Erice history from Frederick II to the kingdom of Italy
Erice at the time of Frederick II
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was the son of emperor Henry VI of the Hohenstaufen dynasty and of Constance, heiress to the Norman kings of Sicily.
He was a great intellectual and had an huge knowledge in law, medicine, natural history and philosophy. He spoke fluent Arabic, French, German, Greek, and Latin, and established a cultured court in Sicily. Here Arabic science, Greek literature, Hebrew biblical studies, and vernacular Italian poetry were all revered.
For this reason they called Frederick “stupor mundi”, which means literally the Wonder of the World. Sicily was the most beloved part of his kingdom.
Erice Universitas terre Montis SanctiIuliani
As emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, with a privilege of 1241, Frederick II granted to the people of Erice the holding of a vast territory which included numerous localities, called hamlets. The wide territory was divided into fiefdoms and districts.
Universitas terre Montis SanctiIuliani included in addition to the current municipality, also the present towns of Valderice, Custonaci, San Vito Lo Capo, Buseto Palizzolo and part of Castellammare del Golfo.
The meeting place of the citizens was the church of San Giuliano, where the people of Erice gathered for the assembly to deal with matters of general interest to the community.
After Frederick’s death
Unfortunately, after his death, there was a power-struggle between the papacy and various pretenders to Frederick’s crown. Among them there was also the Frederick’s illegitimate son Manfred, militarily skilled.
The struggle led to the setup by the Pope of an Angevin ruler, namely Charles, in 1266. He was Duke of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX of France.
Angevins and the Sicilian Vespers
The Angevins oppressed Sicily as no previous power had because of the high taxes and the division of baronial fiefs among French aristocrats. Sicilians hated them.
The seething discontent amongst the Sicilians erupted violently in Palermo on Easter Monday 1282.
An insult by a French soldier to a Sicilian women as the bells were ringing for vespers ended with the slaughtering of the entire French garrison and Charles’s administration. Rioters killed also all the inhabitants of the island who had a French accent.
The Abate, a noble family of Trapani, were among the organizers of the revolt, along with other Sicilian nobles. In particular the brothers Palmiero and Riccardo Abate fostered the revolt in Trapani while the third brother Gerardo in Erice.
The city of Erice, which had been sacked by the Angevin garrison settled in the castle, also turned violently. At the northern gate of the city, which is still called Sword Gate, they did carnage of the French occupants.
Peter of Aragon as a favored successor
King Charles escaped. The leaders of the revolt supported Peter of Aragon, who was the husband of Constance. She was the daughter of Manfred, Frederick II’s illegitimate son, who many Sicilians had considered their rightful monarch.
Angevins managed to maintain control in the mainland part of the kingdom, which became a kingdom commonly referred to as the Kingdom of Naples, after its capital. The island became a separate kingdom under the Crown of Aragon.
The Aragonese
So in 1282 Peter of Aragon landed in Trapani and people of Palermo acclaimed him as king.
Anyway the arrival of the Aragonese meant for the island the beginning of five centuries of Spanish domination and isolation from Italy and consequently from Europe.
Sicily became more and more isolated. With the discovery of America in 1492, Spanish attentions shifted from the Mediterranean. Sicily felt under the control of corrupt nobles while the Inquisition brought religious tolerance to the end.
Luckily the ancient town of Erice became the main centre of a wide agricoltural district.
The building of Mother Church in Erice
Such a long dispute between supporters of the Angevins and the Aragonese, animated by the claims of the Angevins on Sicily, forced Frederick III of Aragon to leave Palermo for a while. The king found a kind protection within the town of Erice.
When the political events allowed the king’s return to the capital, Frederick wanted to leave a sign of gratitude to the citizens of Erice for their kind hospitality. So he decided to enlarge and decorate the chapel to the Our Lady Assumed into Heaven, which according to some scholars dates back to the time of Constantine.
To build the Royal Cathedral they probably used also material from the temple dedicated to the Venus Erycina. In fact, nine Greek crosses from the pagan temple are still on the external right wall of the present church.
The bell tower
The church was next to the quadrangular sighting tower. This was built during the Vespers wars to watch the plains at the foot of the Mount. It became a bell tower with mullioned windows at the end of the 14th century, now Frederick III Tower in honor of the king.
In 1856 the Mother Church was restored or rather rebuilt. The mosaics and frescoes disappeared, while the two rows of columns, the three naves and the four side chapels remained.
The sale of Erice
In 1407 King Alphonso, to reward the loyalty of the town to the Crown, ordered that Erice should never be sold or separated from the Crown.
But in 1555 Charles V tried to sell the town. He justified such a decision with the need of money to fortify the coasts threatened by the Barbaresque pirates. The people of Erice ransomed themselves to keep for the town the privilege of being a “Royal land”.
For that, in recognition of its loyalty, the king nominated Erice “Excelsa Civitas”, meaning a “distinguished city”.
The Inquisition in Sicily
Some of the most famous Aragonese kings were Alfonso the Magnanimous, Ferdinand the Catholic, Emperor Charles V, and Philip II. But none of them set up court on the island. Instead they sent viceroys to rule, whose allegiance was to their king and not to the Sicilians.
In 1487, King Ferdinand of Aragon introduced the Inquisition to Sicily.
