Falcandus

The history of the tyrants of Sicily by ‘Hugo Falcandus’, 1154–69, trans. G. A. Loud and T. Wiedemann, Manchester 1998

Malaterra

De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis, auctore Gaufredo Malaterra, ed. E. Pontieri (Rerum Italicarum Scriptorum v), Bologna 1927–8

The Norman conquest of Muslim Sicily (1061–91) led to the gradual Christianisation of the island in the central Middle Ages, and confirmed the expansionary momentum of Latin Christendom. The Norman sword, the revival of Greek monasticism, the establishment of a Latin diocesan structure and Latin immigration were all responsible for the re-emergence of a Christian Sicily. As part of this process, the role of saints should not be overlooked; the emergence of holy men, the creation of cults, and the movement of relics rooted Christianity in an island that had been within the Islamic sphere, albeit on its fringes, for the preceding two centuries and more.Footnote ¹ Important roles in consolidating Sicily's Christian identity on a local level were played in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries by the sainted bishop Gerlandus of Agrigento (d. 1104), the missionary visits of holy men based on the mainland, Sicilian holy monks, and the collection of relics in the ‘capital’ Palermo. The revival of the cult of St Agatha at Catania during the twelfth century operated both on the local and, significantly, the international stage. As such it played a prominent part in securing a Christian Sicily in the central Middle Ages.Footnote ² This article, therefore, aims to trace the development of the cult of St Agatha in this period and to explore its function in the re-emergence of Sicily as a Christian-ruled territory.

The origins of the cult of St Agatha are shrouded, as is often the case, in ambiguity. Indeed, different traditions place her birthplace in either Palermo or Catania, although her death is generally accepted to have occurred in the latter city in about 251. Agatha died a virgin and martyr, a result of her resistance to the local Roman authorities and of her refusal to venerate their gods. Evidence exists for her cult in the early Middle Ages in martyrologies, frescoes, church dedications and place-names. Rome and Ravenna in particular developed as important cult centres for Agatha.Footnote ³ The appearance of the saint in Bede's Ecclesiastical history, as well as in Usuard of St-Germain-des-Prés's famous ninth-century martyrology, testifies to the growing dissemination of her renown.Footnote ⁴ After Catania fell under Muslim rule, the cult seemingly survived in the city, centred in the church of S. Agata la Vetere.Footnote ⁵ The paucity of surviving source material undoubtedly prevents any firmer conclusions on the development of St Agatha's cult in Muslim Sicily. Nevertheless, recent work on Muslim Sicily, particularly by Alex Metcalfe, has deepened our understanding of the extent of the survival of Christianity on the island. If the island's ecclesiastical structures crumbled, it now seems that the Greek Christian community in Sicily was more entrenched and stable than previously acknowledged. It was, in addition, reasonably well tolerated by the Muslim leadership. The high-profile migration of Greek Christian holy men from the island to the mainland is no longer seen as incontrovertible evidence for Muslim intolerance, or as indicative of large-scale Christian emigration. In addition, new awareness of the cultural flux on the island, where Arabic-speaking Christian communities acculturated with Muslim communities, reveals a deeper stratum to the survival of Christianity in Muslim Sicily. Sicilian Christians may have been willing to assimilate on a socio-cultural level, but on the whole they retained their Christian identities.Footnote ⁶ While disruption and contraction did take place amongst the Christian community, at the same time the Islamicisation of Sicily was clearly far from comprehensive.

In this context, the continued functioning of a localised cult of St Agatha on the island, and specifically at Catania, appears plausible. At first glance, events in the 1030s suggest that St Agatha's relics were still in Catania. However, on further investigation they offer rather inconclusive proof. Between 1038 and 1041 the Byzantine commander George Maniakes led an imperial coalition force, including Norman mercenaries, to Sicily with the intention of reconquering the island. The campaign met with success in the eastern regions of Sicily, the area of heaviest Christian settlement. A number of key cities, quite probably including Catania, briefly fell under Byzantine control, until court factions at Constantinople, disputes within the occupying force, and a rebellion on the south Italian mainland forced Maniakes's withdrawal.Footnote ⁷ However, the commander apparently did not leave before taking the opportunity to remove certain Sicilian holy relics, dispatching them to Constantinople. The earliest south Italian accounts of the expedition, from Amatus of Montecassino (written c. 1080) and from Leo Marsicanus' section of the Montecassino chronicle (written between c. 1087 and c. 1105), only mention the translation of St Lucy from Syracuse.Footnote ⁸ In both these accounts, an old native Christian informed the invading force of the location of St Lucy's sepulchre, suggesting that saintly shrines, perhaps including Agatha's, were falling into disuse. However, the picture of neglect must be treated with some caution. It would certainly justify Maniakes's actions and increase their worthiness, as the alternative, removing relics which still drew popular veneration, presented obvious problems. There is no reference to Maniakes's removal of any relics in the late eleventh-century work of William of Apulia and, more important, nor is there in that of Geoffrey Malaterra. The latter, a monk at Catania in the 1090s, would have been well-placed to uncover any traditions of a translation. That said, Malaterra's silence may reflect his monastic community's discomfiture at the absence of St Agatha's relics, as well as his own authorial interest in composing a Normanno-centric history. Malaterra's account of Maniakes's expedition focuses on the heroism of the Norman contingent within the imperial force, and the dishonour it suffered at the hands of the Byzantine command.Footnote ⁹ In addition, none of the contemporary Greek sources record the removal of these Sicilian relics to Constantinople. John Scylitzes's work, for instance, offers a detailed narrative of Maniakes's campaign, presenting the commander in a positive light, and yet fails to mention any translation activity.Footnote ¹⁰

