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Sicily is the largest and most populous island in the Mediterranean Sea and one of the 20 regions of Italy. The Strait of Messina divides it from the region of Calabria in Southern Italy. It is one of the five Italian autonomous regions and is officially referred to as Regione Siciliana. The region has 5 million inhabitants. Its capital city is Palermo.
The House of Bourbon is a European dynasty of French origin, a branch of the Capetian dynasty, the royal House of France. Bourbon kings first ruled France and Navarre in the 16th century. By the 18th century, members of the Spanish Bourbon dynasty held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma. Spain and Luxembourg have monarchs of the House of Bourbon.
Ferdinand II was King of the Two Sicilies from 1830 until his death in 1859.
The Kingdom of Naples, also known as the Kingdom of Sicily, was a state that ruled the part of the Italian Peninsula south of the Papal States between 1282 and 1816. It was established by the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282–1302), when the island of Sicily revolted and was conquered by the Crown of Aragon, becoming a separate kingdom also called the Kingdom of Sicily. This left the Neapolitan mainland under the possession of Charles of Anjou. Later, two competing lines of the Angevin family competed for the Kingdom of Naples in the late 14th century, which resulted in the death of Joan I by Charles III of Naples. Charles' daughter Joanna II adopted King Alfonso V of Aragon as heir, who would then unite Naples and Sicily into his Aragonese dominions in 1442.
The 1848 Revolutions in the Italian states, part of the wider Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, were organized revolts in the states of the Italian peninsula and Sicily, led by intellectuals and agitators who desired a liberal government. As Italian nationalists they sought to eliminate reactionary Austrian control. During this time, Italy was not a unified country, and was divided into many states, which, in Northern Italy, were ruled by the Austrian Empire. A desire to be independent from foreign rule, and the conservative leadership of the Austrians, led Italian revolutionaries to stage revolution in order to drive out the Austrians. The revolution was led by the state of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Some uprisings in the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, particularly in Milan, forced the Austrian General Radetzky to retreat to the Quadrilatero (Quadrilateral) fortresses.
The Kingdom of Sicily was a state that existed in the south of the Italian Peninsula and for a time the region of Ifriqiya from its founding by Roger II of Sicily in 1130 until 1816. It was a successor state of the County of Sicily, which had been founded in 1071 during the Norman conquest of the southern peninsula. The island was divided into three regions: Val di Mazara, Val Demone and Val di Noto.
The Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, commonly called the "Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom", was a constituent land of the Austrian Empire from 1815 to 1866. It was created in 1815 by resolution of the Congress of Vienna in recognition of the Austrian House of Habsburg-Lorraine's rights to the former Duchy of Milan and the former Republic of Venice after the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed in 1805, had collapsed.
The Expedition of the Thousand was an event of the Italian Risorgimento that took place in 1860. A corps of volunteers led by Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from Quarto, near Genoa and landed in Marsala, Sicily, in order to conquer the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled by the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies.
The Sicilian revolution of independence of 1848 occurred in a year replete with revolutions and popular revolts. It commenced on 12 January 1848, and therefore was the first of the numerous revolutions to occur that year. Three revolutions against Bourbon rule had previously occurred on the island of Sicily starting from 1800: this final one resulted in an independent state surviving for 16 months. The constitution that survived the 16 months was quite advanced for its time in liberal democratic terms, as was the proposal of an Italian confederation of states. It was in effect a curtain raiser to the end of the Bourbon kingdom of the Two Sicilies which was started by Giuseppe Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand in 1860 and culminated with the siege of Gaeta of 1860–1861.
Ruggero Settimo was an Italian politician, diplomat, and patriotic activist from Sicily. He was a counter-admiral of the Sicilian Fleet. He fought alongside the British fleet in the Mediterranean Sea against the French under Napoleon Bonaparte. He reconquered the island of Malta, and defended the city of Gaeta near Naples.
The history of Sicily has been influenced by numerous ethnic groups. It has seen Sicily controlled by external powers – Phoenician and Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Vandal and Ostrogoth, Byzantine Greek, Aghlabid, Fatimid, Kalbid, Norman, Aragonese and Spanish – but also experiencing important periods of independence, as under the indigenous Sicanians, Elymians and Sicels, and later as the Emirate of Sicily, County of Sicily, and Kingdom of Sicily. The Kingdom was founded in 1130 by Roger II, belonging to the Siculo-Norman family of Hauteville. During this period, Sicily was prosperous and politically powerful, becoming one of the wealthiest states in all of Europe. As a result of the dynastic succession, then, the Kingdom passed into the hands of the Hohenstaufen. At the end of the 13th century, with the War of the Sicilian Vespers between the crowns of Anjou and Aragon, the island passed to the latter. In the following centuries the Kingdom entered into the personal union with the Spaniard and Bourbon crowns, while preserving effective independence until 1816. Sicily was merged with the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Although today an Autonomous Region, with special statute, of the Republic of Italy, it has its own distinct culture.
The House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies is a cadet branch of the Spanish Bourbons that ruled Southern Italy and Sicily for more than a century in the 18th and 19th centuries. It descends from the Capetian dynasty in legitimate male line through Philippe de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou, a younger grandson of Louis XIV of France (1638–1715) who established the Bourbon dynasty in Spain in 1700 as Philip V (1683–1746). In 1759 King Philip's younger grandson was appanaged with the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, becoming Ferdinand IV and III (1751–1825), respectively, of those realms. His descendants occupied the joint throne until 1861, claimed it thereafter from exile, and constitute the extant Bourbon-Two Sicilies family.
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was a kingdom in Southern Italy from 1816 to 1860. The kingdom was the largest sovereign state by population and size in Italy before Italian unification, comprising Sicily and all of the Italian Peninsula south of the Papal States, which covered most of the area of today's Mezzogiorno.
The Kingdom of Sardinia, also referred to as the Kingdom ofSardinia-Piedmont or Piedmont-Sardinia during the Savoyard period, was a state in Southern Europe from the early 14th until the mid-19th century.
The Battle of Mileto was a battle of the War of the Third Coalition. It occurred on 28 May 1807 in Calabria during an attempt by the Bourbon Kingdom of Sicily to re-conquer its possessions in continental Italy, known as the Kingdom of Naples. The battle ended in a victory for French forces under general Jean Reynier.
The Sicilian Parliament was the legislature of the Kingdom of Sicily.
Sicilian nationalism, or Sicilianism, is a movement in the autonomous Italian region of Sicily, as well as the Sicilian diaspora, which seeks greater autonomy or outright independence from Italy, and/or promotes further inclusion of the Sicilian identity, culture, history, and linguistic variety.
References
- ↑ Adams, C.F. The Lost Kingdom of the Lombardo's. Oxford Press,1967.
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