Sicilian Vespers (1282): The Revolt Against Charles of Anjou

The Sicilian Vespers was an uprising against French rule that broke out in Palermo on Easter Monday, 30 March 1282, and quickly spread across Sicily. Within weeks the officials and soldiers of King Charles I of Anjou had been killed or driven from the island. The Sicilians then turned to King Peter III of Aragon, opening a twenty-year war that split the old Kingdom of Sicily in two and reshaped the politics of the Mediterranean.

Background: from the Hohenstaufen to Anjou

The Kingdom of Sicily, founded by the Normans in 1130, included both the island of Sicily and southern Italy. In the thirteenth century it passed to the German Hohenstaufen dynasty, most famously the Emperor Frederick II. The popes, who claimed overlordship of the kingdom and feared Hohenstaufen power on both sides of the Papal States, were determined to remove the family.

After Frederick’s death in 1250 the popes searched for a rival candidate, and in 1263 they offered the crown to Charles of Anjou, younger brother of King Louis IX of France, who had fought on Louis’s crusade in Egypt. Charles invaded and defeated and killed Frederick’s son Manfred at the Battle of Benevento on 26 February 1266. In 1268 he defeated the last Hohenstaufen claimant, the sixteen-year-old Conradin, at Tagliacozzo and had him beheaded in Naples.

Charles was an able but demanding ruler. He moved the centre of his government to Naples, filled important posts with French and Provençal officials and raised heavy taxes to pay for his ambitions. Above all he planned to conquer the Byzantine Empire, whose ruler Michael VIII Palaiologos had recovered Constantinople from the Latins in 1261. By early 1282 a great fleet was gathering at Messina for the expedition.

Causes of the revolt

Sicilians had many grievances. Taxes and forced contributions fell heavily on the island, royal officials were accused of abuses, and the island had lost its former importance now that the court sat in Naples. Many Sicilians remained loyal to the memory of the Hohenstaufen.

Charles’s enemies abroad also had reasons to encourage trouble. Peter III of Aragon was married to Constance, daughter of Manfred, and regarded himself as the heir of the Hohenstaufen claim. Michael VIII had every reason to stop Charles’s invasion. Later tradition gave a central role to John of Procida, a former physician of Frederick II living in exile in Aragon, who was said to have travelled secretly between Aragon, Constantinople and Sicily organising a conspiracy. Historians accept that contacts and probably Byzantine money existed, but the outbreak in Palermo itself appears to have been spontaneous.

What happened

On Easter Monday, 30 March 1282, crowds gathered for the evening service of Vespers at the Church of the Holy Spirit just outside Palermo. According to the chroniclers, a French soldier, named in some accounts as Drouet, insulted a young married woman. Her husband or others stabbed him, and the crowd turned on the other French soldiers present.

The violence spread into the city overnight. Mobs searched for French people, including women and children and friars, and killed them. A later tradition says that suspects were made to pronounce the word “ciciri” (chickpeas), which French speakers found hard to say. An estimated 2,000 French died in Palermo.

Palermo proclaimed itself a free commune and appealed to the pope for protection, but Pope Martin IV, a Frenchman and an ally of Charles, refused. Other towns joined the revolt, and within weeks most of the island was in rebel hands. The towns briefly formed a league of free communes, sometimes called the Communitas Siciliae, and sought to govern themselves under the protection of the Church. When the pope rejected them, they had to look elsewhere for a protector.

On 28 April Messina, which had been better treated by the French than Palermo, also rose and burned the ships of Charles’s invasion fleet in its harbour. The loss of the fleet ended any prospect of an attack on Constantinople that year.

The War of the Sicilian Vespers

Charles crossed to Sicily and besieged Messina, but the city held out. Meanwhile Peter III, who had an army in North Africa, landed at Trapani on 30 August 1282 and was accepted as King of Sicily in Palermo in early September. Charles withdrew to the mainland.

The conflict became a long international war. Martin IV excommunicated Peter, declared Aragon forfeit and proclaimed a crusade against it. The French invasion of Aragon in 1285 failed, and King Philip III of France died during the retreat. At sea, the Aragonese admiral Roger of Lauria won a series of victories, capturing Charles’s son, Charles of Salerno, near Naples in 1284. Charles I died in January 1285, and Peter III in November of the same year.

The war continued under their successors until the Peace of Caltabellotta in 1302. Peter’s son Frederick III kept the island as king, while the Angevins held the mainland, which kept the name Kingdom of Sicily and was usually called the Kingdom of Naples.

Key people

• Charles I of Anjou (1226/1227–1285): King of Sicily from 1266, brother of Louis IX of France.
• Peter III of Aragon (c. 1240–1285): King of Aragon, who became King of Sicily after the revolt.
• Constance of Sicily (c. 1249–1302): Manfred’s daughter and Peter’s queen, the heir of the Hohenstaufen claim.
• John of Procida (c. 1210–1298): Exiled Sicilian statesman, later a leading minister of the Aragonese rulers.
• Roger of Lauria (c. 1245–1305): Admiral whose naval victories secured Sicily for Aragon.

Consequences and legacy

The Vespers ended Charles of Anjou’s plans to conquer Constantinople, giving the Byzantine Empire a reprieve. It brought the Crown of Aragon into Italian affairs, beginning a Spanish presence in southern Italy that lasted for centuries. The division between the island and mainland kingdoms lasted, with interruptions, until the creation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1816.

Dante, writing a generation later, referred to the event in the Paradiso of his Divine Comedy, blaming the “bad lordship” of the Angevins for driving Palermo to rise with cries of “Death! Death!”. The passage shows how widely the episode was remembered in Italy.

The revolt also became a national symbol. In nineteenth-century Italy, during the struggle for unification, it was celebrated as a rising against foreign oppression. Francesco Hayez painted it several times, and Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Les vêpres siciliennes (1855) brought it to European stages.

Myths and facts

Myth: the word mafia comes from a slogan used in 1282. Claims that MAFIA stands for a phrase such as “Death to France, Italy yearns” are modern inventions. The word is not recorded until the nineteenth century.

Myth: the revolt was entirely planned in advance. The conspiracy story became famous in later chronicles, but most historians think the Palermo rising itself began spontaneously, even if foreign powers were ready to exploit it.

Timeline

• 26 February 1266: Charles of Anjou defeats Manfred at Benevento.
• 29 October 1268: Conradin is executed in Naples.
• 30 March 1282: The Vespers revolt begins in Palermo.
• 28 April 1282: Messina rises and burns Charles’s fleet.
• 30 August 1282: Peter III of Aragon lands at Trapani.
• June 1284: Roger of Lauria captures Charles of Salerno in the Bay of Naples.
• 7 January 1285: Charles I of Anjou dies.
• 31 August 1302: Peace of Caltabellotta ends the war.

Why it matters

The Sicilian Vespers showed that a local uprising could upset the plans of great powers. It destroyed Charles of Anjou’s Mediterranean empire, saved Byzantium from invasion, divided southern Italy for more than five centuries and brought Aragon, and later Spain, into the heart of Italian politics.