Insularità siciliana e Mediterraneo altomedievale. Dati archeologici e quadri territoriali tra VIII e IX secolo

In recent years, studies on Early Middle Age Sicily have renoved our knowledge, emphasizing the centrality of the island's relations with Constantinople even during the eighth and ninth centuries; archaeological research also made it possible to better assess the process of territorial diversification, that is the basis of medieval Sicily, due to the simultaneous interaction of Byzantium and Islam. The perspective pursued here suggests a chronological articulation of territorial diversification that identifies a long first stage (VI-VII century) in which we witness, in a broad and general way, to a rural settlement expansion and the formation of large villages; a second phase, during the eighth century, characterized by a demographic crisis, particularly evident in the north eastern and the western part of the Island; in a third phase, during the first decades of the ninth, the southern and eastern areas are interested by an settlement recovery that prefigures the strategic interest for restocking and economic exploitation of the lands next to the capital, Syracuse. In this stage the militarization of the Island and the articulation of his defense is bound, in fact, to a restocking policy, which invests the massa fundorum of ecclesiastical and imperial property and contributing to the maintenance of an economic complexity that affects mainly the Eastern territories. It is in this final phase that it’s possible measure the process of diversification between the eastern and western of the island, this process will also influences the articulation of Islamic conquest and the early Islamization of western Sicily.