Sicily’s strategic position in the center of the Mediterranean Sea and its economic potential made it, since Antiquity, a coveted object by the powers of the area. The island was successively occupied by the Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines and Arabs. At the beginning of the I millennium, the latter were defeated by groups of adventurers from Normandy. The new conquerors established a kingdom on the island that also included the south of the Italian peninsula.
After more than a century of Norman rule, the kingdom of Sicily passed by succession rights to the House of Hohenstaufen, whose heir, Frederick II, was also the Holy Roman Emperor. His long reign was marked by antagonism with the Holy See, which in turn was framed in the complex confrontation between Guelphs and Ghibellines, factions headed respectively by the Pope and the Emperor.
Frederick II was a powerful sovereign, and successive pontiffs, apart from excommunicating him, could do little against him.
On the emperor’s death in 1250, the pope saw an opportunity to head off his rivalry with the Hohenstaufen by ridding himself of them and placing a favorable prince on the throne of Sicily. Since it was Rome that had granted Sicily to the Norman invaders in the eleventh century, the pontiff considered the king of Sicily to be his vassal and that he could dispose of the kingdom as he wished.
He proposed the Sicilian Crown to the brother of the King of England, but there was no agreement on the conditions. Instead, Carlos de Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France, accepted it. His boundless ambition saw in Sicily a magnificent springboard for his great project: the conquest of the Byzantine Empire. In 1266 he was crowned King of Sicily.
Now, wearing the Crown and having the approval of the Pope was not the same as possessing the kingdom. Despite everything, the territory remained in the hands of the Hohenstaufen. Frederick II’s son and heir, Conrad IV, had died of fever, and Manfred, also Frederick’s son, but illegitimate, now sat on the throne. Carlos de Anjou would have to conquer Sicily by force, and for this he went to southern Italy armed with a powerful army.
After a rapid advance, he defeated the Sicilians at the Battle of Benevento, in which Manfred died. Soon after, the Sicilian resistance, organized around Frederick II’s grandson Conradin and supported by groups of Italian Ghibellines, made a last-ditch attempt to regain power. Carlos defeated them, captured Conradino and had him beheaded. The French became the undisputed owner of southern Italy and Sicily.
Although the Sicilians were used to being ruled by foreigners, they found the arrival of the French especially irritating. The Angevin king installed an oppressive government and established a high tax burden. He filled Sicily with officials and soldiers who treated both the people and the indigenous nobility with contempt, continually offending his honor.
The main notable Sicilian supporters of the Hohenstaufen, including Roger de Llúria and Juan de Prócida, took refuge in the court of James I of Aragon, turning Barcelona into a Ghibelline political center. It was not by chance: the Aragonese and the Angevins maintained a long rivalry.
In addition, some years ago the infant Pedro, heir to the Aragonese king, had married Constance of Hohenstaufen in Montpellier, daughter of the deceased Manfredo and, therefore, granddaughter of Federico II. It is very likely that the Sicilian exiles soon began to conspire together with the Aragonese to regain the Sicilian throne based on the rights of Constance.
In 1282, Charles of Anjou was preparing in Naples to lead a crusade against the Byzantine Empire and take Constantinople. But an unexpected event forced him to change his plans: on March 30, a great insurrection against the French broke out in Palermo.
According to the traditional version, the faithful were waiting in a square next to the church of the Holy Spirit in Palermo to attend the evening services on Easter Monday when some drunken Frenchmen arrived. One of them began to harass a young married woman and her husband, furious, stabbed him. The other Frenchmen came to help him and avenge him, but the Palermitans surrounded them and killed them just at the moment when the church bells and those of the entire city began to ring.
Another version, less suggestive but more probable, maintains that the uprising was planned and that the organizers had arranged that the signal to unleash it would be the ringing of the vespers bells.
Once the rebellion began, there was an explosion of popular anger that gave vent to the accumulated hatred. The Palermitans massacred the more than 2,000 French in the city, including the elderly, women and children. In the days that followed, the uprising spread throughout the island.