It is not until some ninety years after the alleged removal of St Agatha's relics that two accounts appear specifically recording the deed; one of which was very much an internal source, the other external. The former is found in an account of the translation of St Agatha's relics back to Catania from Constantinople in 1126, written shortly after the event by Maurice, bishop of Catania. In it, the bishop records the earlier Sicilian campaign of Maniakes:

The other external account is from Normandy and Orderic Vitalis who maintained that Maniakes removed St Agatha's relics, and those of other saints, ‘to save them from desecration if the pagans should return’. Orderic's version was probably composed between 1127 and 1130. Despite the potential for links between the Benedictine monks of Orderic's monastery at St Evroul and those at the cathedral-monastery of Catania, perhaps via the Calabrian monastery of S. Euphemia, the chronological proximity of the two accounts could suggest that other earlier independent traditions of the translation were in circulation.Footnote ¹² Indeed, this possibility is strengthened by the fact that Orderic did not mention the ‘return’ of St Agatha's relics to Catania in 1126, which would at least have been more likely had he seen Maurice's account. At the same time, Orderic's omission of the 1126 translation may also reflect the likelihood that he was less well-informed on southern Italian affairs of the twelfth century, as connections between Normandy and southern Italy dissolved, and that he was more interested in the golden period of Norman expansion of the eleventh century.

In summary, the earliest accounts of Maniakes's expedition mention a translation occurring, but of St Lucy and not St Agatha. Other key contemporary sources, both south Italian and Byzantine, are notably silent on the removal of any relics. Accounts of St Agatha's removal from Catania only surface around ninety years after the alleged event. Scalia's study supports the likelihood of St Agatha's translation by Maniakes by noting that in all the documentation pertaining to the city in the period from 1040 to 1126, including some significant charters re-establishing the bishopric of Catania in the 1090s, there is no reference to the presence of the relics.Footnote ¹³ This is indeed compelling evidence for St Agatha's absence from the city in those years. Yet it still does not prove conclusively that the relics were present before 1040, and the possibility remains that St Agatha was removed or lost at an even earlier period. Furthermore, Catania suffered a devastating earthquake in 1169, and its cathedral was burned down in 1197. A great quantity of archival material was undoubtedly lost making an argument from silence more problematic than usual.Footnote ¹⁴ Perhaps of significance, the later accounts mention the translation of multiple relics, alongside St Agatha's, but without naming them; possibly an attempt to ‘hi-jack’ the earliest versions recording only the translation of St Lucy and to mask discontinuities in the cultic traditions of St Agatha. It would certainly seem that the relics were absent from Catania for at least most of the eleventh century and a quarter of the twelfth. The city was conquered from the Muslims by the Normans in 1071. But Catania appears to have remained a largely Muslim city in the immediate aftermath of the regime change, and even briefly rebelled in 1081.Footnote ¹⁵ It was not until 1091 that the Benedictine abbey of St Agatha was founded and attached to the re-established bishopric under its first abbot-bishop, the Breton monk Ansger. If St Agatha's relics had been present in the city during this phase then certainly they would have been used as a powerful tool during the refounding of Catania's bishopric, and referenced in other contexts as a rallying point for an exposed Christian community. Indeed, Geoffrey Malaterra claimed that Ansger ‘received this church which had just been planted in, or as it were forced down the throats of, a populace of unbelievers’.Footnote ¹⁶ Undoubtedly St Agatha would have been a valuable asset in such a climate. It appears therefore that St Agatha was not to be found again in the city until, in 1126, two Latin Christians removed her relics from a church in Constantinople and returned them to Catania.

