Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

Cappella Palatina, church of first unifier Roger II of Sicily.

In 1130 the Norman king Roger II formed the Kingdom of Sicily by combining the County of Sicily with the southern part of the Italian Peninsula (then known as the Duchy of Apulia and Calabria) as well as with the Maltese Islands. The capital of this kingdom was Palermo — which is on the island of Sicily.[5][6][7]

During the reign of Charles I of Anjou (1266–1285),[8] the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282–1302) split the kingdom.[9][10] Charles, who was of French origin, lost the island of Sicily to the House of Barcelona, who were from Aragon and Catalan.[10][11] Charles remained king of the peninsular region, which became informally known as the Kingdom of Naples. Officially Charles never gave up the title of "The Kingdom of Sicily", thus there existed two separate kingdoms calling themselves "Sicily".[12]

Crown of Aragon, greatest extent

Only with the Peace of Caltabellotta (1302), sponsored by Pope Boniface VIII, did the two kings of "Sicily" recognize each other's legitimacy; the island kingdom then became the "Kingdom of Trinacria" in official contexts,[13] though the populace still called it Sicily.[4] In 1442, Alfonso V of Aragon, king of insular Sicily, conquered Naples and became king of both.[14][15]

Alfonso V called his kingdom in Latin "Regnum Utriusque Siciliæ", meaning "Kingdom of both Sicilies".[16] At the death of Alfonso in 1458, the kingdom again became divided between his brother John II of Aragon, who kept the island of Sicily, and his illegitimate son Ferdinand, who became King of Naples.[17][9] In 1501, King Ferdinand II of Aragon, the son of John II, agreed to help Louis XII of France conquer Naples and Milan. After Frederick IV was forced to abdicate, the French took power, and Louis reigned as Louis III of Naples for three years. Negotiations to divide the region failed, and the French soon began unsuccessful attempts to force the Spanish out of the peninsula.[18]

After the French lost the Battle of Garigliano (1503), they left the kingdom. Ferdinand II then re-united the two areas into one kingdom.[18] From 1516, when Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor became the first King of Spain, both Naples and Sicily came under direct Spanish rule.[19] In 1530 Charles V granted the islands of Malta and Gozo, which had been part of the Kingdom of Sicily, to the Knights Hospitaller (thereafter known as the Order of Malta).[20] At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 granted Sicily to the Duke of Savoy,[21][22] until the Treaty of Rastatt in 1714 left Naples to the Emperor Charles VI.[23] In the 1720 Treaty of The Hague, the Emperor and Savoy exchanged Sicily for Sardinia, thus reuniting Naples and Sicily.[24][25]

Ferdinand I

In 1735, during the War of the Polish Succession, Charles, Duke of Parma, defeated the occupying Austrians and became Charles III of Naples and Sicily.[26][27] In 1759, Charles became King Carlos III of Spain and resigned Sicily and Naples to his younger son, who became Ferdinand III of Sicily and Ferdinand IV of Naples.[27][28]

In January 1799, Jean-Étienne Championnet, a general of the French First Republic, captured Naples and proclaimed the Parthenopaean Republic, a French client state, as successor to the kingdom.[29][30] King Ferdinand fled from Naples to Sicily.[31] The French Directory had not authorized Championnet to establish a republic, and recalled him to France. The Republic then collapsed in June 1799.[30] In an 1806 invasion, Napoleon, by then French Emperor, again dethroned King Ferdinand and appointed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, as King of Naples.[32] In the Edict of Bayonne of 1808 Napoleon moved Joseph to Spain and appointed their brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, as King of the Two Sicilies, though this only meant control of the mainland portion of the kingdom.[33][34] While Bonaparte and Murat were in power, Ferdinand remained in Sicily, with Palermo as his capital.[28][35]

Murat remained in power and joined the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon in 1813. The coalition resulted in the defeat of Napoleon and his exile to Elba. When he escaped and took power for the Hundred Days, Murat again sided with Napoleon. He was soon executed,[36][37] and the Congress of Vienna restored Ferdinand in 1815.[38] He established a concordat with the Papal States, which previously had a claim to the land.[39]

Joachim Murat

Joseph Bonaparte

Under Joseph Bonaparte and Joachim Murat, Naples had undergone many reforms. Bonaparte refused to impose the Continental System on the peninsula, which promoted stability in the region. Laws were standardized and cataloged, finances were balanced, taxes were reorganized, education was improved, and the government was consolidated into a civil administration. Though Murat had attempted to strengthen the military, when Ferdinand returned to power, the region was essentially defenseless.[36][40]

Between 1816 and 1848, the island of Sicily experienced three popular revolts against Bourbon rule, including the insurrection of 1847 and the revolution of independence of 1848, when the island was fully independent of Bourbon control for 16 months.

The end of the kingdom came only with the Expedition of the Thousand in 1860, led by Garibaldi – an icon of Italian unification – with the support of the House of Savoy and their Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. The expedition resulted in a striking series of defeats for the Sicilian armies facing the growing troops of Garibaldi. After the capture of Palermo and Sicily, Garibaldi disembarked in Calabria and moved towards Naples, while in the meantime the Piedmontese also invaded the Kingdom from the Marche. The last battles took place at Volturnus in 1860 and at the siege of Gaeta, where King Francis II (reigned 1859–1861) had sought shelter, hoping for French help, which never came. The last towns to resist Garibaldi's expedition, Messina and Civitella del Tronto, capitulated on 13 March 1861 and on 20 March 1861 respectively. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies dissolved and the new Kingdom of Italy, founded in the same year annexed its territory. The fall of the Sicilian aristocracy in the face of Garibaldi's invasion forms the subject of the novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and its film adaptation.

