4 - A Gift to the Normans: the Military Legacy of Sicilian Islam

Summary

It is well known that the Norman rulers of Sicily and southern Italy employed and made very effective use of Muslim troops from Sicily. Certain aspects of their recruitment, organisation, skills, and motivation are also well understood. But the only aspect of their tactics, and by extension their equipment, which has so far been studied in detail concerns archery. However, these Sicilian “Saracens” served as other types of infantry and as light cavalry, as well as providing the Normans with highly regarded military engineers. It has also been suggested that the Muslims of Sicily and southern Italy played a part in the spread of early medieval Islamic military technology to western Europe. As is well known, even after the forcible transfer of Muslims from Sicily to the Italian mainland by the Normans’ successors, this community continued to play a significant role for many decades (fig. 37a–b).

This chapter hopes to explain quite what the Muslims of Sicily had to offer their eleventh-century Norman conquerors in terms of military technology, military organisation, and tactics. Where and how these aspects of Siculo-Muslim military tradition evolved are also important questions, because Islamic Sicily – though prosperous and culturally flourishing – remained a relatively small frontier province of the early medieval Islamic world. How much of what the Normans inherited was a local development, how much from the neighbouring Maghrib (North Africa), and how much from most distant regions of the Islamic world – to east and west? This remains an unanswered question. What is clear is that the military traditions of Islamic Sicily were rooted in the first two centuries of Islamic history in North Africa, the Middle Eastern heartlands, and even Iran.

The Muslim army which invaded Sicily in 827 AD is said to have consisted of ten thousand infantrymen and seven hundred cavalry in about one hundred ships. Its leadership was largely Arab, and Arabs formed the elite of this force. However, the majority were Berbers, mainly from the Huwwarah tribe. Other soldiers included political exiles from Al-Andalus in the West and Khurasanis from the East. Berbers continued to play the major military role throughout what proved to be a hard-fought and prolonged campaign; however, chroniclers also emphasised the role of scholars and religious figures who accompanied the first invading army.