THE SICILIAN VESPERS by Steven Runciman...

THE SICILIAN VESPERS by Steven Runciman (Cambridge/Canto: $11.95, illustrated). The uprising of the Sicilian people against Charles, the Angevin-French King of Sicily, in 1282 provided Verdi with a subject for an opera and 19th-Century propagandists with an example of incipient nationalism. Runciman’s exceptional history of the Mediterranean world during the late 13th Century reveals that this apparently spontaneous revolt was a carefully plotted move in a complex game of international intrigue. Charles planned to reestablish the Latin Empire of Constantinople and make himself emperor, but the Sicilian rebels scuttled his magnificent fleet and wrecked his schemes. Runciman untangles the knotty politics of the era and shows that the uprising was masterminded by the devious Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Paleologus, who recognized that it was safer and cheaper to raise a revolt at his enemy’s rear than to meet him in battle.