The location of St Agatha at Constantinople is entirely plausible – the city was one of the greatest store-houses of Christian relics in the Middle Ages, many rescued from the rising tide of Islam. Even if St Agatha was not known for certain to be in the Byzantine capital, the medieval relic-hunter could almost have expected to find her there.Footnote ¹⁷ Garbled news of Maniakes's relic translations to Constantinople could easily be appropriated to confirm this and provide a providential circularity to St Agatha's narrative. The return of St Agatha's relics to Catania in 1126 is confirmed on two levels. Firstly, by the translation account, written by Bishop Maurice shortly after the event and which is not devoid of historical authenticity; and secondly by the appearance of a range of sources attesting both the saint's presence in the city and the geographic spread of her cult. The 1126 translation was accomplished by two Latin Christians: Giselbertus, genere Gallus (from France), who occupied a military post within the imperial household, and Goscelinus, a Calabrian.Footnote ¹⁸ St Agatha visited Giselbertus in a dream and appealed to him to return her body to Catania. The subsequent theft of the relics from a Constantinopolitan church and their transfer to Catania was characterised by improvised pragmatism. The two Latins placed St Agatha's head in two bowls and divided her limbs into two quivers. Having eluded a search party, they took to the sea, stopping at Smyrna (where they endured an earthquake), Corinth (where St Agatha assisted the men in finding another boat), and the Methoni littoral, before falling in with a group of merchants to cross the Adriatic. The natural flow of the translation narrative is then interrupted by what could well be a later interpolation into Maurice's account describing a miracle worked by St Agatha at Taranto, where the men had arrived. A baby girl discovered a relic of the saint's breast, which appeared to have been miraculously detached from the rest of the saint's body and left in the city after Goscelinus and Giselbertus had departed. The girl then placed the relic in its mouth and began to suck on the ‘milk of wonderful sweetness’ which was then produced. The baby could not be removed from the breast, so the urban community, led by its chief religious officials, ordered a procession to the cathedral. The litany of the saints was then sung, and when they reached the invocation to St Agatha the baby dropped the breast, which subsequently remained in the city as an object of veneration. Meanwhile, from Taranto, Giselbertus and Goscelinus traversed the dangerous Straits of Messina, navigating their way past the ancient ‘sea monsters’ Scylla and Charybdis. Having halted at Messina, Giselbertus proceeded ahead to Catania to notify the bishop of the imminent arrival. Bishop Maurice, whom he found in the nearby castrum of Aci, in response despatched two of his monks to Messina to verify the authenticity of the relics. The authentication was duly accomplished, and the relics escorted into Catania on 17 August 1126 by a huge candle-lit procession. The saint's arrival was accompanied by miracle healings and exorcisms.

The arrival of a saint with Agatha's pedigree, her location at the heart of an increasingly powerful diocese, and the timing of her return, represented a potent combination in the renewal of the island's Christian identity. By the 1120s the first generation of Sicily as a Christian island once more had passed. It had witnessed the first waves of Christian colonisation, the revival of monastic centres, the establishment of diocesan structures, and Urban ii's donation of the apostolic legateship to Count Roger i of Sicily.Footnote ¹⁹ The development of cult centres may be seen as a significant secondary phase of Christian consolidation, and this may explain why Agatha's cult was not overtly revived until as late as 1126. It would appear that the leaders of the Church of Catania in the first decades of its re-establishment were in no position to establish more ambitious agendas. How far they were complicit in the events of 1126 remains unknown, but certainly the expedition was neither as large nor as organised as the famous translation of St Nicholas from Myra to Bari in 1087.Footnote ²⁰ St Agatha's return to Catania proved a great success, and eventually she would become the island's flagship saint: ‘the sacred relic and kind patron of all Sicily’, as Bishop Maurice put it.Footnote ²¹ Let us first return to the two accounts which recorded the alleged translation of St Agatha to Constantinople in c. 1040. It is possible to apply their interpretations of her removal from Sicily in reverse and connect them to the situation in the island when both versions were written, around 1130. Bishop Maurice, in claiming that St Agatha was moved to Byzantium to strengthen a failing empire, might be indirectly implying that her return in 1126 was a sign of Constantinople's final decay and the transfer of the saint's patronage to a youthful and expansive Christian Sicily. Orderic Vitalis, who does not appear to have read Maurice's translation narrative but who may well have heard the news of 1126, as perhaps would many among his readership, suggested that St Agatha was removed by Maniakes to protect her remains from Muslim desecration. He too may implicitly invite the conclusion that the saint's return was a sign that Sicily's Christianity was now secure from the infidel.

