Modern Palermo Cathedral (taken by the author in April 2023).

At the end of the Via Vittorio Emanuele in modern Palermo sits the twelfth century renovation of Palermo’s Latin Christian Cathedral. Following the creation of the Kingdom of Sicily in the mid-twelfth century during the reign of Roger II, the Norman kingdom’s architectural and artistic vision for the Cathedral of Palermo resembled that of Sicily’s previous Islamic and Byzantine roots. Between the construction of the Great Mosque of Palermo that once stood on the Cathedral’s site in the early Middle Ages and the modern construction of the baroque cathedral, the history of Palermo’s religious centre highlights the ways in which religious and cultural interactions shaped the city of Palermo during its time as an Emirate, a County, and a Kingdom over the span of 1,000 years. As thousands of tourists flock to Palermo each year, the long history of its place as a religious centre shines through its stained glass windows and its adjoining museum filled with art from the Byzantine, Islamic, and Latin Christian periods.

Byzantine Origins and the Fall of Palermo (831) 

Prior to its creation as a Latin Christian cathedral in the High Middle Ages, the Great Mosque of Palermo stood as the centre of Byzantine religious life as the city transitioned from a Roman stronghold to a major city in the Byzantine Empire by the ninth century. While most of the Byzantine control in Sicily was based in the eastern Sicilian city of Siracusa (Syracuse), the site of the modern cathedral hosted an Eastern Christian temple that was the centre of religious devotion in Palermo prior to 831.^[1] The early Byzantine temple was a renovation of the Roman church built soon after the Empire accepted and adopted Christianity in the fourth century. While little is known about the design and architecture of the Byzantine structure, other Byzantine inspired cathedrals and mosaics can be found around Western Sicily, most notably, the Norman-Byzantine mosaics of the Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio in Palermo and the Norman-Byzantine mosaics of Monreale Cathedral.

The Norman-Byzantine mosaics inside Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio in Palermo. This church sits a few streets away from Palermo Cathedral and is another tourist centre in the city. (Source: Photos taken by the author, April 2023).

 By the late 820s, the Aghlabids of Northern Africa expanded their authority into Southern Italy and Sardinia to take control of the central Mediterranean at the behest of a Byzantine commander in Sicily, Euphemius (d. 827). According to some contemporary sources, Euphemius’s rebellion – as it is now referred to as – began following his affair with a nun that led to a forced marriage between the two that angered local officials and the Byzantine upper class. In response to their outrage and call for his removal, Euphemius revolted against Byzantine control and invited Ziyadat Allah I of Ifriqiya (d. 838) – the Aghlabid emir of Ifriquiya in Northern Africa – to invade Sicily on his behalf.^[2] After some debate between Ziyadat Allah and his councilors over the matter of invading Sicily and the rest of the Southern Italian Peninsula, the Aghlabids entered Sicily at Mazara and marched towards Siracusa. By 830, the Ifriqiya armies reached the city of Palermo and laid siege to the city for a year until the summer of 831 when the city fell into Ifriqiya hands.

The Emirate of Sicily and the Arrival ofThe Normans, 831-c. 1091

Once the Ifriqiya dynasty established their rule in Palermo and the remainder of Western Sicily, the reconstruction of the Byzantine temple of Palermo – situated at the site of the modern cathedral – was able to begin to remake the Eastern Christian temple into the Great Mosque of Palermo. The establishment of the Great Mosque in Palermo in the ninth century was a part of a larger project of converting Byzantine Sicily’s churches into mosques across the island. By the Norman entrance into the city in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, the city of Palermo had hundreds of mosques centered around the neighborhood of Kalsa in the modern city centre and in the surrounding cities.^[3]

