This would tragically remain Sicily's unanswered challenge. The Norman kings were succeeded by a line of German (Swabian) kings, who inherited the mantle of Norman rule through Henry VI's marriage to Constance, the daughter of King Roger II. Although the succession of these German kings, culminating with King Frederick II in the first half of the thirteenth century, would in many ways extend the prosperity enjoyed by Sicily under their Norman predecessors, Sicily following their reign would never again be an independent or self-sufficient state. It would once again, as under Roman rule, become a granary of continental European empires. In the end, both distant kings and local barons would exploit Sicily's cherished fertility.
WINE-DARK AGES
The last king in the Swabian line died in the middle of the thirteenth century, and during the next five centuries Sicily became an increasingly impoverished and backward corner of western Europe. The island was treated as geopolitical chattel by the French, Spanish, Piedmontese, Austrians, and Bourbons before becoming unified with the Italian mainland in the middle of the nineteenth century. Instead of a heart-shaped apple or pomegranate, Sicily would have been more accurately depicted in a map during this period as a soccer ball kicked around by the power players of continental Europe. The easy historical narrative dwells on this external reality and hardship. And while Sicily's prolonged subjugation to foreign powers undoubtedly was a root cause of its people's poverty and ignorance, this was not the only cause. As the Norman kingdom disintegrated, the noble class in Sicily grew in size and wealth. Beginning with the first waves of Norman and German mercenaries who ventured to Sicily to fight for and support their new sovereigns and who were awarded with land grants and noble titles, the island's baronage consisted largely of the second (and third and fourth) sons of continental Europe, who came to Sicily to make their fortunes and buy their stripes. This was neither an indigenous upper class nor a noble class with shared values and a common purpose. In contrast with the Florentine Republic (a Tuscan city-state dating from the early twelfth century), which began to emerge from the Middle Ages by the end of the thirteenth century, Sicily declined into its own “dark ages” at that time. The Renaissance never flowered in Sicily. And while vines were widely planted and wine was continuously made for local (and even foreign) consumption by Sicilians during the following centuries, the science, art, and business of viticulture and vinification languished in Sicily. If a true culture of wine represents the most cultivated expression of agriculture, then it can be fairly stated that the five centuries following the fall of the last Swabian kings were Sicily's “wine-dark ages” in terms of its agricultural evolution.30
With certain notable exceptions, the Sicilian barons fought to preserve their rights and privileges as feudal lords over their ever-expanding lands, including the powers of taxation and justice, without honoring their historical duties of military service or protection of the public good on behalf of their sovereign. The Sicilian baronage succeeded in preserving the benefits while burying the responsibilities of feudalism. This was a perverted form of feudalism, with deep roots and a rotten core. The foreign sovereigns of Sicily, for their part, were prepared to give the Sicilian barons almost complete local control over their feudal lands in exchange for their subservience. Owning property in Palermo exempted nobles from the taxation of their latifundia in the countryside. Although the Sicilian nobles controlled only one of the three houses in the Parliament based in Palermo, they almost fully controlled the apportionment and collection of taxes to be paid to their foreign rulers. Rather than assuming the payment of taxes based on their vast landholdings, the nobles pushed taxation down to the level of the peasants who worked their lands. Beginning in the sixteenth century, a regressive tax called the macinato was implemented, taxing the milling of grain by tenant farmers. The large landowning barons compelled their tenant farmers to pay multiple additional taxes—for the protection of the baron's property on which they toiled, the right to press olives and grapes in the baron's press, the right to hunt on the baron's land, the right to use the baron's poultry yard, and even the right to attend Mass in the baron's private church. As late as the end of the eighteenth century, some baronial landowners compelled their tenant farmers to pay such taxes by forcing them to grind their grain at the barons’ mills and to crush their olives and grapes in the barons’ presses.31 A baron exercising his ancient rights as a feudal lord could even impose a marriage tax as a condition of granting permission for his tenant farmers’ daughters to marry. In effect, these latifondisti created a private system of taxation to squeeze (in Italian, sfruttare) as much as possible from their tenant farmers.
Sicily's polyculture from the Muslim and Norman eras devolved over the succeeding centuries largely into a monoculture of grain: hard durum wheat. Barons extended their power and prestige by acquiring greater tracts of lands. They used the revenue from their holdings not to improve the quality of agriculture on their lands but rather to acquire more lands and to establish new town settlements under their sole legal, fiscal, and judicial jurisdiction. Such wealth also funded the opulent urban lifestyles to which this noble class had become deeply attached. The nobles commonly became absentee landlords who shunned the active management of their lands and in many cases were ignorant of the boundaries of these lands.
In stark contrast with the Norman era, when there was a strong central authority based in Palermo and the unwavering rule of law islandwide, in the five centuries from the end of the thirteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, there was not one set of laws or one ruler to enforce them in Sicily. The island had one set of laws and courts for clergymen and different legal systems and forums for nobles, merchants, and peasants. The debts and taxes of nobles remained unpaid at the same time that the same nobles hired brigands and gangs to enforce (with the emphasis on force) the subjugation of their sharecropper tenants to the “law” of their lands. As the nobles expanded their landholdings, they hired former field workers and local strongmen to aggressively manage their lands in a form of tenancy called gabella. The gabella usually involved a three-to-six-year lease on the whole estate and required the manager, known as the gabelloto, to pay his rent up front. The gabelloti in turn became the tyrannical enforcers of their overlords’ lands, collecting rents and taxes and meting out “justice” to the peasant sharecroppers. The sharecroppers were subject to short-term leases, which gave them no security of tenure on the land and thus no incentive to invest in capital- or labor-intensive arboriculture such as vines or olive, nut, or fruit trees. Short-term leases also resulted in severe overcropping and the destruction of precious woodland to create more pasturage and farmland. The sharecropper farmers (and itinerant day laborers) had only the most primitive tools and often had to travel hours each day to work the land. In the end, the short-term interests of the nobles and their gabelloti led to severe long-term problems of soil erosion, landslides, and the disappearance of rivers and streams. The export market for Sicily's durable hard wheat was also dwindling, given its high costs of production and the emergence of ships that could more quickly transport northern Europe's less-durable summer wheat to market.
Given the difficulty of collecting taxes from the nobles, Sicily's foreign rulers resorted to other revenue-raising measures. They sold all manner of noble titles and privileges. In the seventeenth century alone, the Spanish king granted 102 new princedoms in Sicily.32 The competition in the baronial class for social rank and prestige was astounding, even by the standards of the foreign sovereigns and their emissaries.33 The Sicilian nobles, by and large, were not educated or even literate. They poured their agricultural revenue into ornate palaces and grandiose lifestyles in Palermo, Messina, and Catania. Many spent themselves into poverty and became borrowers from their gabelloti underlords. The gabelloti, as the new so-called buon signori ("good men") or galantuomini ("honorable men") of the countryside, then aspired to noble titles and palaces themselves. Unlike the boni homines of the Norman era, they—and their noble bosses—were unconcerned with the res publica. In marked contrast with the power of the urban mercantile class in the Tuscan and northern Italian city-states, Sicily's cities had no robust intellectual, merchant, or artisan class to check the power of the bulging noble class. These urban classes were dependent on the nobles and largely servile to their unilateral interests, not the public good. By one account, there was not one bridge built or fixed in all of Sicily for a two-hundred-year period.34 With the island's deep valleys and steep mountains, the lack of a proper road