The other key factor to Angevin success in Hungary, naturally, was the support of the papacy. Boniface VIII supported Carobert’s claim, and instructed the Hungarian clergy to give him their backing. This would have the advantage for Boniface of strengthening papal authority in Hungary, where it had been somewhat tenuous in the past. Despite this clerical support and the support of the Šubićs, Carobert was still not accepted by the barons of Hungary. As we saw previously with both Henry I and King Stephen in England, one way of cementing a claim to the throne was simply by being crowned in spite of other claimants, which afforded an intrinsic status that could overwhelm rivals. Carobert adopted this approach.
There were very specific requirements for a king of Hungary’s coronation. The ceremony could only be performed at the cathedral of Székesfehérvár by the Archbishop of Esztergom, using the crown of St Stephen, or it would be invalid. Carobert was in luck, because Gregory Bicskei, the Archbishop-elect of Esztergom, was a supporter of Boniface VIII and willing to perform the ceremony. Unfortunately the crown of St Stephen was not in his possession and Székesfehérvár was not considered safe, so in 1301 Gregory conducted the coronation in Esztergom with a provisional crown. Although this coronation was not accepted as legitimate by most, Carobert dated his reign to this date.43
With Andrew III dead, a new claimant appeared in the form of Wenceslas, son of King Wenceslas II of Bohemia. He was preferred by the Hungarian barons, and in a potentially devastating blow for Carobert, he too adopted the coronation strategy. Wenceslas was crowned at Székesfehérvár with the crown of St Stephen on 27 August 1301, but the ceremony was performed by the Archbishop of Kalocsa. Civl war broke out, with the Habsburgs of Austria and most of the clergy backing Carobert, and the barons backing Wenceslas. Rising Habsburg power showed the wisdom of Charles II’s alliance with them through the marriage of Charles Martel and Clementia of Habsburg, and Carobert benefitted greatly from this support by his mother’s family. By 1304 Carobert was successful enough for many of the barons to take his side, and Wenceslas retreated to Bohemia, taking the holy crown with him.
Although Carobert and his Habsburg allies invaded Bohemia in turn, the situation reached something of a stalemate. Again Carobert benefitted from a fortunate death, that of Wenceslas II, and Wenceslas III now succeeded to the throne of Bohemia and renounced his claim to Hungary. He passed his claim to Otto of Bavaria, grandson of Béla IV of Hungary through his mother, and Otto retained the Holy Crown. Otto was able to get the bishops of Veszprém and Csanád to crown him in Székesfehérvár on 6 December 1305, but since the Archbishop of Esztergom still supported Carobert the coronation was rejected and Otto failed to mobilize the barons.
Despite this new rival, Carobert steadily built up his power base, capturing Esztergom in 1306 and Buda in 1307. More importantly, in 1307 Otto was captured and the Holy Crown was seized from him, though it remained in the hands of Carobert’s opponents. Carobert was again acclaimed as king in Buda on 10 October 1307 and at a diet in Pest on 27 November 1308, and further crowned in Buda by a papal legate in 1309, but none of these procedures fulfilled the necessary requirements. Only in 1310 did he finally obtain the Holy Crown, and on 27 August 1310 he was crowned in Székesfehérvár, by the Archbishop of Esztergom, with the Holy Crown. It was just as Carobert finally cemented his position as king of Hungary that the Angevins of Naples also reached their peak, after the steadying reign of Charles II.44
Charles II’s Cultural Legacy: Naples and the Beata Stirps
Charles II presided over what would become the settlement between the Angevins and Aragonese over Sicily. This was the Treaty of Caltabellota in 1302, which recognized Sicily as an independent kingdom for the lifetime of Frederick III, though he was only allowed to use the title ‘King of Trinacria’, an ancient name for the three-cornered island, and the Angevins would continue to call themselves kings of Sicily. Charles II’s son Philip of Taranto was released from a Sicilian prison and Charles agreed to pay a tribute of 100,000 ounces of gold. Sicily was meant to revert to the Angevins after Frederick’s death, but unsurprisingly this didn’t happen, and the Angevins and Aragonese would fight over the island throughout the 14th century.45
