Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500

by Jeffrey Anderson

  Villani makes an interesting point that is analogous to the situation when the Angevins faced Germans in plate armour fighting with Manfred at Benevento. He says:

  Then was the battle fierce and hard; but the Spaniards [i.e. the Germans led by Henry of Castile] were well armed, and by stroke of sword might not be struck to the ground, and continually after their fashion they drew close together. Then began the French to cry out wrathfully, and to take hold of them by the arms and drag them from their horses after the manner of tournaments; and this was done to such good purpose that in a short time they were routed, and defeated, and put to flight, and many of them lay dead on the field.62

  He explicitly links the techniques developed in tournaments with a practical use on the battlefield, supporting the justification for tournaments that had been made since their origin. We will remember that Charles was said to have loved tournaments, and what could be perceived as his misspent youth seems to have served him well at Tagliacozzo.

  Now Charles had gained a complete victory, and that night he wrote to the pope to rejoice in the most flowery style:

  Humbly I offer you, most merciful father, as well as the most holy Roman Church, the sweet incense of a joy long awaited by all the faithful of the world, begging that the father, ‘arising and eating of his son’s game’ [Genesis 27:31], might pay his debt of gratitude to the Most High, and that both the father and the mother might henceforth find respite from their labors.63

  Despite the bloody business of warfare, feints and counterattacks, Charles had not forgotten that this was a Crusade to exterminate the ‘race of vipers’, and he had no doubt that he was doing God’s work. In the letter he accused Conradin and his army of seeking a way into the kingdom ‘through which they might secretly enter and join forces with the Saracens’. Although the Muslims at Lucera almost certainly would have supported Conradin, this adds a misleading religious dimension to the struggle as a justification for a holy war against the Hohenstaufen. Charles then gave an account of what happened on the battlefield that ignored his own near defeat, and concluded triumphantly:

  Indeed, the slaughter of the enemy there was so great that what happened to other persecutors of the Church on the fields of Benevento can hardly be compared to it. At the time this letter is written, immediately following the victory, I cannot be certain whether Conradin and the Roman senator Henry fell in battle or were able to escape. I can tell you that the senator’s horse, which fled without its rider, was captured by my men. Therefore, Mother Church should rejoice and let out a cry of praise on high to him for mercifully providing so great a triumph, one obtained by the efforts of his warriors. For now it appears that Almighty God has put an end to her troubles, and freed her from the ravenous jaws of her persecutors.64

  Charles commemorated the victory by founding the abbey of Santa Maria della Vittoria at Scurcola.

  Henry of Castile fled to a monastery, where he was captured and turned over to Charles. Conradin fled first to Rome. There he found that the lieutenant left by Henry of Castile was no more trustworthy than Henry himself had been: he had heard of the battle and barred the gates of the Capitol against Conradin. Rather than risking the roads north where the triumphant Guelfs would be watching, Conradin and his companions headed for the coast and attempted to find a ship to take them to Genoa, but they were recognized by the local lord and imprisoned. Charles’s agents swiftly appeared to take possession of them, and they were transferred to Naples where they were imprisoned in the Castel dell’Ovo.

  The situation was a repeat of what Charles had already faced in Provence. There he had shown mercy at first, but when faced with further revolts he executed the ringleaders. After Benevento he had been scrupulously fair to Manfred’s supporters, but having witnessed how practically all of them defected the moment Conradin arrived in Italy, he immediately executed some of the leading Ghibelline nobles while contemplating the fate of Conradin and Henry of Castile. The kings of France and England begged for clemency for Henry, which was given, though he spent twenty-three years in prison. Conradin was different.

  Matthias von Neuenburg, writing in the 14th century, says that when Charles wrote to Pope Clement asking what to do with Conradin, Clement advocated Conradin’s death, saying, ‘Vita Conradini, mors Caroli; vita Caroli, mors Conradini’ (life to Conradin, death to Charles; life to Charles, death to Conradin).65 Charles must have understood that he would never be safe while a legitimate Hohenstaufen heir remained, but as he would repeatedly show, he believed in scrupulously following the law, or at least appearing to do so. Conradin was formally put on trial and charged with treason for invading the kingdom, and naturally he was found guilty. A scaffold was erected in Naples on the site of the current Piazza del Mercato, and Conradin was publicly beheaded on 29 October 1268.