It was crucial that any aspiring cult follow a number of universal models which highlighted to the wider world its solid Christian credentials. Furthermore, it was vital that zones on the periphery of Christendom establish exchange networks and reciprocal relationships with inner, core regions. In both cases, St Agatha fulfilled the necessary criteria. The acquisition of relics from the city of Constantinople was a mark of their quality and, as Patrick Geary has shown, the furta sacra model was a widely accepted method of articulating to a wider audience that the saint had bestowed divine favour on her new home.Footnote ²² For St Agatha such messages were intensified by her established universal popularity across Europe, and the fact that this ‘relic theft’ also represented a homecoming. In this instance, Catania benefited from its distant Christian past. It did not technically have to import an ‘external’ cult, which was often the case in other border regions of Christendom where ‘foreign’ saints were relied upon in the initial phase of institutionalising Christian structures when ‘native’ saints were not as readily available.Footnote ²³ The path taken during the translation itself was also significant. Once into the orbit of southern Italy, an association was created between St Agatha's relics and the cities of Taranto, Messina and the small settlement of Aci, near Catania. At Taranto, news of the translation was first made public. Here St Agatha's presence created an atmosphere of spiritual commotion and the depositing of a relic in the city, perhaps masking a minor act of relic-theft by the people of Taranto. At Messina the relics were finally back on Sicilian soil and were also authenticated in the city, while it was at Aci that the first glorious news of St Agatha's imminent arrival reached the bishop. As Victor Turner and Edith Turner noted in their classic study, circles of influence radiate out from a central shrine. In this outer orbit were found lesser shrines and chapels, encountered by the pilgrim on his route to the main shrine. These represented ‘sacred valves and resistances … designed to build up a considerable load of reverent feeling’, making the final experience on arrival at the saint's resting place suitably transcendental.Footnote ²⁴ In this case Catania was the central shrine with potential staging posts at Aci (a local settlement drawing in the rural population from Catania's hinterland), at Messina (the chief port of Sicily, attracting merchants and pilgrims) and at Taranto (a key mainland port). Certainly, other staging posts would have arisen along different routes, but those associated with the translation were likely to have particular resonance and connected the cult to an immediate wider zone. In this way the cult of Catania, on the frontier of Latin Christendom, underwent a transformative process, which according to Geary was replicated across Europe. It became a new ‘centre’ on the edge of a world of which it was now an integral component.Footnote ²⁵

From these promising and solid foundations, the cult rapidly spread on both a local and international stage. The power of the bishopric of Catania, one of the largest ecclesiastical lordships in the island which also enjoyed jurisdiction over Catania itself, assisted the spreading influence of St Agatha.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, it would seem that Bishop Maurice was the key figure in the cult's revival at Catania, and was himself a powerful and ambitious prelate. Unfortunately relatively little is known about him. The earliest reference to Maurice appears in 1124, apparently shortly after he replaced Ansger. On this occasion Maurice confirmed earlier charters of his predecessor to the Palestinian monastery of St Maria in the valley of Josaphat, although doubts remain over the document's authenticity.Footnote ²⁷ More significantly, in 1125 Roger ii of Sicily bestowed land between Catania and Lentini on the bishopric of Catania and Bishop Maurice, and exempted the cathedral monastery's ships from certain tolls; clear confirmation that Catania and its bishop were favoured at the highest levels.Footnote ²⁸ Maurice, of course, was promoted to the bishopric shortly before the translation, and was the author of the translation text. Both suggest that he might have played a hand in the venture. Indeed, Maurice wrote himself into the translation script by sending monks to Messina to verify the authenticity of the relics as they arrived in Sicily, and he then extended his account to record a collection of miracles, worked by St Agatha, and probably written by c. 1130. It seems that his successor, Evenus, was in place by 1141, which means that Maurice supervised the crucial first decade and a half of the cult's re-establishment.Footnote ²⁹

The miracle collections written by Bishop Maurice and added to by the monk Blandinus (in the 1140s and 1150s), reveal cultic connections spreading beyond the city.Footnote ³⁰ As Simon Yarrow has made clear, miracle collections should not be dismissed as purely the creations of a small body of literate and ecclesiastical elites. In order to express meaning, their construction required engagement with local knowledge and human experience. As such, they reveal a process in which a wider lay community was ‘communally empowered by their license collectively to negotiate the miraculous’.Footnote ³¹ In other words, records of miraculous episodes carry historical value and stand as solid evidence for the impact of the cult on the wider populace. Amongst the recipients of St Agatha's favour are to be found the indigent, the wealthy, craftsmen, monks, the young and elderly, and both sexes. Of the latter, women feature as an overwhelming majority, perhaps representing understandable attachments to a female saint. It also proved of great value to have the support of the nobility, and the movement of this group amongst higher political circles could act as an excellent tool for a cult's dissemination.Footnote ³² Indeed, St Agatha could claim the patronage of one of Sicily's leading landholders, the north Italian Henry of Paternò, brother-in-law to Count Roger i of Sicily, and ruler of one of the few major lordships in Sicily. By the time of his nocturnal vision of St Agatha, Henry may well have been raised to comital status and was imminently to become (in 1130) the uncle of a powerful new monarch, Roger ii of Sicily.Footnote ³³ Of further significance, Henry's visit to St Agatha's shrine led to a reconciliation with the cathedral monks at Catania, for whom, we are told, he had previously conceived a virulent hatred.Footnote ³⁴ The saint's presence at Catania then operated as a neutral channel for peace-making, which led to a union between the city's Church and this powerful member of the nobility. Indeed, this was a significant alliance, as it seems that Henry was able to influence the bishops of Catania to make donations to two of his favoured Holy Land churches.Footnote ³⁵

