Gàrcia and Ottumarrano (Dīwānī 41)

By August 1175, the boundary-dispute between the peasants of Gàrcia and of Ottumarrano, deep in the very heart of the island, had erupted into open violence. Gàrcia belonged to the church of Cefalù, but Ottumarrano was an estate of the royal demesne, and so Sanson, its bailiff, obtained an official record of its boundary from the royal dīwān in Palermo. When even this failed to settle the quarrel, one of the officers of the royal dīwān was dispatched in person. He was a Greek Christian, and seems to have come from just on the Greek side of the middle of the cultural scale that ran from Sicilian Arab to Sicilian Greek. His Greek name was Eugenios tou Kalou, a name which means literally ‘he who is well-born of the good’, while in Arabic he was Abū l-Ṭayyib, ‘father of the good’, a close equivalent of his Greek name. In Greek he was ‘the secretary Eugenios’, while, in Arabic, with its more elaborate titulature, he was ‘the elder, Abū l-Ṭayyib, lord of the royal dīwān of verification’. He summoned the elders of all the surrounding royal estates to be witnesses before his inquiry into the disputed boundary: thirteen Christians, notaries, priests, and gentlemen, and fourteen Muslims, village head-men and elders, from Cammarata, Casaba, Cassaro, Ciminna, Cuscasino, Gurfa, Petralia, Polizzi, Regaleali, Vicari and Villalba. They assembled on the southern boundary of Gàrcia, and Eugenios called upon them, in the name of the mighty and holy king, to relate everything that they knew about the boundary.