Palermo was founded by the Phoenicians and has been held by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese and Spanish. Unusually, each layer left something standing.

Under Arab rule from the ninth century, Palermo became one of the great cities of the Mediterranean world and the capital of an emirate. When the Normans took it in 1072 they did not erase what they found: the court of Roger II used Arab administrators, Greek scholars and Latin clerics together, and the buildings of that period — the Cappella Palatina , the Martorana , the cathedral of Monreale — carry Arab craftsmanship, Byzantine mosaic and Norman structure in the same room. There is nothing else quite like it in Europe.

The Kingdom of Sicily that followed was, for centuries, a separate kingdom from Naples even when the same monarch held both. It kept its own parliament, its own laws and its own administration — the Deputazione del Regno and the Tribunale del Real Patrimonio among them. Formal union into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies came only in 1816 , and even then Sicilian institutions and timings did not simply match the mainland's.

That separateness is the reason this page exists in the form it does. Sicilian records are not a regional variation on mainland records. They are the products of a different state.