In the first few decades of the cult's development after 1126, the miracle records particularly reveal repeated connections with the city of Messina. A partially deaf and blind woman from the city travelled with sailors to Catania to visit St Agatha's shrine where she was healed.Footnote ³⁶ Other Messinesi benefiting from St Agatha's favour included an old blind man and a man who suffered extreme poverty and was paralysed. Of particular interest is a miracle concerning a woman from Messina who was struck partially deaf by St Agatha and who had her hearing restored after a repentant visit to the saint's shrine. The woman had provided lodging for Giselbertus, Goscelinus and the relics during their halt in the city. Later, she rebuffed her neighbours' entreaties which suggested that because St Agatha had visited her home she likewise should visit the saint's new dwelling-place in Catania. As a result, the woman was ‘stricken with a severe pain in that ear which had scorned to respond to that most advantageous advice’.Footnote ³⁷ The concentration on the city in the miracle records undoubtedly fulfilled some important requirements for St Agatha's cult and for the city of Catania. As the last miracle implicitly articulates, it strengthened the translation tradition in which Messina was established as a key staging post of the cult. It also assisted in the quest for regional supremacy by trying to subordinate Messina spiritually to Catania. Indeed, contemporaneous to these accounts, in the 1130s and the 1140s, the diocesan map of Sicily was being controversially restructured. If accomplished, Catania would become a suffragan see of the newly created archbishopric of Messina.Footnote ³⁸ Finally, it represented an attempt to generate support for the cult in the leading port city of the island. Already, by the mid-twelfth century, the coastal cities of southern Italy were flourishing embarkation points for the growing pilgrim and crusading traffic to the Holy Land. Messina became the leading crusader port on the island of Sicily, home to pilgrim hospices, and property belonging to religious houses based in the Crusader States, including the Templars and Hospitallers.Footnote ³⁹ It was portrayed by contemporaries as a bustling entrepôt. The so-called ‘Hugo Falcandus’ described Messina in the 1150s as ‘composed of immigrants, pirates and brigands. It held within its walls almost every type of human being’; the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, in c. 1170, recorded it as the place where ‘most of the pilgrims assemble to cross over to Jerusalem, as this is the best crossing’; while to the Muslim traveller Ibn Jubayr in the 1180s it was a ‘mart of the merchant infidels, the focus of ships from the world over, and thronging always with companies of travellers’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Indeed, the combined crusading forces of Richard i and Philip Augustus wintered on the island in 1190–1 and were based at Messina. The garrisoning of these Third Crusade forces in Sicily led to deeper awareness of Sicilian folklore and particularly of the cult of St Agatha in western Europe. Perhaps, the desire to tap into these streams of commerce and pilgrimage, and to attach to a rival city's expanding communication network, underlay the translation of 1126. Certainly, similar considerations influenced the city of Bari's move in 1087 for St Nicholas of Myra, ahead of its Venetian rivals.

References to the city of Syracuse might also be considered in a similar, if less high-profile, context. While not as central to crusading and commercial traffic as Messina, Syracuse was the other key port on the east coast of Sicily, this time to the south of Catania. By bringing the city into the orbit of the cult of St Agatha, the Church of Catania could further advertise its ambitions for regional ascendancy. Agatha's performance of an exorcism on the wife of the steward of the bishop of Syracuse implies that the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the latter city were informed on the power of the Catanese cult. Another woman from Syracuse was liberated from demonic possession at St Agatha's cult on the feast day celebrating her return to Catania. On this occasion, the city was said to be host to a huge crowd of Christians, precisely the sort of news which the establishment at Catania would hope to be communicated back to Syracuse and beyond.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, as one historian noted, religious processions reflected ‘the increasing needs for a suitable arena to exchange information across wider distances’.Footnote ⁴² A much more overt message was offered by Blandinus at the outset of his additions to the miracle collection. Here the monk recorded a piratical raid by Iberian Muslims on Sicily in the year 1127. Catania was saved by St Agatha who alerted its inhabitants to the activities of the raiding party, allowing them to defend the city. However, on the same day, the Muslim force attacked Syracuse and massacred its population, leaving only the city walls standing.Footnote ⁴³

