This 1995 book is a detailed study of Sicilian life in the reign of Frederick III (1296-1337), a period which saw Sicily reduced from a bustling and prosperous Mediterranean emporium to a poor backwater torn apart by violence. The relative economic and social backwardness of Sicily within modern Italy has attracted considerable scholarly attention. Attempts to explain its ingrained poverty and civil strife usually blame either the legacy of two thousand years of colonisation by rapacious foreigners or the inherent weaknesses in the island itself and its people. More recently a model of 'economic dualism' has pointed to basic structural flaws in the economic relations that were established between the island and its continental trading partners from the twelfth century onwards. This book, by focusing on Frederick III's crucial reign, argues that there were many more things 'wrong' with Sicilian life than just the shape of its overseas trade relations.

Revised for its fourth edition, The Worlds of Medieval Europe, presents a distinctive and nuanced portrayal of the Greater West during its medieval millennium. By integrating the histories of the Islamic and Byzantine worlds into the main narrative, author Clifford R. Backman offers an insightful, detailed, and often witty look at the continuum of interaction-social, cultural, intellectual, and commercial-that existed among all three societies.

This is the first detailed study of Sicilian life in the reign of Frederick III (1296-1337), a period that marked Sicily's transition from a bustling and prosperous Mediterranean emporium to a poor backwater torn apart by violence. This book, by focusing on Frederick III's crucial reign, argues that there were many more things "wrong" with Sicilian life than just the shape of its overseas trade relations. Placing itself between those who blame the foreigners and those who blame the Sicilians themselves, it shows that an entire nexus of factors and influences were at work in unravelling Sicilian life. It also demonstrates that these forces can be seen best in the forty years that followed Sicily's liberation from foreign control in the bloody war of the "Sicilian Vespers."