Still, Charles did secure peace in his own lifetime, allowing him to consolidate and expand the cultural life of Naples to make it one of the most vibrant cities in Europe, as well as the courtly centre of Italy in the early and mid-14th century. Boccaccio has his heroine in Fiammetta condemn Florence as bristling with arms and filled with ‘greedy, proud and envious people’ compared with Naples, which is ‘contented, peaceful, flourishing, liberal and subject to a single ruler’.46 This slightly misses the mark, as all that Florentine money and political agitation produced the profound intellectual and artistic ferment we call the Renaissance. Moreover, although much of the artistic life of Naples still relied on French craftsmen, there was also an influx of Florentine artists (as well as bankers), which contributed significantly to Naples’s intellectual life. We would be wrong, however, to say that Naples was in some way parasitic on Florence. Through its combination of influences particularly from France and Greece, Naples had a distinctive intellectual life; for example, Naples was the only European court where Greek was systematically studied in the mid-14th century, a century before the Renaissance proper.47
Charles commissioned the single most important medieval object in Naples today, and one of the outstanding artistic achievements of any period, the silver reliquary of San Gennaro. It is a masterpiece of medieval metalwork and enamelling, as in addition to the astonishing portrait bust itself (rumoured without any foundation to depict a member of the Angevin ruling family, or slightly more plausibly, a contemporary bishop), the shoulders of the bust are covered with Angevin coats of arms and precious and semi-precious stones.48
The bust was created by four French silversmiths in 1303–04 to celebrate the millennium of San Gennaro’s martyrdom, and it was designed to hold the ampule of San Gennaro’s blood, which to this day miraculously liquefies three times a year (on 19 September, the day of his martyrdom; 16 December, commemorating his patronage of Naples; and the first Saturday in May, celebrating the transfer of his relics). Or at least it should, because if the blood fails to liquefy, catastrophe will strike, as evidenced by the miracle’s failure in 1939, and as in fact happened on 16 December 2016, which could be considered entirely appropriate given some of the events of 2016.
Although all medieval rulers were religious patrons to a greater or lesser extent, the Neapolitan Angevins starting with Charles of Anjou were the first dynasty to make the idea of their ‘holy lineage’ (beata stirps) a key component of the legitimacy of their rule. The first important family saint was naturally Louis IX, brother to Charles of Anjou. Charles personally provided testimony to support Louis IX’s canonization, and the actual event in 1297 was a huge boost for the Angevins, now represented by Charles II.49
Charles II was known for his piety in a way that strangely eluded Charles of Anjou, the multiple Crusader, brother of a saint and right arm of the papacy. Charles II discovered the remains of Mary Magdalen in 1279 at St Maximin in Provence, and he was instrumental in establishing her cult in Provence as a major religious centre. According to one chronicler he helped to dig up her relics with his own hands: ‘he tore off his royal vestments, helping to remove the earth with his bare hands, sweat pouring profusely from him’.50 The Magdalen became associated with the Angevins, and to this day her shrine in Provence is a notable site. More importantly, Charles’s own son Louis of Toulouse was widely known to be a saint at the time of his death in 1297, even though Charles wouldn’t live to see him canonized in 1317.
Louis’s sainthood was a direct consequence of the Angevin wars with Aragon. After Charles II’s capture, his release was arranged in exchange for his sons Louis, Robert and Ramon Berengar, who were held in the fortress of Cuirana for seven years. They were accompanied by their tutor, Francis le Brun, who was a ‘Spiritual’ Franciscan, a believer in Apost
olic poverty. Louis’s instruction by Francis from the age of fourteen to twenty-one had a great impact, and when in 1295 a treaty was arranged between Aragon and Naples that was meant to be sealed by Louis’s marriage to the king of Aragon’s sister, it was discovered that he had taken a vow of celibacy. On the death of his elder brother Charles Martel, Louis could have become heir to the throne, but he refused and stated his intention of becoming a Franciscan. At the Castel Nuovo in Naples in 1296 he formally renounced his claim to the throne in favour of his brother Robert.51
Although Charles II was prepared to allow his son to choose his spiritual over his political obligations, he was still required to do this in an appropriately aristocratic style. Louis wished to become a Franciscan friar, but his father insisted that he become a bishop and procured the wealthy see of Toulouse for him. Louis went to Rome to be invested by Pope Boniface VIII, but demanded that if he accepted the bishopric he must also be allowed to become a Franciscan. Boniface allowed Louis to be received into the Franciscan order secretly on Christmas Eve 1296, but required him to conceal his habit beneath his episcopal robes.