Blandinus' work attempts to evidence the broadening horizons of the cult. His records refer more frequently to innumerable crowds flocking to Catania and focus on episodes which are greater in magnitude. Blandinus placed St Agatha within the context of the aforementioned Muslim raid of 1127 and later did the same regarding a famine that spread across Sicily.Footnote ⁴⁴ He also stated, under the year 1132, that the fame of Agatha's miracles brought devotees ‘not only from the Sicilians, but also from inhabitants of foreign territories’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Interestingly, neither Blandinus nor Maurice specifically identifies any of the pilgrims as hailing from Catania itself, although in some cases this might be inferred. Maurice's earlier records note individuals from Cosenza (Consentina?) and Gerace, both in mainland Calabria, as well as from Troina, Messina and Syracuse. The recorded identities of Blandinus' pilgrims again include people from Messina and Syracuse as well as from Palatolium (Palazzolo Acreide? About thirty miles inland from Syracuse), but collectively their geographic range is actually reduced in comparison to Maurice's records. A mixed message is presented of a cult broadening its fame and popularity in its early decades, yet its pilgrims appear to originate from a fairly consistent territorial sphere orbiting primarily around eastern and north-eastern Sicily. Perhaps, however, pilgrim origins were not of particular significance to our Catanese hagiographers, for a recurrent feature of Agatha's miracle works is their location at the shrine itself. The vast majority of miracle cures took place before the saint's relics, a number of which followed a period of incubation near the shrine.Footnote ⁴⁶ A few pilgrims were recorded as having been healed or aided by St Agatha away from Catania, but these events always occurred en route to the shrine: a paralytic carpenter had his donkey stolen and was miraculously lifted across a river and able to walk the final two miles to St Agatha's shrine; a monk from Troina was healed and ‘flown’ to Catania; a woman sailing from Messina to the shrine at Catania was visited by Agatha who aroused her from a comatose state; an old man had vision in one eye restored while journeying to St Agatha and the other cured on arrival.Footnote ⁴⁷ The centrality of Agatha's shrine was made explicit: the most effective way to obtain the saint's aid was physical proximity to her relics. At the same time, this would expose visitors to other miracle stories and traditions relating to St Agatha, transmitted visually (through decorations and pilgrim offerings), orally (through liturgical services and encounters with shrine officials) and via written records (through the display of hagiographical texts). The woman at Messina, struck deaf because she refused to visit Agatha's shrine, is emblematic of the dominant message. The need to locate the intensity of the cult at its centre is indicative of the first stage of the development of a fledgling shrine.

Communication networks were of the utmost importance in the establishment and development of cults. At Catania, evidence suggests that those supervising the cult attempted to attach it to existing communication networks, while also creating new ones. The nobility, commerce, pilgrimage and the oral testimony of individuals made information exchange possible. The Church, staffed by a literate elite connected by systems of communication which transcended geographical frontiers, represented one of the medieval world's most effective channels for information transmission. The cult of St Agatha had from the early Middle Ages obtained papal support and devotion within Rome; Gregory the Great had allegedly deposited some of the saint's relics in the city. Furthermore, by the same era, Agatha had entered onto most universal calendars and martyrologies across medieval Europe.Footnote ⁴⁸ At a more localised level, after 1126, the Sicilian ecclesiastical establishment was harnessed to the cult. As one of the island's leading ecclesiastical lords, the bishop of Catania enjoyed a superb platform from which to disseminate knowledge of the city's saint. Also, as a monastic cathedral, connections were evidently forged with both the secular and regular Church. Orderic Vitalis's knowledge of Sicilian affairs and St Agatha in the eleventh century no doubt owed much to the connections that were established between his monastery in Normandy and south Italian Benedictine houses.

