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Miles Pattenden, Fabrizio D’Avenia. La Chiesa del re: Monarchia e Papato nella Sicilia spagnola (secc. XVI–XVII)., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1696–1697, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1696
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Extract
Few ecclesiastical provinces in early modern Europe had politics as complex as Sicily. The Sicilian Church was unique in having had so many of its richest benefices re-founded by the Norman kings who conquered the island from the Arabs in the eleventh century. Yet the island had later also become a papal fief, invested on Charles of Anjou in 1269. The Habsburgs, who were Sicily’s ruling dynasty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had inherited it as part of the Crown of Aragon, by this time a sprawling conglomerate of territories in the western Mediterranean. Conflicts between king and pope about the exercise of their respective rights on the island were almost as numerous as those between the Crown and Sicily’s old medieval feudal class. Ferdinand II, the last Trastámara king of Aragon, won an important concession from Pope Innocent VIII in 1487, such that the pope recognized a royal right of presentation (appointment) to the ten Sicilian bishoprics, two quasi-bishoprics, thirty-two abbeys, and thirty-one minor benefices. But for the next 150 years or so, Ferdinand II’s Habsburg successors and their local agents had to fight hard to exercise this right as they saw fit. They feared, not unreasonably, that popes would obfuscate or attempt to rein the privilege in; they also found themselves constrained by the alternativa, a convention by which the holders of benefices alternated between “native” Sicilians and “foreign” Spaniards. Indeed, the international conflict, between the Spanish king and the Italian pope, intersected many other conflicts: the local, between Sicily’s many competing ecclesiastical jurisdictions; the center-periphery, between the viceroyalty’s officials and the central government in Madrid; and the central, within the government in Madrid itself. The process of asserting royal control over the Sicilian Church—making it “the King’s Church”—was thus a slow one that involved diverse actors in multiple roles.
