Sicilian vespers (1282), an uprising of native Sicilians against the French and Provençals who had occupied the island of Sicily on behalf of Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily since 1266. It began outside the church of Santo Spirito in Palermo on Easter Monday, 30 March, when an enraged husband stabbed to death a French soldier who had made advances to his wife. As the bells of Santo Spirito and other churches began the call to vespers, the incident quickly escalated into a slaughter of all the French throughout the city. Anti-French feeling was sufficiently deep-seated for other towns to follow, including Corleone, Trapani, and Caltanissetta, and, after some hesitation, Messina, the administrative centre of Angevin rule. The major towns established themselves as communes and placed themselves under papal protection.
Charles at once set about crushing the revolt, backed by Pope Martin IV, who had no sympathy with the Sicilian appeals. Then, on 30 August, Peter III, king of Aragon, who had been stationed at Collo in North Africa with a large fleet, ostensibly for a crusade against Tunisia, landed at Trapani. He had come in response to a request from the Sicilians, but he had always intended to invade once an opportunity arose, as his wife, Constance, was the daughter of Manfred, the Staufen ruler of the kingdom whom Charles had defeated and killed in 1266. Peter's intervention changed the whole perspective from a localized revolt to a war which had repercussions throughout the entire Mediterranean, for Charles had been the champion chosen to rid Italy of the Staufen dynasty with which the papacy had been in intermittent conflict since the 1150s. Moreover, when the vespers occurred Charles, together with his Venetian ally, had been about to launch an attack against the schismatic Greeks. In the face of this Angevin threat, the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus had allied himself to the Aragonese.
Although the rising itself was probably spontaneous, both these powers had been trying to destabilize Angevin rule on the island since at least the late 1270s. The military and political implications were far-reaching, for the war with Aragon destroyed Charles's imperial pretensions, saved Constantinople from a new Latin attack, divided the island of Sicily from the mainland, and preoccupied the papacy to the detriment of its other priorities, most notably the crusade to the Middle East.
Bibliography
- Dunbadin, Jean, Charles I of Anjou: Power, Kingship and State Making in Thirteenth-Century Europe (London, 1998).
- Runciman, Steven, The Sicilian Vespers (Cambridge, 1958)
— Malcolm Barber