In decades and centuries after the Great Mosque’s construction, the rulership of the Emirate of Sicily changed hands between the Fatimid Caliphate (c. 909-948), the Kallbids (948-1044), and various other dynasties between 1044 and the arrival of the Normans in the 1060s. During this period, Sicily, like Al-Andalus, was a cultural and intellectual centre as cities like Palermo, Messina, Siracusa, and Catania became the centres of culture on the island.^[4] By the early eleventh century, the Duchy of Normandy’s ruling class had begun a campaign of invasion and conquest that brought Norman influence into territories across Europe from the British Isles to the Mediterranean. For the Normans, possessing the island of Sicily was important for a variety of factors. First, Sicily sat at the centre of Mediterranean political culture and trade due to its geographic position. As an island within striking distance of both continental Europe and North Africa, Sicily’s location made it a prime trading hub and centre for piracy, long distance trade with the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, and a centre of the medieval slave trade. For both the Normans and the Emirate of Sicily itself, controlling the island and the Southern Italian Peninsula was key to controlling the Mediterranean and its traffic. Secondly, for the Normans, controlling Sicily and ousting the Emirate was important for religious and political purposes. For the Normans to successfully justify their occupation of Sicily and other territories around Europe, the Normans needed the support of the Papacy and other church officials. In conquering an Islamic Emirate and converting it to Christian authority in Sicily and Palermo, the Normans could conquer the region with Papal and political support.^[5]

The Normans entered Sicily in 1061 via the Strait of Messina and laid siege to Messina in an effort to push southward and westward toward Palermo and Catania. Over the next three decades, Roger I and his armies made a series of successful attempts to capture cities like Palermo, Naples, Trapani, Taormina, and Siracusa as other Norman armies attempted to simultaneously take control of mainland Italy and Malta. By 1091, the Emirate of Sicily has been violently transformed into the Country of Sicily under the authority of Roger I of Normandy and other local Norman lords that fought in the invasion of the island. As the new Norman dynasty integrated itself into Sicilian life, the survival of the culture of the Emirate of Sicily was still around in the ways in which the early Norman counts – and kings by 1130 – presented themselves as court and in art. For instance – perhaps, most famously – the art that fills the Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio Church in Palermo is filled with both Byzantine and Islamic inspired art that represents Roger II (king from 1130 to 1154) and other Norman figures on mosaics.^[6] The survival of both Byzantine and Muslim art survived well into the Norman period as Jews, Muslims, and Greeks continued to make Palermo and Sicily their home well into early modernity. 

Norman mosaic of the coronation of Roger II of Sicily by Christ in the Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio Church in Palermo, Sicily. Source: Taken by the Author in April 2023.

Survival of the Great Mosque in Modern Palermo – Art and Architecture on the Baroque Cathedral

 Despite the fall of the Emirate of Sicily in the late eleventh century, the survival of the Great Mosque still can be felt by visitors to the Cathedral of Palermo today. Visitors that enter the Cathedral now will find that on two of its columns, an excerpt from the Quran survives carved into the stone. The inscription itself from the seventh Surah of the Quran is a leftover piece from the Great Mosque of Palermo from the 1070s. The column that the text is engraved on dates to the Roman basilica that sat in the spot before the arrival of the Byzantine Empire in the early Middle Ages. The survival of the Arabic text on the Roman column after centuries of control by various Christian kingdoms highlights the importance of the Emirate of Sicily and the Islamic population of Palermo long after 831.^[7]

An image of the Arabic text on the column at the entrance of Palermo Cathedral. Source for photo 1: Wikimedia Commons & Source 2 for the zoomed in image: Wikimedia Commons

As one of the few Arabic texts or pieces of art to survive on the Cathedral’s exterior, the inscription represents the legacy of the Emirate of Sicily in post-Norman Sicily considering the kingdom’s successive Hauteville, Angevin, Aragonese, and Spanish rulers did not remove the inscription. The survival of the text during the Iberian periods, in particular, raise important questions about the role of the Inquisition in Palermo and how Arabic texts, art, and architecture survived in the city as its residents were forced to convert to Latin Christianity.

Palermo – as the capital of Spanish administration in Sicily – was the centre of the Inquisition in Western Sicily with its prisons constructed at the Palazzo Chiaramonte Steri in the seventeenth century. The prison held a wide variety of prisoners from different religious backgrounds and social classes that were held on charges of “heresy.”^[8] Considering Palermo was a centre of violence and incarceration for virtually all non-Christian people in the city, the survival of this excerpt from the Quran on the pillar of Catholic Spain’s Cathedral is remarkable, as very few other pieces of art and architecture from the Emirate of Sicily survive in the city.  When viewed in this context and the long rich history of the presence of Muslim people and Arabic speakers in Palermo and the Kingdom of Sicily, the survival of this script attests to the ways in which Sicily was and is a centre of multiculturalism in and beyond premodernity.

