Neuerscheinung zum Thema Heimat in „Al-Masaq“

How can historiography construct a Heimat? When Norman invaders landed in Sicily in the mid-eleventh century, they encountered a predominantly Muslim society. While only a minority, they would nevertheless succeed in imposing new methods of control and command over the island’s inhabitants and form a single state, centred on Palermo. In the process, historians have long assumed that much of the documentary record for Muslim Sicily was lost or destroyed. Thus, it has been assumed that the Norman Conquest and the forcible imposition of Latin-Christianity not only pushed the island’s Muslim communities to destruction, but also constructed a Sicilian Heimat which was disconnected from its Muslim past. However, in the Epistola Fratris Conradi, a largely forgotten 14^th-century text from Palermo, its author deliberately incorporated an account of this past into a broader history of the island. In doing so, he thus fashioned a Sicilian Heimat which spanned diverse political regimes. In the eighteenth century, this narrative was dismissed. However, as this article argues, such long-standing scholarly neglect is unwarranted. The text not only offers “new” evidence for eleventh-century Sicily, but is remarkable for the way in which its author sought to use historiographical writing to construct a vision of a Sicilian Heimat whose membership was defined by shared historical experience, rather than religion alone.