This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Aghlabid conquest of Sicily began with a landing at Mazara del Vallo in 827 and brought Muslim rule to the island over the following century. Under the Kalbid dynasty from 948 onward, Sicily flourished as a multiconfessional Mediterranean power, and roughly half its population was Muslim by the time Norman conquest of the island began around 1060, ending more than two centuries of Muslim political control.
Norman rule initially tolerated the Muslim community it inherited, but that protection collapsed after King William II's death in 1189, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, following military campaigns he launched from 1221, deported Sicily's remaining Muslim population to Lucera in Apulia through the 1240s, many of them enslaved once resettled there. By the close of that decade organised Islam in Sicily had ceased to exist.
What this changed for Islam's spread was the complete removal, over roughly six decades, of a Muslim population and religious community that had shaped Sicilian life for more than three centuries. Deportation to Lucera rather than gradual assimilation ended organised Islamic practice on the island outright, closing a chapter of Mediterranean Islam that the Aghlabid landing at Mazara del Vallo had opened four hundred years earlier.