History Summarized: Sicily

despite the best attempts of literally every civilization in history they all fall down eventually and that's just part of the game your eyes you fall business is business now sometimes there comes a rare society so catastrophically unfortunate that even their own culture forgets that they existed and that becomes doubly tragic when it's a really cool one too because when it comes to italy we can talk a lot like a lot a lot about the northie bits with all the vembus and forms but meanwhile popular memory of the millennial spanning history of southern italy is buried under two tons of neapolitan pizza mafia movies and icky world war ii stuff in one of europe's weirdest cases of collective amnesia a reputation for poverty now dominates a region that was known for multiculturalism magnificent architecture and exquisite intellect not just another case of this place was shiny and then it wasn't the civilization of southern italy and sicily was so distinct and impressive that their later neglect is far more tragic than their actual downfall so to find out what was so special about naples and sicily and see how their name got stomped into the dust let's do some history being smack in the middle of the mediterranean sea sicily has a distinctly social history starting with greece and the ancient period the south of italy was packed full of greek cities built by settlers from the east with natural resources aplenty and lots of room to grow several colonies became richer and sometimes even more powerful than the mainland cities this the mighty athenian empire discovered the hard way the people of this western hellenic civilization were known as italyotai but the land was known as magnagracia according to their neighbors the romans this corner of the hellenic world happens to be the young roman republic's first contact with greek culture and needless to say it left a strong impression magnaikeya was rome's entryway to the greek east and as it happens the accidental flashpoint for their conflicts with carthage thus beginning the very apt visual metaphor of sicily getting kicked after rome's conquest of the mediterranean southern italy and sicily produced much of the empire's grain and were well positioned for maritime trade and greco-roman cultural exchange one metric empire later italy was byzantine briefly though they reconquered the peninsula from the goths in the mid-500s their work was undone with almost insulting swiftness by a germanic people called the lombards who poured over the alps in the decade after and made the peninsula a checkerboard carving out duchies all across the north and in pockets of the south a few centuries later the new threat came from across the sea as muslim conquerors gradually wrestled sicily from the byzantines over the course of the 800s so by the year 1000 the situation in italy goeth thusly in the north the lombard duchies became domains of the holy roman german empire and the northern byzantine territories of venice and the papal states had become independent so broadly the north was chill meanwhile southwards the byzantines are holding on to the pointy bits of the boot in calabria and depulia while the duchy of naples is technically still a byzantine state but is essentially on its own just sailing around for happy merchant fun times inland the lombard duchies of benevento salerno and capua were locked in a cycle of breaking reassembling and of course sicily belonged to the saracens the south was having quite a rough time and then the normans came as if our cast list isn't complex enough our next players come from the opposite end of europe on the north coast of france there scandinavian viking raiders had been generously bribed by the frankish king to sit down stay put and stop attacking paris these north men or nordmani became christians and learned french but maintains that characteristically scandinavian desire to sail places and fight stuff so they became extremely successful mercenaries around their home base in normandy as well as in the south of italy where given the state of things it was a good time to be in the mercenary business in the early 1000s they fought for the lombards against the byzantines and for the byzantines against the lombards now exploiting conflict for financial gain is distressingly standard practice but the normans had a knack for getting land out of the deal so in 1043 they gained a slice of apoolia and then they kept on going the normans had the best army in the south by far and over the decades they chipped away at the lombards byzantine sicilian muslims and a couple of times even the pope by 1091 duke roger the first conquered all of sicily in southern italy except for a tiny sliver on the bay of naples in 11 30 the pope crowned roger ii as king of sicily and seven years later the normans navs naples to cap the set so having consolidated the entire south for the first time in half a millennium what kind of kingdom was roger working with simply put the king and his royal court were multilingual and they needed to be the mainland was home to french-speaking normans byzantine greeks the descendants of the lombards who spoke in early form of italian while sicily was sporting a mix of muslim arabic speakers and post byzantine greck boys this multicultural atmosphere was a product of circumstance but duke roger the first took it as an advantage and ran with it so the young roger ii grew up learning from greek and muslim tutors and upon becoming king he doubled down by setting out a new legal code in 1140 which established equal rights for all subjects regardless of religion or ethnicity drawing inspiration from norman french law islamic law and byzantine law from as far back as justinian this hybrid code built a centralized norman state but specifically allowed for local customs to pick up where statewide laws left off that said this was still very much a monarchy and the king had final say on everything but it's remarkable that roger cultivated such an enthusiastically pluralistic state and against the context of the crusades actively going on in the holy land norman sicily is utterly wild a multicultural home for scholars and traders from all over to that end norman coinage was stamped in latin and arabic and became extremely popular for long-distance trade in every direction sicilian wheat and citrus exports were off the charts and all that cash paid for quite an impressive building program back home when the normans arrived southern italy's architecture mirrored its linguistic diversity with byzantine architecture here islamic architecture over there and romanesque sprinkled in between they would soon realize that it looks really good when put together and so the multiculture of norman italy took a physical form in buildings like the cappella palatina in the royal palace of palermo the structure of the church is a latin cross but nearly every surface is drenched in golden byzantine mosaics including the very byzantine dome meanwhile classical corinthian columns are capped with arabic arches which lead up to colorful islamic stalactite vaulting on the ceiling and two inscriptions written in greek latin and arabic lots of fancy words to say the place is freaking gorgeous and the synthesis of all