THE RISE AND FALL OF CHARLES OF ANJOUtoo, and a number of Amalfitans-whose families had served
the Hohenstaufen - retained high office in Sicily, and it will
be necessary to return to this influential group shortly. Added
to this, the intrusion after 1268 of French-born knights into
south Italian fiefs created a new aristocracy with new bonds
to the king, though in Sicily itself this group was in fact less
prominent. In 1282 Charles, with a papal legate, tried to
bring the rebels back under his control by a promise that
abuses by royal officers would be severely punished. This
was nothing but an admission that such abuses occurred. He
had reconvened the Hohenstaufen assembly of justiciars at
the beginning of his reign, to check complaints and abuses;
but by 1282 many officials had been replaced and he himself
was preoccupied with projects in northern Italy and the east.
Under pressure of those war needs he expected to realise the
income he felt was his due; as it was, he was indebted to
foreign bankers. And his financial problems may just as easily
have been accentuated by venal bureaucrats as alleviated by
over-diligent ones.
Transformations in the social structure of Sicily help ex-
plain why the Vespers occurred.:lo Large numbers of north
Italian settlers had trickled into Sicily to fill the vacuum left
by the disappearance of the Muslim population, uprooted
after its own lengthy rebellion against Frederick II; in the
towns, merchant communities developed who consisted of
Tuscans, Genoese and other Sicilianised northerners, and
there were significant settlements of Latins in the interior,
often benefiting from handsome privileges of tax exemption;
for example, the 'Lombard' inhabitants of Randazzo, on the
slopes of Etna, had been granted special rights of exemp-
tion as far back as Norman times.^31 Charles of Anjou did not
simply rule the descendants of the Arab and Greek subjects
- The latest study of the social structure of Sicily in this period is the
impressive book of L. Catalioto, Terre, baroni e cittii in Sicilia nell'etd di
Carlo I d'Angio (Messina, 1995). - David Abulafia, The End of Muslim Sicily', inJ.M. Powell, ed., Muslims
under Latin rule, I 100-1300 (Princeton, NJ, 1990), pp. 105-33; David
Abulafia, The Crown and the economy under Roger II and his
successors', Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 37 (1983), ll-13; H. Brese, 'La
formazione del popolo siciliano', Tre millenni di storia linguistica della
Sicilia. Atti del Convegno della Societd italiana de Glottologia (Pisa, 1985),
pp. 243-65; repr. in H. Brese, Politique et societe en Sicile, XIIe-XVe
siecles (Aldershot, 1990).