Yet the pope was either being deceitful or he failed to communicate with his subordinates. The pope sent an army under his nephew to receive the submission of all the parties in southern Italy, but when this demand was made there was no reference to Conradin’s rights, instantly arousing the suspicion of those loyal to the Hohenstaufen. Papal agents also occupied parts of southern Italy that rightfully belonged to Manfred. Manfred, either equally duplicitous or reacting very quickly to the pope’s apparent betrayal, rushed to seize the kingdom’s treasury held at Lucera. Lucera was a historical curiosity that caused considerable tension between the papacy and the Hohenstaufen, because it had been settled by Muslims deported from Sicily by Frederick II. Frederick’s goal had been to cut the Muslim community off from contact with North Africa, but to retain their services as soldiers and weapon-makers. This policy was successful and the community at Lucera remained loyal to the Hohenstaufen, but this tolerance for Muslims in Italy disturbed the papacy. Manfred’s quick action at Lucera allowed him to deprive the papal army of funds, and it dissolved, leaving Manfred virtually unchallenged in southern Italy.30
Innocent IV was at Naples when he heard of this complete defeat, and he swiftly reopened negotiations with Henry III. Once again he offered the eight-year-old Edmund the throne, though now with a caveat that Conradin’s future rights must somehow also be respected. However, Innocent himself died in December 1254. His unrelenting hostility to the Hohenstaufen, which made him willing to scheme with foreign princes to overthrow legitimate rulers and excommunicate his political enemies, was not unprecedented, but critics of the papacy see his pontificate as a low point. He certainly set in motion a train of events that would change Italian history forever and launch the Angevins on their European adventures.
An absolutely vital component to bringing off the Sicilian conquest was lasting peace with France, and Henry III was determined to accomplish this. He negotiated with Louis IX to agree a permanent peace between the two kingdoms, resulting in the Treaty of Paris of 1259. This acknowledged the possession of Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Poitou by the French king and that Aquitaine belonged to the English king, but Henry definitively accepted that he was Louis’s vassal for this territory. It is fitting that the unfinished business involving the collapse of the Angevin Empire was resolved as part of the Sicilian affair that would launch the next great Angevin dynasty and an attempt to form another empire. Proof that Henry III was sincere in this renunciation is that he had a new seal made in England discarding old Angevin titles, as the existing seal still said ‘King of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and count of Anjou’, with an image of the king on his throne holding a sword. Henry’s new seal said ‘Henry, by the grace of God, king of England, lord of Ireland and duke of Aquitaine’ and showed the king on a Gothic chair holding a sceptre. The old seal was destroyed at a ceremony in the king’s chamber at Westminster on 18 October 1260, officially recognizing the end of the Angevin Empire.31
Despite this, the English barons insisted that the king could not commit the kingdom to a costly foreign war without the consent of a parliament, and Henry was forced to agree to hold a parliament at Oxford. This produced the ‘Provisions of Oxford’ that became the rallying point for the barons’ war in the 1260s, forging another key link in the chain of English democracy. Although ultimately the barons gave grudging support to the Sicilian invasion, the new pope, Alexander IV, recognized that Henry III would never be in a strong enough position to carry off the invasion, and in December 1258 he issued a bull formally revoking Edmund’s title as king and releasing Henry from his obligations. The pope had received about £40,000 from England, so he had not done badly.
