Likewise, the artistic and architectural heritage of Muslim Sicily wasn’t entirely destroyed upon the arrival of the Normans, but rather it was incorporated, along with that of the island’s other major group, Byzantine Greeks, into a stylistic fusion today known as the Arab-Norman style.

Few sites are as exemplary of the style that emerged in the Normans’ wake as Palermo’s San Giovanni degli Eremiti, or the Monastery of St. John of the Hermits. The site initially housed a Benedictine monastery founded by Pope Gregory the Great in 581. Upon the arrival of the Muslims—North African Berbers who in the 9th century wrested the island from the control of the emperor in Constantinople—the monastery was destroyed and rebuilt as a mosque.