years ago. However, we have remarkable descriptions from a tenth-century traveler,
Ibn Hawqal, from his book Kitab Surat al-Ard, or the Book of the Face of the World. He writes that a wall surrounded Khālisa with gates on all sides except for the unbroken wall along the sea. Within this large enclosure was quartered the sultan and his entourage. There, they enjoyed public baths and a small cathedral mosque.

  The area occupied by old Khālisa is bounded today by Via Maqueda on the west, Via Lincoln on the south, Via Vittorio Emanuele on the north, and Foro Italico along the seashore. Surrounding it in various quarters were numerous shops, which Ibn Hawqual meticulously detailed—everything from fishmongers and jar merchants to rope makers, butchers, money changers, and olive-oil sellers.

  The palace grounds of Khālisa and the adjoining town of Balarm, tightly wound along the cusp of the seaport, must have been bustling places. Ibn Hawqal counted nearly two hundred shops solely for the sale of meat. In all, he recorded more than three hundred mosques in and around the palace, the town and its various quarters. Standing beside one mosque in Balarm, “I could see, at the distance of a bowshot, about ten mosques, all within view, some of them facing one another and separated only by the breadth of the street.”

  Situated outside of Khālisa’s walls, to the northwest, was, Ibn Hawqual noted, “a great cathedral mosque,” today’s Catholic Cathedral of Palermo, located in the city’s Capo quarter. He said seven thousand persons could be accommodated, standing in thirty-six rows “with not more than two hundred men in each row.”

  Here, he makes a fascinating declaration: “In it there is a great sanctuary, and a certain logician claims that the Greek sage, that is to say, Aristotle, is in a wooden casket hung in the sanctuary … he says that the Christians [Byzantines who ruled Sicily before the Arab invasion] used to revere his grave and come to seek healing from it.… I myself saw a wooden casket which could well be this grave.”

  Imagine that. The bones of Aristotle, who reportedly died in 322 B.C. while in exile in Chalcis, Greece, in a wooden box hanging in the Palermo cathedral? Not likely. Who knows what Ibn Hawqual saw or what it truly represented.

  For the casual modern visitor, some incongruities seem to pop up occasionally on this island: a street sign in Palermo in three languages—Arabic, Hebrew, and Italian; obvious Islamic-style domes on a Christian church; the discovery that Arab and Byzantine craftsmen created the magnificent Christian mosaics in the Palatine Chapel in the onetime Norman fortress in Palermo; Ottoman figures adorn the mammoth gate, the Porta Nuova, that is attached to that Christian fortress, variously known today as Palazzo dei Normanni or Palazzo Reale.

  I find that most people, other than Sicilians, have no idea that the Arabs ruled this island for 250 years and that their direct influence lasted for a few more centuries when the island was under Norman and Germanic rule. Plus, they are surprised to learn that many Sicilians, particularly those from the island’s western half, consider themselves of Arab ancestry.

  Eastern Sicilians may differ on that point. Apparently, as historian Leonard Chiarelli writes, the triangular region of the northeastern part of the island “largely remained a hindrance to Muslim settlement.” Therefore, the Greeks were able, in their isolated communities in that area, to maintain certain autonomy. Today, many Sicilians from the island’s east consider themselves to be of Greek, not Arab, origin. Overall, however, “the peoples who came to Sicily reflected the inhabitants that comprised the Muslim world from Spain to Persia.”

  A twelfth-century poet and military leader from Noto in southeastern Sicily, Ibn Hamdīs, for example, considered himself a Sicilian and, during the years of his Spanish exile after the Normans took over, he wrote heart-wrenching poetry longing for the land of his birth.

  The Arabs may have controlled Sicily and parts of southern Italy for a mere two and a half centuries out of three thousand years of the island’s known human history, but the impact of this relatively brief encounter is shown in the formation of the Mediterranean islanders’ attitudes. It is reflected in the origins of many city, village, and family names and in the cuisine. Sicilians followed Muslim methods in the ways they cultivate their land and what they grow. And their closer, innate sense of connection, DNA-wise and emotionally, with North Africa rather than with mainland Europe or even mainland Italy, undergirds their sense of self.

  A friend, Sicilian-born poet Alissandru (Alex) Caldiero, put it to me simply, passionately, and profoundly one afternoon: “We are not south of Italy; we are north of Africa!”

