Palermo

Though it is not as much visited as other capitals, Palermo, still the chief town of Sicily, has been a great metropolis in its time. That time is now long ago, but one can still see in it traces that it has wielded sway once, and had the course of history been but slightly different, that it might have rivalled many of the capitals of ununified Italy and all of those of Spain. For fate played Palermo a nasty turn, as we shall see, by subjecting Sicily through her own assent and foolish will to the Aragon domination, long after her quasi-native rulers had ended in Queen Maria. But we are anticipating. Let us go back to earlier times. Palermo began—if we can say that of any town in ancient Sicily, one of the oldest of European countries—as a Phoenician settlement, for Sicily twice was the European outpost against the African invaders, first the Phoenician Carthaginians and then later the Saracens. It, like the rest of Sicily, fell under Greek rule, under Phyrrus, King of Epirus, 276 b.c., but, unlike Syracuse, has no remains redolent of Greece. Then like all Sicily it became Roman (there is a casa romana opposite the Royal Palace), but all the Romans wanted of Sicily was a beautiful province to be filled by cruelly entreated slaves for the benefit solely of the free Romans. After invasions of Goths, Vandals, and other conquerors who passed like locusts, the Byzantines held sway and Palermo was reduced by Belisarius, but they concerned themselves much more about Messina and the slopes of Etna than the Western side of the island in which Palermo lies. The Saracens took it about 835 a.d. Under the African Fatimite Khalifs, in 948, an hereditary Emirate, with its seat in Palermo, was established.