Emirate of Sicily

Sicily lay under Islamic rule from the late ninth to the late eleventh centuries, and became a prosperous commercial power of the Mediterranean, with Palermo as a great cultural and political centre of the Muslim world. The island had been a Byzantine outpost when Muslims from Ifriqiya began raiding it in 652, and under the Aghlabids a long war from 827 to 902 took the whole island, Rometta in the far north-east holding out to 965. The Fatimids replaced Aghlabid rule after 909, and from 948 the Kalbids governed as autonomous emirs under Fatimid suzerainty. Under Muslim rule Sicily grew multiconfessional and multilingual, an Arab-Byzantine culture blending Islamic Arab and Berber settlers with Latin, Greek and Jewish communities; new crops, irrigation, gardens and public works made it rich, and art and science flourished. In the early eleventh century the island broke into quarrelling dynasties, and Norman mercenaries under Roger I conquered it, founding the County of Sicily in 1071, with the last Muslim town, Noto, falling in 1091. Roger kept the island tolerant, Muslims stayed citizens and even served at court, and a Muslim majority lasted into the thirteenth century, before expulsion ended some four hundred years of Islamic Sicily.