Palermo: The Massacre, the Miracle and the Inquisition

Frederick II died in 1250, and with him died Sicily’s last homegrown dynasty. His son Conradin held the throne only briefly before the Pope handed Sicily to Charles of Anjou, the first in a long line of foreign rulers: the French, the Aragonese, the Spanish, the Austrians, the Bourbons and eventually, as part of a united Italy, Rome itself. Except for the brief creation of an autonomous Sicilian parliament in 1947, the island was never again to be ruled by a Sicilian, and Palermo was never again to be the seat of a king or queen.

That long decline runs through everything in this instalment of our history of Palermo: a night of sudden violence that ended Angevin rule within six weeks, two centuries under Spanish viceroys in which the city turned from trade towards religion, and the strange, compelling story of the hermit princess who became its patron saint.

A city ruled from Naples

Charles of Anjou was crowned King of Sicily in 1266, but he governed it at arm’s length, from Naples rather than Palermo, and from the Castel Nuovo he built there rather than from any palace on the island. Sicily was never really part of his plans. It was a stepping stone towards a far larger ambition: the overthrow of the Byzantine emperor Michael Palaiologos and the recapture of Constantinople. Palermo, by most accounts, never once saw him. The city was left in the hands of a garrison of his soldiers, and that neglect curdled quickly into resentment.

The night Palermo rang its bells

The name Sicilian Vespers has nothing to do with music, whatever Verdi’s opera of the same name might suggest. On Easter Monday 1282, a group of French soldiers joined a crowd of young Sicilians celebrating outside the church of Santo Spirito. One of them pestered a young married woman; her husband drew a knife and killed him on the spot. When the dead man’s comrades tried to avenge him, the crowd turned on them too. By the next morning, by one account, some two thousand French men and women lay dead across the city, church bells still ringing out the alarm from parish to parish.

Within six weeks the revolt had spread across the whole island and the French were gone, save for the single town of Sperlinga, which sheltered them and has never quite lived down the reputation for it. Tradition even credits the episode with Sicily’s flag: red for Palermo, yellow for Corleone, the two towns said to have led the uprising. Unable to hold the island alone, the Sicilians turned to Peter III of Aragon, who landed that August and was crowned king within days, drawing Sicily into the orbit of Aragon, and in time of Spain, for the five centuries that followed.

From trade to devotion

Under the Aragonese and the Spanish viceroys who governed in the king’s name, Palermo’s character changed. The Spanish crown sold titles to the Sicilian aristocracy, who in turn sent their sons and daughters into the Church, often with dowries of land or money attached, and for two centuries or more the Church rivalled, and at times outweighed, the viceroy himself as the city’s real power. Where the Arab and Norman centuries had made Palermo an economic powerhouse, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made it something closer to a centre of devotion, its trading wealth stalled even as a wave of ever more exuberant Baroque churches went up across the city. It’s against that backdrop that the cult of Palermo’s most beloved saint took hold.

The hermit princess

According to tradition, Rosalia Sinibaldi was born in Palermo around 1130 into a noble family said to descend from Charlemagne, and grew up at the court of the Norman king Roger II. The story goes that a nobleman named Baldovino once saved the king from a wild animal, and asked, as his reward, for Rosalia’s hand in marriage. That same evening, praying before a mirror, Rosalia saw a vision of Christ and understood her calling lay elsewhere. She cut off her hair, declined the marriage, and eventually withdrew to live as a hermit, first in a cave on her family’s estate at Santo Stefano Quisquina, and later in another on Monte Pellegrino, the wooded headland above Palermo still crossed today by a long-distance path known as Rosalia’s Way. She died there, alone, sometime in the 1160s.

The bones that ended a plague

The story might have ended there had the plague not arrived in Palermo in 1624, carried, it’s said, by a ship from Tunis. As the legend has it, a young man named Vincenzo, in despair after losing his fiancee to the disease, climbed Monte Pellegrino intending to throw himself from the cliff. A vision of Rosalia stopped him, directing him instead to the cave where she had died and telling him to carry her bones down to the city. He did; the Bishop of Palermo examined and authenticated them, and they were paraded through the streets to the sound of the Te Deum. The plague, so the story goes, retreated.

Rosalia was canonised and made patron saint of Palermo, displacing the four saints (Agata, Cristina, Ninfa and Oliva) who had held the role before her. Her relics now rest in a silver reliquary in Palermo Cathedral, one of the stops on Esplora Travel’s small-group cultural tour of Sicily, where a statue of her also stands outside the west front.

A cult that’s still very much alive

Rosalia’s feast day, the 4th of September, still draws pilgrims walking barefoot up Monte Pellegrino. Far bigger is the Festino, held every 14th and 15th of July, when her relics are paraded through the city behind an enormous carro, a decorated wagon rebuilt from scratch each year, each edition more elaborate than the last. It remains one of the largest festivals anywhere in Sicily. Even Palermo’s football club plays in pink, in Italian rosa, a nod, however loose, to the saint whose cult has long outlasted the dynasty that first gave her a city to save.

A city turned inward

Not every legacy of these centuries was so benign. In 1492, the same decree that expelled Spain’s Jewish population was extended to Sicily, ending a Jewish presence in Palermo that stretched back to Roman times. Some families left for Calabria, Naples or eventually Constantinople; others converted rather than leave, and their descendants can still be traced today in surnames such as Calì and Speranza. Palermo itself became the seat of the Sicilian Inquisition, run from the Palazzo Chiaramonte, known simply as the Steri, where suspected heretics were held in cells whose whitewashed walls still bear the prayers and pictures prisoners scratched into them while awaiting trial.

Between the loss of its Muslim population under Frederick II and its Jewish population under Spain, the cosmopolitan city we described in our first two posts had, within a few centuries, become something far more uniform. It’s a theme we’ll pick up again when this story reaches the upheavals of the nineteenth century, and a man named Garibaldi.