The War of the Sicilian Vespers
The History and Legacy of Sicily’s Rebellion Against the French in the Late 13th Century
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Narrated by:
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Colin Fluxman
About this listen
The largest island of the Mediterranean has always been a complicated place with a fraught relationship to the Italian mainland. Separated by only the narrow Strait of Messina, Sicily feels like a different country in many ways, and the differences between Sicilians and Italians are much vaster than the tiny geographical separating them might intimate. For example, the linguistic differences between the two are substantial, as Sicilian is practically its own language, rather than just a dialect. In fact, most Italians have difficulty understanding Sicilian if they can comprehend any of it, at all.
However diverse Sicily might be, it is also paradoxically considered to be an emblem of Italy itself - a paradox it shares with Naples. In fact, Frederick II was the last ruler of a fully autonomous Sicily, and his son Manfred (r. 1254 - 1258), was the final Norman ruler in Sicily. Manfred met his death heroically on the battlefield, fighting the army of Charles of Anjou after Charles was made King of Rome by the Vatican in 1266.
Charles chose Naples as the capital of his lands, and this created tensions between his people and the Sicilians, culminating with a rebellion known as the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. According to legend, the rebellion started after a French soldier harassed a Sicilian woman on Easter Sunday outside the Church of Santo Spirito.
When it started, the rebellion inaugurated a period of anarchy in Sicily, and for a time, it was unclear who would take the crown. Two warring factions, the Aragonese and the Angevins, competed for the crown for 90 years, to the detriment of all involved.
At one point, there were two different kings of Sicily, one from each side, and it was not until 1372 that peace was finally reached and the Aragonese were awarded rule of Sicily. As a result of all this geopolitical turmoil, Sicily’s status in the world was greatly diminished. Spain was on the rise, and even if Palermo received certain bureaucratic dispensations, nothing would shift the center of power back into Sicily’s orbit. In the wake of the infighting, Sicily was affected by other major geopolitical events elsewhere.
When Constantinople fell in 1453, the ascent of the Ottoman Turks meant that Sicily was constantly being threatened. Pirates and corsairs from North Africa continued to besiege the coastal towns, and the island became an important staging ground for those trying to counter the Muslims.
Thus, while much of Europe experienced a flourishing culture during the Renaissance, the 15th and 16th centuries in Sicily were completely cut off from all the cultural and technological advances, despite the fact Italy was the epicenter of everything. Moreover, thanks to Spain’s Catholic zeal, Sicily faced the worst excesses of the Counter-Reformation.
The War of the Sicilian Vespers: The History and Legacy of Sicily’s Rebellion Against the French in the Late 13th Century chronicles the revolt and the ensuing war that was fought among several European powers.
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Performance
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The Dark Ages is the story of the birth of Western civilization. It was a harrowing crucible of war, destruction, and faith. For over 100 years, Charles Oman's famous history has remained one of the finest sources for the study of this period. Covering a period of 500 years and an area stretching from Northern Germany to Egypt, this is the definitive history that will alter your conceptions of a period of history that gave birth to the civilization we live in today.
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An Excellent Production
- By Ken on 08-11-17
By: Charles Oman
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God's Shadow
- Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World
- By: Alan Mikhail
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 16 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Long neglected in world history, the Ottoman Empire was a hub of intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. Yet, despite its towering influence and centrality to the rise of our modern world, the Ottoman Empire's history has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and even suppressed in the West. Now Alan Mikhail presents a vitally needed recasting of Ottoman history, retelling the story of the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470-1520).
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Entertaining narrative, but poor scholarship
- By Yosemite on 09-15-20
By: Alan Mikhail
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The Birth of Britain
- A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume I
- By: Sir Winston Churchill
- Narrated by: Christian Rodska
- Length: 17 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The English-speaking peoples comprise perhaps the greatest number of human beings sharing a common language in the world today. These people also share a common heritage. For his four-volume work, Sir Winston Churchill took as his subject these great elements in world history. Volume 1 commences in 55BC, when Julius Caesar famously "turned his gaze upon Britain" and concludes with the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
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Birth of Britain
- By Terryl Pettengill on 02-11-07
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The History of the Ancient World
- From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome
- By: Susan Wise Bauer
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 26 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the first volume in a bold new series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history. This narrative history employs the methods of "history from beneath" - literature, epic traditions, private letters, and accounts - to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled.
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An Historic Achievement
- By Ellen S. Wilds on 04-25-14
By: Susan Wise Bauer
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Inca Apocalypse
- The Spanish Conquest and the Transformation of the Andean World
- By: R. Alan Covey
- Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann
- Length: 19 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Previous accounts of the fall of the Inca empire have played up the importance of the events of one violent day in November 1532 at the highland Andean town of Cajamarca. To some, the "Cajamarca miracle" - in which Francisco Pizarro and a small contingent of Spaniards captured an Inca who led an army numbering in the tens of thousands - demonstrated the intervention of divine providence. To others, the outcome was simply the result of European technological and immunological superiority.
