Content area
Full text
Abstract:
This article examines the nature of relations between Muslims and Christians in southern Italy during the thirteenth century. In response to uprisings in Sicily, the emperor Frederick II transferred an estimated 20,000 Muslims to the city of Lucera in Apulia. Outside the Iberian Peninsula, Lucera came to have the largest Muslim population of any city in western Europe. Although the formation of the colony led to competition for resources between its inhabitants and the local Christian population, the members of the two religious communities often traded and collaborated. Social mobility was possible for the Lucerine Muslims, particularly through military service. Like Christians and Jews living in the dar al-Islam, the Muslims of Lucera had a protected status, and they paid a tax called the jizya. They remained free to practice their religion. The heavy taxes paid by the Muslim colony at Lucera during its almost eighty-year existence made it a valuable asset to the Hohenstaufen and Angevin crowns. Nevertheless, the settlement was dismantled in 1300 on the order of the Angevin king, Charles II, who gave a religious justification. The colony's history provides insight into the complex relations between Muslims and Christians in medieval Mediterranean Europe.
During the thirteenth century, the city of Lucera in southern Italy had the largest Muslim population of any city in western Europe outside the Iberian Peninsula. For almost eighty years, some 20,000 Muslims lived in and around the Lucerine settlement established by Emperor Frederick II in the early 1220s. The history of the Muslim community at Lucera provides valuable insight into Muslim-Christian relations in medieval Europe and the efforts of religious minorities to preserve their identities.
Conquered during the ninth century by Arabs and Berbers from north Africa, Sicily was ruled by Muslims until the Norman invasion of the eleventh century. After the arrival of the Normans, the Muslim population became increasingly economically and politically marginalized. The mountains of central and western Sicily became places of refuge for Muslims who periodically fled there to escape violence or to avoid the toils of servitude. Many went to Iato and Entella, which gave them a strategic advantage against Norman, and later Hohenstaufen, forces because of the rocky terrain and elevation.1 The refusal by several Muslim communities to submit to...