  This execution violated contemporary customs and caused shock around Europe. Even though he condemned Conradin with a formal trial, Charles’s reputation was permanently stained by this action. His contemporaries condemned him for it and Villani linked this crime to Charles’s later misfortunes:

  Yet because of the said judgement King Charles was much blamed by the Pope and by his cardinals, and by all wise men, forasmuch as he had taken Conradino and his followers by chance of battle, and not by treachery, and it would have been better to keep him prisoner than to put him to death. And some said that the Pope assented thereto; but we do not give faith to this, forasmuch as he was held to be a holy man. And it seems that by reason of Conradino’s innocence, which was of such tender age to be adjudged to death, God showed forth a miracle against King Charles, for not many years after God sent him great adversities when he thought himself to be in highest state, as hereafter in his history we shall make mention.66

  Conradin is buried in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine near the marketplace where he was executed. Charles of Anjou magnanimously placed a grave marker for him, though this was subsequently lost and only rediscovered in the 19th century. That slab, and another explaining the circumstances in which it was recovered, are displayed unobtrusively in the chapel of the miracle-working image of the Madonna del Carmine, which completely upstages them. Fortunately for Conradin, Crown Prince Maximilian of Bavaria erected a much more substantial memorial in the nave in 1847: this is a suitably romantic statue of Conradin with inscriptions and reliefs commemorating the ‘last of the Hohenstaufen’. A German friend of mine (who is something of a Swabian nationalist) remarked that it is unusual to see a Bavarian celebrating a Swabian, but we have seen Conradin’s Bavarian connections and his association with Hohenschwangau, and it is fitting that Mad King Ludwig’s father should so honour him, also neatly locating him in the current of 19th-century doomed German romanticism.

  With Conradin dead, in the words of a troubadour, Charles would now be ‘lord of the greatest part of the world’.67 As he described himself in a peace treaty he made with Siena in 1271, he was now ‘most glorious king of Sicily, Duke of Apulia, Prince of Capua, Senator of Rome, count of Anjou, Provence and Forcalquier, vicar-general of the Roman empire in Tuscany through the Holy Roman Church’. He would also take the title King of Albania and become King of Jerusalem. Yet this creation of almost a second ‘Angevin Empire’ created powerful enemies, and Charles’s vaulting ambition also exposed him to risks.

  CHAPTER 8 – THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE: THE SICILIAN VESPERS AND THE NEW ANGEVIN KINGDOMS

  THE CONFLICTS WE HAVE seen between Charles and Manfred, then Charles and Conradin, had so convulsed Italy that there was much work to do to restore order. On top of that, Clement IV died a month after Conradin’s execution, certainly with misgivings over the death of the teenager. Although the cardinals met to elect a new pope, there were too many divisions between the French and Italian parties in the college of cardinals to reach an agreement, and it took nearly three years to reach a decision. During this time Charles was the only power in Italy, and he used his position to the full.

  Charles was again elected Senator of Rome fo
r ten years, and he had already been confirmed as imperial vicar of Tuscany. Although Charles did not often visit Rome or Tuscany, he was quite active in ruling them through his officials. In Tuscany, Charles’s agents joined the Florentine Guelfs and together they defeated Siena decisively and isolated Pisa by land. Charles then concluded an agreement with the Genoese to isolate Pisa from the sea and finally brought the Pisans to terms. By 1270 Charles controlled all of Tuscany, and he appointed a governor for Florence. In Rome, he struck coinage in his own name, stabilized the finances and reformed the judiciary, and the citizens of Rome erected a statue of Charles in gratitude for his stable government.

