Going to Rome this year has me interested in getting a better grip on Italian history. Since my heritage on my mom’s side is Sicilian, I thought I’d get a bead on Sicilian history too, though that isn’t my focus right now.
A basic history is that in the area of Sicily where my family is from, there were an initial people called the Elymoi. From somewhere 1000-750 BC, the Carthaginians, a Phoenician people that had established an outpost in modern Tunisia, colonized the area of Trapani, on the far west point of Sicily. There were a series of wars fought with the Greeks for control of the island until the mid 200’s BC when the Romans made Sicily a province of Rome. The Vandals and Ostrogoths ruled from 469-535, then the Byzantine (Greek) empire took over Sicily until 826. A Muslim emirate from Tunisia invaded Sicily in 826 and by 962, Sicily became the emirate of Sicily. The Normans, originally from Scandinavia, but coming through France, conquered Sicily by 1091.
In 1282, Peter of Aragon (Spain) takes over Sicily. From 1400-1600, there is a wave of Greek immigrants that flood the island due to Greeks fleeing the Ottoman invasions. In 1720, Sicily is ruled by the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, but the Bourbon Spaniard Charles VII takes over again in 1735. Garibaldi invaded and captured Sicily in 1860, when it was unified with Italy as the Kingdom of Italy.
So being Sicilian could mean Elymoi, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, German, Arab, Norman, Spanish, Austrian or Italian blood. This is where I was interested in the mtDNA test that 23 and me offered.
The maternal DNA test was what interested me since the Sicilian heritage was from my mom’s side, and this traces back through mom, my maternal grandmother, and then her mom, etc. The farthest I can go back on that side is my nonna’s mom, whose maiden name was Rosa Sinatra, born in 1886 in Custonaci, Sicily.
The results came back with a haplogroup of L3d, which is from central to north-east Africa.
Looking up haplogroup L3 on wikipedia, it shows that it spread from east Africa in the upper paleolithic (50k-12k years ago) to Central Africa with some subclades spreading to East Africa with the Bantu migration. It is found among the Fulani, Chadians, Ethiopians, Akan, Mozambique, Yemeni, Egyptians and Berbers.
The Berbers were located on the north and north-west coast of Africa along the Mediterranean and some of that area was ruled by Carthage. Egypt was also a Roman province from before Christ. So it’s possible that the bloodline has been in Sicily since those early times.
But only 2% of the Sicilian population has the haplogroup type L, so it doesn’t seem likely that my ancestry is from some ancient line of peoples that had been there for millennia.
That would probably mean some more recent migration, of which, as can be seen through the history, there has been a LOT. I suppose the most likely choice would be during the Caliphate years. The Muslims who had come from north Africa were perhaps more easily expelled when the island was taken by the Spaniards after the Normans, which would have meant there were relatively few of them left. Or perhaps the blood line came up in one of the more recent migrations that happened in the ensuing centuries. Since the L3 line isn’t common, I’m assuming it wasn’t part of any ‘wave’ of immigration, unless it was the Arabs that were in Sicily from 900-1300.
However, since the main location of L3 is found in central Africa, it’s possible there was some slave trading involved, and an ancestor ended up in Sicily as part of the slave trade. This paper looks at the Arab trans-saharan slave trade: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2875235/
This trade of black slaves began circa 650 AD. The estimate was that roughly 4.8 million slaves were taken between 650-1600 AD. The site shows the trans-saharan slave trade routes.
The paper mentions that males were sought for service functions as well as soldiers. But the bulk of the trade was in females, for domestic service, entertainers and/or concubines. The figure 6 maps (on the site, but not reposted here) show the particular L3d group being on the far west and north-west coasts of Africa, (modern Senegal, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Algeria and Morrocco) and also in southern Arabia, Turkey and Jordan, then further into Iran
Another author I found wrote this:
Lori De Lucia | I Tatti | The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies
“For the span of one hundred years, early modern Sicily became an export market of a trans-Saharan slave trade route that originated in Borno, West Africa. In turn, Black men, women, and children became a significant portion of the enslaved populations living in Sicily. This project focuses on the long-standing communities of West Africans in sixteenth-century Palermo. It examines census, legal, and ecclesiastical records for indicators of their mobility both within Sicilian society and the wider Mediterranean. Enslaved and freed Black Africans’ experiences reveal the complex ways in which local practices of slavery interplayed with Mediterranean constructs of religion, race, and empire.”
This leads me to suspect that one of the ancestors was a female slave brought up from central Africa through the slave trade. Maybe.
I’m certain the truth of the story is lost to history by now, but it is interesting to me. I hadn’t expected to see central African as the maternal haplogroup, but there it is.