Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and, contrary to the king, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill!
Henry VI, Part 2
“Moranu li Franchiski!” screamed the Sicilians in their peculiar dialect. “Death to the Frenchmen!”
A large, festive crowd had gathered outside the Church of the Holy Spirit, a half mile southeast of the Sicilian capital of Palermo. It was early evening of Easter Monday 1282, and the prayer service of vespers was soon to commence inside the church. An unwelcome contingent of uniformed French officials, representatives of the hated occupation forces, showed up, possibly a little tipsy on spring wine, and attempted to consort with some of the pretty, young Sicilian women in the crowd. Sicilians were a historic mixture of prehistoric peoples—called Sicani and Siculi—ancient Greeks, Orthodox Byzantines, Italian mainlanders, North African Arabs and other “Saracens,” and the Northmen (or Normans) who were originally Norwegian Vikings. But the one thing they all knew they were not was Franchiski. The Frenchmen claimed to be checking for weapons, while surreptitiously fondling female breasts. One sergeant made the mistake of petting a young bride whose outraged husband carried a knife, which was swiftly put to use. The other Frenchmen, attempting to close ranks against the crowd, found rocks raining down on them, then blades slashing into them, as the Sicilians rose in a body.
“Moranu li Franchiski!” rang out as the bells of the church proclaimed that vespers was about to begin. Their message was taken up by bells throughout Palermo, as was the cry “Moranu li Franchiski!” All Sicily rose in revolt. “By the time the furious anger at their insolence had drunk its fill of blood,” in the words of one early chronicler, “the French had given up to the Sicilians not only their ill-gotten riches but their lives.” Many thousands lay dead throughout the island, two thousand French corpses in Palermo alone.
This was no spontaneous uprising, however; it had been planned well in advance by an international consortium. King Peter III of Aragon just happened to be sailing nearby at the head of a fleet he had constructed for a crusade against Islam—or at least this is what he had told the pope when the pope expressed concern about Peter’s warlike preparations. Supposedly changing course on their way to North Africa and landing instead in Sicily, Peter’s forces were welcomed by the Sicilians, and he was brought with great dispatch to the Palermo cathedral, where he was crowned King Peter I of Sicily. In this way the Sicilians hoped to rid themselves of the cruel French despot Charles of Anjou, whom the pope had forced upon them. Peter’s wife, Constance, was a Hohenstaufen and sole legitimate heir to Frederick Barbarossa, late, great Holy Roman Emperor of the West, whose territories included not only the German-speaking lands, the Low Countries, and Spain but much of the Italian peninsula.
The popes, who had invented the notion of a Holy Roman Emperor of the West, had come to regret investing so much power in the hands of one man. They now preferred the French royals as counterweights to the Holy Roman Hohenstaufens; thus their support of Charles. What Martin IV, pope at the time and himself a Frenchman, did not know was that Spanish Peter had built his fleet with funds sent by Michael Paleologos, Roman Emperor of the East, from his capital of Constantinople. For, as Paleologos knew, there was also another fleet, sitting in the Sicilian harbor of Messina, built by Charles for the purpose of invading Constantinople. This fleet the Sicilians set afire in their island-wide rampage, dashing Charles’s bellicose intentions.
The pope, who had excellent sources of information, also knew of the existence of the fleet at Messina but had been assured by Charles that it was in aid of his crusade against Islam. Oh, all right then, said the pope, so long as you don’t intend to use it against theEastern emperor, whom I hope to lure into an ecumenical agreement, thus reuniting our divided churches. Whether reunification was to be achieved through talk (à la Pope Martin) or through conquest (à la Charles), the formal schism between East and West, little more than two centuries old, still looked healable to many, if not most, European Christians. After the Sicilian Vespers, however, there would be but one more attempt to reunite Christendom—at the Council of Florence in 1439—and by then failure was the expectable outcome.
Though the bishops of East and West found themselves in substantial agreement at Florence, the monks and the ordinary Christians of the East firmly rejected reunion. Far more conscious of nationality than they had once been (if not so well versed in theological abstractions), they felt they would be giving up too much autonomy should the proposed reunion go forward. This meant that Christianity was to exist in the world in two permanent forms, Orthodox and Catholic, and that these would remain significantly different in fairly obvious ways. Such divergence could only encourage speculation that there might be even more diversity in the future—almost as much diversity, perhaps, as was to be found among the various nation-states then forming inchoately.
As A. N. Wilson has remarked, “The long dominance of the island [of Sicily] by Charles of Anjou was over. Charles, the most powerful figure in the Mediterranean, had been on the point of invading Constantinople. Egged on by a succession of French, or Francophile, popes, he had hoped not merely to regain Byzantium for the West, but also to subjugate the Eastern Orthodox Church to the authority of the papacy. With the Sicilian Vespers, there died any possibility of a universal papacy dominating Christendom. The foundations had been laid for the phenomena that shaped modern Europe—the development of nation states and, ultimately, of Protestantism.”
The story of the Sicilian Vespers—and of the impossibility of successfully imposing French punctiliousness on Sicilian fluidity— has long claimed a hold on the European imagination. It was referred to in the fourteenth century by Boccaccio, whom we shall have the pleasure of consulting next. In the nineteenth century it helped fuel Italian nationalism to such an extent that Verdi wrote an opera about it. Perhaps most famously, it crept slyly into a sixteenth-century conversation in which the bluff King Henry IV ofFrance—who, as he said, “ruled with weapon in hand and arse in the saddle”—boasted to the Spanish ambassador of his fearsome martial capabilities. “I will breakfast in Milan, and I will dine in Rome,” roared the king ahead of a planned campaign.
“Then,” said the ambassador, smiling pleasantly, “Your Majesty will doubtless be in Sicily in time for vespers.”