As his enemies fell into disarray, Manfred’s position was flourishing. After discomfiting the papal forces in 1254, Manfred had sent to Bavaria where Conradin was living with his mother’s family, and obtained recognition as regent on behalf of the infant prince. Alexander IV had sent another mercenary army south to unseat Manfred and incited the Sicilians to declare themselves an independent republic under papal authority, but in an atmosphere of constant betrayal and uncertainty, Manfred blockaded and starved the papal army into submission, procured the deaths of his other rivals and offered himself as the saviour of the kingdom. Sicily preferred this to an uncertain future under papal control, and by 1257 Manfred controlled the entire kingdom of Sicily. When a rumour, perhaps started by Manfred, spread that Conradin had died, Manfred had himself crowned king on 10 August 1258 in the cathedral at Palermo.32
Within four years of Conrad’s death, another Hohenstaufen king was in complete control of Sicily and southern Italy, and the papal position was deteriorating inexorably as Manfred built alliances with anti-papal interests in Rome, Tuscany and Lombardy. After traditionally pro-Hohenstaufen Siena decisively defeated traditionally pro-papal Florence at the battle of Montaperti in 1260, Manfred was the greatest power in Italy, and in the pope’s words, he had ‘imitated his father’s evil actions from his early years, and we have seen how much further he has gone in savagery’.33 The pope was completely isolated in Rome with no army to help him, and as Manfred consolidated his hold in Italy, Alexander IV must have been thinking that Manfred might ultimately gain the Holy Roman Empire as well. This was not the only empire on Manfred’s mind though, since the Latin Empire of Constantinople was in its death throes and the Emperor Baldwin II was touring Western Europe seeking assistance.
The End of the Latin Empire of Constantinople
There were several successor states of the Byzantine Empire after its conquest by the Fourth Crusade. On the Latin side, these were the nominal Latin Empire ruled by Baldwin II (essentially only two-thirds of the city of Constantinople, since the Venetians ruled one third of the city); the Duchy of Athens, an area in central Greece ruled by the La Roche family with a capital at Thebes; and the Principality of Achaea, consisting of the Peloponnese or ‘Morea’, ruled by Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s successors. On the Greek side, there was a small but rich state centred on Trebizond on the Black Sea coast and ruled by a successor to the Comneni; the land ruled by the Despot of Epirus, a successor to the Angelus Emperors overthrown by the Fourth Crusade, which included the northwestern part of Greece between Albania and the Gulf of Corinth; and most importantly, the Empire of Nicaea, whose ruler called himself Emperor and had captured all the territory up to the outskirts of Constantinople and beyond into Thessalonica, and seemed on the verge of recapturing the capital itself.
Frederick II had supported the Emperor of Nicaea as an ally against the pope, but Manfred recognized that opposing the Nicaeans would make him the de facto champion of the Latins, and the pope might find it embarrassing to continue his vendetta against the potential saviour of the Latin Empire. Manfred married Helena, the daughter of the Despot Michael of Epirus, and received Corfu and several towns on the coast as her dowry. Michael had married his other daughter to the Prince of Achaea, thus all the pieces were in place for an Epirote-Latin alliance against Nicaea.34
The Emperor in Nicaea was now the highly skilled general Michael Palaeologus, who in 1259 sent a force against Epirus that defeated the Despot’s army and seized some of his territory. The Despot Michael now called on his allies, and an impressive coalition formed consisting of the Despot’s forces, a strong contingent of heavily armed horsemen from Manfred, a large force from Athens and Achaea led personally by William Villehardouin, and various other contingents provided by Latin and neighbouring rulers assembled in Epirus. They ranged themselves against the Nicaeans on the plain of Pelagonia, where they had the advantage of numbers. However, for reasons that are not clear – the most common story given was that the Achaeans insulted the beautiful wife of the Despot Michael’s son – the Epirotes quarrelled with the Latins and withdrew overnight, leaving Manfred’s troops and the Achaeans alone to face the Nicaeans the following morning. In the resulting chaos the Nicaeans attacked and completely defeated the Latin force, capturing William of Achaea and most of the Fr
ankish lords on the battlefield.35
Baldwin II realized this complete Nicaean victory could spell his doom and appealed to Manfred and the pope for help, but Manfred was too busy tightening his grasp on Italy and the pope was too busy inciting opposition to Manfred for either to respond. Baldwin agreed a truce with Michael Paleologus to last until August 1261, though neither side was likely to consider it binding if it became inconvenient.
Then an astonishing event occurred. In July 1261 Michael Paleologus sent a small army to resolve some trouble on the border with Bulgaria, and instructed the soldiers to pass by Constantinople and make a show of force. When the army arrived before the city they met a Greek villager who told them that most of the city’s garrison and the Venetian fleet were away trying to a capture an island in the Black Sea. He further offered to show them a secret underground passage into the city. On the night of 24 July a few men entered the city and opened the gates to the rest of the army, and by the morning of 25 July Constantinople had been taken. Although the Venetian fleet and garrison returned later in the day, they were driven off, and Baldwin II only just managed to row out to meet them to avoid capture. The Latin Empire was finished and the Byzantine Empire returned to Constantinople.
