The French in the Kingdom of Sicily 1266–1305 (review)

Dunbabin, an eminent authority on medieval France and the career of Charles of Anjou, has written a more thought-provoking book than this meager title suggests. Her topic is not the Angevin conquest of southern Italy in the 1260s but rather what the temporary French visitors to their new Regno (southern Italy and Sicily) learned there and brought back to northern France. The vast majority of travelers (elites often by sea and armies by land) to the south were warriors, many of whom settled there or died in the wars. The few returning to Capetian France and Flanders were changed men with new knowledge gained in the Regno about how to rule more effectively. Hence, this book is partly about the transformative experience of war, as well as the effects that an imperialist project had on both the colonizers and the colonized.

Being well aware that medieval France encountered a complex web of influences gained from wars and crusading in England, Languedoc, and the eastern Mediterranean, Dunbabin has to disentangle the particular effects of the Regno’s traditions from these other possible sources of experience. French nobles who understood lordship saw in the south one of the most legally sophisticated and centralized monarchies in Europe. Hence, it is not surprising that Dunbabin finds the origins of some late Capetian administrative and fiscal innovations in the lessons that returning veterans drew from the Norman and Hohenstaufen governance of Naples and Palermo. Because the years 1266 and 1305 mark a period of intense French engagement in Italian affairs, it makes sense for Dunbabin to focus on this period.

This book becomes interdisciplinary and innovative in Dunbabin’s attempt to look beyond bureaucracies and taxes to illuminate possible southern influences on developments in the north. One interesting argument concerns how and why the university of Paris during the late thirteenth century became more like the one in Naples. Medicine and science were interests in places like Salerno and Naples; teachers and students came to expect more than arts and theology from Parisian masters. The kings of France also learned from their southern cousins to take a stronger interest in the faculty and to view it as a source for opinions to justify their policies toward the church in Rome and the Jews, among other issues. Dunbabin’s ability to locate Thomas Aquinas in his southern Italian milieu is particularly refreshing, as is her view that many of his ideas were shaped long before his Paris sojourn. He is the prime but not the only example of southerners whose path north was smoothed by the new links between Paris, where he became famous, and Naples, where he returned home to teach, and to die.

Other fruitful interdisciplinary themes in this book concern how the knighting of lawyers and the style of sumptuary legislation, southern traditions, came north. Another possible theme is northern Italy, through which so many French men, and a few women, passed, and where other cultural influences and fashions awaited the open-minded.