these different styles represents the great accomplishment of norman italian society another major outlet was scholarship with simultaneous access to greek latin and arabic sources in one place plus local geniuses in every field and branch of knowledge southern italy might have been one of the single smartest places in the medieval world at the time and everyone could participate as for example many muslims worked in the royal court arab mathematicians handled finance and the cartographer muhammad al-idrisi spent 15 years working on a map of the world for king roger the tabula rogeriana was the most accurate and detailed map ever made and in addition to a circular drawing of the world aledrici made a mammoth 70 piece chart of the northern hemisphere with each subsection described at length in the whole ass encyclopedia that he made alongside the maps the book was written in arabic and in latin though everyone at the court could read both anyway and this astounding feat of scholarship pairs like a fine sicilian wine alongside the cappella palatina in illustrating what made norman italy so uniquely fascinating so here's what went wrong the royal huttville family stayed in power through the rest of the eleven hundreds doing their thing occasionally dabbling in pointless wars with the byzantines and ultimately sealing their fate with some dodgy marriages that handed the crown to the royal german hohenstaufen family in 1194 and the next century sees sicily pivot away from the mediterranean to instead face north toward mainland europe and this resulted in the steady disassembly of everything the hotvilles worked for in 1224 all muslims were expelled from sicily to apoolia but they were kicked out of the kingdom entirely at the end of the century because while the hohenstaufen family were at least half norman and had some respect for the kingdom's history the rulers who came after were not at all and thus had none in 1266 the whole south was conquered by the french count charles of anjou but 16 years later sicily was invaded by the king of aragon in the war of the sicilian vespers big mess lots of stabbing end result in 1302 is that sicily belongs to aragon while the mainland stays french for the next few centuries the histories of sicily and naples diverge in their politics style and language but it's the same basic story dominion by an outside state that didn't understand the territory and couldn't enforce a strong central authority through anything but violence power fell to local cities and aristocratic estates and while this problem dated back to the hotels they could actually keep their barons in line here not so much although the sicilians may have welcomed spanish rule as a relief from the domineering hatred of the engine and french the result of being pleasantly ignored is that they were largely neglected and as sicily entered the 1300s tethered to distant iberia rather than italy they would miss the renaissance entirely the cold war between the aragonese and the angiovens was broken when aragon conquered naples in 1443 so in 1494 the king of france marched an army down the peninsula in an attempt to retake naples and they did for a year but aragon came back fighting well and by 1504 the south was firmly spanish and the story settles down in the south in the north the fighting continued subjecting those poor defenseless scams to 65 years of invasions wild times way off topic with a few brief exceptions sicily and naples remains loosely ruled by spanish royals and locally controlled by the spanish nobles who had vast amounts of land and wealth after the discovery of the new world southern italy had stopped being particularly useful but with spain now drowning in empire money they could afford to spruce the place up a bit in 1693 eastern sicily suffered a devastating earthquake so with space to build and cash to burn the aristocracy and the church got to work on their new digs entire cities were replant from scratch and this rebuild sicily took on its own flavor of baroque architecture it's got classical elements if you squint but it's dense swooshy and very expensive looking and yet the extravagant grandeur of southern italian architecture did nothing to make life better for the impoverished masses i can't imagine why to make matters even worse for sicilians after the napoleonic wars the kingdoms of naples and sicily were combined into the kingdom of the two sicilies ruled from naples much to the disappointment of the sicilians who were now doubly second-class citizens and this was the state of the south on the eve of italian unification very long story short giuseppe garibaldi and a thousand of his buddies took advantage of a revolt in sicily to march across the island and up to naples to help annex the south for the new kingdom of italy in 1861 but the trickier task was combining the north and the south into the same country because although they were culturally close enough their economies were centuries apart north italy with the industrial revolution south italy with some farms which by this point were hopelessly out competed by american grain northerners naturally saw themselves above the inferior barbaric south and so southern italians started looking for the exit especially after europe's most destructive earthquake ever struck sicily in 1908 facing all of this and lacking in any meaningful help from the government south italy developed its own mechanism of enforcing social order the mafia taking advantage of the power vacuum left behind by the old aristocracy the mafia informally governed the south through private dealings and violence in the 1920s the mafia met their match in mussolini who thought that stomping them out would be good pr for the fascist party and it kinda worked but the alternative wasn't great so in world war ii the allies buddied up with the mafia for their march up the peninsula against the fascists and at the risk of dragging us into modern history that is where we'll cap the winding tale of sicily and southern italy they strike the unfortunate balance of being always in the middle but nearly always in the background yet for as much of sicilian history was written for them by outside powers it remains a product of its people from magna gracia to today but especially during the norman golden age while sicily was no stranger to prosperity after the hotvale kings those riches lacked meaning the normans found a region locked in conflict at a time when holy war was all the rage and forged a new type of state built on the quintessentially norman idea that culture is harmonic that it gets exponentially more beautiful when combined and transformed into something that each culture could never have been on its own and the tragedy of sicily is how no one else realized that and sure this happens to be exactly my aesthetic but how could anyone miss this with those maps and mosaic domes i swear normans are op nerf the damn normans thank you so much for watching i struggled immensely to contain this script within a reasonable time frame and even still one a bit over look i've got a soft spot for this stuff what do you expect from me big thanks to our community of supporters on patreon whose names you can see scrolling along here and i'll see you all in the next video