A courier rushed to tell Michael Palaeologus about the miraculous event, and Michael formally entered Constantinople on 4 August 1261, following the traditional imperial processional route through the city to Hagia Sophia. Although he was crowned a few days later at Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Empire would survive for almost 200 more years, it was now only a phantom of what it had once been and the scars of the Fourth Crusade still lay on the city. A contemporary Greek source describes what Michael Palaeologus found when he arrived:
Then indeed you might have seen that the Queen of Cities was a vast field of desolation, full of rubbish and heaps of stones: some buildings were destroyed and little remained of others gutted by the great fire. For the violence of the flames had often consumed its beauty and its most potent decoration since the time that it had first been menaced with the slavery of the Latins. They had taken so little care in imposing that subjugation that they destroyed it in every way, day and night. For it was as if the Latins despaired of the possibility that they could keep possession of it forever; God, I believe, in secret words told them what the future would be. … The first and special occupation of the emperor was therefore that he should at once cleanse it and restore order to the confusion that had prevailed by propping up the churches that had not completely collapsed and filling the empty houses with inhabitants.36
Michael also lost no time turning the screw on Frankish Greece, and offered to ransom William Villehardouin in exchange for the three key fortresses of the Peloponnese. Guy the Duke of Athens was the highest-ranking lord not in captivity, and he summoned a parliament to consider the offer. This was the famous ‘Ladies’ Parliament’, so called because almost all the Frankish lords had been captured at Pelagonia and their wives ruled their lands. Although Guy questioned the wisdom of accepting the terms, the Princess of Achaea insisted that they be accepted and the other women agreed. The exchange was made and William and the other lords were released.37
Although Constantinople was lost to the Franks, Michael Paleologus was unable to capitalize on his success. An expedition against Epirus was defeated, and Duke Guy and Prince William were able to resist attacks on their territories. Although the Latin Empire of Constantinople was gone, the Frankish land of Morea also endured for another 200 years, and unsurprisingly would one day become Angevin.
The Angevin Invasion of Italy
Manfred, despite the defeat of the force he sent to Pelagonia, was not inconvenienced by the disasters in Greece. He was still firmly in control of Corfu and the important city of Durazzo (modern Durres, in Albania) on the Dalmatian coast. Further, he warmly welcomed the exiled Emperor Baldwin II to his court and pledged to help him regain his Empire. Manfred offered to send an expedition to recapture Constantinople that would then continue on to the Holy Land as a Crusade, if only the pope would agree to a truce with him, and he asked Baldwin to intercede with the pope on his behalf. This put the pope (now Urban IV, after Alexander IV’s death) in an awkward position. The papacy must remain committed to the restoration of the Latin Empire and the reunion of the Latin and Greek churches, and more importantly, Urban had been the Patriarch of Jerusalem and he had only come to Europe to seek help for the increasingly beleaguered Crusader States when he was unexpectedly elected pope. Yet even with a new pope, the papacy’s antipathy to Manfred was still too great for any attempt at reconciliation. After visiting the pope, Baldwin proceeded to Paris to seek Louis IX’s help in reconciling the pope and Manfred, but Louis still viewed Manfred as a usurper and also refused.38
England, France, Italy, Germany, the Spanish kingdoms and Greece were now caught up in the struggle between Manfred and the papacy. Henry III’s brother Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso X of Castile were vying to become Emperor, and Richard had been elected King of the Romans (Emperor-elect). Manfred had also concluded a marriage alliance with James of Aragon, thus ensuring that the ruling houses of most of Western Europe were now involved. This is what put the Angevins so firmly at the heart of Europe for 200 years, and this is why the Angevin story touches almost every aspect of European history.
