ABSTRACT
It would be difficult to deny that the ‘Norman’ kingdom of Sicily was anything but enormously fragmented and had been forcibly cobbled together from areas and peoples that were geographically, linguistically, religiously, administratively, culturally and politically diverse. Indeed, it is no surprise, given the internal and external pressures brought to bear on it, that the Norman kingdom proper lasted barely sixty-five years. However, these were rather special years in southern Italian history, and ones that had seen Palermo as arguably the most populous city in Europe, and almost certainly its richest at the height of the High Middle Ages. Yet, these general observations obscure the difficulty of how to establish general truths that might be applied accurately to communities with their own dynamics which operated across regional boundaries, and which underwent a number of significant changes over the course of the Islamic and Norman periods. Although this present work deals primarily with the Arabic-speaking Muslim communities, and has thus focussed on events and states of affairs on the island of Sicily (as opposed to the mainland), it is no less easy to articulate their general circumstances, reactions and changes that affected successive generations. This final section attempts to piece together conclusions from the previous chapters and to give a summarized account of Sicily’s fundamental transition from a largely Arabic-speaking Muslim island to an essentially ‘Latin’-speaking Christian one.
