All events · The Medieval World

Deportation of Sicily's Muslims to Lucera and the Colony's Destruction

1223–1300 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Displacement

Displaced

20,000

Estimates of the Lucera colony's size cluster between about 15,000 and 20,000, with some scholars suggesting that up to 60,000 people were moved in total across the two decades of transfers. The figures come from Hohenstaufen and Angevin fiscal and administrative records — tax assessments, grain levies and the accounts of the 1300 dispersal — and from chronicles; they are administrative estimates rather than a census, and modern historians treat the higher totals with caution.

Share of the population affected

80%

of the Muslim community of Sicily deported to Lucera, which is also the only population for this event that was ever counted, 1223

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What happened

After suppressing a long Muslim revolt in the mountains of western Sicily, Frederick II from 1223 deported the island's remaining Muslim population to Lucera in Apulia on the mainland, where they were settled as a royal colony — taxed directly by the crown, permitted their mosques and law, and supplying the emperor with archers and craftsmen. The transfer removed Islam from Sicily after three and a half centuries and created an isolated Muslim community of perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand in the middle of Latin Christendom. The colony survived Frederick's death and the Angevin conquest until 1300, when Charles II, under pressure from the papacy and needing money, had it destroyed: the inhabitants were seized, enslaved and sold, some killed, the mosques demolished, and the town repopulated with Christians. Julie Taylor's study of the community is the standard modern account. The episode is unusually well documented for a medieval forced transfer because the crown taxed the colony directly and left records.

Parties

Emperor Frederick II deported the remaining Muslim population of western Sicily to a segregated colony at Lucera in Apulia; in 1300 the Angevin king Charles II destroyed the colony and enslaved or dispersed its inhabitants

Disputed

The size of the colony is uncertain, with estimates ranging from about 15,000 to as many as 60,000 moved in total, and the number killed as opposed to enslaved in the 1300 destruction is not recoverable.

The denominator

No independent count survives of the Muslims remaining in western Sicily when Frederick II began the deportations in 1223. Estimates of the Lucera colony itself range from about 15,000-20,000, the figure preferred by Abulafia, to as many as 60,000 in older literature; when Charles II destroyed the colony in 1300 its inhabitants were sold into slavery or dispersed. Sicily's Muslim population had been several hundred thousand under Islamic rule and had already collapsed through conversion, emigration and the rebellions of the 1190s-1220s.

Baseline and affected figure are the same estimate seen from two sides, so the ratio is near 100 per cent by construction; what it records is that the community was moved and then destroyed in its entirety.

Where the baseline comes from

Muslim settlement of Lucera — Wikipediaopen-edited
History of Islam in southern Italy — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

No reliable toll. The 1300 destruction of Lucera involved killings as well as mass enslavement and sale, but the Angevin records document the sale of captives rather than a count of the dead.

Documented forms of violence

Forced LabourDestruction of PropertyCultural Destruction

The enslavement and sale of the colony's inhabitants and the demolition of its mosques in 1300 are documented in Angevin administrative records and analysed in Julie Taylor's study of the community.