e Sicilian community shifted as European history unfolded explains how an organization such as the Mafia could emerge. In about AD 1000, Arab occupation of Sicily ended with the invasion of the Normans, who brought European feudalism. The feudal social structure persisted in Sicily throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, its dominant feature one of the interpenetration of personal and professional loyalties and obligations on one hand, and on the other a shifting of control of Sicily's land according as "each new sovereign, from Swabiu to Bourbon, established his power on the coast and hastened to strengthen it by distributing lands in the interior, land which became the title feudi of new nobles and their followers." Sicilian territory being the object of cyclical conquests, these noble landowners were as a practical matter absentee landlords. Private guards (gabelotti) employed to protect their feudatories against encroachment by other lords on one side and by serfs on the other, became the core from which the Mafia evolved: "[T]he total lack of public authority and absolute power of the lords which was delegated to henchmen whose only qualification was their talent for delinquency, built up tyranny based on violence and systematic exploitation.
However violent toward recalcitrant peasants, gabelotti were not hated, though absentee lords of the principal prevailing government authority were. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the gabelotti controlled more rural estates in Sicily than the absentee barons and retained control (in classically feudal terms) over the rural peasantry despite pressures for constitutional nationalism and social reform: "To achieve this it continually broadened its sphere of influence and tried to solve all problems of connivance within its organization either through violence or intrigue." Viviano and Lloyd use the term sistema del potere, or system of power, to describe Mafia control, a "nightmare...