their longed-for new home in Italy, Aeneas
. . . shares
the wine that had been stowed by kind Acestes
in casks along the shores of Sicily:
the wine that, like a hero, the Sicilian
had given to the Trojans when they left.20
Aeneas “soothes [the] melancholy hearts” of his men with the wine gifted by the heroic Sicilian king.21 Unlike in the Odyssey, where it is the Greek hero who offers ambrosial wine to the brutish Sicilian Cyclops, in the Aeneid it is the gracious Sicilian king who gives the precious gift of wine and solace to the Trojan hero. Virgil, who was writing seven centuries after Homer, would have been well aware of the influence of Greek culture and viticulture in Sicily. The founding legend of Rome, however, envisioned a Sicily whose culture was built by its mythological ancestors, the last surviving Trojan kings and princes, not by the Greeks. In reality, Sicily—apart from tourist attractions like Mount Etna and the ancient ruins of Syracuse and Agrigento—did not have a high profile in the official annals of the Roman era. Its utility was based principally on the quality and reliability of its production of summer wheat, a commodity. In purely mythological terms, however, Sicily and Sicilian wine played a seminal role in the epic narrative of Roman history as told in Virgil's Aeneid.
MUSLIMS AND NORMANS BEAR FRUIT
After the fall of the Roman Empire, first Vandals and then Goths, two different Germanic tribes, overran Sicily. Beginning in the sixth century A.D. the emperors from Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), the capital city of the Eastern Christian Empire, took control of Sicily. Then, in the first quarter of the ninth century, a sizable army of Arabs, Berbers from North Africa, and Spanish Muslims began to invade Sicily. As for previous conquerors, Sicily's strategic position in the Mediterranean and its lush fertility were powerful draws for the Muslim invaders. It would take approximately seventy-five years for the Muslims (referred to by medieval chroniclers as Saracens) to complete their conquest of the island and to supplant Sicily's Greek culture with a Muslim one (except in the northeastern part of the island known as Val Demone, which remained predominantly Greek).
The period of Muslim control lasted almost two hundred years (878–1061) and ushered in a golden age for Sicilian agriculture. Based on the system of Islamic fiscal administration in the Muslim strongholds of Libya and Tunisia, the Muslims in Sicily imposed a fixed-rate annual land tax (called the qānūn or kharāj) that landowners had to pay regardless of their crop yield.22 This incentivized the productive use of cultivatable land. (By contrast, with certain limited exceptions, the baronial class in Sicily following the decline of the Normans would jealously resist any taxation based on their agricultural landholdings until the middle of the nineteenth century, even when their foreign sovereigns urged them to undertake such tax reform.) The Muslim rulers used a portion of the revenue from land taxes to make land grants of small farms to soldiers, creating a broad base of free landholders. The Muslim laws of inheritance led to the further fragmentation of farms among families over generations, thus providing an additional incentive for the efficient and intensive cultivation of land by the heirs of ever-smaller parcels. These smaller landholdings, while not supplanting the latifundia established in the Roman era, were concentrated in hamlets around the island (particularly around the cities) and provided peasant farmers with the opportunity to own and work their own land. The Muslims also provided exemptions from the land tax to certain classes of disadvantaged landowners—such as widows and the blind—as well as young married couples and immigrants for a period of time, as a direct incentive to “establish their new household and their new lands.”23
With an advanced knowledge of irrigation and intensive farming, the Muslims created a polyculture of small farms, orchards, and gardens principally in the western and southeastern areas of the island. They cultivated a variety of new food plants and other crops in Sicily, including hard durum wheat. Beginning in the Muslim era, the market gardens of Palermo brimmed with lemons, bitter oranges, melons, apples, pomegranates, pears, peaches, grapes, quinces, mulberries, eggplant, saffron, date palms, dried figs, sugarcane, apricots, bananas, mangoes, sesame seeds, pistachios, hazelnuts, and almonds.
During this period, however, there was less emphasis on the cultivation of wine grapes than during the Greek and even Roman eras. Still, although Muslim law prohibits the drinking of wine in public, it is unlikely that the cultivation of wine grapes and the production of wine ceased in Sicily (any more than it did in Prohibition-era United States). The Muslim Sicilian poetry of the twelfth century is replete with references to wine and the pleasures of wine drinking. While such poetry is consistent with a Muslim genre that uses the image of wine metaphorically, it also reveals an intimate familiarity with an established wine culture in Sicily. In one of his odes recalling the idyllic pleasure of his youth in Sicily prior to the Norman conquest, the Muslim poet Ibn Hamdis describes in familiar detail the qualifications of a wine expert:
A youth who has studied wine until he knows
the prime of the wines, and their vintage
He counts for any kind of wine you wish
its age, and he knows the wine merchant24
In the lines of another Arabic poem, written by an anonymous poet believed to be an emir in Palermo during the period of Muslim rule, the imagery of the garden paradise is intricately woven with the recollections of a self-avowed wine lover who savors “a well-matured wine, more exquisite than youth itself.”25
Notwithstanding the nostalgic image of Sicily as a garden paradise in Muslim Sicilian poetry, internal strife among the various Muslim factions controlling the island ultimately created ripe conditions for its conquest by the Normans in the second half of the eleventh century. The first Norman ruler, Count Roger, came from northwest France and was of Viking lineage. The unique legacy of the Norman line of kings, beginning with Count Roger's son, King Roger II, was the degree to which these foreign rulers established centralized authority in Sicily and incorporated a professional class of Greek and Muslim Sicilians into their administrative, military, and court regimes. For the first and only time, an all-powerful and resident sovereign ruled the island, directly enforcing the rule of law, the payment of taxes, and the administration of justice—for baron, landowner, and peasant alike. The early Norman rulers even established almost complete control over ecclesiastical matters.
During the initial period of their rule, the Norman kings maintained the Muslim pattern of existing small farms while carving out the majority of the island as bigger landholdings for themselves and a tight group of fellow mercenaries-cum-barons. Many of the land grants that the early Norman rulers made to the new barons did not, however, convey rights of inheritance. In addition, because the Norman rulers employed a professional army and navy (using Muslim troops and expertise), they were not as dependent as their feudal counterparts in northern Europe on their baronage. As a result, the new Sicilian baronial class was politically weak. The Norman kings set and steered the economic, political, military, judicial, and cultural course of Sicily from their palace courts in Palermo. The court of Roger II and his successors was a dazzling synthesis of Latin, Greek, and Muslim traditions and influences. As under Muslim rule, Sicilian agriculture and commerce thrived under the efficient governance of the Norman kings. Small farmers continued the intensive cultivation of fruit trees and vines along with grain. The Book of Roger, written in the twelfth century by King Roger II's Muslim court geographer, al-Idrisi, describes Sicily as a garden paradise where exquisite fruit and other cultivated crops abound. It also celebrates the presence of perennial water and identifies grapevines as being well adapted to certain locations, such as Caronia on Sicily's north coast and Paternò on Mount Etna.
The wealth of the
