The Age of Chivalry (26 page)

Provence was part of the kingdom of Burgundy and, owing an ultimate allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire, it was accustomed to a fairly relaxed administration. Marseille, Arles and Avignon enjoyed a good deal of autonomy as imperial free cities, and the Provençal nobility enjoyed historic liberties. Charles appointed committees of inquiry into his rights as ruler and these investigations, conducted by obliging lawyers in 1252
and then again in 1278, gave him the answers he wanted. But insistence on his full rights—and the need to pay accompanying fees—had typified Charles's administrative style as soon as he arrived in Provence. When he went north again in 1247 to be invested as count of Anjou the imperial cities combined to form a defensive league against him. The count's more prolonged absence on the Seventh Crusade in 1258–60 gave his local enemies a chance to mount a prolonged revolt which he defeated with his accustomed vigor on returning to Provence. Arles and Avignon submitted in the summer of 1251 as did Marseille a year later.

Provence's agricultural wealth and the commercial prosperity of its towns produced the revenues that enriched Charles, but ruling the county could not satisfy all his ambitions. Then came a proposal that he should be king of Sicily, a territory regarded as its fiefdom by the papacy. The notion was first mooted in 1252 by Innocent IV and resulted from the usual papal neurosis about the Staufer. However, Louis IX vetoed the proposal that Charles should usurp Conrad IV, Frederick II's son, as ruler of the Sicilian kingdom.

During the next decade Charles settled down to being a highly successful, if somewhat frustrated, ruler of Provence, and the county's political élite grew accustomed to his brisk but efficient government. However, the seizure of power in Sicily by Manfred, Frederick II's illegitimate son, in 1258 changed the dynamics of power in the central Mediterranean. The papacy was once again confronted by a vigorous and resourceful Staufer on its southern frontier and Manfred's maneuvering in central and northern Italy aroused its traditional fear of encirclement. An alarmed papacy therefore renewed its offer of the kingdom of Sicily to Charles. In July 1263, with Louis IX's support, Charles signed a treaty with Urban IV granting him the Sicilian throne.

In the years following his victory at the Battle of Benevento (February 26, 1266) Charles ruled the Italian south with an exactitude already familiar to his Provençal subjects. He was also now planning a major offensive against the Byzantines, and he persuaded Louis IX that a campaign to restore the Latin empire of Constantinople could form part of a wider crusade. In 1267 he signed a treaty with the exiled emperor Baldwin II, who transferred to Charles the overlordship of Achaea, the Latin empire's vassal state that had survived the re-establishment of the Greek empire. The Villehardouin family, who were princes of Achaea, therefore became Charles's vassals, and he supplied them with the men and materials necessary to continue an anti-Byzantine struggle within the Peloponnese. Charles had already seized Corfu, as well as most of the Aegean islands, and he was therefore well placed for a full frontal attack on Michael VIII Palaeologus.

THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES

1204
A “Latin empire of Constantinople” is established by the Fourth Crusade's leaders following the capture of Greek imperial territory.

1246
Louis IX's youngest brother, Charles, becomes count of Provence on marrying Beatrice, heiress to the county, and is invested (1247) as count of Anjou and of Maine.

1261
Michael VIII Palaeologus defeats the Latin empire and restores Byzantium.

1263
Urban IV grants Charles of Anjou the throne of Sicily, a papal fiefdom that includes the island of Sicily and the southern Italian mainland.

1266
After defeating Manfred of Sicily at the Battle of Benevento, Charles starts to rule as king of Sicily.

1281–82
Charles prepares for a military offensive against the Byzantium empire.

1282
Rebellion spreads from Palermo to the rest of Sicily. King Peter III of Aragon becomes King Peter I of Sicily.

1302
Frederick III is recognized as ruler of the island kingdom of Sicily, and the rule of the House of Anjou-Naples is restricted to the southern Italian kingdom.

Byzantium's emperor nevertheless had one card to play in his defense. Michael wrote to Louis IX, and suggested a
rapprochement
between the Latin and Greek Churches. Besides which, he argued, would not an attack on Constantinople by the king's brother interfere with Louis's eagerness to launch a crusade defending the crusader states against Baybars, the Mamluk sultan of Syria and Egypt? Charles went through the motions of postponing his conquest plans, but his alternative strategy was typically adroit in its self-interest. The caliph of Tunis had been Manfred's vassal, and Charles wished to re-establish the Sicilian kingdom's suzerainty over Muhammad I al-Mustansir. The fact that the caliph was rumored to be contemplating conversion to Christianity lent weight to Charles's suggestion that the Eighth Crusade be directed initially against Tunis as an easy target. Louis IX accordingly sailed for Tunis and, following the king's death almost immediately after landing there, Charles conducted the siege of the town which ended in al-Mustansir's renewal of his vassalage to the kingdom of Sicily.

B
ELOW
The
Castel Nuevo
in Naples was built by Charles of Anjou following the decision to make Naples, rather than Palermo, the administrative center of the Kingdom of Sicily
.

