The Image of the Tyrant in the Work of ‘Hugo Falcandus’

The Liber de Regno Sicilie of the so-called ‘Hugo Falcandus’, which describes events at the Sicilian court between 1154 and 1169, is a problematic text. Modern scholars cannot agree upon either the identity of its author or the date when it was written. One of the dominant themes of this work is that of tyranny: here the author develops a twelfth-century cliché that Sicily was the quintessential land of tyrants, with particular reference to King William I and his chief minister Maio of Bari. The latter’s tyrannous instincts were shown both by his lack of sexual self-control and by his overweening ambition. Yet tyranny was not confined to these two, and in parts of his History ‘Falcandus’ came close to suggesting that Sicily needed a formidably strong ruler in order for it to be governed at all. And in one particular respect, the author’s concept of tyranny is unusual, for example when compared with that of his contemporary John of Salisbury, for while his work is suffused by a strong moral sense, this is derived from his classical learning, and there is no teleological framework. God, indeed, is conspicuously absent from the text, and the concept of tyranny therein is a wholly secular one.