Constance, Queen of Sicily

Constance (2 November 1154 – 27 November 1198) was the heiress of the Norman kings of Sicily and the wife of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. She was Queen of Sicily in 1194–98, jointly with her husband from 1194 to 1197, and with her infant son Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, in 1198.

Biography

Constance was the posthumous daughter of Roger II by his third wife Beatrice of Rethel.

Constance was not betrothed until she was thirty, which later gave rise to stories that she had become a nun and required papal dispensation to marry. The betrothal was announced 29 Oct 1184 at the Augsburg episcopal palace, and they were married two years later, on 27 January 1186.

The death of her younger nephew Henry of Capua in 1172 made Constance heiress presumptive to the Sicilian crown, after her elder nephew King William II, who did not marry until 1177, and whose marriage remained childless. Abulafia (1988) points out that William did not foresee the union of German and Sicilian crowns as a serious eventuality; his purpose was to consolidate an alliance, with an erstwhile enemy of Norman power in Italy.

Sicily

Sicily (/ˈsɪsᵻli/ SISS-i-lee; Italian: Sicilia [siˈtʃiːlja]; Sicilian: Sicilia) is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea; along with surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy officially referred to as Regione Siciliana.

Sicily is located in the central Mediterranean. It extends from the tip of the Apennine peninsula, from which it is separated only by the narrow Strait of Messina, towards the North African coast. Its most prominent landmark is Mount Etna, which, at 3,350 m (10,990 ft), is the tallest active volcano in Europe and one of the most active in the world. The island has a typical Mediterranean climate.

The earliest archeological evidence of human dwelling on the island dates from as early as 12,000 BC. At around 750 BC, Sicily had three Phoenician and a dozen Greek colonies, and for the next 600 years, it was the site of the Greek–Punic and Roman–Punic wars, which ended with the Roman destruction of Carthage. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, Sicily frequently changed hands, and during the early Middle Ages, it was ruled in turn by the Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans who created the Kingdom of Sicily subsequently ruled by Hohenstaufen dinasty, for a short period by Angevins, later by Iberians dinasties, by the Austrians for a brief time, and then finally unified under the Bourbons with Naples, as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Following the Expedition of the Thousand, a Giuseppe Garibaldi-led revolt during the Italian Unification process and a plebiscite, it became part of Italy in 1860. After the birth of the Italian Republic in 1946, Sicily was given special status as an autonomous region.