A Dominican History of Muslim Sicily: Revisiting the Epistola Fratris Conradi

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ABSTRACT Extreme document loss has ensured that the history of Muslim rule in Sicily can only be written by reference to a limited body of primary sources. However, the Epistola Fratris Conradi, a little-known fourteenth-century text from Sicily, has been overlooked since it was first published by Giovanni Battista Grossi in 1654. The Epistola is remarkable for the way in which it gives a brief history of Muslim rule in Sicily for the decades around the year 1027. In the eighteenth century, this narrative was dismissed, but as this article argues such long-standing scholarly neglect is unwarranted. Not only does the Epistola challenge previous assumptions about the transmission and interpretation of knowledge from the Muslim period, but it also offers new insights into Sicily’s internal dynamics, its connections with other Mediterranean lands, and the historiographical construction of a Sicilian Heimat between the medieval and early-modern period.