The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (Canto)
On March 30, 1282, as the church bells of Palermo were sounding vespers, a crowd of Sicilians  fell on a party of French soldiers, the enforcers of Angevin rule over the island. Within minutes the French  lay dead. The Palermo revolt spread quickly across Sicily, opposed by Frankish lords and the Italian clergy,  and supported by Sicilian commoners, Aragonese infiltrators, and Byzantine spies. Against a complicated  multinational backdrop, the noted medieval historian Steven Runciman deftly portrays the tangled world of  Mediterranean politics in the 13th century, the apex of the Middle Ages.