This entry is about the history of Caltanissetta, a municipality in the central interior of Sicily, Italy, and the capital of the Province of Caltanissetta, from prehistory to the present day. The city, whose recorded history begins with the Norman occupation in 1086, was damaged during heavy fighting in World War II. It has several sites of historical interest, including the ruins of Pietrarossa Castle, the Abbey of Santo Spirito, and several 19th-century neoclassical palaces. From the 18th century, the city supported an important sulphur mining industry, although the mines were abandoned in the late 20th century.
From prehistory to late antiquity
Early Sicanian villages
Although some worked flints found at the site of Gibil Gabib and other archaeological finds attributable to the Copper Age testify that the territory of Caltanissetta was inhabited as early as the 4th millennium B.C., the earliest known urban nuclei are some Bronze Age villages that arose around the 19th century B.C. on the main heights west of the southern Imera: Gibil Gabib, Sabucina, Vassallaggi, San Giuliano, and Capodarso. At least five have been identified within the municipal territory.
The inhabitants of these villages, which Diodorus Siculus identifies as Sicani, can be traced back to the Castelluccio culture: they were predominantly sedentary farmers, also occasionally engaged in pastoralism and hunting. Each nucleus maintained its own political autonomy, and was endowed with its own necropolis, but similar to other Castelluccio sites, it is hypothesized that they constituted a single social and economic entity, even sharing the same place of worship, which has been identified at Mount San Giuliano. At the same time, however, the absence of imported objects among the archaeological finds indicates an attitude of closure and distrust of the outside world.
Sabucina
Around 1270 B.C. the Castelluccio villages were abandoned and a new one was built perched on top of Mount Sabucina. This was a phenomenon similar to what happened to the rest of Sicily in response to the invasion of the Sicels, a people from the Italic peninsula who settled in the eastern part of the island: the inhabitants of small, defenseless villages gathered together by founding one in a safer and more defensible place, and the natural conformation of Mount Sabucina and its location, west of the "border" along the Himera River with the Sicels, met the defensive needs of the inhabitants of the present-day territory of Caltanissetta. Given the impossibility of tracing the original name of the site, this settlement is referred to by the contemporary toponym of the locality, Sabucina.
At an early stage, it progressed seamlessly with the Castelluccio culture, although it presented a more evolved society also depending on the hostility with neighboring enemies, as evidenced by the production of very complex and functional objects, but with few simple decorative elements. The site was abruptly abandoned after three centuries, probably due to incursion and looting by the Sicels.
Sabucina became inhabited again in the eighth century B.C., some two hundred years after its sudden abandonment, by local peoples who were heirs of the ancient Sicels and Sicani now integrated and intermingled. Once the needs of war ceased, the strategic position of the village was used to control the main access route from the coast to the hinterland, represented by the Imera valley, which favored the birth of a flourishing commercial exchange with Greeks and Carthaginians settled along the coast, as shown by some objects found there. During this period, the other sites abandoned in the 13th century also became inhabited again. In Sabucina, Greek culture slowly replaced the indigenous one; initially it had privileged relations with Gela, but in the 6th century B.C. it entered the area of influence of Akragas, probably as a result of the conquest by the tyrant Phalaris during his campaign to conquer the hinterland as far as the colony of Himera, on the Tyrrhenian coast of the island. During the Agrigentine period Sabucina experienced a golden age, galvanized by a flourishing agriculture and intense trade with Akragas, but it never became its own subcolony, and indeed retained its own indigenous identity as shown by works dating from that period, including the Sabucina sacellum.
During the fifth century B.C.E. a phase of decline of the village is observed, beginning at the same time as the war that Ducetius, king of the Sicels, unleashed against the large Hellenized centers of the hinterland. It has therefore been assumed that Sabucina remained involved in the war, and some historians have gone so far as to associate it with Motyon, a city destroyed by Ducetius and not yet precisely identified. In any case, Sabucina was finally abandoned around 400 B.C.E., and Timoleon's subsequent attempts to repopulate it in 310 B.C.E. also failed.
Roman and Byzantine eras There is no evidence to support the existence of an urban center in the territory of Caltanissetta during the Roman period; for instance, of all the island settlements mentioned by Cicero in the In Verrem, none can be traced back to Caltanissetta or ancient Sabucina; the same archaeological findings show that the territory must have been distant from inhabited places. The almost total absence of urban centers in the Sicilian hinterland during this phase of history can be explained by the fact that, following the Roman conquest of Sicily, the territory began to be managed according to the latifundium scheme; this, combined with the advent of the pax romana, which made all defensive systems superfluous, caused the disappearance of numerous perched villages in place of a concentration of human activities in a few urban centers located at the bottom of the valley. The same situation can be seen in the subsequent Byzantine period, during which the presence of a few rural villas cannot be ruled out, but no real urban settlement can be mentioned.
