lands and to establish new town settlements under their sole legal, fiscal, and judicial jurisdiction. Such wealth also funded the opulent urban lifestyles to which this noble class had become deeply attached. The nobles commonly became absentee landlords who shunned the active management of their lands and in many cases were ignorant of the boundaries of these lands.
In stark contrast with the Norman era, when there was a strong central authority based in Palermo and the unwavering rule of law islandwide, in the five centuries from the end of the thirteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, there was not one set of laws or one ruler to enforce them in Sicily. The island had one set of laws and courts for clergymen and different legal systems and forums for nobles, merchants, and peasants. The debts and taxes of nobles remained unpaid at the same time that the same nobles hired brigands and gangs to enforce (with the emphasis on force) the subjugation of their sharecropper tenants to the “law” of their lands. As the nobles expanded their landholdings, they hired former field workers and local strongmen to aggressively manage their lands in a form of tenancy called gabella. The gabella usually involved a three-to-six-year lease on the whole estate and required the manager, known as the gabelloto, to pay his rent up front. The gabelloti in turn became the tyrannical enforcers of their overlords’ lands, collecting rents and taxes and meting out “justice” to the peasant sharecroppers. The sharecroppers were subject to short-term leases, which gave them no security of tenure on the land and thus no incentive to invest in capital- or labor-intensive arboriculture such as vines or olive, nut, or fruit trees. Short-term leases also resulted in severe overcropping and the destruction of precious woodland to create more pasturage and farmland. The sharecropper farmers (and itinerant day laborers) had only the most primitive tools and often had to travel hours each day to work the land. In the end, the short-term interests of the nobles and their gabelloti led to severe long-term problems of soil erosion, landslides, and the disappearance of rivers and streams. The export market for Sicily's durable hard wheat was also dwindling, given its high costs of production and the emergence of ships that could more quickly transport northern Europe's less-durable summer wheat to market.
Given the difficulty of collecting taxes from the nobles, Sicily's foreign rulers resorted to other revenue-raising measures. They sold all manner of noble titles and privileges. In the seventeenth century alone, the Spanish king granted 102 new princedoms in Sicily.32 The competition in the baronial class for social rank and prestige was astounding, even by the standards of the foreign sovereigns and their emissaries.33 The Sicilian nobles, by and large, were not educated or even literate. They poured their agricultural revenue into ornate palaces and grandiose lifestyles in Palermo, Messina, and Catania. Many spent themselves into poverty and became borrowers from their gabelloti underlords. The gabelloti, as the new so-called buon signori ("good men") or galantuomini ("honorable men") of the countryside, then aspired to noble titles and palaces themselves. Unlike the boni homines of the Norman era, they—and their noble bosses—were unconcerned with the res publica. In marked contrast with the power of the urban mercantile class in the Tuscan and northern Italian city-states, Sicily's cities had no robust intellectual, merchant, or artisan class to check the power of the bulging noble class. These urban classes were dependent on the nobles and largely servile to their unilateral interests, not the public good. By one account, there was not one bridge built or fixed in all of Sicily for a two-hundred-year period.34 With the island's deep valleys and steep mountains, the lack of a proper road system further alienated the country peasantry from the urban landed nobility. The divisions within and among the classes of society (and Sicily's principal cities) ran deep. The conditions for lawlessness and violence were ripe as barons, gabelloti, merchants, and peasants all took the law into their own hands. There are historical accounts of noble families hiring armed bandits to settle scores against rival noble families in broad daylight in Palermo.35 Other accounts provide evidence that even justice was for sale, with nobles being able to buy their way out of criminal convictions and jail sentences.36 These criminal elements would grow and harden with time, and it can hardly be doubted that the seeds of the Mafia took root in this climate of lawlessness and injustice.
For one brief, shining period during the seventeenth century, there was a form of landholding that had the potential to create the conditions for an agricultural renaissance in Sicily. It was called the enfiteusi ("emphyteusis") and involved long-term leases (sometimes as long as twenty years) whereby the tenant farmer rented small parcels of land for his home and his farming. He also had the legal right to prepay the balance of the long-term lease and effectively buy this land. The word enfiteusi derives from a Greek verb that means “to plant and to graft.” In other words, this form of long-term tenancy gave the peasant farmer the opportunity to plant his crop, harvest it, and then select which plants to graft to improve his crop. This form of farming is precisely the kind that fosters the careful cultivation of grapevines and olive and fruit trees, with crop rotation and selection for quality improvement. This was the method of farming that in northern Italy and France permitted the selection of vine varieties and other crops for quality over centuries. The use of the enfiteusi was concentrated near Menfi in the Val di Mazara, Vittoria in the Val di Noto, and Mount Etna in the Val Demone. Nobles who acquired licenses from the ruling Spanish viceroys in Palermo created hundreds of new town settlements throughout the island built on this form of land tenancy in the 1600s. Sadly, this experiment in land reform did not survive into the eighteenth century beyond specific locales. Barons were desperate to revert to shorter-term tenancies that gave them greater protection against inflation. The degeneration of Sicilian agriculture throughout most of the island was ensured.
It is no coincidence, however, that in two of the areas where the enfiteusi leaseholds were most firmly rooted, Mount Etna and Vittoria, grapevines were systematically planted and wine production thrived through the end of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, the bishop of Catania, in his capacity as the count of Mascali, granted long-term leases in tracts of land on the fertile plain between the Ionian coast and the eastern slopes of Etna to bourgeois families in exchange for their payment of the tithe based on the land's annual production. These families, in turn, subleased parcels of their land to long-term tenant farmers, who transformed Mascali from an uncultivated forest into the flourishing wine zone that it became by the eighteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Mascali had more land under vines than any other area of Sicily and was a vibrant center for wine production and export to England, Naples, and Malta. Mascali's success as a wine-producing area created the conditions for the freer flow of capital and a nascent middle class to take hold. In the growing towns of Giarre and Riposto, wine merchants, barrel makers, shipbuilders, artisans, shopkeepers, lawyers, and other professionals all played vital roles in strengthening the agricultural and maritime economy of Mascali during this epoch.
From the beginning of the eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century, three succeeding foreign powers, the Piedmontese, the Austrians, and the Bourbons, recognized the need for fundamental, islandwide reform in Sicily. They had concluded that with its fertility and other natural resources, there was no objective reason for Sicily to be destitute. The island exported raw materials such as silk, cotton, sugarcane, and sulfur as commodities to overseas commercial industries, only to buy back the finished goods at a premium. Four principal reforms were required. First, the rule of law would have to be restored and enforced if Sicily ever hoped to develop the conditions for entrepreneurship and commerce. Second, land reform would be required to improve the agricultural economy in Sicily. Third, Sicily would need a public infrastructure of roads and bridges to facilitate the movement of people and goods. Fourth, the hundreds of different weights and measures used across the island would need to be made uniform. In response to the various reforms proposed by these successive foreign rulers, the Sicilian baronage actively resisted and ultimately defeated any changes that would diminish its own wealth or stature.
The Sicilian nobles were extravagant consumers of foreign luxuries such as clothing and wine. With limited exceptions, they had the affectations and pretenses of northern European nobility without the commensurate education or culture. They imported French chefs, called monzù, for their kitchens and French wine for their cellars. Rather than improve domestic sugarcane production by allowing the imposition of an import tax on refined
