From the mid 11th-mid 13th centuries, Sicily was ruled by the Hauteville family from Normandy and their Hohenstaufen successors. For most of that time, the indigenous Muslim and Greek Christian inhabitants constituted the demographic majority. DocuMult investigated the coexistence of these diverse communities under their Norman and Hohenstaufen rulers (Arabic-speaking Muslims and Jews, Greek and Latin Christians): the legal foundations upon which the coexistence of the subject communities rested; the nature, extent and results of cultural, linguistic and social interactions between them; and variation of the above in time (c.1060–c.1284) and place within the island. The objective was to create tools to study and begin to write the history of the subject communities of Norman Sicily from the bottom up using documentary rather than narrative sources, illustrating as far as possible the full variety in space and time.
DocuMult made new critical editions of the administrative and legal documents for Norman Sicily in the three principal administrative languages — Arabic, Greek and Latin. These texts are being published and used to populate a database to which further data from the non-documentary sources will be added. These data are now being used to generate a series of powerful research tools that will revolutionise the future study of the history of Norman Sicily. A series of summative studies are in preparation document, analyse and discuss different aspects of coexistence and popular multiculturalism in Norman Sicily and set the case of Sicily in the wider Mediterranean context.
DocuMult is important in three ways. First, we are beginning both to write a new history of Norman Sicily and to provide scholars, students and the reading public with a series of fundamental research tools. First, new editions of the documents themselves which have, until now, been available only in their original languages, Arabic (fig.1) Judaeo-Arabic (fig.2) Greek (fig.3) and Latin (fig.4) in a wide variety of books and journals. Now they are being published for the first time on open access in accurate, up-to-date editions in the original languages with English and Italian translations, and historical and textual commentaries. In addition, new analytical research tools will provide a resource for the history of Sicily, universally accessible online to academics, teachers, students and the general public.
Second, DocuMult has added to the primary sources available for Norman Sicily by publishing previously unedited documents for the first time, such as the hundreds of Greek documents from Messina in the Archivo Ducal de Medinaceli (Toledo). DocuMult is also discovering and publishing documents that were unknown before the start of the project, including a group of Arabic documents from the periods of Kalbid and Norman rule now preserved in the Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi (Istanbul). The corpus of primary documentary sources available for the study of Norman Sicily is now far greater than it was at its beginning.
Third, a great deal of nonsense is currently said and written for popular consumption about coexistence and multiculturalism in Norman Sicily. The administrative and legal documents offer a series of pictures of the Norman past that are far more complicated, nuanced, vivid, humanising and evidence-based. History is not cyclical, and people consistently fail to learn from history, but a society’s view of its past does change over time and can change for the better. Our project aims to contribute to supplanting the current, inaccurate, popular image of multiculturalism in Norman Sicily with one firmly based upon the evidence of the documents and other primary sources.
