Corleone was fortified in antiquity and repopulated under Frederick II in the thirteenth century, partly with Lombard settlers — which is why traces of Gallo-Italic speech are documented in this part of Sicily, as at Piazza Armerina and in Basilicata.

The town's history is the history of the Sicilian interior: grain , worked on great estates — the latifondi — owned by absentee nobles and managed by intermediaries, with a population of landless labourers. That structure, more than anything else, explains both the poverty of these towns and the emigration that followed.

Corleone was a centre of the Fasci Siciliani , the peasant and worker movement of 1891–94 that demanded land reform and was suppressed by force. Its leader Bernardino Verro , later mayor of Corleone, was murdered in 1915 — one of a line of local trade unionists and land reformers killed here across the following decades, including Placido Rizzotto in 1948. The town's own twentieth-century history is substantially a history of that struggle.

The name's international fame comes from Mario Puzo's novel of 1969 and the films that followed, which have no connection to the town's actual past beyond the borrowed name.