Louis maintained this secrecy for a month, but on 5 February 1297 he received the pope’s permission to celebrate mass at Santa Maria Aracoeli – the great city church of Rome that now belonged to the Franciscans – and publicly reveal himself as a member of the order. In what has been called the most dramatic scene in 13th-century Rome,52 at the end of Mass Louis publicly removed his bishop’s robes and revealed his Franciscan habit to a huge crowd. A king’s son and heir, and bishop, openly renouncing so much pomp and authority in the heart of the Christian world had, and has, a profound resonance, and when Louis died in August 1297 his canonization came swiftly after in 1317.
The Death of Pope Boniface VIII: The ‘Colonna Slap’ and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church
Unlike Louis, there was no question that Boniface VIII fully embraced the power of the Church and believed that the time had come for the pope to wield secular power directly and openly. During the papal jubilee of 1300 when Rome was crowded with pilgrims from all over Europe who had come to expiate their sins, Boniface appeared on the balcony at the Vatican and openly brandished two swords: these were the ‘two swords’ of secular and religious authority that he unsubtly claimed for himself. This was particularly offensive to Philip IV of France, now the most powerful ruler in Europe, who presided over an intensely centralized and wealthy state. In the following years Boniface pushed his claims over the Church in France too far, and in 1304 Philip sent Guillaume de Nogaret and other henchmen, including the infamous Sciarra Colonna (member of one of Rome’s most powerful families), to the papal palace of Anagni to convince the pope to modify his claims. Philip made it clear that he wasn’t too particular about the methods of persuasion they used.
The armed men burst into the elderly pope’s bedchamber and manhandled him, culminating when Sciarra dealt the pope the ‘Colonna Slap’, which passed into legend. When Boniface died shortly after, presumably from shock, there was a rerun of the Becket situation for Henry II, though Philip IV (probably much more culpable than Henry II had been) did not attract quite the same opprobrium. Notably, Charles II backed Boniface VIII in this incident, straining his relationship with Philip IV.53
In the aftermath the papacy fell into confusion, and after the brief pontificate of Benedict IX, the French and Italian cardinals were unable to agree on a new pope. The cardinals finally elected the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who avoided Rome, where he would have been at the mercy of the Colonna, eventually settling in Avignon and leading to the sixty-seven-year ‘Babylonian Captivity’ of the papacy, when a series of French-speaking popes ruled from the Provençal city.
Although as we have seen Provence wasn’t part of France, the series of French popes in Avignon were regarded by everyone else in Europe as tools of the French king, and part of that was their support for the ‘French’ Angevins of Naples. There was a solid basis for this in the behaviour of the first Avignon pope, Clement V, who although French-speaking, as Archbishop of Bordeaux was a subject of the king of England and so might have been expected to maintain his independence from France. Sadly for him, Edward I of England was far too involved in trying to conquer Scotland and had no time to support the pope.54 Instead the popes turned to the Angevins of Naples, who became their chief supporters, although by the mid-14th century the Angevins were much more reliant on papal support for their survival than vice versa. This relationship between the Avignon popes and the Angevins (in Naples and elsewhere) would provide the political architecture for the 14th century, and the background to some of the most momentous events of the Middle Ages.
CHAPTER 9 – THE ANGEVINS OF NAPLES AND HUNGARY: THE KING OF SERMONS AND THE HARLOT QUEEN
WITH CHARLES MARTEL AND Louis of Toulouse dead, and Carobert now King of Hungary, in 1309 Charles II’s third son Robert the Wise succeeded to the throne of Naples. Robert was born in 1278 and initially educated in Provence, where contemporaries particularly commented on how closely the education of the Angevin royal children matched that of the French royal household. Of course this came to an end in 1288, when Robert and his brothers Louis and Ramon Berengar were sent into captivity to replace Charles II, and the boys were educated by the Franciscan tutor Francis le Brun, who instilled a deep piety and devotion to the Franciscans in all three princes.
