EDITOR'S PREFACE
David Abulafia's Western Mediterranean Kingdoms is a wide-
ranging political narrative of the struggle for control of Sicily
and southern Italy over the whole of the Later Middle Ages.
Borrowing the phrase from a better known, but arguably
no more important, conflict Dr Abulafia describes events in
terms of a 'Two Hundred Years' War'. He skilfully integrates
a panorama of the economic, cultural, religious and political
considerations which absorbed the interest of all the great
Mediterranean powers from the kingdom of Jerusalem of
the thirteenth century in the East to the kingdoms of Aragon
and Castile in the West, and which fatefully also sucked in
the papacy and the kingdom of France. Crucially, the strug-
gles are seen against the background of the internal tensions
of the main participating kingdoms of Sicily and Aragon,
and in the context of the fraught relations between Muslims
and Christians and of economic rivalries which took in the
entire Mediterranean.
The subject's origins lie in the conquest of southern Italy
and Sicily by Normans in the eleventh century and their cre-
ation of the kingdom of Sicily in the twelfth. Sicily's geo-
graphical centrality within the Mediterranean world made it
a legend for wealth and cultural diversity and attracted im-
migrants and adventurers throughout its history. Its acquisi-
tion by the Hohenstaufen at the end of the twelfth century
placed it at the heart of the rivalry of Empire and Papacy
and· created the conditions which led eventually to its acquisi-
tion by Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX of France.
Charles's subsequent overthrow by Peter III of Aragon initi-
ated the long conflict between Angevins and Aragonese for
control which eventually merged into the so-called Italian
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