The Muslims of Medieval Italy

Unlike, Muslim Spain, Italy’s experience with Islam and Muslims remains largely uninvestigated or merits only a few solitary references here and there in books on the Medieval World or while recounting the history of Islam in Europe. Whereas the Fall of Granada in 1492 is seen as the tragic turning- point followed by inquisitions, expulsions and sheer elimination of Muslims and Jews—until as late as the Seventeenth century—the drop scene on Muslim communities in Italy happened long before that. While Sicilian cities such as Palermo, Messina, Cafalo, Trapani and Agrigento were ethnically cleansed following the Norman conquests in the late twelfth century, it was the Muslim population of Lucera in Bari that two centuries later became the precursor of what was to happen in Granada subsequently. It was here that the remaining Muslim communities met their ‘final solution’ in 1266. The elimination of Muslims and a smaller community of Jews in southern regions especially Sicily was overshadowed by larger and lasting conflicts and even an enormity of Arabic sources including the highly respectable works by Ibn al-Athir (1097- 1146), Sicilian expatriates, contemporary correspondence and most importantly the account by the Andalusian intellectual traveller Ibn Jubayr (d. 1217) have not been investigated to the extent that a more cogent history of the Muslim past of this vital region could be reconstructed.