Palermo

History of Sicily and Palermo

People lived in caves on Mount Pellegrino, overlooking today's Palermo, during the Paleolithic age of 35,000–9,000 BCE.

The first repeated contacts between Sicily and the wider Mediterranean occurred during the Mycenaean age of 1600–1150 BCE. Mycenaean traders from the Peloponnese regularly visited Sicily, part of a trading network that also included Rhodes and Cyprus.

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The Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200–1150 BCE affected civilizations all around the eastern Mediterranean. Mycenaean palaces and cities in Greece were either destroyed or abandoned, and their bureaucrats stopped using the Linear B script. Minoan palaces and cities on Crete were abandoned. The Egyptians, the Hittites across Anatolia, the Mesopotamians, and other civilizations were disrupted.

Phoenician settlement on Sicily began in the 10th century BCE, and a Phoenician colony was established around 750 BCE at what today is Palermo's harbor.

Greek colonies were established in the 8th through 6th centuries BCE all around the Mediterranean and Black Seas. This was "Greater Greece", Μεγάλη Ελλάδα, and it included colonies along the coasts of Sicily and the southern Italian peninsula. Palermo remained a Phoenician city.

Phoenicians had founded the city of Carthage on the North African coast in the 9th century BCE. By the mid-sixth century BCE, Carthage was the dominant power in the central and western Mediterranean. Conflicts between Carthagenians and Greeks continued over the following centuries. That led to the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage in 264–241 BCE, and to Rome's eventual control of Sicily.

The Western Roman Empire began to disintegrate in the 4th century CE. The Vandals took control of Roman North Africa in 429 CE and began raiding Sicily. Romulus Augustus, the rather nominal last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed by the barbarian general Odoacer in 476 CE. In 486 the Vandal leader Gaiseric took control of all of Sicily, and in 494 he sold it to Odoacer.

The Eastern Roman Empire, what we now call the Byzantine Empire, based at Constantinople, took control of Sicily in 535. Siracusa or Syracuse became the main city of Byzantine Sicily. Byzantine Emperor Constans II moved his imperial residence from Constantinople to Siracusa in southeastern Sicily in 662. His chamberlain assassinated him in his bath in 668. His son succeeded him as Constantine IV, residing in Constantinople.

Arabs of the Fatimid Caliphate first landed on Sicily in 827, seized Palermo in 831, and within 50 years had taken control of the entire island. Palermo became al-Madinah or "The City", known as "the city of a thousand mosques". It was the capital of an emirate and a rival to Cairo and Cordoba in splendor. The Arabs brought skilled craftsmen, both Jewish and Muslim. They greatly improved agriculture with terraced fields, irrigation, and water storage systems, allowing them to plant many new crops.

Norse adventurers had raided and then settled northern France in the 9th and 10th centuries. Their Old Norse name Norðmaðr led to the French Normans for the people and Normandy for their territory. The Normans arrived in Sicily in 1060, and by 1091 they controlled all of Sicily. They adapted to the established mix of Greek, Latin, Arab, and Jewish traditions and customs. Yes, these are the same Norse people who in 1066 landed in southern England.

By 1194 the Normans' time in Sicily was over, beginning a series of dynasties from the north — Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, Bourbons. Centuries of Spanish mis-rule led to Sicily's decline.