After the Sicilian Vespers drove the French from the island, Sicily came under the rule of the Crown of Aragon in 1282. What began as a century of Aragonese rule became, after the unification of Aragon with Castile in 1479, Spanish rule, that would last more than four centuries. For most of this period, Sicily was governed not by resident kings but by appointed viceroys representing distant Spanish monarchs, who never once visited the island they ruled. The result was the longest, most consistent, and one of the most damaging periods of foreign neglect, exploitation and economic decline in Sicilian history.
Spanish rule resulted in the steady erosion of any effective centralized government in Sicily. The island came increasingly under the control of the greedy and repressive Spanish aristocracy on the island, which impoverished the Sicilian people and stripped them of all rights. Excessive taxes, collected principally from its poorest residents, flowed off the island to Madrid to fund the expansion of the Spanish empire. The principal legacy of the Spanish monarchy to Sicilian history was its introduction of the Spanish Inquisition to the island in the late-15th century. The first actions of the order were to violently expel all remaining Jews and Muslims from Sicily. The horrors of torture and murder of alleged heretics unleased by this insidious religious order would plague the population of Sicily for the next three centuries.
The end of Spanish rule in the early 18th century marked the beginning of a new and distinctive architectural movement, known as Sicilian Baroque, which would remake entire Sicilian cities after the Great Earthquake of 1693, which devastated nearly all of southeastern Sicily. Entire cities like Noto, Ragusa, Modica, Scicli, and Catania were rebuilt from the ground up in a coordinated Baroque style so beautiful that UNESCO would eventually designate these multiple “Late Baroque Towns of Val di Noto” as a World Heritage Site.