  The Arab tradition lives on in the stories portrayed in puppet shows that are common across the island and the images on the hand-painted carts that now reside mostly in museums. These conquerors dramatically changed the island’s economy from one based primarily on wheat and wool under Romans and Byzantines to one with diverse agriculture. The Arabs introduced oranges and lemons, certain varieties of olives, pomegranates, pistachios, peaches, cotton, eggplants, and apricots. They instituted innovations previously unknown in the island, such as terraces for growing crops in hilly terrain. They devised methods of irrigation still used today.

  Jews were welcomed into the slowly emerging society, as were Berbers from North Africa. These disparate peoples lived side by side and were fully integrated with the native peoples and the Greek-Sicilians who had been there for centuries. This is why Sicilians have so much Arab blood in their veins; other conquerors—such as the Normans, French, and to a certain degree the Spanish—did not foster mass migrations of their own people into Sicilian life. They were overseers, rulers, or barons who remained somewhat isolated in their own enclaves, marrying among themselves to preserve their vast estates.

  Hundreds of towns and villages take their names from Arabic: Gibellina comes from jabal, the word for “mountain”; the Alcàntara River derives from qantara, or “bridge”; La Kasbah is still a district of Mazàra, the town where the Arabs first landed in A.D. 827 to begin their seventy-five-year conquest of the island. Just northwest of Mazàra is Marsala, which comes from mars Ali or “Ali’s port.” Caltabellotta, qal’at al ballut, means “fortress of oak trees.”

  Strangely, there is little architectural evidence of Muslim influence in buildings still standing: the Favara Palace in the Brancaccio neighborhood of Palermo and, eighteen miles to the southeast, the baths of Cefalà Diana. At Cefalà, Muslims, then under Norman rule, built the roof on top of old Roman walls that enclosed ancient springs.

  The location operates today as part of a historic site where one afternoon I sat with a group of schoolchildren listening to a lecture about what took place there. Ironically, and unnoticed by the young audience, the water that flowed into the ancient baths came from garden hoses slipped under the Roman wall and into channels feeding the various stone tubs. When visitors are gone, the water is turned off by the simple twist of a valve.

  The former baths are flanked on one side by a two-story stone structure that served as a resting spot, a way station or type of inn, during Norman times. Now it serves as a storage space for the historic site.

  Historian Chiarelli, in the introduction to his landmark book A History of Muslim Sicily, writes: “… there is [only] a visual hint of their settlement. A glimpse of the arabesque architecture of the palaces and churches built under their successors, the Normans, brings into view the Arab presence. Their legacy largely remains, however, in the consciousness of Sicilians.…”

  Chiarelli then quotes early twentieth-century Sicilian folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè, who tells us that his people have forgotten the epochs of the Greek, Latin, and Byzantine; “only the Arab remains alive, although their reign was brief and vague. Everything ancient is [Muslim]: monuments, hidden caches, charming treasures, mountains, farm lands, caves, abandoned ruins, and old trees, especially olive trees.”

  So the Arabic influence today remains intrinsic, emotional, within the people themselves.

  * * *

  How did the Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, which today includes Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and Muslims from North Africa get here? Some scholars believe the seeds w
ere planted just twenty years after the A.D. 632 death of Muhammad. They made their first raid against the island, controlled then by Byzantine Greeks who had taken over after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. The date has been challenged, particularly by Chiarelli, but he does agree that in 669, fewer than two decades later, Muslims captured Siracusa, returning “to Alexandria with captives and booty.”

  While the exact number of Muslim attacks on Sicily cannot be documented, they “increased dramatically after the Arab conquest of Carthage [in modern-day Tunisia] and the establishment of permanent Arab settlements along the North African coast.”

  Even while the Arab conquest of Spain was under way, their focus on Sicily never wavered. For Sicilians, the story of how the Muslims decided to move against the island in A.D. 827 is the kind of tale that repeats itself a few times over the course of history. In this case, a Byzantine naval commander, who reportedly was going to be punished for marrying a nun against her will, sought to get out of his predicament by taking control of the island from its governor. Some historians disagree with this story, saying the whole attempted takeover was strictly a political affair.

  At any rate, the naval commander and his supporters routed the governor’s army at Siracusa, but he knew he could not hold on to the island. So, he traveled to the Aghlabid court in Qayrawan (today Kairouan, Tunisia), now considered the fourth most holy city in Islam, and asked for help.

  At first, when the Muslims agreed to help, they did not view it as their own conquest, but that quickly changed. They recruited religious zealots and opportunists, and the goal gradually turned to conquest. With both Spain and Sicily, they could control the entire western Mediterranean basin.