Started as a patriotic organization when the Arab invaders seized the island, driving bands of citizens into the hills where they conducted guerilla operations. Later the 'Mafia' fought the French oppressors and functioned as a fraternal society initially created to protect the lives and welfare of the Sicilinas.

2. "Ma-fia, Ma-fia!"

The most prevailing myth among southern-Italians of the word.
In 1282, during a revolt of Sicilians against against their French occupiers, a French soldier allegedly raped a young Sicilian woman on her wedding day. Her anguished mother ran though the streets crying, "Ma-fia, Ma-fia!", infuriated Sicilians rose up and thousands of Frenchmen died in a bloodbath.

3. Squadri della Maffia

The first recorded use of the word.
A group of peasants supporting Giuseppe Garibladi were described as 'squadri della maffia'.
Born on July 4, 1807, in Nice, France, Garibladi (1807-87) was an Italian nationalist revolutionary and leader in the struggle for Italian unification and independence. In 1833 he joined Young Italy, the movement organized by the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini to achieve the freedom of the Italian people and their unification into a self-governing republic. He promised the peasants that their years of enslavement were at an end and that unification would bring social change to Sicily. But nothing happened. Garibaldi was condemned to death in 1834, but he escaped to South America, where he lived for 12 years.

4. I mafisusi della Vicaria

A celebrated play in 1863. It described the life in a Palermo prison in which there existed a 'consorteria mafiusa' - a secret society of criminals, with a hierarchy which had its own rules, ran the prison by bribing or scaring the guards into submission.