Could anything have been done to avoid the social and economic decay portrayed here? Certainly the challenges confronting the island were great, when Frederick first took the throne, but the situation was hardly hopeless. Indeed it was the very persistence of hope for the future that brought an end to the war and inspired the creative adaptations of the post-Caltabellotta years. In some ways, that decade was the high point not only of Frederick's reign but of the entire medieval era for Sicily, for it was the time of the greatest native achievement in commerce, spiritual renewal, public building, military strength, and rudimentary education. The romanticized Norman era, by contrast, had achieved most of its glories – which were, anyways, limited to the royal court – by the importation of what had been accomplished elsewhere. A palpable atmosphere of excitement and confidence was present. As it happened, the excitement was justified, but not the confidence. The coincidence of political, economic, and religious disaster in 1311-14 turned the tide and exposed all the weaknesses in Sicilian life.

No single explanation can suffice to account for what happened to Sicily. The unraveling of the kingdom in the first third of the fourteenth century progressed so relentlessly, and to so great an extent, that in order to explain it one must look for either a single, cataclysmic event that suddenly and irretrievably altered everything – something along the lines of the Turkish conquest of Anatolia, for Asia Minor – or for an entire network of innate local weaknesses, a congeries of fault lines in the very structure of society that prevented it from adapting to the challenges that confronted it.