Barons, bandits and rebels in spanish Sicily

Abstract

This article takes into consideration the characterization and evolution that historiography provides for the Sicilian banditry in 16th and 17th centuries in order to check to what extent the behaviour of the Sicilian brigandage fit the pattern of evolution of the Mediterranean banditry commonly accepted by scholarship, according to which from mid-seventeenth century onwards, banditry lost their links with the oligarchy ´s political and factional interests –the great feudal lords in the case of Sicily–, to become a social phenomenon of public disorder, led by members of the weaker and worst integrated groups of society whose targets were mere economic spoils