Departments and Districts of Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

The peninsula was divided into fifteen departments[40][53] and Sicily was divided into seven departments.[54] The island itself had a special administrative status, with its base at Palermo. In 1860, when the Two Sicilies were conquered by the Kingdom of Sardinia, the departments became provinces of Italy, according to the Rattazzi law.

Peninsula Capital 1 Abruzzo Ultra I Teramo 2 Abruzzo Ultra II Aquila 3 Abruzzo Citra Chieti 4 Contado di Molise Campobasso 5 Terra di Lavoro Capua, Caserta from 1818 6 Province of Naples Naples 7 Principato Ultra Avellino[lower-alpha 1] 8 Principato Citra Salerno 9 Capitanata originally San Severo, then Foggia 10 Terra di Bari Bari 11 Terra d'Otranto Lecce 12 Basilicata Potenza 13 Calabria Citra Cosenza 14 Calabria Ultra II Catanzaro 15 Calabria Ultra I Reggio

Insular Capital 16 Caltanissetta Caltanissetta 17 Catania Catania 18 Girgenti Girgenti 19 Messina Messina 20 Noto Noto 21 Palermo Palermo 22 Trapani Trapani

Industry was the largest source of income if compared with the other preunitarian states. One of the most important industrial complexes in the kingdom was the shipyard of Castellammare di Stabia, which employed 1800 workers. The engineering factory of Pietrarsa was the largest industrial plant in the Italian peninsula, producing tools, cannons, rails, locomotives. The complex also included a school for train drivers, and naval engineers and, thanks to this school, the kingdom was able to replace the English personnel who had been necessary until then. The first steamboat with screw propulsion known in the Mediterranean Sea was the "Giglio delle Onde", with mail delivery and passenger transport purposes after 1847.

In Calabria, the Fonderia Ferdinandea was a large foundry where cast iron was produced. The Reali ferriere ed Officine di Mongiana was an iron foundry and weapons factory. Founded in 1770, it employed 1600 workers in 1860 and closed in 1880. In Sicily (near Catania and Agrigento), sulfur was mined to make gunpowder. The Sicilian mines were able to satisfy most of the global demand for sulfur. Silk cloth production was focused in San Leucio (near Caserta). The region of Basilicata also had several mills in Potenza and San Chirico Raparo, where cotton, wool and silk were processed. Food processing was widespread, especially near Naples (Torre Annunziata and Gragnano).

The kingdom maintained a large sulfur mining industry. In industrializing Britain, with the repeal of tariffs on salt in 1824, demand for sulfur from Sicily surged upward. The increasing British control and exploitation of the mining, refining, and transportation of the sulfur, coupled with the failure of this lucrative export to transform Sicily's backward and impoverished economy, led to the 'Sulfur Crisis' of 1840, when King Ferdinand II gave a monopoly of the sulfur industry to a French firm, violating an earlier 1816 trade agreement with Britain. A peaceful solution was eventually negotiated by France.[55][56]

Rail lines of the Italian Peninsula in 1861

Rail lines in Italy in 1870

With all of its major cities boasting successful ports, transport and trade in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was most efficiently conducted by sea. The Kingdom possessed the largest merchant fleet in the Mediterranean. Urban road conditions were to the best European standards, by 1839, the main streets of Naples were gas-lit. Efforts were made to tackle the tough mountainous terrain, Ferdinand II built the cliff-top road along the Sorrentine peninsula. Road conditions in the interior and hinterland areas of the kingdom made internal trade difficult. The first railways and iron-suspension bridges in Italy were developed in the south, as was the first overland electric telegraph cable.

The kingdom achieved several scientific and technological accomplishments, such as the first steamboat in the Mediterrean Sea (1818),[57][58] built in the shipyard of Stanislao Filosa al ponte di Vigliena, near Naples, and the first railway in the Italian peninsula (1839), which connected Naples to Portici.[59] However, until the Italian unification, the railway development was highly limited. In the year 1859, the kingdom had only 99 kilometers of rail, compared to the 850 kilometers of Piedmont.[60] This was because the kingdom could count on a very large and efficient merchant navy, which was able to compensate for the need for railways. Also, southern landscape was mainly mountainous making the process of building railways quite difficult, as building railway tunnels was much harder at the time. Other achievements included the first volcano observatory in the world, l'Osservatorio Vesuviano (1841),[61][62]. The rails for the first Italian railways were built in Mongiana as well. All the rails of the old railways that went from the south to as far as Bologna were built in Mongiana.

• 
  Ferdinand I, 1816–1825
• 
  Francis I, 1825–1830
• 
  Ferdinand II, 1830–1859
• 
  Francis II, 1859–1861

In 1860–61 with influence from Great Britain and Gladstone's propaganda, the kingdom was absorbed into the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the title dropped. It is still claimed by the head of the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies.

Francis I or Francis II, King of the Two Sicilies, of Jerusalem, etc., Duke of Parma, Piacenza, Castro, etc., Hereditary Grand Prince of Tuscany, etc.[63]