The Inquisition seems also to have culturally cut off Sicily from the intellectual and cultural developments taking place in the rest of Renaissance Italy, with a few notable exceptions, such as the Gagini family of sculptors and the artist Antonello da Messina.
Spanish domination
Spanish rule meant that unlike mainland Italy, Sicily did not benefit from liberation from feudalism. Indeed, feudal bonds were strengthened as large portions of land were awarded to Spanish nobles, as reward for service to the Aragonese throne.
Nobility reinforced the feudal system forcing peasants off the land and leaving estates in the hands of Massari or Gabellotti, bailiffs charged with collection of rent. Sicily was essentially a source of funds for Spanish expansion. Discontent led to rise of brigandry supported by oppressed population who found defence from prosecution in a code of silence. This was the beginnings of the Sicilian Mafia.
The Turkish invaders
During the 15th and 16th centuries, Sicily remained under constant threat by Turkish invaders and the occasional attempt by the Angevin to reassert their authority on the island.
The island experienced relative economic prosperity in the XVII century, but exports and agricultural yields plummeted during the next century, which combined with outbreaks of plague and earthquakes led to a decline from which it never really recovered.
Erice sold again
In 1647 the Spanish governmnt sold Erice to the florentine merchant Pandolfo Malagonelli. Once again Erice ransomed itself by paying a huge amount of scudos to the Spanish Treasury. After that it deserved the title of “Fidelissima” or vey loyal.
The Bourbons
In the early 1700s, after the division of the Habsburg empire, at the beginning the House of Savoy got Sicily. But the House of Savoy swapped Sicily for Sardinia with the Austrians. However, in 1734, the young heir to the Spanish throne, Charles of Bourbon, successfully claimed the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples.
Charles and his Bourbon successors preferred Naples to Sicily and established their courts there. They did little to develop the island.
When Charles I became Charles III of Spain he left Sicily to the government of Ferdinand IV of Naples.
In 1799 Napoleon invaded Naples, forcing Ferdinand to flee to Palermo in Admiral Nelson’s flagship. The king rewarded the admiral with a large estate near mount Etna.
King Ferdinand returned to Naples in May 1800 and probably with the help of Nelson they slaughtered the French Republicans left in the city.
The expansion of handicraft in Erice
In the 18th century the population of Erice lived mainly inside the town because of the risks of piratic raids. In its lands they grew wheat, olives, grapes and other vegetables and flowers. Farming and sheep rearing were source of remarkable wealth.
This wealth allowed the building of many churches and the many activities of monastic orders. Consequently it was a great age for development of handicraft.
British Administration
Sicily officially came under British control in 1806 and remained so until the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. During that time the governor, Lord Bentinck, set about abolishing feudal privileges and introducing a two-chamber parliament based on the British model. He dreamt of Sicily becoming a permanent British protectorate with a new constitution, an idea that had great support from many influential Sicilians.
But in1815 Napoleon was defeated and the British abandoned Sicily to the Bourbons.
Kingdom of the two Sicilies
The kingdom was a union of the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples, which collectively had long been called the “Two Sicilies”.
The new kingdom marked the end of the feudal system and the constitution of a modern state with a centralized power. Erice lost its old privileges and turned a secondary chief town. Trapani became chief valley town.
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies lasted from 1815 until 1860, when the Savoyard Kingdom of Sardinia annexed it to form the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.
Rebellions against the Bourbons
Several rebellions took place on Sicily against King Ferdinand II, who reigned from 1830 to1859.
One of the main leaders of the protest was Giuseppe Coppola, an aristocrat from Erice, persecuted by the Borbonic police.
Giuseppe Coppola
Giuseppe Coppola, born in Erice, was among the most influential members of the Trapani revolutionary committee. In 1848 he and Enrico Fardella led the assault on Bourbon barracks at the land castle in Trapani.
When the revolution failed, Coppola continued to conspire against the Bourbon regime undergoing prison. Freed from prison in 1860, he reorganized the anti-Bourbon resistance. But he had to hide from Bourbon and waited for Garibaldi in the mountains near Castellammare del Golfo.
He succeeded in forming a coalition of various representatives of local liberalism. Immediately after Garibaldi’s landing in Marsala on May 11st 1860 with an army of volunteers, the coalition organized armed groups.
Coppola led 940 men to reinforce Garibaldi’s troops for the battle of Calatafimi.
These newly gathered troops convinced Garibaldi to confront the Borbonic army on the high grounds of Pianto Romano.
the Expedition of the Thousand
The end of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies came only with the Expedition of the Thousand in 1860, led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, with the support of the House of Savoy and their Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.
However exuberance ended quickly. Sicily was once again the outpost of an empire, with faraway rulers who understood little and cared less about the Sicilians and their problems of poverty. Sicilians still struggled to make a living from agriculture and fishing.
In the new unitary state Erice kept its ancient role of chief town and its territory maintened almost entirely the extension it had at the time of the Norman kings. It was one of the largest town in Sicily.
In 1948 parts of its territory became self governing towns, such as Custonaci, Buseto Palizzolo, Valderice and San Vito lo Capo. So the ancient role of Erice as administrative town declined and it became a lovely touristic place.
Source: wikipedia