AUTHOR'S PREFACE
THE SICILIAN QUESTION:
A TWO HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
This book is concerned with events in Italy and Spain that
dominated the political consciousness of those who lived not
merely on the shores of those lands, but far afield in France,
the Low Countries, Greece, north Mrica, occasionally even
Germany and England. The issue was control of either or
both of what would later be called the 'Two Sicilies': main-
land southern Italy on the one hand, the island of Sicily
and its smaller neighbours such as Malta on the other. This
'Sicilian Question', apart from upsetting the affairs of the
English king Henry III in the mid-thirteenth century, was
one of those great perennial disputes that sucked popes,
emperors and French and Spanish princes into conflict from
the end of the twelfth century to the start of the sixteenth.
Between the foundation of the Kingdom of Sicily in 1130 and
the absorption of southern Italy by Ferdinand of Aragon in
1503, claims to rule the Sicilian kingdom, or the two separ-
ate Sicilian kingdoms after 1282, drew foreign forces into
Italy, moulded the factionalism of the Italian city-states, and
determined wider relationships linking Italy to the Balkans,
Mrica and above all Spain. The entire Italian south - Sicily,
southern Italy and Sardinia - became the stamping ground
of Catalan-Aragonese armies sent by rulers of a fragmented
group of states in which central power was weak, and in
which the monarchy complained of a constant lack of money,
yet which achieved a remarkable series of conquests begin-
ning with Majorca in 1229 and ending with Naples in 1442
and again 1503.
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