Conradin

Conradin was born on March 25, 1252 at the castle of Wolfstein in Bavaria, near Landshut ^[1]. His father was Conrad IV, King of Germany, Sicily, and Jerusalem, son of the emperor Frederick II. His mother, Elisabeth of Bavaria, belonged to the Wittelsbach family, and the infant was placed under the protection of her brothers, Duke Louis II and Duke Henry XIII of Bavaria ^[2].

He never knew his father. Conrad IV died of fever in Italy in May 1254, when the boy was barely two years old, leaving him a paper inheritance of extraordinary breadth: the duchy of Swabia in Germany, the crown of Jerusalem through his great-grandmother Isabella II, and the kingdom of Sicily, which then covered southern Italy as well as the island itself ^[1]. Contemporaries called him Conradin, the diminutive of Conrad, a name that stuck to him in histories ever after.

The political weather of his childhood was harsh. Pope Innocent IV, locked in the long papal struggle against the Hohenstaufen, refused to recognize the child's Sicilian claim and worked to transfer the kingdom to another prince ^[3]. In Germany the death of Conrad IV opened the period historians call the Interregnum, when no ruler commanded general obedience, and the boy's guardians could protect little beyond his Swabian lands ^[2].

While Conradin learned letters at the Bavarian court, his uncle Manfred, an illegitimate son of Frederick II, governed Sicily in the boy's name. In 1258, acting on a rumor of Conradin's death, Manfred had himself crowned king at Palermo, and he declined to step aside when the rumor proved false ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Conradin in those years would have received different answers in Munich, Palermo, and Rome: rightful king, displaced child, or excommunicate's heir.

The papacy settled the question by force of arms. Pope Urban IV offered the Sicilian crown to Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX of France, and Charles invaded Italy. At the battle of Benevento on February 26, 1266 Manfred was defeated and killed, and Charles took possession of the entire southern kingdom ^[3].

Angevin rule quickly bred resentment. Exiled Ghibellines, partisans of the imperial house in Italy's factional wars, sent envoys north to Bavaria urging the teenage duke to come and claim his own. Against the advice of his mother and despite the threats of Pope Clement IV, who held the young Hohenstaufen's cause to be a serpent's egg, Conradin resolved to cross the Alps ^[2].

In the autumn of 1267 Conradin left Bavaria with a small German army and his closest companion, Frederick of Baden, titular margrave and claimant to Austria. To fund the expedition he sold or pawned much of his remaining property, including rights in Swabia purchased by ambitious neighbors ^[2]. He reached Verona in October and found the Ghibelline cities readier with cheers than with money, so that part of his force turned home unpaid.

The cause nevertheless gathered momentum. Pisa and Siena declared for him, Rome welcomed him under the senator Henry of Castile, and in Sicily and Apulia revolts flared against Angevin officials ^[1]. Pope Clement IV excommunicated Conradin and his supporters, but the sentence did little to slow the march. In July 1268 the young king entered Rome to a triumphal reception, an astonishing scene given that the city was the pope's own see ^[3].

From Rome he moved southeast toward the kingdom itself. Charles of Anjou, who had been besieging rebels at Lucera, hurried to intercept him. The two armies met near the border of the Abruzzi, by the plains of the Palentine valley close to Tagliacozzo, on August 23, 1268 ^[1].

The battle of Tagliacozzo began well for the Hohenstaufen side. Conradin's German and Spanish knights broke through the Angevin lines, overran the enemy camp, and scattered to plunder, believing the day won. Charles, acting on the counsel of the experienced French knight Erard de Valery, had kept a reserve concealed. It fell upon the disordered victors and destroyed them ^[3].

Conradin escaped the field with Frederick of Baden and a handful of companions and rode for the coast, hoping to reach Sicily, where the revolt still held. At Astura, south of Rome, the party hired a boat, but the local lord, Giovanni Frangipani, seized them and handed them over to Charles ^[1]. The captives were taken to Naples.

Charles chose to treat his rival not as a prisoner of war but as a criminal. A court assembled in Naples tried the sixteen-year-old for treason and for disturbing the peace of the Church's vassal kingdom. Several of the judges reportedly opposed a capital sentence, but the verdict Charles wanted was delivered ^[2].

On October 29, 1268 Conradin was beheaded in the marketplace of Naples, the square now called the Piazza del Mercato, together with Frederick of Baden and several other companions ^[1]. Executing a royal captive after a formal trial was almost without precedent in thirteenth-century Europe, and chroniclers across the continent recorded the scene with horror. Later tradition, of uncertain reliability, told of the boy throwing his glove into the crowd as a challenge to be carried to his heirs ^[2].

With his death the legitimate male line of the Hohenstaufen dynasty was extinguished. The duchy of Swabia dissolved into smaller lordships and was never reconstituted, and the claims to Jerusalem and Sicily passed into the tangled disputes of other houses ^[3]. Charles of Anjou kept southern Italy, though Sicilian resentment of his rule exploded fourteen years later in the rebellion of 1282 known as the Sicilian Vespers, during which the memory of the executed king was invoked against the Angevins ^[4].

Conradin's remains were eventually buried in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine beside the marketplace where he died. In 1847 a marble statue by the workshop of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, commissioned by Crown Prince Maximilian of Bavaria, was placed near his tomb there ^[5].

Among Conradin facts often overlooked is his literary side. Two songs attributed to him survive in the Codex Manesse, the great fourteenth-century Heidelberg manuscript of Middle High German lyric poetry, where he appears under the heading of the young King Conrad ^[6]. The verses are conventional love songs in the Minnesang tradition, praising a lady in the courtly manner, and they show the polished education he received at the Wittelsbach court.

The Manesse manuscript also honors him with a full-page miniature showing a crowned youth hawking with falcons, one of the most reproduced images of the codex. Whether the songs are truly his own composition or courtly attributions cannot be settled, a common problem with noble poets of the period, but the manuscript tradition consistently names him ^[6]. His listing among the Minnesänger connects him to his grandfather Frederick II, whose Sicilian court had nurtured the earliest school of Italian poetry.

Any Conradin biography must reckon with the gap between his brief, defeated life and his enormous afterlife in European memory. Dante placed the wrong done to him within the moral accounting of the Divine Comedy, alluding in the Purgatorio to Charles's victims ^[3]. In Germany the beheaded boy became a Romantic emblem of lost imperial glory: writers of the nineteenth century returned to him repeatedly, and Bavarian royalty paid for his Naples monument as an act of dynastic piety ^[5].

Historians read the execution as a turning point. It marked the definitive failure of the Hohenstaufen attempt to unite Germany and Italy under one dynasty, confirmed papal and Angevin dominance in the peninsula for a generation, and deepened the German Interregnum that ended only with Rudolf of Habsburg's election in 1273 ^[2]. The judicial killing of a crowned claimant also became a byword for political ruthlessness, cited for centuries in debates about the treatment of defeated princes ^[4].

Conradin achievements were cut short before they could mature, yet his story endures precisely because it is unfinished: a sixteen-year-old king of three titles who ruled almost nothing, wrote love songs, gambled everything on one campaign, and died with a composure that even hostile chroniclers acknowledged. Few medieval lives so short have been remembered so long ^[1].