Charles I of Anjou

Power, Kingship and State-Making in Thirteenth-Century Europe

Jean Dunbabin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317890775
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Charles I of Anjou (1225-85), brother of St Louis, was one of the most controversial figures of thirteenth-century Europe. A royal adventurer, who carved out a huge Mediterranean power block, as ruler of Provence, Jerusalem and the kingdom of Naples as well as Anjou, he changed for good the political configuration of the Mediterranean world - even though his ambitions were fatally undermined by the revolt of the Sicilian Vespers. Jean Dunbabin's study - the first in English for 40 years - reassesses Charles's extraordinary career, his pivotal role in the crusades and in military reform, trading, diplomacy, learning and the arts, and finds a more remarkable figure than the ruthless thug of conventional historiography.

PART 1

THE MAN

Chapter 1

THE PRINCE

Charles I of Anjou, king of Sicily and later of Jerusalem, duke of Apulia, prince of Capua, count of Provence, Anjou and Maine, sometime senator of Rome and imperial vicar of Tuscany, was the most colourful figure in thirteenth-century Europe. A strange combination of the opportunistic self-aggrandizer and the idealistic Christian leader, he has throughout the centuries continued to excite interest and conflicting opinion. Although he left behind him abundant records of his administrative acts, his motivation remains contentious, his personality enigmatic. Yet it is impossible to discuss thirteenth-century European history without coming up against him in context after context. In his own time, he was a colossus, admired, feared and hated in almost equal amounts.

The youngest brother of King Louis IX of France, Charles (and his elder brothers to a lesser extent) departed conspicuously from the pattern that had been customary for siblings of Capetian monarchs. Up till this point, the accidents of birth had controlled the destinies of such younger sons as had not inherited the throne. They were disposed of by their fathers without pomp and circumstance to suitably modest roles among the lords of France. But Charles’s father, Louis VIII, amazed by the good fortune that had recently befallen his line as a consequence of Philip Augustus’s conquest of the Angevin empire and his own expansion in the south, determined that his younger sons should inherit some at least of this wealth. He created apanages for Robert, John and Alphonse, so that they might hold their heads high as princes. For Charles, however, probably born posthumously, King Louis laid down a clerical career. During his childhood and early youth, Charles had no expectations – a fact that perhaps accounts for his subsequent determination to take what he could. He owed his only elevation in France, to the counties of Anjou and Maine, to his brother Louis’s kindness; Louis IX chose to bestow what had been the apanage of his now dead brother John on Charles shortly after he knighted him in 1246.

Charles’s career was a dazzling one. In January 1246, in the teeth of much opposition from rivals, he married the heiress of the county of Provence, and took over rule in that disturbed but potentially wealthy county. In 1248 he accompanied all his brothers on Louis IX’s first crusade, was captured with Louis and Alphonse at Mansourrah, was ransomed, and returned to France with Alphonse to run the kingdom during Louis’s prolonged absence. In 1253 he was drawn into claiming the county of Hainault to oblige the countess of Flanders. Though on Louis’s return home in 1254 he returned the county to its Avesnes lord, he gained money and some form of lordship in Hainault to compensate him. For the next decade, he concentrated on suppressing rebellion in Provence, extending his own authority over those to whom comital lordship was a novelty, and intervening in neighbouring Piedmont, a channel to Lombardy.

In 1263 Charles was prevailed upon by the French pope Urban IV to accept the throne of Sicily and southern Italy as a papal fief. In 1265 the count of Anjou set out to win this prize from Manfred, the illegitimate son of the Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, who had established himself in his father’s seat. On 6 January 1266 Charles and his wife Beatrice were crowned in Rome by five cardinals (the pope explained his absence in Viterbo by fear of what the Romans might do to him). The coronation was an epoch-making event, in papal as well as Italian history. On 26 February 1266 Charles won the battle of Benevento, Manfred and many of his supporters were killed, and the kingdom of Sicily (the Regno) became Angevin. However, the arrival on the scene of the young Corradin, only surviving legitimate grandson of Frederick II, in the autumn of 1267 threatened to destroy Charles’s achievement. It took another battle, that of Tagliacozzo on 23 August 1268, for the kingdom to be secured for Charles. He rubbed in his victory by summoning Corradin and one of his closest friends before his court, finding them guilty of treason, and on 29 October 1268 executing them (a deed that made him accursed in Ghibelline circles for centuries, and that caused dismay even among his own supporters).

