The Norman Sicily Project

¹Quantifying the evidence and harnessing the power in technology to render it visually opens up new ways of understanding Sicily’s landscape. Take, for example, this stacked bar graph that represents the breakdown of Norman Sicily’s monastic houses by gender and order.²

With occasional exceptions, we have a good sense of the religious houses’ identities. Female communities on the island were divided evenly between Basilian and Benedictine foundations with six houses each.³ The one known exception was the Cistercian house at Prizzi, at first a male foundation but later converted to a community of nuns.⁴ Male communities were more diverse. In addition to Basilian foundations, which comprised about 41% (64 of 158) of the male houses we have identified, there were also houses of Benedictines (56), Augustinian Canons (22), Cistercians (7), Cluniacs (3), Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (2), Knights of the Hospital of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem (1), Premonstratensian Canons (1) and Knights Templar (1). If we compare this to Burgundy, a region to which some of the Norman rulers had ties, a different picture emerges. By 1200, Benedictines comprised some 65% of the monastic population as a whole (compared to Sicily’s +/- 32%) whereas approximately 25% were canons (though just 13% in Sicily); 10% belonged to other orders or were hermits, a percentage much smaller than Sicily’s.⁵ The dramatic difference is largely attributable to the strong presence of Basilian houses, which not only mirrored the large number of Greek Christians on the island, but also reflected Norman public policy; the Benedictine monasteries, on the other hand, many of which were founded during the early years of Norman rule, were largely expressions of “spontaneous piety.”⁶ One wonders, though, given the broader campaign of Latinization that occurred across the island during the Norman period, whether the rulers preferred to leave the establishment of Latin houses to individuals to avoid the outward appearance of divided loyalties. By establishing four important Benedictine abbeys (Lipari-Patti, Catania, St. John of the Hermits and Monreale), to which, as White observed, the majority of the other houses were either colonies or subordinates, the Normans could allow donors to endow Benedictine houses with relatively little concern while they themselves supported the Basilians and cultivated goodwill among their Greek Christian subjects.⁷

It is noteworthy that some orders had little influence.⁸ For example, Cluniacs and Cistercians combined comprised just 6% of Sicily’s houses. It is very likely that Roger II did not want to contend with the personalities and agendas of politically powerful abbots like Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux as he worked to consolidate political power and build a kingdom in southern Italy and Sicily.⁹ Welcoming significant numbers of monks from these orders could have destabilized an already complex political landscape. Similarly, Hospitallers and Templars were poorly represented, a fact that may be explained, as Loud has noted, by the humiliation of Roger’s mother in 1118 as well as by his reluctance to raise the ire of the Muslims both in his kingdom and in North Africa.¹⁰ There does appear to have been a number of Augustinian communities, perhaps as many as 22 over the course of the Norman period, but compared to their presence in other areas of Europe as well as in the Crusader states, their influence was relatively minor.¹¹ As for the Premonstratensian Canons, please see the blog post on the significance of St. George of Gratteri, the only Premonstratensian foundation in Norman Sicily.

Distribution by gender is also instructive. Of the 170 houses whose genders are known with a relative degree of certainty, just 12 (7%) seem to have been populated by nuns. The remaining 158 houses (93%) were inhabited by monks. Even if we take into account that the gender of the inhabitants of 35 houses (17% of the total number of houses recorded) is unknown, it is clear that from a monastic perspective, Sicily appears to have been very much a man’s world. For more on why this may have been, please see the blog post dedicated to the question of gender.

Clearly, the monastic makeup of Sicily was quite different from much of western Europe. The strong presence of Basilian monks and nuns is perhaps the most obvious evidence of this and can be largely explained by Sicily’s specific historical and geographical contexts. But it would be interesting to compare this data to other areas in twelfth-century Europe, particularly to the French lands to which the Normans had ties. It is possible to compare Sicily’s monastic data to England, largely thanks to Alison Binns’ (1989) Dedications of Monastic Houses in England and Wales, 1066-1216, whose catalog is based on male communities and excludes Cistercian foundations.¹² Nicholas Orme has conveniently extracted the English data from her study, recording the spiritual patrons in the kingdom who had been honored by five or more dedications, a process that created a subset of 514 houses established between 1086-1216.¹³ If Binns’ parameters are applied to the Sicilian data – male, non-Cistercian monasteries whose dedications are known to us - 153 houses remain.¹⁴ This results in the removal of seven Cisterican houses and one monastery whose subject of dedication is unknown. And when we extract from them the names of patrons who had five or more dedications, that number becomes 70.¹⁵

There were 101 subjects of dedication among the English houses during these years, with 24 of them honored by five or more foundations, revealing a relatively high concentration of dedications to approximately one quarter of the spiritual patrons identified.¹⁶ A similar trend is not found in the Sicilian data. Yet, England did not experience a dramatic rupture in its religious culture nor did it contend with such widely disparate cultural forces. As a result, the Sicilian sample offers a different picture, one that suggests a more diverse spiritual landscape. Just four of the island’s spiritual patrons (+/- 14% of the total) had five or more monasteries dedicated to them.¹⁷ In other words, the vast majority of Sicily’s monasteries shared a spiritual patron with four or fewer houses. Whereas its profile of religious orders was relatively small when compared to other areas of Europe at the time, the number of spiritual patrons reflects the diversity of the island’s population. Like England, some Sicilian foundations bore the names of local saints, such as Agatha, Elias, Lucy, and Venera.¹⁸ But the subjects of its monastic dedications also betray a strong Greek Christian presence on the island; Sts. Barbarus, Basil, Constantine, Cosmas, Mercurius, Nicander, Onuphrius, Pantaleon, Philip of Thrace and Theodore are some examples. It is noteworthy, though, that all four of the saints who were particularly popular in Sicily were also venerated enthusiastically in England. The celebrity of Sts. Peter, George, Michael the Archangel, Nicholas and Philip extended across Europe as did the devotion to the Virgin Mary who, in both lands, was the most popular spiritual patron by far.¹⁹ A look at the 64 male Basilian foundations so actively supported by the Norman rulers reveals that the number of repeat spiritual patrons was even more restricted with just two saints – Nicholas and the Virgin Mary – having more than three dedications to their names.²⁰

As Paul Oldfield has noted, with the exception of St. Agatha, Sicily’s Greek monks, Latin clerics and Norman rulers only revived in a limited way the cults of the Sicilian saints that pre-date the Muslim conquest of the island.²¹ And although efforts were made to revive Agatha’s cult during the Norman period, her name seems to appear in just one monastic dedication. Although a few new saints appeared during the Norman period, their influence was limited.²² In addition, although the Normans in Sicily favored some cross-cultural saints, cultivating devotion to a specific holy person, a campaign that would have constructed a coherent cultural narrative, would have been ill-advised in a kingdom with such a diverse population.²³ In short, an examination of Siculo-Norman monasteries and their dedications reveals that although the Normans maintained control over the monastic orders – the “hard power” that could have strong political ramifications on the island – they were less focused on streamlining the softer power that was represented by the cults of the saints. Whereas it was in their interest to direct the former – presumably an attractive opportunity to exert real control over one of the kingdom’s many intricate dynamics – the power of sanctity was left diffuse, a religious and cultural force largely allowed to express the varied concerns and interests of the subjects of an up-and-coming state located at a crossroads of civilization. On the whole, cultivating spiritual patrons was not a concern to the Norman rulers of Sicily, even if managing external political influences that could be exerted through monastic channels was.²⁴