The Sicilian Vespers led to the ousting of the French as rulers of Sicily and the installation of the Spaniards as rulers.
When Frederick II of the Hohenstaufen house died in 1250, Sicily sank back into chaos and confusion. (yeah, you’re going to read that a LOT during this history recap) The barons took over, each fighting to enrich himself and grab as much as possible. (oh, you’ll read THAT a lot too) Frederick’s son Conrad was crowned emperor in Germany, but was stuck there, so Fred’s bastard son Manfred was entrusted with control of Sicily and southern Italy. Pope Innocent IV didn’t think bastard sons ought to be ruling anything and suggested Manfred turn control of the kingdom over to someone else… the someone else just happening to be… himself, the Pope. Manfred declined the offer and the Pope excommunicated him altogether. Innocent then declared someone else King, but everyone else just sort of ignored it.
Manfred was, I hear, an astonishingly good-looking man, intelligent, learned, and had devastating charm. Bastard, indeed! By 1258, Manfred, using such abilities as nature had endowed him with, had convinced the Sicilian barons to proclaim him King.
In the meantime, another daughter of Frederick, Constance, married Peter, heir to the throne of Aragon.
The successor Pope to Innocent, however, Urban IV, had not given up on puppeteering in Sicily, and named Charles of Anjou as the man who should be king of Sicily. Charles was cold, cruel, and vastly ambitious, and recognized an opportunity when he saw one. He was crowned King of Sicily in Rome in 1266 by Urban’s successor, Clement IV. Charles then invaded and chased out Manfred.
With this event, the Hohenstaufen line, and Sicily’s golden age, was truly ended.
The Angevin (Anjou family) line showed little interest in Sicily, concentrating more attention on the mainland, but the Sicilians weren’t so easy to ignore. They revolted in 1267, and were promptly put back into place. But the severity of the repression left a lingering resentment. Administration of the island was heavy-handed, with landowners needing to prove their ownership. This was difficult for many and if it wasn’t done satisfactorily, the land was confiscated and handed out to the new King’s friends, all Frenchmen. In what would become a recurring theme, the Sicilians lost out.
In general, Sicily remained neglected, and the Sicilians themselves could only conclude that they belonged to an obscure and unimportant province that their ruler could not be bothered to care about.
The Sicilian Vespers
Here we find one John of Procida. A native of Salerno, he had been the personal physician of Frederick when he died. He appealed to Peter of Aragon to overthrow the Angevins. By 1282, the Angevins were pretty thoroughly detested, both for the severity of their taxation and their general arrogance. The incident that precipitated John of Procida’s call to overthrow the Angevins was what has come to be called the Sicilian Vespers. When a drunk French sergeant hit on a Sicilian woman on March 30, 1282 as the bells were ringing for Vespers, her husband’s pent-up anger boiled over into beating the sergeant, which boiled over to a murder. The Sicilian crowd’s anger then boiled over and the murder led to a riot, the riot to a massacre, and by morning, 2000 French were dead. Ya gotta be careful about riling up Sicilians. The rising spread and on August 30, Peter of Aragon and his army landed at the far northwestern city of Trapani.
By September, Charles was driven back to the northeastern corner of the island at Messina and was forced to recognize that the Spanish conquest was basically a done-deal.
But Charles was a stubborn bastard and refused to recognize the legitimacy, and actually challenged Peter to settle up mano a mano in a duel. Charles being 55, and Peter only 40, they decided it would be more fair that each would be accompanied by 100 knights. The day was set, but they forgot to set a particular time.
In a comic scenario, the “fight” went something like this: Peter showed up early in the day, and finding no French, declared them cowards and himself the victor by forfeiture. Later in the day, the French showed up and finding no Spaniards, declared the Spaniards cowards and themselves the victors by forfeiture. I guess they at least saved face and lives this way.
But neither side giving an inch, the Regno was split with Charles remaining King of “Sicily” in Naples, and Peter calling himself king of Sicily in Palermo. This is the initiation of “The Two Sicilies”.
Charles died in 1285. He had neglected Sicily. The Sicilians had pissed him off with their stubborn rebellion, and he had become bored with them, considering them poor, unprofitable, and therefore useless to him. Moreover, he thought they were a mongrel race of Latin, Greek and Arab, and therefore not to be taken seriously as a people.
Charles II was the heir, but he was being held in prison. The Angevin Kings in France still wished to recover Sicily, and the Papacy was looking after its own prestige, having granted Sicily to the Angevins.
Sicilians, on the other hand, preferred Spanish rule, but this had a consequence: it cut them off from Naples, AND… the burgeoning Italian renaissance, which would subsequently largely pass over Sicily.
The Aragonese, James “the Just” was proclaimed King of Sicily in 1286. He sought Pope Honorius’ blessing and was promptly rewarded for his efforts with excommunication. Honorius then, to add injury to insult, ordered an invasion of Sicily in 1287… which was a disaster.
A number of years passed in which the decisions about who would govern/rule Sicily were made without any concern for the Sicilians themselves. But this was so standard, and would continue to be so, that most of the history of Sicily is really the history of decisions about its government made elsewhere. The machinations behind the scenes are byzantine, and frankly, have little to do with Sicily, so I’m not going to bother to even write them down here.
In 1301, the treaty of Caltabellota was signed: The Angevins would withdraw from Sicily, and Frederick would call himself King of Trinacria (the ancient Greek name for Sicily) rather than King of Sicily, so that the Angevins could still call themselves kings of Sicily. This is a prime example of European monarchy BS, so that each could feel a little less butt-hurt be the loss of land, by retaining a title.
The Sicilians themselves didn’t care too much about which of these foreigners called themselves whatever, as long as said foreigners didn’t inflict themselves on the island itself. The Sicilians had suffered a lot since the Vespers 20 years prior, but they were steadfast on this one point: they would not accept French rule.