  This statue by Arnolfo di Cambio is probably not an entirely accurate portrait of Charles, but it must be based on his appearance and is considerably more realistic than other royal statues from the 13th century. If we consider the images available of Louis IX, Charles’s statue gives us a much more immediate sense of his appearance. The way Charles is represented is also instructive. He is portrayed seated, as a judge, rather than standing as kings usually were. The statue specifically commemorates Charles as a bringer of justice to the chaos of Italy, and fits him into a line of lawgivers stretching back to ancient Rome – literally, since the statue is carved from a piece of ancient architectural moulding.1 The statue is in the Capitoline Museum in Rome and to stand before it is a vivid reminder of how far Charles had travelled in status from being the landless youngest son of the French king. It also gives us a psychological insight into Charles, as Robert Brentano comments: ‘Arnolfo’s imaginatively plain, strong statue of him on the Capitol is great in the way he was great. It is full of powerful authority.’2

  Charles needed all of that authority to maintain his position. Although he held Tuscany, Rome and Piedmont securely, Lombardy was dominated by Ghibellines, and various foreign powers such as Alfonso of Castile and Peter of Aragon displayed an interest in the region. Sicily and the Muslims at Lucera were also still in open revolt. Lucera was only taken in August 1269, and it took until 1270 for Sicily to be brought under control. Many of the enemy leaders were beheaded in Naples as Conradin had been, reinforcing impressions of Charles as brutal and inflexible, acting against the custom of the time to execute those who opposed him.

  In the midst of this turmoil Charles continued to look for new arenas of expansion. He had already gained feudal authority over William of Achaea, but he now demanded that William marry his eldest daughter Isabelle to Charles’s second son Philip, with a provision that if Isabelle died without issue Achaea should pass to Charles himself. This disrupted a proposed marriage alliance between Isabelle and the eldest son of Emperor Michael Paleologus that might have reunited the Latin and Byzantine Empires and, theoretically, brought greater stability to the region and given the Byzantine Empire a stronger position against the Turks. Numerous Angevin critics in the mould of Dante see this as another example of the ‘sick weed’ of Capetian and Angevin acquisitiveness spreading over Europe and causing untold damage.3

  Charles had agreed to launch an attack on Constantinople on behalf of the Emperor Baldwin, but of course Conradin’s invasion put paid to that. The agreement had certainly not been forgotten, and by the summer of 1270 Charles was preparing an armada to attack the Byzantine Empire. He stated that he wanted to help Baldwin and the doge of Venice recover their rights in Constantinople, and began preparing all his ships for the invasion. We have seen how intimately the question of the Latin Empire was bound up with Crusading, and indeed the justification for the Fourth Crusade attacking Constantinople in the first place was largely because it would be a formidable staging post and ally for any attack on the Holy Land, and a support for the few remaining and desperately imperilled Crusader States. It would not be possible to launch an attack on Constantinople if it would clash with a Crusade, and unfortunately for Charles, Louis IX was planning just that.

  Louis IX’s Crusade Against Tunis

  If the execution of Conradin is a stain on Charles’s reputation, he is accused of the much worse crime of perverting the course of Louis IX’s second Crusade. This Crusade, directed against Tunis, would turn out to be yet another disaster and caused the death of Louis himself. Joinville, still a good friend of Louis’s, certainly opposed the expedition, but not because of its destination:

  I considered that all those who had advised the king to go on this expedition committed mortal sin. For at that time the state of the country was such that there was perfect peace throughout the kingdom, and between France and her neighbours, while ever since King Louis went away the state of the kingdom has done nothing but go from bad to worse.

  It was besides a great sin on the part of those who advised the king to go, seeing that he was physically so weak that he could neither bear to be drawn in a coach, nor to ride – so weak, in fact, that he let me carry him in my arms from the Comte d’Auxerre’s house, where I went to take leave of him, to the abbey of the Franciscans. And yet, weak as he was, if he had remained in France he might have lived for some time longer, and have done much good, and carried out many fine projects.4

  Thus the accusation that someone manipulated Louis into the attack on Tunis contains the implication that that person also effectively killed Louis.

  That a Crusade failed is unremarkable, but what is the basis for accusing Charles of somehow hijacking Louis’s Crusade? It is simply the choice to attack Tunis, which seems odd considering a Crusade had never been directed here before, and it would do nothing to help the Crusader States or strike at their real enemies, the Mamluks of Egypt, whose systematic conquest of the Holy Land and recent taking of Antioch were the primary concern in the West.

