Chapter 7SICILY AND SOUTHERN ITALY.
IN AN AGE OF DISORDER
THE ISLAND KINGDOM OF SICILY IN THE
FOURTEENTH CENTURY
Both Robert the Wise and Frederick III of Sicily were deeply
pious men, willing to show favour to the Spiritual Franciscans.
It is thus a paradox that so Christian a monarch as Frederick
should have spent so much of his career as king bitterly
engaged in conflict with the papacy. Such was his respect for
the Holy See that, when excommunicate, he dutifully avoided
attending Mass, unlike his flamboyant ally Matteo Visconti of
Milan, whose Christian devotions were employed to discredit
papal accusations against himself. Indeed, one important ele-
ment of Frederick's programme of reforms after 1302 was the
restoration and rebuilding of churches and monasteries, and
the establishment of schools for the teaching of religion.^1
Frederick emerges as a pious evangelist, aware of the need
to generate recovery, and similar to his Angevin rivals in his
insistence that moral reform would generate lasting peace
and welfare. His interest in the abstruse edges of Christian
belief culminated in his patronage of the missionary mystics
Ramon Llull and Arnau de Vilanova.
Frederick became king of Sicily because he was to all
intents a Sicilian. In 1295-96 the Sicilian barons were fear-
ful of being betrayed into Angevin hands, as part of a global
peace which would assign Sardinia and Corsica to Aragon in
return for the renunciation of Sicily. Since Peter the Great's
l. C. Backman, Tlze decline and fall of medieval Sicily. Politics, religion and
economy in the rtig·n of Frednirk Ill, 1296-1337 (Cambridge, 1995).