Charles I of Anjou

Charles was born in Paris on March 21, 1226, the youngest son of King Louis VIII of France and Blanche of Castile ^[1]. His father died within months of his birth, leaving the throne to Charles's eldest surviving brother, the nine-year-old Louis IX, with Blanche governing as regent. Charles therefore grew up at a court dominated by his formidable Castilian mother, who steered the Capetian monarchy through baronial revolts while raising her sons in an atmosphere of intense piety and dynastic duty ^[2].

As the last-born of many children, Charles could expect little by inheritance. That changed in 1246, when Louis IX invested him with the counties of Anjou and Maine as an appanage, the arrangement that gave him the name by which history knows him ^[1]. In the same year he married Beatrice of Provence, heiress to the county of Provence, after her father Raymond Berengar V died leaving her the succession. The marriage instantly made the twenty-year-old prince a major territorial lord on the Rhone, though it also drew resentment from Beatrice's three elder sisters, each of whom was a queen and felt cheated of a share ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Charles I of Anjou before his Italian adventures should picture a hard-working, austere administrator. Contemporaries noted that he rarely laughed, slept little, and treated government as relentless business. In Provence he suppressed urban communes at Marseille and Arles and imposed tight comital control, an early display of the centralizing instincts he later brought to southern Italy ^[2].

Charles's first major test came on crusade. He accompanied Louis IX on the Seventh Crusade to Egypt, landing at Damietta in 1249. The campaign collapsed in the Nile Delta in the spring of 1250, and Charles was captured along with the king and much of the army after the disaster at Fariskur. He was released once negotiations for ransom began and returned to France ahead of his brother ^[4].

Back in the west, Charles rebuilt his position with characteristic energy. He completed the pacification of Provence, acquired rights in Piedmont, and in 1263 was elected senator of Rome by a papal faction seeking a strong protector ^[2]. The decisive opportunity arrived from the papacy itself. Successive popes had been locked in a long feud with the Hohenstaufen rulers of Sicily, and after the death of Emperor Frederick II in 1250 they searched for a champion willing to remove Frederick's heirs. Following failed negotiations with English candidates, Pope Urban IV offered the Sicilian crown to Charles, and his successor Clement IV confirmed the grant ^[5].

The terms were demanding. Charles would hold the kingdom as a papal fief, pay an annual tribute, and renounce any claim to the imperial title, conditions designed to prevent a repeat of Hohenstaufen encirclement of the Papal States ^[5]. Charles accepted, raised loans from Tuscan bankers, and gathered an army of French and Provencal knights. On January 6, 1266, he was crowned King of Sicily in Rome before he had won a single battle in the kingdom he now claimed ^[1].

The campaign that followed ranks among the most efficient conquests of the era and sits at the center of any account of Charles I of Anjou achievements. In February 1266 his army crossed the frontier and met the forces of Manfred, Frederick II's son and the reigning king, near Benevento. On February 26 the Angevin cavalry broke Manfred's German and Saracen troops; Manfred himself was killed in the fighting, and resistance across the mainland collapsed within weeks ^[4].

The Hohenstaufen cause revived two years later when Conradin, Frederick II's teenage grandson, marched from Germany to reclaim his inheritance. Ghibelline cities across Italy rallied to him, and a Muslim revolt at Lucera in Apulia threatened Charles's rear. The armies met at Tagliacozzo on August 23, 1268. After early Hohenstaufen success, a concealed Angevin reserve turned the battle, and Conradin fled, only to be captured on the coast. Charles had the sixteen-year-old tried for treason and beheaded in the marketplace of Naples on October 29, 1268, an execution that shocked contemporaries and permanently stained his reputation ^[5].

With the last legitimate Hohenstaufen male dead, Charles ruled the wealthiest kingdom in Italy unchallenged. He moved the effective capital from Palermo to Naples, staffed the administration heavily with French and Provencal officials, and retained the demanding fiscal machinery his predecessors had built, including the general subvention tax that his subjects, especially the Sicilians, deeply resented ^[2].

