Louis suggested that Charles of Anjou or Alphonse of Poitiers remain as a hostage to guarantee the treaty, but the sultan refused the offer, saying only Louis himself would be an adequate hostage. Unfortunately for the Crusaders, disease decimated the army and their situation deteriorated so dramatically during the negotiations that any deal became irrelevant. The entire army was captured and many were killed. Damietta was still under the control of Louis’s queen, Margaret of Provence, who arranged a treaty whereby Louis and the army would be released in exchange for Damietta and a large ransom. After incredible hardship, the king was released and sailed to the Holy Land, where he remained for some years in an attempt to bolster the situation in the Crusader States.
Joinville gives horrific descriptions of the suffering the French endured in Egypt, the disease that ravaged them and the constant fear after their capture that they would be killed. Yet this pales into insignificance beside the experience of the Queen of France, who gave birth in Damietta while all this was going on. She too was in constant terror and Joinville reports that she had an elderly knight stay in her room to protect her, and she instructed him to kill her if the Egyptians should take the city. Her new son was named Jean, but Joinville says he was known as ‘Tristram’, after the unfortunate Arthurian hero, because the circumstances of his birth were so horrific. When the Queen heard that the Pisans, Genoese and other merchants were about to abandon the Crusade, she called them in and dramatically appealed to them, saying that if they wouldn’t stay for her sake, they should at least have pity on the infant before them.17
As the defeated Crusaders sailed to the Holy Land, Joinville notes one of the most striking episodes about Charles. Louis was naturally upset by the failure of the Crusade and the death of his brother Robert. Louis plaintively said that if Robert were alive he would have come to see Louis, and not avoided him as Alphonse of Poitiers was doing. Louis then complained that Charles of Anjou was also avoiding him, and asked where he was. On being told that Charles was below deck gambling, ‘Weak as he was through illness, his Majesty tottered towards the players. He snatched up dice and boards, flung the whole lot into the sea, and scolded his brother very soundly for taking to gambling so soon.’18
The Charles we see on the Crusade seems to be a completely different person from the future King of Sicily, who is universally described as cold, aloof, unapproachable, methodical and calculating. Brave to the point of rashness, unable to control his temper, lacking in seriousness to the extent that he played dice whilst sailing away from the utter defeat of a Crusade – who was this? It suggests that Charles, who was only twenty-two when he went on the Crusade, changed his entire personality under the pressure of imposing his authority on Provence, then on conquering Sicily and beginning the never-ending cycle of acquisition and warfare that would mark the rest of his life. This gives considerable definition to the somewhat flat impression we have of Charles later in his life. If Joinville is correct – and we have no reason to doubt him, since he spent years on Crusade with Charles and clearly had a great deal of contact with him – and Charles was a rash and undisciplined young man, what an effort of will it must have taken to produce such iron control later in life. His ill temper could sometimes still come out in the harsh reprimands he gave to officials who failed him, but his entire later life was spent in an effort of repression and control that never slipped. Charles can already be seen as a tragic figure because of the Sicilian Vespers and the catastrophes that attended his final years, but on a psychological level this denial of everything he was seems even sadder.
Once in the Holy Land, Louis held a council of all the barons including his brothers and Joinville, because Blanche of Castile had written to request his urgent return, saying that there was no truce with England and the entire realm was in peril. All the barons except Joinville advised Louis to return to France, though the barons of Outremer pointed out that the Crusader States would be in desperate straits if he departed. Joinville says that he alone of the French barons counselled Louis to remain, and Louis did decide to stay. The king’s brothers did not: ‘The king, it is said, ordered his brothers to return to France; but whether this was at their own request or by his wish I cannot really say.’19 Charles and Alphonse risked suffering the same stigma that adhered to Philip Augustus after leaving the Third Crusade, but in fact this was not the case: both had behaved too well during the actual fighting, and there certainly was a perception that the Crusade was over. They also went on Louis’s next Crusade, though this did far more damage to Charles’s reputation than leaving Acre. Although Alphonse and Charles both entreated Joinville to take care of the king, he was unusually caustic in his description of Charles’s departure: ‘When the Comte d’Anjou saw that the time had come when he must embark, he showed such grief that everyone was amazed. All the same he went back to France.’20
On his return, Charles turned to Provence and resumed the methodical organization of the county that would be the hallmark of his rule, both here and later in Italy. Provence was the laboratory of state building where Charles implemented all the procedures that would later be enacted on a larger scale in Sicily and southern Italy. There were striking similarities between the situation Charles found in Provence and what he would later encounter in Sicily. Charles brought a French mindset and a team of French lawyers, and he was determined to enforce all his rights. The Capetians had been through the crucible of competing against and finally conquering the Angevin Empire, and Henry II’s empire and the Anglo-Norman kingdom it sprang from were the most bureaucratically advanced states in Europe. The Capetians had been forced to maximize the revenue from their limited possessions, and they had learned from Henry II to insist on every right due to them. Provence, technically part of the Empire and previously ruled independently by a cadet branch of a Spanish kingdom, was not a place accustomed to obsessive adherence to the law. The counts of Provence had ruled with a light hand, and the cities of Arles, Avignon and Marseilles did not even form part of the county and were used to managing their own affairs.
