TWO

The Gardens of Paradise

Come, delight in the orange you have gathered:

it brings happiness with its presence.

Let us welcome these rosy cheeks from off the boughs:

let us give welcome to stars plucked from the trees.

It seems that the heavens have poured forth pure gold

which the earth has fashioned into shining orbs.

Abu al Hasan Ali ibn al-Basayr the Sicilian, eleventh century

The most amusing if not necessarily the most reliable account of how the next chapter in Sicilian history began is to be found in the Byzantine imperial chronicles, which relate how Euphemius of Messina, captain of the Greek militia on the island, fell in love with a beautiful young girl and carried her off from the nunnery where she had taken the veil. Her brothers appealed to the Emperor Michael, who, despite a similar skeleton in his own imperial closet, ordered that Euphemius be apprehended and punished. Rather than lose his nose, the standard penalty for ravishing a nun, Euphemius fled Sicily for Kairouan, in what is now Tunisia, and offered his services to Ziadat-Allah, the Aghlabite Emir of North Africa, as leader of an expedition against Sicily.

It does seem out of character for Sicilians of any epoch to entrust the reparation of their sister’s honour to an emperor many leagues distant, and of dubious morality to boot. Sources differ as to the actual motives for Euphemius’s rebellion, but whatever passions or high principles may have moved him, all are agreed that Euphemius landed at Mazara del Vallo, on the south-western coast of Sicily, on June 17, 827, at the head of a Saracen army comprising seven hundred knights and ten thousand infantry. He did not live to see his revenge completed: it was fifty years before the Byzantine capital at Syracuse fell to the Arabs. But by 831 Palermo was in their hands, and under their guidance it became the largest and richest city in Sicily, a primacy it was never again to relinquish.

Legend further informs us that, once the beachhead at Mazara was established, Euphemius ordered his Arab cooks to look around and see what they could find to feed the hungry troops. At the harbour of Mazara, then as now an important fishing port, they found quantities of fresh sardines, as well as wild fennel growing on the hillsides, currants drying in the vineyards, saffron and pine nuts on display in the marketplace. Tossing everything together, they came up with the Sicilian national dish.