Chapter Four
The Palermese Clique, 1000-1046
During the half century after the death of Agellid the Magnificent, Sicilian power over the Italian peninsula was consolidated whilst a clique of nobles, courtiers and merchants in Palermo amassed tremendous power at the expense of the monarchy.
The first Emperor was succeeded in 1000 by his son Agellid II. The new monarchy very quickly fell ill and died in 1002 after a bout of measles. He was followed by one of his dozen sons, although many of those sons were illegitimate, the eight year old Z’effun – facilitating the first of many regency councils that dominated the period. The council was filled with rapacious individuals happy to use their position to enrich themselves and jockey for power, yet it retained a shared ideology driving it to seek to protect the Magnificent’s conquests.
This determination proved necessary as in the ensuing decade the Empire was threatened by an Aquitainian assault in North Africa and the incursions of a large, Papal backed, Frisian army in Lombardy. In North Africa the Aquitainians initially overwhelmed Muslim defences – bringing Tunis under siege before eventually being forced to withdraw after Sicilian reinforcements arrived from Italy. In the North, the Frisians sacked Milan before meeting their opponents at the Battle of Parma, where they were decisively beaten and forced back over the Alps.
When Z’effun reached his maturity at the end of the decade he did not rise to a position nearly as powerful as his grandfather had occupied. Instead he had to contend with the mitigating power of a council that had grown use to governing, a body he could not hope to challenge in light of the crown’s extensive debts built up during its tenth century conquests.
Nonetheless, the young Z’effun was eager to prove himself, and in 1011 declared war on the Byantine Empire. With the Sicilian armies marshalled by the Emperor’s veteran uncle Annaber, the Emir of Salerno, the war proceeded more quickly and successfully than could have been expected. The Roman fortresses in Calabria were overrun within months of the outbreak of fighting, while Sicilian naval strength limited the Greeks’ ability to send reinforcements across the sea to Italy. With little hope of victory, the Byzantines agreed to cede Calabria in 1013, while an Italian foothold at Bari.
The war with the Byzantines was followed by an extended period of peace. As Palermo’s economy boomed in line with its growing importance as the Central Mediterranean’s most important trading hub, the Emperor began to gradually ease its debts. At the same time, Sicilian power spread further across North Africa as the Emirates of Tripoli and Cyrenaica accepted Palermo’s supremacy.
The early eleventh century also saw the beginnings of the Islamisation of Italy itself. Following the conquest of Southern Italy, much of the area had been settled by a Berber nobility hailing from Sicily and North Africa, yet virtually no attempts were made to proselytise among the native Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic inhabitants of the area. In the period after Agellid I’s death this changes dramatically, with the launch of concerted efforts at conversion, admittedly with limited success. At the same time, the nobility of Northern Italy, Agellid the Magnificent had allowed to remain in place and retain its Catholic religion, was placed under pressure to adopt Islam by the central government. While many were happy to take advantage of the opportunities and favour conversion offered, a notable minority held firm to the Catholic faith of their ancestors and subjects.
These religious cleavages would become very important in the 1020s as a result of the actions of Z’effun’s older half-brother – Agellid. As he grew into his role as Emperor, Z’effun had grown paranoid that his more ambitious siblings might be conspiring against him, and began to take action against them one by one. Seeing this threat, Agellid fled – travelling initially to Spain before crossing into Christendom and the court of the King of France. There he recruited a substantial, largely Frankish, army and in 1022 crossed the Alps into Italy. Promising an end to religious persecution, tolerance for Christians and even offering to restore the Pope to Rome, albeit under Sicilian suzerainty, Agellid become the unlikely rallying point for a Christian revolt in the North. In the course of two years he ravaged Imperial power in the area – capturing Milan, Genoa, Florence, Pisa and a host of other cities as he defeated loyalist forces through much of the area.
In 1024, Agellid marched on Rome. There Z’effun met him at the head of a powerful force which represented the Emperor’s last barrier between his brother and control over the entire peninsula. The result was a triumph for the loyalists. Agellid was killed, his army scattered, and the rebellion brought to heel. Yet the Emperor was not satisfied merely with the successful defence of his realm, he desired to strike at the Christian powers who had funded and supported his brother’s invasion. Z’effun therefore continued his march North, breaking the last rebel holdouts, and then proceeding into the rich, Lotharingian ruled, territory of Provence. In response to this a coalition of Frankish states united in opposition to the Sicilians. Z’effun plunged into the territory, winning a series of battle before the King of Aquitaine arrived on the scene – defeated the Sicilian army and captured the Emperor. The war might have ended there, but instead the Aquitainians released Z’effun in exchange for an eyewatering ransom.
The payment of this sum brought the Sicilian crown to the brink of bankruptcy. With the war with the Franks still ongoing, even with the Sicilians retreating into Liguria, the crown found it impossible to continue to support the war effort. After going without payment for several months, a company of North African mercenaries rebelled and began to pillage the North-Western Italian countryside. It was during a battle to supress these mercenaries that Z’effun was killed in 1026. With his young son, Agellid III, becoming Emperor, the council at court once again assumed power – and rallied behind the war effort.
Struggling under a weight of debt, with their army in a shambolic state and the Christians beginning to pursue them into Italy, the regents found themselves in a dire situation. However, they were able to find salvation in diplomacy – by restoring the old alliance with Spain. With tens of thousands of Spanish troops approaching their frontiers, the Aquitainians withdrew from the Provencal front – tipping the balance back in favour of the Sicilians. Over the course of the next half decade, Muslim forces in the East and West of Occitania would make steady progress against their Christian enemies – eventually resulting in a peace treaty in 1032 that saw the Sicilian Empire annex Provence. Three years later, approaching his seventeenth birthday, Agellid III died after falling from the tower of his palace in Palermo. His death resulted in the continuation of the regency’s absolute control over Imperial government, with Agellid’s younger brother Massiva being named Emperor.
Aside from the conquest of Istria by the Emir of Friuli in 1042, Massiva’s short reign, which was ended by his death in 1043 while still a teenager, was dominated by a civil war that raged from shortly after his ascension in 1035 until 1040. This war was the result of a power grab by insular elites – with factions based on the island of Sicily itself forcing the Emirs of Tunis, Apulia and Capua from the council. Faced with their alienation from power, the Arab nobility of North Africa and Southern Italy rose in rebellion. Although Sicily itself could not sustain a sufficiently large army to overcome its opponents, Palermo was able to win the support of the ethnically Italian nobility of the North with promises of decentralisation – providing the manpower that eventually overcame the revolt.
Massiva was followed by the vanishingly quick reign of his uncle, Gildun who had been a leading member of governing council for decades. Gildun, possessing lands in Calabria, resented the Roman’s continued presence on the Italian peninsula and in 1044 stormed Bari. The following year the Byzantines retook the city and met the Sicilians in an indecisive battle near Taranto – during which the Emperor was slain. Gildun’s eldest son, the bookist Hispanophile Abdul-Hakam, then proceeded to the Imperial throne. Following the recruitment of a large army of mercenaries the Byzantines were overcome and in 1046 the entirety of the Italian peninsula came under Sicilian overlordship for the first time. Yet, while the Empire was strong, the Tegamid dynasty had been gravely weakened by nearly half a century without a credible leader, as it became increasingly reliant upon historic memories of Agellid the Magnificent and his predecessors for its authority.