Significantly, the Church could also use visual media throughout their religious spaces. While there is not space here to trace the full range of her visual representations in ecclesiastical houses, St Agatha was depicted in two of the most famous Sicilian mosaic cycles. Her image adorned the interior of both the royal chapel in Palermo, the Capella Palatina (decorated between c. 1140 and c. 1170), and the extravagant cathedral at Monreale (constructed c. 1174–83), which was intended to serve also as a mausoleum for the royal dynasty.Footnote ⁴⁹ On another level, recipients of St Agatha's miracles were drawn from ecclesiastical circles or interacted with them. The miracle at Taranto during the translation drew the intervention of the city's ecclesiastical establishment. Elsewhere, among those cured were the wife of the steward of the bishop of Syracuse, and Greek monks from Troina and Gerace in Calabria.Footnote ⁵⁰ The latter are particularly interesting, suggesting that St Agatha's cult, centred in a city under the control of Latin-Benedictine churchmen, was popular among the Greek Christian communities of southern Italy. Agatha's stay in Constantinople and her earlier connections to Byzantine Sicily may well explain why this was so. Moreover, twelfth-century Messina, which was connected to many of Agatha's miracles, still contained a large Greek Christian community. The monk from Troina was healed of a swelling in his knee and miraculously transported the forty miles to Catania in the space of one hour. Maurice says that he accompanied seven fellow-monks and their Greek abbot, who had been inspired to visit the shrine after ‘having discovered the news of the return of the most blessed virgin, and having heard of her wonders’.Footnote ⁵¹ The episode is of additional interest, as a similar incident forms the first miracle in the vita of St Silvester, a monk of the Greek monastery of S. Michele at Troina who died at some point in the second half of the twelfth century. Silvester had been ‘gripped with great desire to see the tomb of the divine Agatha, he received permission to go from his superior, [and] completed the journey, beyond the laws of nature, in the space of one hour’.Footnote ⁵² The two monks from Troina would thus appear to be one and the same, independently corroborated from two hagiographical texts. St Agatha here is seen nurturing new forms of sanctity on the island of Sicily, contributing to the consolidation of a network of holy figures and shrines.

After the early phase of the revival of St Agatha's cult, increasing evidence suggests that in the second half of the twelfth century the shrine began to operate on a wider stage, in addition to the saint's long-established presence in church dedications and in universal martyrologies and calendars. Its promising foundations and the array of connections established in the cult's formative development set up St Agatha's potential for long-term popularity. Within this, three developments above all others explain the saint's re-emergence onto the international stage. First, the growth of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the evolution of the crusading movement provided sustained exposure for the cult. Cultic connections were immediately established with the city of Messina which was increasingly a key node on a major Christian pilgrimage route. The link with Taranto would also have opened up similar connections. Unfortunately, the majority of those travellers and pilgrims, passing to and from the Holy Land, who might have visited St Agatha's shrine or have encountered the cult's traditions, have evaded record. It is only the more high-profile episodes that are known. In about 1170, for example, Prior Theobald of Vermandois of the Cluniac house of Saint-Arnoult at Crepy-en-Valois appears to have passed through the island of Sicily heading for the Holy Land on diplomatic business.Footnote ⁵³ As Lynn White discovered, the church of Saint-Arnoult at Crepy-en-Valois claimed to have acquired relics of St Agatha – her mouth with teeth and her veil. Perhaps Theobald visited his fellow Benedictine monks at Catania and was able to procure the precious objects.Footnote ⁵⁴

But it was an event of the magnitude of the Third Crusade that significantly boosted the international reputation of Agatha's cult. The Anglo-French crusading forces wintered near Messina in 1190–1 on their way to face Saladin in the east. As a result, a large number of western Europeans were intimately exposed to a range of Sicilian traditions, customs and folklore, which then filtered westwards. The Englishman Roger Howden, who accompanied Richard i on the Third Crusade, took a keen interest in St Agatha. He noted Agatha's ability to prevent eruptions from the nearby volcanic Etna, and how the saint's veil acted like a shield against the fiery lava. Howden recorded a specific occasion when Agatha's veil was used to divert the volcanic fire into the sea, leaving half-burned some fish, fondly termed pisces Sanctae Agathae, which could still be seen in the 1190s,. From this incident, a local custom then developed: any fisherman who caught one of the fishes immediately had to release it ‘on account of reverence for Blessed Agatha’. The chronicler here records some of the more quotidian and curious ways in which the cult infiltrated into lay consciousness. Furthermore, Roger Howden's account of the diverted lava depicts the ‘multitude of pagans’ [Muslims] fleeing to St Agatha's tomb as the ones who actually held up the veil. This certainly draws on the earliest hagiographical traditions of St Agatha's cult in which a year after the saint's death (ad 252) the people of Catania ran to her tomb and used her veil as protection against Etna's eruption. Among this crowd were pagans who were subsequently converted by Agatha's miraculous intervention. As well as possible knowledge of these early traditions, Howden may also be providing a snap-shot of the developing socio-religious landscape in Catania in the later twelfth century.Footnote ⁵⁵ None of the traditions surrounding the cult's revival explicitly portray it as missionary in objective despite the presence of large Muslim communities. This mirrors broader policy in Norman Sicily, where no consistent and widespread conversion programmes were aimed against the island's Muslims. Instead, evidence for conversion suggests that it was often a gradual process arising from long-term socio-cultural assimilation. The conversion of a mosque in Catania in the 1170s probably represents not an official attempt to push a conversion agenda forward, but an acknowledgement of evolving social and religious change within the city.Footnote ⁵⁶ In such an environment, some Muslims (and indeed Christians) are likely to have adopted aspects of both Islamic and Christian culture. The efficacy and protective powers of holy shrines could easily transcend specific religious affiliations; especially in a region dominated by the numinous dangers of Etna. Indeed, al-Harawi, the Muslim traveller who visited Sicily in the 1170s, noted an Islamic pilgrimage site, which contained thirty martyrs, in a cemetery in Catania.Footnote ⁵⁷ While not spreading the faith directly, St Agatha may well have counted among her devotees Muslims who were comfortable with using different elements of both religions. Finally, Howden made one other significant reference to St Agatha: in 1190–1, with the crusader forces at Messina, King Tancred of Sicily and Richard i of England finally settled their differences and made a symbolic visit to Agatha's tomb (as part of this diplomatic rapprochement, Richard also allegedly donated King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, to Tancred).Footnote ⁵⁸

