Muslim settlement of Lucera
[1] The Sicilian territories inherited by Frederick II from his mother Constance of Sicily carried with them not only authority over the Roman Catholic majority of the island, but also over significant numbers of Greeks, Jews and Muslims.
The terrain of the island favoured in fact the resistance action of groups of Muslims, hoping to restore the dominion of Islam in what in Arabic had initially been called al-Ard al-Kabira, the "Great Land", and then, simply, Siqilliyya.
[4] These troops, most of them lightly armed archers and many also trained in the use of the sling,[5] constituted the faithful personal bodyguard of the Hohenstaufens, since they had no connection to the political rivals of the "House of Swabia" and were ready to wage war—ferociously even for the contemporary standards—on the local populations, and depended entirely on their sovereign.
The Muslim colony of Lucera was evangelized by the Dominican friars who, under Imperial licence, as requested by the Pope, were authorized to preach and to attempt to convert the infedeli (unbelievers), including the Jews, in the city.
The results were, usually, decidedly disappointing, in spite of the attempt by the Church in 1215 to carry out highly discriminatory measures, in the Fourth Council of the Lateran, that Muslims and Jews (defined as servi camerae, that is personal property of the Crown [9]) wear clothes that allowed for their easy identification.
It had a mosque-cathedral (jamiʿ) of its own, Koranic schools (Agarenorum gymnasia) and a qadi, able to judge litigation between Muslims, using Islamic shari'a law.
After a hard and exacting siege, Charles of Anjou preserved the Muslim colony, confirming it in all of its existing privileges, in exchange for the payment of a heavy levy.
This moderation was related to the imminent organization of the Eighth Crusade, led by Charles I’s brother Louis IX of France, that moved in 1270 against Tunis, and ended in failure with the death of the king from illness.
Some sources speculate Charles was prompted to seize the settlement as the-then ongoing War of the Sicilian Vespers was going poorly for him, and had sapped his kingdom's finances.
A remnant of the descendants of these Provençal colonists, still speaking a Franco-Provençal dialect, has survived till the present day in the villages of Faeto and Celle di San Vito.
A Dalmatian Dominican bishop, Agostino Casotti, was appointed in 1322 in charge of the new diocese of Lucera di Santa Maria, by the Avignon Pope, as requested by the Angevins to restore Christianity in the region.