When Charles went on Louis IX’s first Crusade, the three cities formed a defensive alliance against him and the rest of Provence revolted as well. Charles was gone for three years, but when he returned he quickly took control of Provence and defeated the cities one by one. He treated the rebels leniently, and when he was again called away for several years on Louis’s business (this time because Blanche of Castile had died and he became co-regent of France), the situation remained relatively stable. His mother-in-law actually proved the chief cause of trouble, as she refused to surrender Forcalquier and incited others to resist Charles. Charles resolved the situation through diplomacy, helped markedly by the fact that the Dowager Countess was Louis IX’s mother-in-law as well, so Louis felt an obligation to help resolve the dispute. The Dowager finally did relinquish Forcalquier, but only on the condition that she received a stipend for the rest of her life, and this was paid by Louis.21
Although he could not have known his future and how he would become engaged in ongoing wars for control of the entire eastern Mediterranean as King of Sicily and Jerusalem, Charles’s determination to use all his resources to the full would prove useful in the future. Maritime cities such as Genoa, Venice, Pisa and to an extent Marseilles dominated Mediterranean trade, but Charles established an arsenal and shipyard in Nice in 1251 to support his ambitions along the Ligurian coast. This foundation flourished and the Niçois navy participated in Charles’s later campaigns. Provence, more than Anjou, became the keystone to Charles’s lands, providing a steady income (particularly from a monopoly on salt exports on the Rhone) and a constant supply of administrators throughout his reign. Provence remained a solid source of support for the Angevins long after Charles’s death, a mutually beneficial relationship that allowed the Provençals access to lucrative opportunities in southern Italy and the other Angevin domains.
Throughout the later 1250s Charles built on his territory in Provence with methodical legality, ob
taining the submission of local lords such as the Count of Ventimiglia and the Bishop of Gap, and extending his authority along the coast and into Piedmont. Once into what we now think of as Italy, Charles patiently formed alliances with one town after another, building a path from Provence into northern Italy by way of Cuneo, Alba and Asti. In the absence of a Holy Roman Emperor, Charles was becoming an Italian potentate to be reckoned with a decade before he became an Italian king.22
The Sicilian Question
I have referred several times to the fact that Charles became King of Sicily, but how did this happen? As we know, the beginning of the 13th century was chaotic, with the war between the Angevins of England and the Capetians reaching its climax with the collapse of the Angevin Empire, John’s excommunication, the barons’ revolt and a French invasion of England; the conquest of the Byzantine Empire by the Fourth Crusade; the vicious Albigensian Crusade in southern France; and a power vacuum in the kingdom of Sicily and the Holy Roman Empire. This situation stabilized in the 1220s and with a period of peace between France and England and the succession of Frederick II both to the throne of Sicily and as Holy Roman Emperor, it might have been expected that the situation in Europe would stabilize. Precisely the opposite happened. The devastating conflict that erupted between Frederick II and the papacy shattered Italy and left the Holy Roman Empire in disarray for decades, and as the popes actively sought to overthrow first Frederick, then his son Manfred, gradually France, the Empire and the Spanish kingdoms were drawn into centuries of conflict. The key event in this was the French invasion of southern Italy, an invasion led by Charles of Anjou at the invitation of the papacy.
Charles’s invasion was at the instigation of a series of fairly short-lived popes, who nevertheless worked together towards a policy that would end with the near destruction of the papacy itself. This policy of ‘papal monarchy’ had been developing since the late 11th century, and culminated in the early 13th century. Pope Innocent III was a lawyer trained at Bologna, the leading law school in Europe, and he falls neatly into the line of monarchs such as Henry II and Charles of Anjou who had a meticulously legalistic sense of their rights and authority and were doggedly determined to uphold them. Although Innocent did not claim universal political authority, he did claim absolute power within the Church and by extension the power to enforce any of the Church’s rights within the secular sphere. The centralization of political power in France and England played its part in this process, since the newly powerful administrations in Westminster and Paris were able to promulgate papal authority as effectively as their own. Secular leaders had borrowed sophisticated papal administrative techniques to consolidate their power, but now the papacy reaped the benefits, since if a king were willing to disseminate papal commands within his kingdom – the ‘Saladin Tithe’ or the Inquisition – he could do so much more easily and successfully. The papacy had also learned from its secular counterparts in Anglo-Norman England and Capetian France, and consciously reorganized the papal administration on monarchical lines.23
More importantly, Innocent was applying these methods as a secular ruler himself. He had formally established the papal states in central Italy, a block of land that had been left to the papacy by the Countess Matilda of Tuscany in 1115, possession of which was finally recognized by Otto of Brunswick, the Angevin ally and contender for the imperial crown, in 1209.24 This confirmation of the pope as a secular lord with a territory that must be ruled, taxed and defended forever compromised the authority of the papacy and had a poisonous legacy. Innocent, although not claiming abstract authority over all the lands of Christendom, was also the feudal overlord of the kingdoms of Sicily, Aragon and Hungary – and later England – which had been given into his care, and he was as scrupulous in retaining the papacy’s rights in this regard as in every other. Innocent’s theoretical framework of papal power was hugely influential with his successors, and their attempts to make these theories a reality led directly to the Italian wars of the Angevins in the 13th century.25
The popes of the 13th century were now unapologetically concerned with Italian politics. Frederick II died in 1250, but he had been married three times and left two legitimate sons as well as several bastards. Frederick’s heir was Conrad, son of Yolanda of Brienne, who took his father’s lands in Germany and also had a legal right to Sicily and Jerusalem. Conrad was elected king of the Romans (the title of the Emperor-elect before his coronation) and moved into Italy to take up the rest of his inheritance, though the turbulent politics in the peninsula made this difficult. Frederick II’s will had appointed his bastard son Manfred as Prince of Taranto, which gave him control of southern Italy and a mandate to secure the territory for Conrad. Sicily was held peaceably by another Hohenstaufen retainer, but Manfred sent his own agents and attempted to take over the island as well. These signs of Manfred’s ambition were just as disturbing to Conrad as to the pope, and Conrad swiftly intervened. He reappointed his own loyal deputy in Sicily and reduced Manfred’s formal power on the mainland, though he still had to fight for another year to assert his authority over centres such as Naples.