Kingship in Sicily was for Charles a platform, not a destination. His diplomacy and arms reached across the entire Mediterranean during the 1270s. In 1272 he assumed the title King of Albania after his agents secured Durazzo and the loyalty of Albanian chieftains, giving him a bridgehead on the eastern shore of the Adriatic ^[2]. In 1277 he purchased the claim to the crown of Jerusalem from Maria of Antioch and sent a bailiff to govern Acre in his name, and in 1278 the principality of Achaea in southern Greece passed under his direct rule by treaty ^[3].

The grand target behind these acquisitions was Constantinople. Charles planned a great expedition to restore the Latin Empire overthrown by the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos in 1261. Michael countered with skilled diplomacy, most notably by accepting a union of the Greek and Latin churches at the Council of Lyon in 1274, which obliged the papacy to restrain Charles's crusading plans against a fellow Catholic ruler for several years ^[6].

Charles also served his brother's last enterprise. He joined the Eighth Crusade against Tunis in 1270, arriving shortly after Louis IX died of disease outside the city. Charles took command, defeated Tunisian forces, and negotiated a treaty that included an indemnity and tribute payable to Sicily, converting a failed crusade into a profitable settlement ^[4].

Charles's marriage to Beatrice of Provence lasted until her death in 1267 and produced several children, including his heir Charles II of Naples, called Charles of Salerno, as well as daughters married into the royal houses of Hungary and France ^[3]. The Hungarian connection proved especially durable: the marriage of his son to Mary of Hungary eventually carried Angevin blood to the Hungarian and Polish thrones in the fourteenth century.

In 1268 Charles married Margaret of Burgundy, countess of Tonnerre. The second marriage brought Burgundian lands and prestige but no surviving children. Margaret outlived him by many years and devoted part of her widowhood to founding a hospital at Tonnerre ^[3].

In private habits Charles remained the severe figure of his youth. Chroniclers described a tall, dark, sober man who avoided luxury at table, worked through the night on documents, and showed genuine devotion in religion while keeping churchmen firmly subordinate in government. He patronized scholars and physicians at the University of Naples and kept troubadour culture alive at his court, a legacy of his Provencal connections ^[2].

The most dramatic reversal in Charles I of Anjou facts and chronology came on March 30, 1282. As Palermo celebrated Easter Monday, an altercation between French soldiers and Sicilian townspeople outside the church of Santo Spirito ignited a massacre of the French across the city. The rising, remembered as the Sicilian Vespers, spread through the island within weeks, and thousands of French officials and settlers were killed ^[6].

The rebels appealed to Peter III of Aragon, husband of Manfred's daughter Constance and thus heir to the Hohenstaufen claim. Peter landed at Trapani in August 1282 and was accepted as king by the Sicilians, while his Catalan admiral Roger of Lauria swept Angevin fleets from the surrounding seas ^[6]. Charles, whose armada for the Constantinople expedition lay ready at Messina, saw the greatest project of his life destroyed at the moment of launch.

The war went badly for the old king. In June 1284 his son and heir Charles of Salerno was captured by Roger of Lauria in a naval battle in the Bay of Naples, leaving the succession itself in enemy hands ^[5]. Still organizing a counteroffensive, Charles died at Foggia in Apulia on January 7, 1285, aged fifty-eight. He was buried in Naples, the city he had made his capital ^[1].

Any balanced Charles I of Anjou biography must weigh conquest against consequence. He destroyed the Hohenstaufen dynasty, ended the long struggle between empire and papacy in Italy on papal terms, and founded the Angevin dynasty that ruled Naples until 1442 and supplied kings to Hungary and Poland ^[5]. His transfer of the capital to Naples began that city's rise into one of the great urban centers of Europe.

The verdict of contemporaries was divided and remains so. Dante placed him in purgatory rather than hell but blamed Angevin greed for Italy's misfortunes, while Sicilian tradition remembered his rule as foreign oppression justified only by taxation ^[6]. Modern historians such as Steven Runciman emphasized the arrogance that provoked the Vespers, while Jean Dunbabin's study presented a disciplined state-builder whose administrative registers reveal one of the best-documented governments of medieval Europe ^[2].

The division of the old Sicilian kingdom that his defeat produced, with Aragonese kings in Palermo and Angevins in Naples, endured in various forms into the eighteenth century. Few thirteenth-century rulers left a longer geopolitical shadow, and the War of the Sicilian Vespers that outlived him reshaped the balance of power in the western Mediterranean for two hundred years ^[4].