County of Modica
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The County of Modica was a semi-independent feudal territory which within existed in the Kingdom of Sicily from 1296 to 1812. Its capital was Modica, on the southern tip of the island, although the cities of Ragusa and Scicli housed some government offices for a period.
[edit] History
On 25 March 1296, King Frederick II of Aragon conceded the great County of Modica to Manfredi I Chiaramonte, which fought the Angevin and their king James and married Isabella Mosca, daughter of the rebel count Federico Mosca.
The first dinasty of Counts obtained by the king lots of feuds in Agrigento, Caccamo, Licata and Palermo, where they built a beautiful palace called Steri or Palazzo Chiaramonte; after being residence of the Viceroy and of the Holy Inquisition is now residence of Palermo University. It contains on its ceilings one of the most important pictorial cycle on wood of the Italian Middle Ages.
The Chiaramonte family built many castles at Mussomeli, Caccamo, Chiaramonte Gulfi, Ragusa and all over the island, in a very typical Gothic style.
At the death of king Frederick IV, Manfredi III Chiaramonte became viceroy and tried to defend the throne of Sicily by the illegitimate king Martin I. Unfortunately the city of Palermo fell and his governor Andrea Chiaramonte, son of the late Manfredi, 8th Count of Modica, was beheaded on July 1, 1392, by the new king Martin I of Aragon in front of his palace in the Marina Square of Modica.
[edit] The Cabreras
New Count became Bernat Cabrera, a Spanish condottiero who actually conquered Sicily for the new Spanish king. The Modica State is now bigger and stronger: it includes the city of Scicli, Spaccaforno, Ragusa, Chiaramonte Gulfi, Comiso, Giarratana, Monterosso Almo, Biscari and the castles of Dirillo and Cammarana. The Count had the faculty to export 3,112.68 tons of grain per year free of duties from one of his 7 ports, Pozzallo, where he built the beautiful Cabrera Tower.
Modica since 1296 is the capital city of a “state in the State”, as it is written in the Investiture Diploma to Bernat Cabrera: Sicut ego in regno meo tu in comitato tuo ("You in your county as me in my kingdom"). The county had a Governor, its own Tribunals including the Tribunal of Second Instance, and a police. The cities part of the state were ruled by a municipal magistracy according to the Governor.
[edit] 15th-17th centuries
In the 15th and 16th centuries the spread of emphyteusis and the privatization of the land with the reformation of the Governor Bernaldo Del Nero assigned to the city the role of leader in the south-east of Sicily. The lower part of Modica grew with churches, high-class palaces and monasteries, until the 1693 earthquake, that killed over 60,000 people in Sicily from Catania to Syracuse, and destroied numerous buildings. The late Baroque of Val di Noto is the result of the reconstruction.
On March 5, 1607, Vittoria Colonna Enriquez-Cabrera, Countess of Modica, daughter of the Viceroy Marcantonio Duke of Tagliacozzo and wife of Ludovico III Enriquez-Cabrera, founded the new city of Vittoria, now the second most populous city in the province of Ragusa.
The title and the position of Count of Modica was held in succession by two other noble families, the Alvarez and finally the Fitz-Stuart. However by the time of the latter dynasties the title of Count was meaningless and carried little power, and Modica ruled on its own. This situation continued until the 18th century when Sicily was ruled by the Austrians, then in the late 18th and early 19th century as part of the Kingdom of Sicily from Naples (this Kingdom changed its name to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies), and then finally after the Risorgimento it was unified with the rest of Italy, as it remains today.
