Introduction

The success of monarchical power in late medieval Sicily saw several different stages, characterised by different outcomes in the confrontation between king and country. The causes of these transformations in the political geography, as well as the differences and the institutional and economic elements of continuity and rupture, specifically over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, will be examined in this chapter.

Following the Aragonese conquest of 1282, a non-vertical relationship between king and country gradually took shape, in which the monarch acted as a co-ordinating force over different political actors endowed with jurisdiction. The establishment of a strong royal role was a gradual, and not always linear, process. It involved significant revisions to the initial ways of co-ordinating the different political forces, as experimented with by the kings. The absorption of Sicily into the crown of Aragon fostered an important circulation of different political cultures, without, however, obstructing the growth and development of distinctive experiences, favoured by the complete autonomy acquired by the region in 1296 and maintained until 1412.