Sicily

The Sultanate of Sicily is a Shia Muslim nation covering the entirety of Southern Italy at the beginning of the game, Sicily can form the Nation of Italiyya and does have custom missions and events.

Lore
The emirate of Sicily was founded when Tunisian Raiders had successfully conquered the Island in 831 from the declining Byzantine Empire that lost a war against their historical Arch Nemesis the Bulgarian Kingdom and left the island completely undefended which made the war easy

The Maghreb raiders had finally founded the emirate as a base of operations on conducting more raids on the more wealthier parts of Europe at the time which were the Genoese and Venetian Republics and southern France and prospered by the money they took from Christian Merchant Ships

Due to this wealth, their new capital Palermo (Bal'harm) became a pearl in the Mediterranean that rivaled the Byzantine City of Constantinople and Qurtuba.

The Sicilian raided the eastern coasts of the mighty Umayyad Andulasian Caliphate which enraged sultan Abdul Rah man II which declared punitive actions against the Sicilians in 1045 which their whole fleet got destroyed by the more experienced pirate fleet of the Sicilians and the Umayyad Sultan had to give the important city of Cagliari

The Sultan ( Hasan am Sasam) after seeing their brothers in faith declared war on them and was willing to apolagized was enraged and converted to shiite Islam which isolated them from the majority Sunni sultanates of Northern Africa

The Greeks abandoned Southern Italy and left the southern part of Italy exposed to weak warring principalities. The Sultan Abdallah had successfully invaded and ended these principality and southern Italy was completely controlled by the sultanate.

The papacy seeing this new emerging Islamic threat order a crusade against the Sicilian Muslims with many Italians and French (especially Normans) volunteers to take the strategic city of Napoli which a battle had took place. The Sicilians had defeated the cusaders at the battle of Pavia 1119 and the cursader army had shattered and the Pope seeing this failure ordered a white peace which the Sicilians agreed which scarred the Sicilians and many sultans started treating their Roman Catholic subjects even worse after the crusade and imposing many Higher Taxes (jizya) and force conversions on the Southern Italian nobility

Relations with the papacy had strained to the point where the Sicilians considered them as their arch-nemesis and commanded raids where frequent on the outskirts of Rome itself and many ambitious sultans wanted to take the heart of Roman Catholicism, Rome itself and unite the Peninsula under Muslim Rule