Charles’s arrival in Italy, his brief tenure of the senator-ship of Rome from 1263 to 1267, and his two victories had a major impact on Italian politics. Clement IV made him first keeper of the peace and then imperial vicar of Tuscany. Over most of Tuscany, the towns came under the control of Guelfs, nominally papal allies, often identified with the popular party. Of these towns the most important was Florence. Florentine political and financial assistance to Charles and his successors until 1343 was a defining feature of later medieval Italian history. In the short term the alliance assisted the pope in controlling rebellion in the Papal States. In Lombardy, although the Guelfs were initially strengthened by Charles’s appearance, there were always opponents ready to fight the Ghibelline cause. The papal accord with the new king of the Romans, Rudolph of Habsburg, in 1274 threatened Charles’s position there, and the Angevin army failed to impose his lordship on the populace.

As king of Sicily and count of Provence, Charles inevitably played a major role in Mediterranean politics. He exploited Louis IX’s second crusade in 1270 to reassert the traditional Norman lordship over the Muslim emir of Tunis. In 1277, after negotiations instigated by Pope Gregory X, he bought the tide to the kingdom of Jerusalem from Maria of Antioch. But his chief concern lay on the Adriatic coast and in Achaia, the Latin colony established in Greece in 1204, which had not been lost to the Greeks in 1261 after the reconquest of Constantinople. As soon as he was secure in the Regno, he set about building up Angevin power around Durazzo and assisting Guillaume, prince of Achaia, to hold off the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Paleologus and his army in Greece. He married his second son Philip to Prince Guillaume’s daughter, thereby acquiring influence over all the Frankish settlers still remaining in Greece. Much of the central Adriatic coast around Durazzo reluctantiy recognized his lordship. But in his attempt to consolidate his power across Greece he faced stiff and increasingly successful opposition from Michael Paleologus, opposition that encouraged him to contemplate an all-out attack on Constantinople in the name of his son-in-law, Philippe de Courtenay, titular Latin emperor.

In 1281 Charles was preparing the largest expedition he had ever undertaken with the aim of capturing Constantinople. He had spent the intervening years building up alliances across the Mediterranean. But so too had his enemies, led by Peter of Aragon, whose wife Constance was the daughter of Manfred. As the Aragonese, the Byzantines and the Italian Ghibellines plotted to unseat the Angevin, a major rebellion broke out in Palermo against the taxation the king was imposing to pay for his campaign. The Sicilian Vespers began in March 1282. The war inaugurated by the rebellion was to last till 1302 and to have repercussions well beyond that. In September 1282 Peter was proclaimed king of Sicily in Palermo.

From March 1282 until his death on 7 January 1285, Charles was entirely taken up with trying to defend what he still kept of the Regno and to retake what he had lost. For the first time, the luck that had been so conspicuously on his side was deserting him. When he died, his navy had been twice defeated by the Aragonese, his eldest son and heir Charles of Salerno was in a Catalan prison, and southern Italy was under attack. It looked as though all he had achieved since 1265 was about to be lost.

As it happened, it was not all lost. Angevin monarchs retained the kingdom of Sicily until 1435. But from 1282 onwards, that kingdom consisted only of southern Italy; the island of Sicily was lost for good, and with it, the king’s capacity to intervene in Mediterranean politics was severely limited. Charles’s successors were interesting and odd rulers, but none of them possessed anything like the power that he had enjoyed.