In 1262, the pope again had to seek a saviour. Ten years after the first offer was made to Richard of Cornwall the papacy had gained a substantial sum of money from Henry III, but no material aid in deposing Manfred. The English barons had made it clear that England would provide no further assistance. The Empire was still highly unstable, and although it did have a ruler in the form of Richard of Cornwall, in truth he was a compromise candidate who never actually commanded any power in the Empire. The Spanish kingdoms might have been an option, but James of Aragon was allied to Manfred and Alfonso of Castile was still trying to claim the Empire despite the election of Richard of Cornwall. That left only France, which had become the traditional bastion of the church and would likely have been Urban’s preferred choice anyway.
Urban sent a legate yet again to Paris to offer the throne of Sicily to a French prince. Louis IX had promised his support to Henry III for Edmund’s candidacy, and he was also aware that Conradin was the legitimate heir to the kingdom. Yet he did not refuse outright. He declined the offer on behalf of himself and his heirs, but when it was suggested that the offer might be made once again to Charles of Anjou, Louis did not object.
Urban IV was on the verge of renewing the appeal to Charles, but paused when Baldwin II came to him again to beg for help restoring the Latin Empire, as well as bringing another letter from Manfred promising to assist Baldwin. Despite believing that Manfred was a usurper who should be deposed, Urban did take into account Baldwin’s position, and he did carefully consider whether it might not be better to allow Manfred to stay in power if he was going to launch an assault on Constantinople to restore the Latin Empire. More importantly, Urban was fully aware of the threat to the Crusader States posed by the Mamluk dynasty who now ruled Egypt. They had defeated even the Mongols in 1260, and were the most organized Muslim state since the time of Saladin. Putting aside his animosity towards Manfred, and instead of continuing with the plan for an invasion of Sicily, Urban called for a new general Crusade to the Holy Land. He went further, summoning Manfred to appear before him by the end of November 1262, when presumably the two might be reconciled.39
Although Urban is a more attractive figure than Innocent IV or Alexander IV, because he did genuinely seem to have the interests of all of Christendom at heart, he too was caught up in the impossible political situation in Italy. Further, there were too many parties involved now to avoid misunderstandings, delays and miscommunications. For example, Louis IX was fervently in favour of a general Crusade and wrote to the pope to approve of the attempt to reconcile with Manfred, a vote of confidence that might have confirmed Urban in this course of action. Yet Louis’s letter was delayed (Steven Runciman sug
gests it was a plot by Charles of Anjou!), so when Urban did begin negotiating with Manfred he still had too many misgivings, and ultimately relations between the two broke down again. Even while the discussions were in progress, Urban sent his legate to renew talks with Charles of Anjou. We can’t be sure that Manfred was negotiating in good faith, but Urban definitely appears duplicitous.
By 1263, Baldwin was in Paris exhorting Louis IX to support the Crusade and end his opposition to Manfred, but the pope had already informed Louis that no reconciliation with Manfred was forthcoming, and that for the Crusade to succeed Manfred must be deposed. In May, Charles of Anjou was also in Paris and Louis officially approved his involvement in the papal scheme. Moreover, the pope had begun negotiating with Michael Paleologus for the unification of the Eastern and Western Churches without the restoration of the Latin Empire in Constantinople, cutting off at the roots any influence Baldwin may have had. The net was tightening around Manfred, and Baldwin became aware of the situation. In July, he wrote to alert Manfred of the pope’s treachery and urged him to send an envoy to Paris to detach Louis from the scheme. Baldwin also cleverly suggested that Manfred send a separate message to Queen Margaret, as it was clear that she disliked Charles of Anjou and might be willing to use her influence to stop any scheme beneficial to Charles.
Baldwin’s letter had catastrophic consequences for Manfred. The letter was intercepted by the Podesta of Rimini, who sent it to the pope. Urban saw at once how damaging it would be, and forwarded the letter to Louis. The idea that Baldwin, a deposed Emperor who was living off Louis in Paris, should be intriguing with Manfred behind his back outraged even the saintly Louis. He was even more annoyed by the suggestion that his wife’s hatred for Charles of Anjou might be used to influence him. Louis now supported the Sicilian scheme fully and the pope finalised the agreement, which included steep tribute payments and various limitations on Charles’s power, in a bull issued on 26 June 1263.40
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 28