 History of Sicily

The history of Sicily has been influenced by numerous ethnic groups.It has seen Sicily sometimes controlled by external powers — Phoenician and Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Vandal and Ostrogoth, Byzantine Greek, Islamic, Norman, Aragonese and Spanish — but also experiencing important periods of independence, as under the indigenous Sicanians, Elymians and Sicels, and later as the County of Sicily and Kingdom of Sicily.