Abstract
ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on the cities of the twelfth-century Kingdom of Sicily continues to nuance our understanding of urban life under the umbrella of a new monarchy. Collectively, these studies demonstrate that this new monarchy, centralising and powerful as it was, did not fully squash its cities’ independence, and that this was not even its aim. This picture has been aided by recent studies that interpret urban identity and agency in a more holistic and polycentric framework, incorporating both its political and economic situations and its socio-cultural, religious, ceremonial and communicative contexts. Consequently, recognition of a vibrant “public arena” within the cities of the medieval world now extends to those in the twelfth-century Kingdom of Sicily. The present article supports and further expands this re-evaluation of the kingdom’s cities through a microhistory. It takes one episode of unrest in one city which offers an unusually close (for the Kingdom of Sicily at least) snapshot of urban dynamics. It interprets this moment via approaches grounded in recent scholarship on urban public politics that foreground the “political turn” in rebellion, and which view such moments of unrest and collective action as a normal part of a continual dialogue within a polycentric political landscape.
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