Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/42

 28 SICILY [HISTORY. 1282-1735. to a Sicilian woman led to the massacre at Palermo, and the like scenes followed elsewhere. The strangers were cut off; Sicily was left to its own people. The towns and districts left without a ruler by no means designed to throw off the authority of the overlord; they sought the good will of Pope Martin. But papal interests were on the side of Charles ; and he went forth with the blessing of the church to win back his lost kingdom. Angevin oppression had brought together all Sicily in a common cause. There was at last a Sicilian nation, a nation for a while capable of great deeds. Sicily now stands out as a main centre of European politics. But the land has lost its character ; it is becoming the plaything of powers, instead of the meeting-place of nations. The tale, true or false, that Frenchmen and Provencals were known from the natives by being unable to frame the Italian sound of c shows how thoroughly the Lombard tongue had overcome the other tongues of the island. In Palermo, once city of threefold speech, a Greek, a Saracen, a Norman, who clave to his own tongue must have died with the strangers. Peter of Charles was now besieging Messina ; Sicily seems to Aragon. have put on some approach to the form of a federal com- monwealth. Meanwhile Peter of Aragon was watching and preparing. He now declared himself. To all, except the citizens of the great cities, a king would be acceptable ; Peter was chosen with little opposition in a parliament at Palermo, and a struggle of twenty -one years began, of which Charles and Peter saw only the first stage. In fact, after Peter had helped the Sicilians to relieve Messina, he was very little in Sicily ; he had to defend his kingdom of Aragon, which Pope Martin had granted to another French Charles. He was represented by Queen Constance, and his great admiral Roger de Loria kept the war away from Sicily, waging it wholly in Italy, and making Charles, the son of King Charles, prisoner. In 1285 both the rival kings died. Charles had before his death been driven to make large legislative concessions to his subjects to stop the tendency shown, especially in Naples, to join the re- volted Sicilians. By Peter's death Aragon and Sicily were separated ; his eldest son Alphonso took Aragon, and his James, second son James took Sicily, which was to pass to the third son Frederick, if James died childless. James was crowned, and held his reforming parliament also. With the popes no terms could be made. Charles, released in 1288 under a deceptive negotiation, was crowned king of Sicily by Honorius ; but he had much ado to defend his continental dominions against James and Roger. In 1291 James succeeded Alphonso in the kingdom of Aragon, and left Frederick not king, according to the entail, but only his lieutenant in Sicily. Frederick was the real restorer of Sicilian independence. He had come to the island so young that he felt as a native. He defended the land stoutly, even against his brother. For James presently played Sicily false. In 1295 he was reconciled to the church and released from all French claims on Aragon, and he bound himself to restore Sicily Freder- to Charles. But the Sicilians, with Frederick at their head, disowned the agreement, and in 1296 Frederick was crowned king. He had to defend Sicily against his brother and Roger de Loria, who forsook the cause, as did John of Procida. Hitherto the war had been waged on the mainland ; now it was transferred to Sicily. King James besieged Syracuse as admiral of the Roman Church ; Charles sent his son Robert in 1299 as his lieutenant in Sicily, where he gained some successes. But in the same year the one great land battle of the war, that of Falconaria, was won for Sicily. The war, chiefly marked by another great siege of Messina, went on till 1 302, when both sides were thoroughly weakened and eager for peace. By a treaty, confirmed by Pope Boniface the next year, Frederick was acknowledged as king of Trinacria for life. He was to marry the daughter of the king of Sicily, to whom the island kingdom was to revert at his death. The terms were never meant to be carried out. Frederick again took up the title of king of Sicily, and at his death in 1337 he was succeeded by his son Peter. There were thus two Peter, Sicilian kingdoms and two kings of Sicily. The king of the mainland is often spoken of for convenience as king of Naples, but that description was never borne as a formal title save in the 16th century by Philip, king of England and Naples, and in the 19th by Joseph Buonaparte and Joachim Murat. The strict distinction was between Sicily on this side the Pharos (of Messina) and Sicily beyond it. Thus the great island of the Mediterranean again became an independent power. And, as far as legislation could make it, Sicily became one of the freest countries in Europe. By the laws of Frederick parliaments were to be regularly held, and without their consent the king could not make war, peace, or alliance. The treaty of 1302 was not confirmed by parliament, and in 1337 parliament called Peter to the crown. But Sicily never rose to the greatness of its Greek or its Norman days, and its old character had passed away. Of Greeks and Saracens we now hear only as a degraded remnant, to be won over, if it may be, to the Western Church. The kingdom had no foreign pos- sessions ; yet faint survivals of the days of Agathokles and Roger lingered on. The isle of Gerba off the African coast was held for a short time, and traces of the connexion with Greece went on in various shapes. If the kings of Sicily on this side the Pharos kept Corfu down to 1386, those beyond the Pharos became in 1311 overlords of Athens, when that duchy was seized by Catalan adventurers, dis- banded after the wars of Sicily. In 1530 the Sicilian island of Malta became the shelter of the Knights of Saint John driven by the Turk from Rhodes, and Sicily has received several colonies of Christian Albanians, who have replaced Greek and Arabic by yet another tongue. There is no need to dwell at length on the Sicilian Subse- history of the last five hundred years. The descendants quent of Frederick did not form a great dynasty. Under him and lnstoi T after him Sicily played a part in Italian affairs, invading and being invaded on behalf of the Ghibelline cause. But it was torn by dissensions between Spanish and Italian fac- tions, and handed to and fro between one Spanish king and another. At last Ferdinand the Catholic (1479-1515), king by inheritance of Aragon and of Sicily beyond the pharos, conquered the continental Sicily, and called himself king of the Two Sicilies. Both were now ruled by Spanish viceroys. In Charles the First (1516-1555) Charles of Anjou is not reckoned Sicily had a third imperial king, and once more became the starting-point for African war- fare. Philip, already king of Naples, became king of the Two Sicilies at the abdication of his father, and the two crowns passed along with Castile and Aragon till the division of the Spanish dominions. Under the foreign rule the old laws were trampled under foot. Three risings took place, that of Messina in 1672, with pretended French help, which led to deeper subjection. At the death of Charles the Second in 1700, Sicily acknowledged the French claimant Philip ; but the peace of Utrecht made it the kingdom of Victor Amadeus of Savoy (1713-1720). He was crowned at Palermo ; but he had to withstand Spanish invasion, and to exchange Sicily for the other insular crown of Sardinia. Both Sicilies now passed to the emperor Charles the Sixth, the fourth imperial king, who also is passed by in Sicilian reckoning. Charles the Third is the Spanish prince of the house of Bourbon who won both Sicilies from the Austrian, and who was the last king crowned at Palermo (1735).