Muslim settlement of Lucera

The Muslim settlement of Lucera was the result of the decision of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of the Hohenstaufen dynasty (1194–1250) to move 20,000 Sicilian Muslims to Lucera, a settlement in Apulia in southern Italy. The settlement thrived for about 75 years. In 1300, it was sacked by the Christian forces of Charles II of Naples and its Muslim inhabitants were exiled or sold into slavery.

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 Muslims of the regno were a heterogeneous community, that included Arabs (concentrated particularly in the triangle made by Mazara del Vallo-Monreale-Corleone), Berbers (settled mostly in Agrigento and in its province), small groups of Persians (amongst them, in particular, the Khwarizmi community of Palermo), and a sizable number of local people who had converted to Islam during the Muslim rule in Sicily.

Frederick’s accession to the throne did not bring social and religious peace to Sicily. 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.

The more stubborn Muslim groups had found bases for resistance in central and western Sicily, around Iato and Entella. In Entella the resistance was led by a Muslim woman recorded in the contemporary Christian chronicles as the “Virago of Entella”.

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