SICILIAN VESPERS
. On Easter 1282, when the French sergeant Drouet molested a young Sicilian woman in
Palermo just before Vespers, her husband stabbed him. The incident provoked a bloody
rebellion throughout the island against the monarchy of Charles I of Anjou, in which
Sicilians slaughtered some 4,000 Frenchmen and went so far as to rip the fetuses believed
to have been fathered by Frenchmen from the wombs of women who had consorted with
the hated foreigners.
The result of this uprising was to remove the island of Sicily from the control of the
house of Anjou and to precipitate many years of war, during which the French monarchy
and the Angevin king at Naples were unable to dislodge from Sicily the royal house of
Aragon, whose king, Peter III, the Sicilians invited to rule them.
Historians have attributed the uprising to various foreign conspiracies: one involving
John of Procida, a Sicilian exile, and Peter of Aragon, whose wife had a claim to Sicily;
or one involving Michael Paleologus, the Byzantine emperor whose lands Charles of
Anjou had hoped to invade. Whatever the truth of these theories, such conspiracies alone
could not have produced so spontaneous a mass uprising. The real cause was desperation
over extraordinarily high taxation, which produced revenues greater than those of
England, France, and the papacy combined. In the end, the Sicilian Vespers permanently
dismembered the most precocious medieval monarchy and undermined the crusading
movement in western Christendom. After twenty years of war, during which the last
foothold of the crusaders in the Holy Land was lost, the old Sicilian kingdom remained in
two much weakened parts, and the leadership of the pope, an Angevin supporter, was
badly compromised.
William A.Percy Jr.
[See also: ANJOU, HOUSES OF; CHARLES I]
Geneakopolos, Deno J. Emperor Michael Paleologus and the West, 1258–1282: A Study in
Byzantine-Latin Relations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.
Percy, William A. “The Earliest Revolution Against the “Modern State”: Direct Taxation in
Medieval Sicily and the Vespers.” Italian Quarterly 22.84(1981):69–83.
.”The Indirect Taxes of the Medieval Kingdom of Sicily.” Italian Quarterly 22.85(1981):73–85.
——.“A Reappraisal of the Sicilian Vespers and the Role of Sicily in European History.” Italian
Quarterly 22.86(1981): 77–96.
Runciman, Steven. The Sicilian Vespers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.
SIDRAC, ROMAN DE
. The work of an anonymous compiler of the 13th century, Sidrac is a wisdom book in
French prose, probably the imitation of an oriental model, in the form of alternating
questions and answers. Although its prologue gives the date 1243, it was more likely
composed late in the century, perhaps at Lyon, by an author who had probably visited the
Latin kingdoms in the Middle East. Numerous manuscripts and three principal redactions
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1664