Before the arrival of the Normans, the central Mediterranean belonged to the Muslims of North Africa. The Aghlabid conquest of Sicily and the subsequent establishment of pirate bases on the south Italian peninsula in the ninth century gave the Muslims control of both the north and south shores of the central Mediterranean as well as the islands in-between. This enabled them to effectively regulate maritime traffic through the Sicilian Channel and the Strait of Messina and harry Christian commerce at will. For all intents and purposes, such a stranglehold essentially bisected the ‘middle sea’ and denied east–west movement to all except Aghlabid allies like Amalfi and Naples. It is precisely this dominance of the north and south shores and the islands in-between that the Normans would eventually supplant, returning control of the central Mediterranean to the Christian West for the first time since the fall of Rome.

The Muslim conquest and the coming of the Normans

The seeds of ‘Saracen’ suzerainty over the central Mediterranean germinated in Ifriqiyah, the old Roman province of Africa, which consisted of the coastal regions of western Libya, Tunisia and eastern Algeria. Here, in this region just south of Sicily in 800, the Abbasid caliph of Bagdad, Harun al-Rashid, appointed Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab as emir for an annual tribute of 40,000 dinars. Thus began the Aghlabid dynasty, which would eventually conquer Sicily.