Pope Innocent IV called together the First Council of Lyon, an ecumenical council attended by almost 150 bishops, on June 28, 1245, with the intention of deposing Frederick II as both Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Kingdom of Sicily. On July 17, Innocent issued a papal bull to formally accomplish this task. The bull contained a vast litany of charges, including accusations of Frederickâs many associations with Muslims.
These charges built upon an anti-Islamic rhetoric that the papacy deployed against the Emperor for over a decade, asserting that Frederick had not only âjoined in league with Saracens and was more a friend to them than to Christiansâ but also was âmore in agreement with the law of Muáž„ammad than those of Jesus Christâ and he had even âmade Saracen whores his concubines.â 2 These charges were not limited to the attempt to depose Frederick at the Council of Lyons but were also employed throughout the thirteenth century in an attempt to rally further support against him and his illegitimate son Manfred, after Manfred claimed the throne of the Kingdom of Sicily and continued to oppose papal policy in the region.[Frederick II] is joined together with Saracens by detestable friendship; he often sends envoys and gifts to them and he accepts [envoys and gifts] from them with acts of honor and hospitality. He cherishes their religious rites. Remarkably, he keeps [Saracens] with him during his daily routine. In addition, according to their customs, he is not ashamed to assign eunuchs. . . whom he has castrated, as guards for his wives, who are descended from royal lineage. And what is more detestable is that when he traveled to lands across the sea, having forged a pact with [Saracens], or more correctly having forged a collusion with the sultan, he permitted the name Muáž„ammad to be publicly proclaimed day and night in the temple of the Lord. Not long ago, envoys of the Sultan of Babylon were received with honor and sumptuously attended to throughout the Kingdom of Sicily with praise heaped upon the sultan, after this same sultan had inflicted grave financial loss and inestimable injury to the Holy Land and its Christian inhabitants. 1
While Innocent IV may have embellished some of the charges against Frederick, he grounded the anti-Islamic denunciation in incontrovertible truths. Frederick had engaged in extensive diplomacy with Muslim princes, most notably the Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt, al-KÄmil . Frederick maintained a subject population of tens of thousands of Sicilian Muslims, which he relocated to the city of Lucera on the Southern Italian mainland. Frederick included Muslims, both those from Lucera and slaves purchased from across the Mediterranean, in his personal retinue. When Frederick went into battle, he deployed units of thousands of Muslim soldiers , even against armies of the papacy. Frederick maintained a harem and eunuchs, becoming famous for his love of the luxuries and cultural trappings of the Islamic world, leading the nineteenth-century Italian historian Michele Amari to dub Frederick and his grandfather Roger II âthe two baptized sultans of Sicily.â 3
The condemnation of Frederick II conforms to the contemporary popular imagination of the Middle Ages, which envisions a medieval Christian âWestâ engaged in what Samuel Huntington termed a âclash of civilizationsâ with the Islamic world, a conflict made manifest through the religious violence of crusade and jihÄd. 4 It does not seem surprising that a Christian ruler who made political alliances that violated religious boundaries and adopted cultural trappings of the Islamic world would earn the ire of his coreligionists and raise questions about the orthodoxy of his own faith. However, these views ultimately presuppose a world in which vast cultural constructs are locked in an eternal struggle and separated by well-defined boundaries that are both immutable and impermeable. As Edward Said has shown, Huntington constructs civilizations as âmonolithic and homogenousâ entities, which âassume the unchanging character of the duality between âusâ and âthem.ââ 5
In reality, an examination of representations of Muslims within Sicily and anti-Islamic rhetoric against Sicilian rulers reveals a remarkable amount of fluidity. The use of Muslims as a polemical tool against Frederick was a novelty and one that had not been deployed against any previous Sicilian king. Comparing Frederick II to his grandfather, Roger II , Amariâs other âbaptized sultanâ who ruled a hundred years earlier, reveals a ruler who engaged in extensive diplomacy with Muslim polities in Egypt and North Africa , ruled over a vast Muslim population in Sicily, deployed armies of Muslim soldiers against his foes, sponsored Muslim artists and intellectuals within his court, created an Arabic-language royal fiscal administration, perhaps knew the Arabic language himself, and reigned in a court steeped with the luxuries of the Islamic world even more so than Frederick II. And yet, Rogerâs mid-twelfth-century contemporaries never engaged in the religious polemics so frequently directed at Frederick. Even when Roger II deployed an army of Muslims to wage war against papal supporters in the 1130s, Rogerâs critics never invoked his Muslim soldiers to disparage the Sicilian king. The anti-Islamic invectives levied against Frederick were not born of an immutable hostility between Muslims and Christians. Nor were they directed against anyone who adopted elements of a rival civilization. Rather, these invectives were products of specific historical circumstances that played out in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. We have no indication that mid-twelfth-century Latin observers found anything problematic or controversial in Rogerâs appropriation of Islamic cultural elements or his use of Muslim soldiers and administrators.
This monograph establishes ways in which the Latin Christian rulers of Sicily incorporated Muslim soldiers , farmers, scholars and bureaucrats into the formation of their own royal identities and came to depend on their Muslim subjects to project and enforce their political power. It illustrates that the Islamic influence within the Sicilian court drew little scrutiny, and even less criticism, from other Latin intellectuals in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. At the same time, the courtâs adoption of Islamic cultural elements, its employment of Muslim administrators and its granting of protections to Sicilian Muslims inexorably linked Sicilian rulers to their Muslim subjects and created circumstances in which resistance to royal governance was articulated through acts of violence against the Muslim subjects of the crown. My intention is to contextualize and explain the subsequent emergence of popular violence against Muslims in Sicily and the construction of an anti-Islamic polemic that highlights the Muslim population of Sicily in order to undermine the religious faith and political legitimacy of Sicilian rulers.
On Tolerance, Pragmatism and Symbolic Value
The vibrant mix of cultures at play across Sicily has tempted generations of historians to heap praise on the Sicilian court, to describe it as Charles Homer Haskins did, as âthe first modern stateâ or as a locus of religious tolerance and cultural exchange, a vision of convivencia in the central Mediterranean. 6 More recent work stresses that cultural exchanges were limited almost exclusively to the court and that while Sicilian rulers co-opted administrative techniques and cultural elements from Islamic courts, they did so within the framework of explicit Christian domination. This comes through most clearly in the work of Jeremy Johns, who shows that while âa thin Islamic veneerâ permeated the court, it concealed âanti-Muslim brutalityâ beneath it. 7 âFrederick was no âbaptized sultan,ââ 8 writes David Abulafia. His research on the Kingdom of Sicily and Frederick II undermines the fantasy of Frederick as a paragon of modern notions of religious tolerance. 9 The continued existence of a Muslim population in Sicily stemmed not from an ethical commitment to tolerance or multiculturalism, but from a calculated pragmatism. 10
The Norman rulers of Sicily procured a variety of practical benefits from maintaining a subject population of Muslims. Starting in the late eleventh century, the Norman overlords forced Sicilyâs non-Christian population to pay a tax . The Norman rulers either retained this valuable source of revenue for themselves or doled out the right to collect taxes from certain non-Christian communities to favored subjects. In addition, the terms of surrender for Sicilian Muslim communities obligated them to provide soldiers for the armies of Sicily. These soldiers supplied needed manpower, but they also offered additional advantages over their Christian counterparts. In light of the history of tempestuous relations between the Norman warlords of the Mezzogiorno (the regions of Southern Italy and Sicily) and the Papacy, a devoted, loyal, non-Christian army proved to be a valuable tool for a ruler who knew he might come into conflict wit...