The rest of this book will be concerned with the detail of Charles’s extraordinary career and with his government and court. For the moment it is worth reflecting that, although the scale of his achievements made him unique in Europe, Charles was simply the most successful of a number of younger sons of royal families who, in the middle years of the thirteenth century, determined to break out of the rather dull careers envisaged for them by their families, and make their mark on the wider world. Richard of Cornwall in England, Frederick of Aragon and Henry of Castille (of whom the latter two were to play their part in the drama of Charles’s life) had much in common with their Angevin contemporary. All were motivated by a feeling that they had inherited a capacity for leadership which they ought to exploit. All valued military skill as a means of gaining power. And all sought imposing titles with which to clothe their ambitions.

Of the four younger sons named, Henry of Castille was left empty-handed, having failed to win the throne of Sardinia which he coveted and been deprived of his senatorship of Rome in 1268 by his support of Corradin against Charles; he spent many years in a gaol within the Regno. Frederick of Aragon was the least ambitious, being contented with rule over the island of Sicily between 1296 and 1337. Richard of Cornwall acquired the title of emperor in 1261, but not the authority, and had nothing but his English lands to hand on to his son. Only Charles of Anjou obtained hereditary power in a great kingdom, which he used as a base for expansion in the Mediterranean. For contemporaries, he was the archetype of the Machiavellian new prince.

Giovanni Villani summed up the common view among Charles’s admirers:

This Charles was the most feared and redoubtable lord, and the most valiant in arms, and of the most lofty designs, of all the kings of the house of France from Charles the Great to his own day, and the one who most exalted the church of Rome; and he would have done more if, at the end of his life, fortune had not turned against him.¹

On the other hand, his enemies did not hesitate to call him a usurper, a tyrant, and even Antichrist himself.²

From a twentieth-century perspective, the fascination of Charles of Anjou’s career lies at least partly in the tension between thought and action evident there. He was led to effect the conquest of the Regno, which totally changed his life, by adherence to a programme drawn up by canon lawyers at the papal curia. His function was to eradicate the evil regime of the Hohenstaufen and to inaugurate the reign of righteousness in what had been their realm. It was hardly surprising that eschatalogical expectations gathered around his head.³ While the canon lawyers who remained hors de combat were frequently critical of what he did, he found himself facing dilemmas of which they had never dreamed. As an experiment in giving concrete form to a political theory, Charles’s rule of the Regno was a failure. Success would not have been possible.

Yet his failure was not dishonourable. What he established acquired a surprising degree of permanence in southern Italy, if not in Sicily. Ironically, given the criticism aimed at him, Angevin justice came to be admired across the western world. The Angevin court became the cradle of many cultural developments of significance in the Italian renaissance; the historical fashion of excluding Charles from all credit for these has just begun to be questioned.⁴ Many of the financial and courtly practices Charles inaugurated soon came to be imitated in France and even in England. If he is judged by the same criteria as most late thirteenth-century kings are judged, Charles was a very influential figure with at least some claim to greatness. He was no more aggressive than Edward I of England, no more avaricious than Philip IV of France, and his achievements were more interesting than either of these.

1. Nuova cronica, p. 558.

2. Paladino, p. 10.

3. M. Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study of foachimism (Oxford 1969), pp. 75, 321.

4. P.L. de Castris, Arte di corte nella Napoli angioina (Florence 1986), p. 129. S. Asperti, Carlo I d’Angiò e i trovatori. Componenti ‘provenzali’ e angioine nella tradizione manoscritta della lirica trobadorica (Ravenna 1995).

Chapter 2

THE CAPETIAN

C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Names
• Abbreviations
• Part 1: The Man
• Part 2: The Dominions
• Part 3: Policies
• Part 4: Court Life and Culture
• Bibliography
• Map: The Mediterranean in the thirteenth century
• Index