Channel: Overly Sarcastic Productions

Views: 293,011

Rating: 4.9734035 out of 5

Keywords: Funny, Summary, OSP, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Analysis, Literary Analysis, Myths, Legends, Classics, Literature, Stories, Storytelling, History, Mythology, Sicily, Naples, Magna Graecia, Normans, Vikings, Palermo, Palatine Chapel, Capella Palatina, Church, Christian, Muslim, Islam, Lombard, Architecture, Conquest, France, Spain, Baroque, Mafia, Italy, Italian, Historical

Id: N9aS8yy1n98

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/RealAbd121]

Normans, man!

[u/SeasOfBlood]

Oh, this is really interesting! I have always been fascinated by the little Kingdoms like Sicily. All I ever knew about them before this video was that they had a King called Roger.

Also, there's a funny story about Sicily during the Mussolini years. The dictator went there, and this enraged the Mafia. So when he tried to do one of his absurd speeches - gesticulating like an elephant trying to fornicate with itself - the mob arranged it so the only people in the crowd were the village idiot and a donkey. No idea if the story is just apocryphal or really happened, but I like to believe it's true.

[u/xttifratm_trowaway]

This video did justice to my other comment on this subreddit, but on the other hand if that 9 seconds footnote on the unification of Italy wasn't enough for you, I'm going to leave here just one example of what Garibaldi and his "buddies" did when they "liberated" Sicily; quoting from Wikipedia:

Meanwhile, the Sicilian peasants had hoped for – and did not get from Garibaldi – reforms from the restrictive conditions imposed by noble landowners. This hope had been reinforced by Garibaldi's decree of 2 June 1860 that land would be redistributed. At the little village of Bronte, Sicily in Catania province, a revolt took place, claimed by Garibaldi to have been led by local criminals and bandits, which caused the massacre of 16 people including peasants, officers, nobles (including two children) and a priest; during the revolt, the town theater and municipal archives were set on fire. On 4 August 1860, Garibaldi decided to send [Nino] Bixio to suppress the revolt and punishing the responsible. Once he arrived with two battalions of Red Shirts, Bixio besieged and successfully secured the village. Unfortunately, most of those who had caused the revolt had already run away. Bixio organised a military court which found 150 locals guilty, and sentenced 5 of them to death.[2] This episode reflected Bixio's bias about Sicily, bringing him to write to his wife: "In these regions it is not enough to kill the enemy, it is necessary to torment them, to burn them alive in a slow flame... they are regions that need to be destroyed or at least depopulated, their people sent to Africa to become civilized."[3]

"To change everything so to leave everything unchanged", because the tale of colonialism never changes...

Also casual reminder that we all hate mafia as much as everyone hates Al-Qaeda, those pigs can go spend the rest of their life in prison thank you very much.