Foundation of the city
The earliest documents in which the city's name appears date to Norman times. The first to mention a toponym traceable to Caltanissetta was in the 11th century the personal chronicler of the Great Count Roger, Goffredo Malaterra, who narrated the Norman conquest of Sicily; he lists it, with the name of Calatenixet, among the eleven strongholds conquered to encircle and isolate the Emir of Enna:
This text unequivocally demonstrates the existence of a settlement predating the arrival of the Normans that did not correspond to the current town center.
During the Norman period, in his 1154 work “The Book of Roger”, the Arab geographer al-Idrisi referred to the city by the Arabic name “Qalʿat an-nisā”, literally translated as "fortress of the women" (or "castle of the women")..However, based on his studies of the origin of the place name Caltanissetta, scholar Luigi Santagati argues that the first people to inhabit the present site of the town may have been the Byzantines, who in the second half of the 8th century would have built the castle of Pietrarossa and the adjoining village that they would have named Nissa after the possible name of the city of origin of the town's founding stratiotes. Founders who in 730, or more likely during the iconoclastic period between 730 and 787, emigrated from ancient Nissa of the Hittites, now Nevşehir, from the province of the same name in central Anatolia.Luigi Santagati - Castelli e Casali della Provincia di Caltanissetta. Ed. Paruzzo One cannot rule out the existence of a settlement at the time of the Arab arrival around 846—a settlement that took the name “Qalʿat an-nisāʾ” due to its phonetic resemblance to the old Byzantine name..
Textually, Santagati writes: "At the origin of the name of Caltanissetta, therefore, there may have been a homogeneous settlement of stratiotes from the first Greek, then Roman and Byzantine city of Nissa, today known as Nevşehir, located in Cappadocia (Turkey). The region from 730 suffered a very serious socio-economic crisis that forced a large part of the population to move elsewhere; a small part of it may have settled at the site of present-day Caltanissetta, calling it by its original name. Once it fell to the Arabs the settlement would have assumed the name Qal'at an-Nissa or Nisa (fortress of Nisa) hence the easy confusion with the Arabic term nisa or nisah (women) plural of marah (woman)."
In support of this hypothesis is the circumstance of the life of Gregory of Nyssa (Caesarea in Cappadocia, 335 - Nyssa, c. 395): he was an ancient Greek bishop and theologian, and in 371 he was appointed bishop of the Diocese of Nyssa; he is venerated by all the Christian Churches, and is one of the Cappadocian Fathers; and is considered one of the most expressive Eastern Fathers of the fourth century. He died between the years 395 and 400 and his feast is celebrated on March 9.
From the Arabs to the Aragonese Dynasty
11th-12th century: the Kingdom of Sicily
In 1061 Roger of Hauteville landed in Sicily, initiating the Norman conquest of the island, which would end thirty years later, in 1091, with the fall of Noto. Caltanissetta, along with eleven other "fortresses" located between Agrigento and Enna, was conquered by Roger in 1086, a year before the final battle against the Emir of Enna Ibn al-ʿAwwās, from which the latter emerged defeated, which probably took place near Capodarso, where the bridge of the same name stands today.
Among the first measures taken by the Great Count Roger were the founding of the present-day town and the construction of the Castle of Pietrarossa. He also oversaw the division of the island into dioceses and the appointment of their respective bishops; the Diocese of Agrigento, founded in 1093, had the Southern Imera River as its eastern boundary and thus included the territory of Caltanissetta. To convert the Muslim population, plans were made to build a network of rural churches, including the Abbey of Santo Spirito, the city's first parish,; the church of San Giovanni, which in 1101 was reported to be among the dependencies of the Abbey of the Holy Trinity of Mileto, is also mentioned as a "church outside the walls" in a bull by Eugene III in 1150. At the same time, the territory was divided among various feudal lords. The earliest feudal lord of Caltanissetta of whom there are certain records is Goffredo di Montescaglioso. He took part along with other Sicilian nobles in a conspiracy against Maio of Bari, adviser to King William the Bad, but the conspiracy failed and Goffredo was blinded and deprived of his property; the fief of Caltanissetta then in 1167 was assigned to Queen Margaret's half-brother and brother-in-law of the king, Henry of Navarre, who, however, because of his unrestrained lifestyle, was removed by the queen in 1170. Left without a feudal lord, the city then became state-owned, that is, under direct royal jurisdiction, and remained so even under the subsequent Swabian and Angevin dominations.
13th century: from Frederick II to the Sicilian Vespers