This significant new work focuses on the formation and disintegration of Arab-Muslim rule and society in Sicily and south Italy between 800 and 1300 which led to the creation of an enduring Muslim-Christian frontier during the age of the Crusades. It examines the long and short-term impact of Islamic authority and culture on these regions and how they later fell into the hands of European rulers, explaining how the Norman conquest of Sicily came to import radically different dynamics to the central Mediterranean. The change of ruling elites left a majority Muslim population under Christian...

This volume complements the one published in 2013 as Norman Expansion: Connections, Continuities and Contrasts, and provides a European-wide treatment of the Norman diaspora and polities they established between the 10th and 12th centuries in France, the British Isles, southern Italy and the Levant. While providing strong links with the first volume, it offers at the same time a distinctive interpretative framework and new material. The Introduction lays out the nature of the Norman Edge project and its aims, and the approaches taken in the previous volume. It assesses the current state of...

The social and linguistic history of medieval Sicily is both intriguing and complex. Before the Muslim invasion of 827, the islanders spoke dialects of either Greek or Latin or both. On the arrival of the Normans around 1060 Arabic was the dominant language, but by 1250 Sicily was an almost exclusively Christian island, with Romance dialects in evidence everywhere. Of particular importance to the development of Sicily was the formative period of Norman rule (1061 1194), when most of the key transitions from an Arabic-speaking Muslim island to a 'Latin'-speaking Christian one were made. This...