The second significant development to boost St Agatha's international reputation can be identified from the mid-twelfth century when the new kingdom of Sicily gradually shook off its pariah status. Here is not the place to trace how and why this happened, but as a result cordial diplomatic relationships were established above all with the Angevins in England, the Capetians in France and the popes in Rome.Footnote ⁵⁹ Peter of Blois and Gervase of Tilbury were just two of the prominent authors who came into contact with the region through diplomatic ties, and recorded aspects of Sicilian life. As we have seen, the Church of Catania had influence in the highest Sicilian circles and two of its archdeacons during the 1140s and 1160s – Asclettin and the celebrated scholar Henry Aristippus – were royal chancellors and leading advisors to the king.Footnote ⁶⁰ A chain of prominent communication channels thus connected St Agatha at Catania to a much wider audience.

The third and final key factor connects to the first two. The crusading/pilgrimage movement and the creation of diplomatic links increased knowledge of Sicily in western Europe. Above all, the message that returned westwards, from authors such as Peter of Blois, Roger Howden, Walter Map, Conrad of Querfurt and Gervase of Tilbury, was of a strange and exotic land.Footnote ⁶¹ The region's landscape had a mystical quality, marked by fiery volcanoes and the scars of terrible earthquakes. The dangerous seas around it hosted classical monsters such as Scylla and Charybdis, and the Sirens. Here was found the new home of King Arthur in the caverns of Etna, and the battlefields of chansons de geste, waged against Muslim foes, most famously in the Chanson d'Aspremont.Footnote ⁶² Some authors located the gateway to the Underworld in Mount Etna or near Naples respectively, and others placed the entrance to purgatory in Sicily.Footnote ⁶³ Gervase of Tilbury, Alexander of Neckham and Conrad of Querfurt were fascinated by legends which placed the tomb of Virgil in Naples, and cast the famous poet as a magical protector of the city.Footnote ⁶⁴ In addition, the continued presence of Muslim communities added to the region's pagan and supernatural undertones. These perceptions of a volatile southern Italy would thrust into the limelight the role of any protector, and St Agatha was aptly placed to assume the task. The proximity of her shrine to the supernatural Etna, its fame known across the Christian and Muslim worlds, immediately placed Agatha into a perpetual conflict with this fiery entity. Roger Howden commented on it, as did Gervase of Tilbury who noted that Saint Agatha's shrine ‘preserves the city from fire by its protection’.Footnote ⁶⁵ News of the catastrophic Sicilian earthquake of 1169, which almost entirely obliterated Catania, further disseminated the image of Agatha operating in a world of powerful forces. The disaster occurred on 4 February, the vigil of St Agatha, destroying the saint's church.Footnote ⁶⁶ According to Peter of Blois it was actually St Agatha's punishment for a sinful episcopal election in Catania.Footnote ⁶⁷

St Agatha thus represented goodness and purity in a landscape of hell, purgatory, sinister natural forces and pagan communities. This combination undoubtedly attracted external interest and fascination. By 1200 the cult of St Agatha was firmly rooted both in its immediate locale and the wider European consciousness. The revival of Agatha's cult uncovers the initial, prosaic consolidation of the island's Christian identity. Standard techniques for propagating the shrine's popularity were used by a powerful episcopal centre, connected to the highest socio-political circles, building on a reputation already enhanced both in the early Middle Ages and by the saint's residence at Constantinople. In addition, the patrons of the cult were able to channel wider Mediterranean movement and exchange into St Agatha's orbit, ensuring that her fame spread beyond the island. The proximity to uniquely sinister, mythical forces, news of which was increasingly circulated across Europe, enabled Agatha to stand as a protector of the faith, and to allay external suspicions of an otherwise strange and semi-pagan island. In the process, medieval Sicily obtained a cult to rival the mainland shrines of St Nicholas at Bari and St Michael the Archangel at Monte Gargano, and placed itself within the topography of Christian pilgrimage.