Los árabes en el Sur de Italia. Asentamientos y legado cultural musulmán en la Italia medioeval

Abstract

During the Early Middle Ages, the Mediterranean basin was the subject of numerous Arab incursions, some of which prepared the ground for true territorial conquests, although of different form and duration depending on the areas. The Arabs and other Islamized populations settled permanently in Spain and Sicily, but they also conquered and founded cities and camps in almost all the southern regions of

Italy, on the French Mediterranean coast and even in Liguria and Piedmont for more or less long periods, even going so far as to plunder the Venetian and Croatian coasts.

This study focuses on the Arab presence in southern Italy, highlighting the differences between what happened in Sicily, where a true Arab civilization developed, and the rest of southern Italy, where the Arabs settled in a less stable and more intermittently, nevertheless leaving some traces of its presence in the geography, architecture and language of those regions.

Next I reconstructed the main events and modalities of Arab penetration in Italy, showing how the Arabs also established solid and lasting commercial relations and strategic alliances on the peninsula. After describing the cultural and political apogee reached in Sicily during the period of the Malkite governors, I showed how the divisions between the Arabs and other Muslim populations favored the arrival in Sicily of the Normans, who conquered the island and established there the capital of their nascent  kingdom .

Next, I analyzed the main contributions of Arab culture in the literary and artistic fields both during Arab domination and in the Norman and Swabian periods. Specifically, one of the main contributions of the Islamic conquest was the arrival in Europe of the texts of great Greek authors through translations into Arabic.

Thus, I pointed out how the philosophy and innovations brought by the Arabs to Europe, often also the result of their encounters in Persia and India, influenced European thought, enriching the medieval cultural panorama and providing the tools and texts after the beginning. of Humanism and the Renaissanc.