The Franciscan tutor was competent as well as pious, because Robert’s religious fervour was underpinned by genuine learning. His education formed the basis for the most famous aspect of Robert’s reign, and indeed the one that gave him his name, ‘the Wise’. He demonstrated this in his public examination of Petrarch to prove his worthiness to be the first poet laureate since Roman times, as well as his delivery of hundreds of public sermons and authorship of at least two theological treatises. Despite tales of Richard the Lionheart correcting a bishop’s Latin, Frederick II writing a treatise on hawking, Louis IX engaging in theological debates and Alfonso the Wise of Castile commissioning astronomical tables, we have not seen a true scholar king before Robert who produced such a copious body of work. Kings were still largely seen as military leaders, and there was suspicion about a king who was too pious or learned, a prejudice to which Robert was not immune.
Yet although critics such as Dante mocked him as ‘King of Sermons’, he was not an ineffective king. He saw off two major threats from the Empire, and repeatedly attempted – with some minor successes – to retake Sicily. In addition to this skirmishing over Sicily, there would also be proxy wars between the Angevins and Aragon in various areas of the Mediterranean: for example in Greece, where companies of Catalan mercenaries centred on Athens had repeated conflicts with Angevin deputies in Morea; and in Genoa, where the city’s Guelfs, particularly the Grimaldi family (who still rule Monaco), struggled against local Ghibellines supported by the Visconti of Milan.1
The first great crisis of Robert’s reign was the invasion of Italy by Henry VII of Luxembourg. Henry was elected King of the Romans in 1309, with the support of Pope Clement V, as the papacy had finally realized that the power vacuum in the Empire dating back to the deposition of Frederick II was just as bad for Italy as for the Empire itself. However, this was awkward for the Angevins, whose dominance of Tuscany and other parts of Italy would be threatened by a reigning Emperor, as well as Guelfs throughout Italy whose Ghibelline rivals would receive imperial support.
Thus Henry’s journey to Rome for his coronation was a military expedition that was viewed as an invasion, and an Angevin army led by John of Gravina advanced to block him. Although there was no military confrontation, the Angevin army prevented Henry from reaching St Peter’s and he had to be crowned at the Lateran, on 29 June 1312, although the pope was not present and three Ghibelline cardinals performed the ceremony. As Emperor, Henry responded to the Angevin attempts to block his coronation by summoning Robert to appear before him for trial as a treasonous vassal, and when Robert refused he was declared a rebel on 26 April 1313.
Henry was also negotiating for a marriage alliance with King Frederick of Sicily, and there was a danger Robert could be encircled.
Although Robert had sent a military force to Rome to impede Henry’s coronation, he personally responded to Henry’s attempt to depose him in exactly the way that we would expect him to, by having jurists prepare legal opinions showing why Henry’s position was invalid. Robert’s scholars prepared glosses on the law code promulgated by Frederick II in the 13th century, the Constitutions of Melfi, demonstrating that Robert was not subject to the Emperor and thus could not be deposed by him. They went further, and attacked any Emperor’s claim to universal jurisdiction by saying that the kings of Sicily were sovereign in their own realm exactly as the Normans and Frederick II had been; that in any event the Roman Empire itself had no right to rule others through conquest; and regardless of all that, all imperial rights had been ceded to the pope in the Donation of Constantine, the 4th-century document in which (allegedly) the Emperor Constantine ceded dominion of the empire to the pope. Robert put a personal twist on this argument in a letter to the pope, pointing out that all emperors since Domitian (who reigned from 81–96) had harmed the church (putting the first Christian Emperor Constantine in an interesting position), and as the Germans were barbarians, the Holy Roman Empire should be dissolved. Although Henry VII died on 24 August 1313 and the conflict ended, Clement V, perhaps thinking better of his support for Henry, accepted these arguments and issued a bull in March 1314 declaring that there was no basis for imperial claims of universal dominion.2
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 35