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A Comparison
- By Than on 12-28-20
By: R. Alan Covey
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The Ottomans
- Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs
- By: Marc David Baer
- Narrated by: Jamie Parker
- Length: 17 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic Asian antithesis of the Christian European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans’ multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe’s heart. Indeed, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans’ remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, historian Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic, and Byzantine heritage.
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Great except for pronunt of Turkish names
- By Anonymous User on 11-04-22
By: Marc David Baer
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The Anglo-Saxons
- A History of the Beginnings of England: 400 - 1066
- By: Marc Morris
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Sixteen hundred years ago Britain left the Roman Empire and swiftly fell into ruin. Grand cities and luxurious villas were deserted and left to crumble, and civil society collapsed into chaos. Into this violent and unstable world came foreign invaders from across the sea, and established themselves as its new masters. The Anglo-Saxons traces the turbulent history of these people across the next six centuries. It explains how their earliest rulers fought relentlessly against each other for glory and supremacy, and then were almost destroyed by the onslaught of the vikings.
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"Pretty Good"
- By Stephen on 05-30-21
By: Marc Morris
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The Most Powerful Women in the Middle Ages
- Queens, Saints, and Viking Slayers, From Empress Theodora to Elizabeth of Tudor
- By: Melissa Rank, Michael Rank
- Narrated by: Anne Day-Jones
- Length: 3 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The idea of a powerful woman in the Middle Ages seems like an oxymoron. Females in this time are imagined to be damsels in distress, trapped in a high tower, and waiting for knights to rescue them, all while wearing traffic-cones for a hat. After rescue, their lives improved little. Their career choices were to be either docile queens, housewives, or be burned at the stake for witchcraft. But what if this image of medieval women is a complete fiction? It turns out that it is. Powerful female rulers fill the Middle Ages.
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Wonderfully empowering
- By Teresa Carter on 01-29-23
By: Melissa Rank, and others
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The Roman Empire
- The Amazing History of a Great Empire That Has Fallen
- By: Kelly Mass, Summaries from History
- Narrated by: Miriam Webster
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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The Roman Empire has been in the spotlight for ages. It has been studied, research, and taught in schools across the world. Inventions, words, vocabulary, and philosophy have been derived from those important transition in human history. The Romans were ruthless in some ways yet civilized in others. They were a peculiar people who did things differently than those they called barbarians. Their warfare, their habits, their vision of the future...these all made their empire what it became. What is that makes us so obsessed with this particular time period?
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This is great
- By Edwin on 09-26-19
By: Kelly Mass, and others
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Powers and Thrones
- A New History of the Middle Ages
- By: Dan Jones
- Narrated by: Dan Jones
- Length: 24 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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When the once-mighty city of Rome was sacked by barbarians in 410 and lay in ruins, it signaled the end of an era—and the beginning of a thousand years of profound transformation. In a gripping narrative bursting with big names—from St Augustine and Attila the Hun to the Prophet Muhammad and Eleanor of Aquitaine—Dan Jones charges through the history of the Middle Ages. Powers and Thrones takes listeners on a journey through an emerging Europe, the great capitals of late Antiquity, as well as the influential cities of the Islamic West.
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Hard to take a break from it!
- By Mariano's Music on 12-09-21
By: Dan Jones
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The Birth of Classical Europe
- A History from Troy to Augustine
- By: Simon Price, Peter Thonemann
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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To an extraordinary extent we continue to live in the shadow of the classical world. At every level, from languages to calendars to political systems, we are the descendants of a “classical Europe,” using frames of reference created by ancient Mediterranean cultures. As this consistently fresh and surprising new audio book makes clear, however, this was no less true for the inhabitants of those classical civilizations themselves, whose myths, history, and buildings were an elaborate engagement with an already old and revered past - one filled with great leaders and writers....
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Excellent overview of the Classical World
- By David I. Williams on 01-12-14
By: Simon Price, and others
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Vanished Kingdoms
- The Rise and Fall of States and Nations
- By: Norman Davies
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 30 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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There is something profoundly romantic about lost civilizations. Davies peers through the cracks in the mainstream accounts of modern-day states to dazzle us with extraordinary stories of barely remembered pasts, and of the traces they left behind. This is Norman Davies at his best: sweeping narrative history packed with unexpected insights. Vanished Kingdoms will appeal to all fans of unconventional and thought-provoking history, from listeners of Niall Ferguson to Jared Diamond.
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needs a good editor.
- By Ryan Anderson on 09-25-21
By: Norman Davies