There may have been a plan to use the crusading fleet in order to launch an attack on Byzantium, but its destruction by storms while returning to Sicily put paid to any such proposal. However, there were other pickings within easy reach, and in 1272 Charles proclaimed himself king of Albania after he had conquered lands along the Albanian coast that had previously been part of the despotate of Epirus. He still thought that Byzantium was within his grasp, but a reunion of the Greek and Latin Churches now
seemed imminent, and since Michael Palaeologus was in serious discussions with the papacy on the subject, Charles's ambition remained frustrated.

Pope Gregory was, however, in a position to grant Charles a consolation prize: the kingdom of Jerusalem. Deprived of the city of Jerusalem and with its capital in Acre, the tiny kingdom that clung to the Syrian coast was not much of a gift. Hugh III of Cyprus had been crowned its king in 1269, but the faction-ridden local nobility disgusted him and in 1276 he returned to his island throne. This left Mary of Antioch as a claimant, and she was ready to sell her rights to Charles of Anjou. With papal approval the deal was done in 1277, and following the application of some strong-arm tactics by Charles's agents the local nobility swore fealty to their new king.

Simon de Brion's election to the papacy as Martin IV on February 22, 1281 was an encouraging moment for Charles. The count had gone so far as to imprison two obstreperous Italian cardinals to ensure that the conclave voted unanimously for the French cardinal who had been Louis IX's chancellor in 1259–61. Michael VIII had found it difficult to sell the idea of a Church reunion in Constantinople, and the new pope helped Charles by excommunicating the Greek emperor. In 1281–82, therefore, and with papal approval, Charles could at last prepare to go to war against Byzantium.

Initial land campaigning designed to break out from Charles's Albanian base provoked a Byzantine counter-attack which put his army to flight. Campaigning in Achaea had also gone badly, with the principality proving a problem in other respects. The deal of 1267 meant that Charles was now lord of Achaea as well as its suzerain, following the death without issue in 1271 of his son Philip, who had been his vassal in the Peloponnese principality. But the Villehardouin family contested his succession, and although possession of Achaea gave Charles's Angevin dynasty a major role in Frankish-occupied Greece, squabbling over the succession ensured over a century of civil wars. Still, in the summer of 1282, Charles's hopes must have been bolstered by the sight of the 400 ships he had assembled at the great port of Messina in readiness for the attack on Constantinople.

On the evening of March 29, however, just as the church bells of Palermo started to ring in readiness for the service of Vespers, a quarrel broke out between French officials and some locals. A contemporary account of the evening describes a Frenchman pestering a young married woman, whose husband then attacked the lout and stabbed him to death. Whatever the cause, a spark had been lit and in the ensuing massacre the local Palermitans killed as many of the French as they could find. The rebellion spread after local leaders were elected in Palermo, and six weeks later Charles of Anjou's French
government had lost control of most of the island of Sicily. By the end of April even well-fortified Messina was lost to the French, and the rebels set fire to Charles's armada.

Why did this happen, and how spontaneous was it? Charles's French administrators could certainly be harsh, and his decision to base himself in Naples had isolated him from the island of Sicily. And there was a long history of Italian communalism behind the demands sent to a predictably unsympathetic papacy: the rebel leaders wanted their cities to be self-governing and directly answerable only to Martin IV as their suzerain. To some extent therefore this was a popular revolt. But the rebellion following the Sicilian Vespers incident was also part of the diplomatic politics of European princes.

After the pope had rejected their demands rebel leaders sent a message to King Peter III of Aragon, whose wife Constance was Manfred's daughter and a claimant to the Sicilian throne. Peter was well placed to champion the claim made in the summer of 1282 since his navy—a newly built fleet intended to protect his subjects' trading interest in north Africa—was located at Tunis just a couple of hundred miles to the south of Sicily. There was also another element to the Sicilian Vespers incident: Peter's Aragonese kingdom contained numerous Sicilian refugees who hated Charles. These exiles tended to be Ghibellines who opposed papal territorial power in Italy, and in the past Charles had shown no qualms about killing people who held such views. In 1272 he had declared war on Genoa, a city run by Ghibellines whose revolts, partly financed by the Greek emperor Michael VIII, spread across north Italy. By 1275 the Ghibellines had forced Charles to withdraw from Piedmont, but their hostility remained intense.

John of Procida, Manfred's former chancellor and once a counselor to Frederick II, was an all-important point of contact between all these groups, and the strength of his devotion to the Staufen memory was equaled only by his detestation of Charles. In 1282 John was 72, but this gifted conspirator's age did not stop him from being an effective liaison between the emperor Michael in Constantinople, the Aragonese court and Charles's opponents in Sicily.

The Sicilians' appeal to Peter and Constance of Aragon was accepted, and on August 30, 1282 the Aragonese fleet docked at Trapani. The king promised a restoration of ancient Sicilian liberties rather than free communes, but the undertaking was good enough for the islanders and he was acclaimed Peter I of Sicily on September 4 at Palermo.

Charles could still rely on the papacy for support. Martin IV first excommunicated Peter of Aragon and then declared that Charles of Valois, son of France's King Philip III (“the Bold”) should rule Aragon. These actions were part of a pattern of consistently craven support for Charles of Anjou, and Martin's subservience to French interests
had a serious long-term effect in undermining the papacy's spiritual authority as an independent power. The pope's further announcement of 1284 that the war against the Sicilians would be an Aragonese Crusade devalued the vocabulary of an ideal that was once supposed to unite all Christian princes and their subjects.