At the entrance of the Cathedral, a Byzantine mosaic survives just above the front door. (Source: Photo taken by the Author in April 2023).

Further Reading:

Catalos, Brian A. Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050-1614. Cambridge:       Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Davis-Secord, Sarah. Where Three Worlds Met: Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean.        Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017.

Granara, William. Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean          World. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2019.

Johns, Jeremy. Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Diwan. Cambridge:    Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Mallette, Karla. The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History. Philadelphia: University   of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Metcalfe, Alex. Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily: Arabic-Speakers and the End of Islam             London: Routledge, 2014.

Nef, Annliese, ed. A Companion to Medieval Palermo: The History of a Mediterranean City      from 600 to 1500. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

[1] Lucia Arcifa, “Byzantine Sicily” in A Companion to Byzantine Italy edited by Salvatore Cosentino (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 472-495.

[2] Warren Treadgold, The Byzantine Revival, 780-842 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 249-252.

[3] Annliese Nef, “Islamic Palermo and the Dar al-Islam: Politics, Society, and the Economy (from the mid-9^th to the mid-11^th Century” in A Companion to Medieval Palermo: The History of a Mediterranean City from 600 to 1500 edited by Annliese Nef (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 39-61.

[4] William Granara, Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2019), 1-35; Sarah Davis-Second, Where Three Worlds Met: Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 111-174.

[5] Graham A. Loud, “The Papacy and the Rulers of Southern Italy, 1058-1198” in The Society of Norman Italy edited by Graham A. Loud and Alex Metcalf (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 151-184; Alex Metcalf, The Muslims of Medieval Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 88-112.

[6] To learn more about Arab-Norman art and culture in Palermo see: Kapitaikin, Lev. "“The Daughter of al-Andalus”: Interrelations between Norman Sicily and the Muslim West." Al-Masaq 25, no. 1 (2013): 113-134; Rodríguez, Luisa Fernández. "The Riḥla: a trip to Arab–Norman Palermo–A Story of A Mediterranean Koine By Way of Two Buildings." WIT Transactions on The Built Environment 159 (2016): 183-195; Alex Metcalfe, Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily: Arabic-Speakers and the End of Islam (London: Routledge, 2014); Brian A Catalos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050-1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

[7] The text itself reads: “Your Lord is God; He who created the heavens and the earth in six days, then established himself on the throne. The night overtakes the day, as it pursues it persistently; and the sun, and the moon, and the stars are subservient by His command. His is the creation, and His is the command. Blessed is God, Lord of all beings.” “Arabic Inscription of Palermo Cathedral.” Atlas Obscura. Accessed on September 25, 2023. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/arabic-inscription-of-palermo-cathedral#:~:text=The%20inscription%20is%20a%20verse,are%20subservient%20by%20His%20command.

[8] In recent years, scholars of the Inquisition in Sicily have focused on the graffiti made by prisoners of the Inquisition inside the prison cells at the Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri. To learn more, see: Anna Clara Basilicò, "Though the Agony is Eternal: Voices from Below, from Anywhere. Exhibit of Dungeon Graffiti in Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri, Palermo." Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 34, no. 1 (2023): 37-58; Giovanna Fiume, “Soundless Screams: Graffiti and Drawings in the Prisons of the Holy Office in Palermo.” Journal of Early Modern History 21, no. 3 (2017): 188–215; Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 29-73; Raffaella Sarti, ed., Stones, Castles, and Palaces to be Read: Graffiti and Wall Writings in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Journal of Early Modern Studies 9 (2020): 7-213; Garcia-Arenal, Mercedes. "A Polyphony of Voices. Trials and Graffiti of the Prisons of the Inquisition in Palermo." Quaderni storici 53, no. 1 (2018): 39-70; Mitra Kazemi, “Graffiti as Living Archive: Carceral Aesthetics at an Inquisitorial Palace in Sicily” (master’s Thesis, McGill University, 2022).