Securing the Empire and Sicily would make Conrad just as much a threat to the papacy as his father had been, and the pope was determined to thwart him. In August 1252, the pope sent a legate with a letter to Henry III’s brother Richard of Cornwall offering him the kingdom of Sicily. The legate was also provided with a copy of the letter addressed to Charles of Anjou if Richard refused. Richard famously did refuse, saying it was ‘like being offered the moon on condition that one unhooked it from the sky’.26 The legate then went to Paris to make the same offer to Charles, who was interested, but naturally had to consult his brother Louis IX.
Louis was in the Holy Land when news of the pope’s offer was relayed to him, but he was disturbed by the pope’s scheming and saw no reason that Conrad, Frederick’s legitimate son and the rightful heir to Sicily and Jerusalem, should be deposed. Blanche of Castile as regent of France was also horrified by this attempt to launch a holy war against a papal enemy for purely political purposes and wanted no part of it. Whatever his personal feelings may have been, Charles couldn’t accept the offer in opposition to his mother and brother. Although he deliberated until October 1253, ultimately he refused as well.27
Pope Innocent IV now put forward William of Holland as an opposition candidate for Emperor and William was elected as a rival king of the Romans, but this was of limited value. The pope’s attempts to divide Conrad’s inheritance and stir up trouble against him failed, and relations between Conrad and the pope deteriorated swiftly. By January 1254 Conrad was accusing the pope of usurpation and heresy, and the pope responded by excommunicating Conrad in February.28 Once again the pope attempted to launch a Crusade against the Hohenstaufen, and once again it met with either vague repugnance or outright hostility, with Blanche of Castile threatening to confiscate the lands of anyone in France who participated.
Despite the initial failure of the pope’s scheme to find a replacement for Conrad, the pope had succeeded in piquing the interest of one person, and that was Henry III. Although Richard of Cornwall had refused to become involved (having even greater ambitions of his own), Henry III thought that obtaining a throne for his younger son Edmund (still a child) would be a worthy project. The pope was desperate to replace Conrad, and events moved quickly. By May 1254 the pope had written letters referring to Edmund as ‘King of Sicily’ that were to be delivered by his legate, who would arrange the final terms of the agreement.
Now there was another stunning reversal in the negotiations: Conrad fell ill and died in May 1254, even as the letter offering his throne to Edmund was en route, and the legate refrained from delivering the letter until the situation could be assessed. Conrad had married Elizabeth of Bavaria, and she had remained in the Empire with their two-year-old son Conradin, who was now the legitimate heir to Sicily and Jerusalem. The titles of Emperor and King of the Romans were elective, and would not automatically pass to a minor, th
ough as a Hohenstaufen Conradin could hope one day to succeed. This meant there was a vacancy at the head of the Empire, and now Richard of Cornwall, who had rejected the offer of invading Sicily as too ambitious, directed his considerable resources towards achieving this prize.29
Conrad’s will had appointed agents to administer Sicily and southern Italy for Conradin, but in a bizarre twist Conrad also placed Conradin in the pope’s care and begged Innocent IV to safeguard his rights. This gave the pope an opportunity to prove that, however much he may have disliked Conrad or believed him unfit to rule, he still supported rightful succession and the rule of law and would not persecute an innocent infant. Innocent declined this opportunity.
Although Conrad’s will made it clear who should rule the kingdom of Sicily, Manfred remained on the scene, and he was an attractive figure to those who wanted to see a Hohenstaufen prince rule immediately without having to wait for Conradin to reach maturity. The pope, as feudal overlord, insisted that the kingdom be put under his own control, and Manfred submitted to him in return for recognition of his rights as Prince of Taranto. With the pope acknowledging Conradin’s future claim on the kingdom and Manfred in agreement with the pope, the situation might potentially have remained stable.
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 27
