ABSTRACT
No thesis has yet been fully articulated nor, for that matter, has any theory become widely accepted that might account for the complex and radical transformation in the religious and linguistic base of the island from Arabic-speaking Muslim to ‘Latin’-speaking Christian. Broadly speaking, two contrasting arguments define the two extremes of possibility. First is the idea that emigration, later in the form of deportation, left the Muslim areas so de-populated that their numbers eventually fell below a critical threshold at which such a community could continue to survive. Evidence from narrative sources and demographic studies suggests that areas once inhabited by the Muslims were gradually filled by Latin settlers, a process that began during the Christian reconquest of the mid-eleventh century.1
However, unforced emigration is unlikely to have been an option open to any other than the wealthy and would hardly account for the overall demographic change. Similarly, the deportations of the Muslim rebels in the mid-thirteenth century removed only the final vestiges of the oncedominant Sicilian Muslim communities. Alongside the demographic theory is the idea that the Muslim population was significantly eroded by largescale assimilation and religious conversion. However, the relative lack of unambiguous evidence for this begs the question as to how widespread conversion was and what the levels and rates of acculturation actually were. Closely linked to both these questions of religious identity and the changing distribution of the Muslims is the role played by language and how best to trace the margins of the Arabic-speaking Muslim communities and their pivotal relations with other Arabic-speaking groups. Unlike medieval Spain, there is less evidence to hand for Sicily in many respects. Indeed, although it is tempting to draw analogies between the two, we shall repeatedly see that it might be wiser not to. In Sicily, however, the extensive registers of villeins kept by the royal chancery and private landlords provide an important and unique tool for understanding and comparing the relative social and religious compositions of such communities.2 While outlining the
general distribution and composition of Arabic-speaking communities is a relatively straightforward task, the real difficulties lie in defining the margins of such communities as these often showed the direction of the underlying social drift.