Having won their independence, the Sicilians wanted to give themselves a republican government, establishing communes, or free cities, inspired by the model of central and northern Italy. However, given their defenselessness, these communes could not survive on their own. First the guardianship of the pope was requested. But Martin IV, of French origin, refused to take Sicily, which had expelled King Charles, under his protection.
The Sicilians then decided to offer the Crown to Pedro de Aragón (now Pedro III) and his wife, Constanza. The solution was supported by the barons and accepted by all social classes. Pedro agreed delightedly: the possession of Sicily represented a giant step in the expansion of the Crown of Aragon in the Mediterranean.
At that time the Aragonese were preparing to invade Tunisia, but they headed for Sicily. Pedro and Constanza were welcomed in Palermo with enthusiasm. The Aragonese king sent an embassy to Carlos de Anjou urging him to recognize him as king of Sicily. The Angevin refused and withdrew to southern Italy, from where he would try to recapture the island.
The Pope, an unconditional supporter of Carlos, excommunicated Pedro III. He not only urged him to return Sicily, but also tried to dispossess him of his kingdom of Aragon, handing it over to Carlos de Valois, second son of Philip III of France and great-nephew of Carlos de Anjou. Martin IV declared that the war had the character of a crusade. A powerful French army undertook the invasion of Aragon.
Pedro III was in a difficult situation, because he had serious internal problems with the Aragonese nobility. The situation was saved by the Sicilian-Aragonese fleet, commanded by Admiral Roger de Llúria, which defeated the French covering squadron off the Catalan coast and forced the French to withdraw.
The Vespers war continued without a clear advantage for either side. It was a long, expensive and complicated contest, which had various venues besides Sicily. During the course of the conflict, surprising changes occurred in the alliances, and the Aragonese Crown and the Sicilian-Aragonese crown came to confront each other.
The war ended with the signing of the Peace of Caltabellotta at the beginning of the 14th century, which approved the separation of an insular kingdom (in the hands of the house of Aragon, but as an independent kingdom) and a continental one (hereinafter called the Kingdom of Naples, which would remain in Angevin hands).
It had been almost two decades since the protagonists of the conflict had disappeared. In a single year, 1285, Carlos de Anjou, Pedro III of Aragon, Felipe III of France and Pope Martin IV died. The first died unsuccessful, without having been able to recover Sicily, with his son a prisoner of the Aragonese and having renounced the company of conquering Byzantium. The latter, on the other hand, had considerably expanded his sphere of influence, making the Crown of Aragon one of the great powers of the Mediterranean.
There are many aspects of the revolt that remain unclear. But the big question is whether it was a popular insurrection taken advantage of a posteriori by Pedro III of Aragon or if the opposite occurred, if it was the Aragonese who orchestrated it with the help of the Sicilian exiles to facilitate the conquest of the island and its expansion by the Mediterranean.
Many historians are inclined towards this second possibility, although if true it is not understood why Pedro III did not wait a few months. In such a case, Charles of Anjou would have been far from him, with his entire fleet bent on the capture of Constantinople, and the Aragonese would have had a much easier way.
This leads to a third hypothesis that would involve the Byzantine Empire. Emperor Michael Palaiologos was terrified at the idea that Charles of Anjou wanted to take over Constantinople. According to this theory, the Emperor Michael, militarily weak but skilled as a diplomat, would have instigated and financed the Sicilian revolt to keep King Charles busy.
Despite its consequences, the Vespers uprising remained forgotten for centuries. The episode returned to historical memory in the 19th century, in the midst of the Italian unification process. The image of the Sicilians as heroes of the Italian people in the fight against a foreign power fit very well with the patriotic ideals of the Risorgimento, the nationalist movement that appeared on the peninsula. And the situation that Sicily was going through at that moment, in the hands of the Bourbons, presented obvious parallels with the situation that led to Vespers.
The revolt thus acquired a character close to legend, to which numerous literary works written at the time contributed.
This text is part of an article published in number 471 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
