According to a well-established historiographic tradition whose roots go back to the eighteenth century and that emerged out of the contemporary political debate, the history of the kingdom of Sicily was characterized by a substantial degree by institutional continuity from the time of the Norman kingdom to 1812. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sicilian institutions have, by and large, adopted this assumption. In this regard, Alessandro Silvestri's book, which sharply criticizes this approach through a series of studies devoted to the Sicilian administration, is of particular note. Silvestri pays special attention to the Quattrocento, drawing on the results obtained in various fields of late medieval historiography: studies on the administrative, financial, and political structures of the Crown of Aragon; research on the institutional changes that were occurring in the territorial states of the Italian Peninsula at this time; and discussions of the production, registration, and conservation of documents by government apparatuses. With regard to documents, Silvestri provides a detailed analysis of the various fonds housed in the Archivio di Stato di Palermo, which have hitherto been little studied, with the aim of reconstructing the activities of the sovereigns of the house of Trastámara (especially Ferdinand I of Aragon and Alfonso the Magnanimous) in Sicily and their strategies to construct an efficient system of delegated power on the island.

The ascent to the throne of Sicily of Ferdinand I of Antequera (1412), who was also king of Aragon, meant that the island was now part of a broader political entity, which made it necessary to develop tools that could legitimize and give practical effect to the viceroy's government. These figures then began to establish themselves institutionally and became indispensable in the peculiar politics of the composite Aragonese monarchy. The sovereigns’ aims were twofold: on the one hand, they needed to coordinate the island's government structure with that of the distant royal court; on the other, it was even more important to set up a system of checks and balances that would prevent an authority endowed with delegated royal power from acting in an uncontrolled manner to the disadvantage of the others. With this aim in mind, the author ushers the reader into the administrative chambers of the palace in Palermo, examining at close hand the officials of the royal chancellery, the protonotario del regno, the maestri razionali, and, above all, the royal secretaries. Silvestri studies their procedures, the changes they experimented with over the course of Alfonso's reign, thanks to a series of rules and orders whose purpose was to regulate action, define spheres for intervention, and resolve conflicts between those overseeing the administration. Of particular importance was the work of the financial offices: the creation of the conservatore del real patrimonio is only the most obvious component of a far-reaching reform in the area of collecting and distributing revenues, which involved local officials and led to a drastic change in the way they operated. Of significance were the administrative practices that were adopted and that now required attention to be given to the drafting of documents, to their registration, and to their archiving.

The picture that emerges sheds light on a period of Sicilian history that has so far been neglected by the scholarship, and it presents fifteenth-century Sicily as a vital reservoir of resources destined for Alfonso the Magnanimous's military campaigns in Italy. Offices in Palermo busied themselves not only with transferring money to the king's treasury but also with paying the expenses for the transportation, maintenance, and supply of soldiers, and paying off the king's various debts. This tells us something not only about Sicily's economic capacity but also about the sovereigns’ ability to cultivate consent among the island's elite. In spite of the considerable revenue that was extracted, Sicily remained staunchly loyal to the Aragonese dynasty.

This fact is probably also due to the high degree of autonomy the island enjoyed because of its inclusion in the Crown of Aragon, which meant that it could profit from the opportunities of trading over a wide area of the Mediterranean. The only encroachments on Sicily's autonomy were Alfonso the Magnanimous's efforts to centralize—efforts that, in a certain sense, only came to an end after his death. It is important to note here that the method used to govern Sicily became an internal model for the Aragonese Federation, where, over the course of the latter half of the Quattrocentro, individual states acquired greater administrative independence. This was a role that would be preserved during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, inside the Spanish monarchy. Quattrocento Sicily as described by Silvestri proved to be an important testing ground both from the administrative-bureaucratic standpoint and from a purely political perspective.