The right to avenge wrongs was reserved for the victims and their families, and to break the code of silence was to incur reprisals from the Mafia. This code was based on omertà- i.e., the obligation never, under any circumstances, to apply for justice to the legal authorities and never to assist in any way in the detection of crimes committed against oneself or others. The Mafia survived and outlasted Sicily’s successive foreign governments because the latter were often so despotic that they alienated the island’s inhabitants and made tolerable the Mafia’s peculiar system of private justice, which was regulated by a complicated moral code. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the energetic ruffians in these private armies organized themselves and grew so powerful that they turned against the landowners and became the sole law on many of the estates, extorting money from the landowners in return for protecting the latter’s crops. The Mafia owed its origins and drew its members from the many small private armies, or mafie, that were hired by absentee landlords to protect their landed estates from bandits in the lawless conditions that prevailed over much of Sicily through the centuries. The Mafia arose in Sicily during the late Middle Ages, where it possibly began as a secret organization dedicated to overthrowing the rule of the various foreign conquerors of the island- e.g. The term applies to the traditional criminal organization in Sicily and also to a criminal organization in the United States. Mafia, hierarchically structured society of criminals of primarily Italian or Sicilian birth or extraction.
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