Chiesa di San Tommaso Becket Caramanico Terme, Abruzzo

The cult of St Thomas of Canterbury is very widespread in Italy. As we shall see, perhaps the earliest image of him as a martyr is found in Sicily. So why is this? Shaping a Saint’s Identity: The Imagery of Thomas Becket in Medieval Italy, a paper by Constanza Cipollaro and Veronika Decker, offers some interesting ideas.
  One answer is Thomas’s exile. It is often assumed that he went alone, but this is not the case: many members of his family went as well. A nephew, Gilbert, went to the Norman kingdom of Sicily. In a letter, Becket entrusted him to the bishop of Syracuse. A later letter from Becket to the queen regent of Sicily in 1169 thanks her for giving ‘solace to our fellow-exiles, outlawed for Christ, in their affliction. And to our own relatives, who fled to your lands before the face of the persecutor.’
  There is a political strand to the story, both in Sicily and elsewhere on the Italian peninsula.  In 1168, two years before the martyrdom, Henry II had arranged a marriage for his infant daughter Joan to William II of Sicily, who was as yet too young to take the throne. Following the death of Thomas, this was called off, but after Henry’s penitence the marriage took place in 1177. The relic shown below left, given to the regent queen by an English bishop, commemorated the marriage: it contained a part of Thomas’s blood-soaked clothing. The mosaic, from the cathedral in Monreale, was commissioned in 1178, just a few years after Becket’s canonization in 1173.