The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History

When Muslim invaders conquered Sicily in the ninth century, they took control of a weakened Greek state in cultural decadence. When, two centuries later, the Normans seized control of the island, they found a Muslim state just entering its cultural prime. Rather than replace the practices and idioms of the vanquished people with their own, the Normans in Sicily adopted and adapted the Greco—Arabic culture that had developed on the island. Yet less than a hundred years later, the cultural an...