  The story of the Crusade is brutally simple. Louis and his army set out from Aigues-Mortes on 1 July 1270, and arrived in Tunis on 17 July where they established a camp to wait for Charles of Anjou. Disease broke out in the camp and many died, including Louis’s son Jean ‘Tristram’, who had been born in Damietta twenty years before on the previous Crusade. Charles’s fleet was in the Adriatic to prepare for the assault on Constantinople, so it took more than a month for him to sail back around Sicily, and he finally arrived on 25 August to be told that Louis had died that morning.

  Charles worked with Louis’s son, the new king Philip III, to pick up the pieces of the Crusade. They attacked Tunis and defeated the emir’s army. On hearing that an additional Crusading army under Prince Edward of England was on the way, the emir sought a peace treaty. He would pay the expenses of the Crusaders (one-third of which went to Charles), restore his tribute payments to the King of Sicily, allow merchants from Sicily free access to the city, release all his Christian captives and exile political refugees hostile to Charles. This was agreed on 1 November 1270 and the Crusade was over.5

  The simplicity of the events around this four-month Crusade reveals why the conspiracy theory about Charles is so compelling. Louis launches a misguided Crusade against an irrelevant enemy and tragically dies. If we ask who benefitted from the attack on Tunis, the answer is Charles. The emirs of Tunis since the 12th century had paid tribute to the kings of Sicily, but after Manfred’s death the emir stopped these payments. Tunis had also harboured Charles’s enemies like Frederick of Castile and had served as a base for them to attack Sicily and foment rebellion. Charles of Anjou then arrives and makes a settlement that benefits him financially and politically, and the Crusade ends. As in so many cases, we have a contemporary source, the ever hostile Saba Malaspina, who stated in 1285 that Charles convinced Louis to attack Tunis for his own gain: ‘wishing to go to that country and desirous of extirpating by the force of others the serpent from his cave, Charles had acted adroitly to lead such an important army against Tunis’.6

  Although there is no other direct evidence to support this theory, the attack on Tunis is so odd that it cries out for an explanation. Among modern historians, Runciman entirely accepts Saba’s accusation, and bolsters this position by highlighting criticism of this Crusade launched by – amongst others – the
Crusaders led by Prince Edward. They asked why, instead of trying to capture Tunis, Charles and the Crusaders had instead agreed a treaty that benefitted Charles, and then ended the Crusade. The conspiracy theory also presupposes that Louis could not be talked out of the Crusade (which would have suited Charles better), and so if there had to be a Crusade, in Runciman’s words, Charles decided ‘it would be against Muslims whose conquest would be of direct advantage to him’.7

  Villani actually gives a perfectly valid reason for attacking Tunis. He says of Louis and his advisers:

  And believing it to be the better course they determined to go against the kingdom of Tunis, thinking that if it could be taken by the Christians they would be in a very central place whence they could more easily afterwards take the kingdom of Egypt, and could cut off and wholly impede the force of the Saracens in the realm of Ceuta, and also that of Granada.8

  But he also repeats criticism of Charles, especially that Charles stopped the Crusader army from capturing Tunis, which would have meant it would be divided between all the parties involved in the Crusade, and instead arranged tribute payments for himself. This was duly punished:

  Others blamed King Charles, saying that he did it through avarice, to the end he might henceforward, by reason of the said peace, always receive tribute from the king of Tunis for his own special benefit; for if the kingdom of Tunis had been conquered by all the host of the Christians, it would have afterwards pertained in part to the king of France, and to the king of England, and to the king of Navarre, and to the king of Sicily, and to the Church of Rome, and to divers other lords which were at the conquest. And it may have been, both one cause and the other; but however that may have been, when the said treaty was concluded the said host departed from Tunis, and when they came with their fleet to the port of Trapani in Sicily, as it pleased God, so great a storm overtook them while the fleet was in the said port that without any redemption the greater part perished, and one vessel broke the other, and all the belongings of that host were lost, which were of untold worth, and many folk perished there. And it was said by many that this came to pass by reason of the sins of the Christians, and because they had made a covenant with the Saracens through greed of money when they could have overcome and conquered Tunis and the country.9