With an advanced knowledge of irrigation and intensive farming, the Muslims created a polyculture of small farms, orchards, and gardens principally in the western and southeastern areas of the island. They cultivated a variety of new food plants and other crops in Sicily, including hard durum wheat. Beginning in the Muslim era, the market gardens of Palermo brimmed with lemons, bitter oranges, melons, apples, pomegranates, pears, peaches, grapes, quinces, mulberries, eggplant, saffron, date palms, dried figs, sugarcane, apricots, bananas, mangoes, sesame seeds, pistachios, hazelnuts, and almonds.
During this period, however, there was less emphasis on the cultivation of wine grapes than during the Greek and even Roman eras. Still, although Muslim law prohibits the drinking of wine in public, it is unlikely that the cultivation of wine grapes and the production of wine ceased in Sicily (any more than it did in Prohibition-era United States). The Muslim Sicilian poetry of the twelfth century is replete with references to wine and the pleasures of wine drinking. While such poetry is consistent with a Muslim genre that uses the image of wine metaphorically, it also reveals an intimate familiarity with an established wine culture in Sicily. In one of his odes recalling the idyllic pleasure of his youth in Sicily prior to the Norman conquest, the Muslim poet Ibn Hamdis describes in familiar detail the qualifications of a wine expert:
A youth who has studied wine until he knows
the prime of the wines, and their vintage
He counts for any kind of wine you wish
its age, and he knows the wine merchant24
In the lines of another Arabic poem, written by an anonymous poet believed to be an emir in Palermo during the period of Muslim rule, the imagery of the garden paradise is intricately woven with the recollections of a self-avowed wine lover who savors “a well-matured wine, more exquisite than youth itself.”25
Notwithstanding the nostalgic image of Sicily as a garden paradise in Muslim Sicilian poetry, internal strife among the various Muslim factions controlling the island ultimately created ripe conditions for its conquest by the Normans in the second half of the eleventh century. The first Norman ruler, Count Roger, came from northwest France and was of Viking lineage. The unique legacy of the Norman line of kings, beginning with Count Roger's son, King Roger II, was the degree to which these foreign rulers established centralized authority in Sicily and incorporated a professional class of Greek and Muslim Sicilians into their administrative, military, and court regimes. For the first and only time, an all-powerful and resident sovereign ruled the island, directly enforcing the rule of law, the payment of taxes, and the administration of justice—for baron, landowner, and peasant alike. The early Norman rulers even established almost complete control over ecclesiastical matters.
During the initial period of their rule, the Norman kings maintained the Muslim pattern of existing small farms while carving out the majority of the island as bigger landholdings for themselves and a tight group of fellow mercenaries-cum-barons. Many of the land grants that the early Norman rulers made to the new barons did not, however, convey rights of inheritance. In addition, because the Norman rulers employed a professional army and navy (using Muslim troops and expertise), they were not as dependent as their feudal counterparts in northern Europe on their baronage. As a result, the new Sicilian baronial class was politically weak. The Norman kings set and steered the economic, political, military, judicial, and cultural course of Sicily from their palace courts in Palermo. The court of Roger II and his successors was a dazzling synthesis of Latin, Greek, and Muslim traditions and influences. As under Muslim rule, Sicilian agriculture and commerce thrived under the efficient governance of the Norman kings. Small farmers continued the intensive cultivation of fruit trees and vines along with grain. The Book of Roger, written in the twelfth century by King Roger II's Muslim court geographer, al-Idrisi, describes Sicily as a garden paradise where exquisite fruit and other cultivated crops abound. It also celebrates the presence of perennial water and identifies grapevines as being well adapted to certain locations, such as Caronia on Sicily's north coast and Paternò on Mount Etna.
The wealth of the Norman kingdom of Sicily under Roger II was astounding. By one account, his revenue from the city of Palermo was greater than that of the first Norman king of England, William the Conqueror, from the entire country of England. Another account tells of the retinue of ships sailing from Sicily with King Roger II's mother, Adelaide, on her way to become the queen of Jerusalem, laden with “wheat, wine, oil, salted meats, arms, horses and, not least, an infinite amount of money.”26 Under Norman rule Palermo was esteemed as one of the great cities of the civilized world, along with Cordoba, Cairo, and Baghdad. Shipwrecked on the eastern coast of Sicily on his return from Mecca, a Muslim scholar named Ibn Jubayr chronicled his travels across the island on his way home to the royal court of Granada. He had left Spain on a pilgrimage to Mecca as penitence for having been pressured into drinking a cup of wine. His chronicles alternate condemnation of the ruling Norman infidels with praise for the richness of Sicily and its rulers. On the final leg of his voyage to the port of Trapani on Sicily's western coast to board a ship bound for Spain, Ibn Jubayr recounted how the fertility of the Sicilian soil, both tilled and sown, was unlike any he had seen before and surpassed even the choiceness of Cordoba's countryside.27 As further testament to the prosperous and vibrant culture of Norman Sicily, a Norman chronicler writing under the name Hugo Falcandus described Palermo as a luxuriant garden under the last king of pure Norman origin, William II.28 While his language is consistent with the rhetorical flourishes of a public eulogy for a royal patron, the image and detail cannot be ignored for what they reveal about Sicily's agricultural wealth under Norman rule.
In addition to its creation of magnificent palaces, churches, and parks, the period of Norman rule was exceptional for its protection of Sicily's islandwide natural resources: water, plains, woodland, and marshes. The Norman rulers also assumed responsibility for maintaining the kingdom's roads. The continued vibrancy of Sicilian agriculture during the Norman era must have been served well by the safeguarding of the public's interest in these vital resources. The common good was served not just by the Norman kings and their feudal nobles but by the boni homines ("good men") of the local countryside, who honored their civic responsibilities to defend public property (res publica).
Alas, there was trouble in paradise. By the middle of the twelfth century a growing and restive baronial class was pushing for greater political power and autonomy. Unlike the city-states of Tuscany and northern Italy, Sicily's Palermo, Messina, and Catania had no independent urban merchant class to balance the power of the landowning baronage. The synthesis of Latin, Greek, and Muslim cultures in the courts and palaces of the Norman rulers also never reflected a true integration among the cultures throughout the island. The building tensions between Christians and Muslims ultimately erupted in open violent conflict. Muslims escaped to the interior of the island or were exiled to other parts of the Mediterranean. The loss of Muslim farmers and culture fundamentally eroded the splendid quality and diversity of Sicilian agriculture. Upon the death of the last Norman Sicilian king, William II, the chronicler Hugo Falcandus grasped what was at stake for Sicily and prophetically asked what his fellow Sicilians were prepared to sacrifice to maintain their freedom and prosperity: “What plan do you believe the Sicilians will pursue? Will they believe that they must name a king and fight against the barbarians with united forces? Or rather with diffidence and a hatred of unaccustomed labor make them slaves of circumstance: