(1282) Massacre of the French that began a Sicilian revolt against the Angevin king Charles I. Backed by Peter III of Aragon, the rising broke out when Sicilians killed some insulting French soldiers at vespers in the church of Santo Spirito in Palermo. The people of the city followed suit and massacred 2,000 of its French inhabitants. All of Sicily soon revolted and sought help from the Aragonese, and the war became a French-Aragonese struggle for possession of Sicily. The conflict was finally resolved when the Sicilians chose Frederick III, brother of the king of Aragon, as their ruler in 1302
Group of Sicilian, southern Italian, and Tuscan poets centred in the courts of Frederick II (r. 1194-1250) and his son Manfred of Sicily (d. 1266). They established the vernacular, as opposed to Provençal, as the standard language for Italian love poetry and are also credited with inventing two major Italian poetic forms, the canzone and the sonnet. Some 125 of their poems are extant, many by Giacomo Da Lentini (fl. 13th century), the school's senior poet. The Sicilian-school sonnet became, with variations, the dominant poetic form in Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England, where it was modified to form the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet