MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

BOOK V.

CONRAD IV—WILLIAM—RICHARD.

CHAPTER IX.

RICHARD. [1268.

Conradin in Tuscany — at Rome — Success in Sicily — Battle of Tagliacozzo — Flight of Conradin — and Capture — Tyranny of Charles — Fate of Conradin — of his Friends — in Sicily — St. Lewis's last Crusade — Sicilian Vespers.          

Whilst Charles was thus actively preparing to defend his usurped kingdom, Conradin and his friends were deliberating at Pavia, where his enterprise was really to begin, upon plans for baffling his adversary’s precautions, and penetrating into Tuscany, there to gather the Tuscan Ghibelines round their standard. It was a move that required deliberation; even the fiery impetuosity of youth acknowledged, that such an adventure, as Conradin had undertaken, could not be achieved by objectless fighting, at every opportunity ; that the plan of the expedition must be, to reach, in unbroken force, the kingdom of Conradin’s ancestors, and there, by presenting the lawful heir to the discontented people, excite a general insurrection; which, supported by the Italian Ghibelines, the Germans, and the Roman Senator, should overthrow the usurper. Hence followed, that Conradin’s life, the life upon which hung all the hopes of the Apulians, Sicilians, and Italian Ghibelines, was not to be idly risked, before the destined scene of action was attained. But the problem was how, without fighting, to attain that scene of action; how to reach even the frontier of that kingdom, preliminarily effecting a junction, first with the Tuscan Ghibelines, next with Don Henrique? Only two roads offered; the one, by the virulently Guelph Bologna, where Conradin’s uncle, Enzio, lay ruthlessly immured; the other through Tuscany, where Pisa, not deeming herself bound by a compulsory treaty, and having already supplied Capece with vessels, eagerly invited the presence of the hereditary Emperor to whom she renewed her offers of assistance. But access to Tuscany by land, was, if not impossible, yet hazardous, far beyond what the last of his race could be suffered to dare. The envoys of Pisa proposed that the young King should journey with the utmost secrecy, therefore, almost unaccompanied to some safe point of the Ligurian coast, where Pisan vessels should meet him, whilst the army endeavoured to avoid, or, if therein baffled, to break through the guarded passes of the Apennines. This plan was adopted.

But, still, all was not clear; for, which was the safely accessible Ligurian point ? Genoa still hesitated which side to take, and enmity to Pisa seemed likely to turn the scale against Conradin. Genoa was therefore to be shunned, and Vado, a small town situate between Savona and Finale, upon the Riviera, or line of coast stretching from Nice to the Gulph of Spezzia, was selected. Thither Conradin, accompanied by Frederic, who could not be dissuaded from seeing him safe on board, was securely escorted by the Ghibeline Marchese di Caretta, through whose territory his road lay; there, upon the 22nd of March, he embarked in a Pisan ship, which, convoyed by nine others, transported him to Pisa, where he landed upon the 5th of April. Frederic parted from him at the seaside, returning to Pavia, lest the seeming defection of both princes, should depress the troops. The army then immediately marched, and, guided by Ghibeline mountaineers, skilfully shunning the guarded passes, crossed the mountains by tracks known only to the natives, and entered Tuscany unopposed. As successfully—aided by the mental disturbance, which the sudden appearance of the Ghibeline forces in a locality whence they were thought excluded, produced amongst their enemies—they eluded all the attempts of Charles’s Lieutenant, Marechal Boiselve, to check their advance within its frontiers, rejoining Conradin at Pisa.

Again Pisa did not neglect her own interests, but her care of them at the present opportunity, not being so reckless of consequences, wrought not results as disastrous as upon the recent occasion. Having obtained from Conradin, prospectively, against he should be Emperor, a charter granting her large privileges, she frankly gave him the use of a numerous, well appointed and well manned, fleet, intrusting the command and employment—whether clearing Sicily of the French, or otherwise—as should be deemed most expedient to Federigo Lancia.

Conradin then began his march for Rome, at the head of his army, still small, though materially reinforced by Tuscan Ghibelines. He first alarmed Lucca—whence Boiselve withdrew to Florence—and then, turning short southward, proceeded towards Ghibeline Sienna, leaving Charles’s Marshal upon his left hand. The shortest road to Rome was now, at least as far as Viterbo, open to the rightful heir of the Sicilies; but his adversary still hoped, by follow ing another line in the same direction, to harass and impede his progress, finally, perhaps, inclosing him between his own army and the strongly garrisoned Viterbo. With this object, Boiselve quitted Florence; but, actuated by arrogant confidence in his numbers and generalship, from Montevarchi he, most unaccountably, sent back the Florentine troops that had thus far accompanied him, refusing all reinforcements whatever.

These movements of the French were reported to Conradin, in whose little council it was resolved, that the opportunity, imprudently offered them, of freeing themselves from an enemy ever hanging upon either their flank or their rear, must not be neglected. A considerable detachment was sent, under one of the Uberti, to lie in ambush near Ponte di Valle, where that enemy would probably cross the Arno. Upon the 25th of June, Boiselve reached Ponte di Valle, unsuspicious of the proximity of a foe, and marching in disorderly confusion. Uberti burst from his ambuscade, and, falling suddenly upon the disorderly hostile troops, completely routed them. Boiselve himself was taken prisoner with 500 knights; l’Étendart, the second in command, fled; and, with the greater part of the army, reached Viterbo.

Tuscany was now free from Charles’s foreign mercenaries, and the spirits of the Ghibelines rose, as much as those of the Guelphs sank. At Sienna, Conradin spent some days, and sought to secure active support by granting liberal charters. Thus, again prospectively, as Emperor, he, upon the 7th of July, exempted the Siennese from all imperial tolls and duties. From Sienna, he pursued his route as far as Acquapendente unmolested; filling the Papal Court with alarm, notwithstanding the increase of numbers that l’Étendart’s flight had brought, to the previously very sufficient garrison.

Immediately upon the appearance of Conradin, in warlike guise, south of the Alps, Clement had commanded him to disband his army, and attend, singly and unarmed, at the foot of the pontifical throne, there to receive his just sentence. This thrice repeated command being, of course, disregarded, he had, on Easter day, punished the disobedience of this refractory representative of a refractory race, by excommunicating him and his partisans, and depriving him of the kingdom of Jerusalem, to which alone, of all his widely spread patrimony, the Popes had hitherto admitted his right. Clement now endeavoured to allay the terror of his court by oracular assurances, that the boy was hurrying to Apulia as to a slaughter-house. His endeavours were unavailing, and it was Conradin who relieved their fears. Even had it been consistent with the plan of the expedition to spare the time requisite for besieging a strong, amply provided, and amply garrisoned town, and had Conradin himself not shrunk from an attack upon the Pope in person, he must have dreaded, by such sacrilegious audacity, to alienate all pious minds from his cause. He turned off to the right, and leaving Viterbo upon his left, marched by Toscanella and Vetralia to Rome.

At Rome, the Senator, having resolved that Conradin’s entry should eclipse the glories of Charles’s, prepared to receive the Heir of so many Emperors with Imperial honours. The whole male population of Rome, in military array, but softening their martial appearance with nosegays and wreaths of flowers, marched forth, as far as the foot of Monte Malo, to meet the acknowledged, lawful King of the Sicilies. Thence they escorted him in triumphal procession to the city gate, where the fairest daughters of Rome, maids and matrons, divided into companies distinguished by different uniforms, welcomed him with song and dance. Then, both bands, male and female, forming themselves in marching order, and resuming the triumphal procession, attended him through festally adorned streets, carpeted with flowers, hung, on either side, with tapestry, precious stuffs, purple silks, and gold-wrought, &c., intermingled with garlands of flowers, with branches of laurel, amidst which glittered and sparkled jewellery of all descriptions; and canopied overhead with the same costly materials, to protect the triumpher from the scorching rays of the sun. Thus was the young Adventurer conducted to the Capitol, where the Senator, with all the Italian Ghibelines and Apulian malcontents he could assemble, awaited him. And now Conradin, surrounded by German, Sicilian, and Apulian nobles, by the most illustrious Italian Ghibelines, by kinsmen of his own imperial blood, legitimate and illegitimate, stood upon the spot whence the world had so long been governed. Young and old made the welkin ring with acclamations in honour of the handsome, as daring boy, of the despoiled heir of so many crowns, of the hitherto successful young hero, gallantly seeking his heritage. The youthful heart swelled high with present triumph, as with proud anticipations.

Historical partisans of Conradin’s have thrown doubts upon the sincerity of Don Henriquezs friendship for his German cousin, imputing to the Spaniard, if not actual collusion with Charles, yet Machiavelian plans for using and disappointing the royal Adventurer, overthrowing, first, Charles, by Conradin, then Conradin, and ultimately possessing himself of the Sicilies, to which he could not by possibility devise the shadow of a pretension. The Infante appears to have been a selfish, recklessly bold, and, perhaps, unprincipled Condottiere, who would unquestionably have claimed exorbitant recompense for his services! Sardinia and the Senatorship for life at the least. But, that he had no secret understanding with Charles, is proved by his fate; and to suspect him of plotting against the life of Conradin under the very eye of Galvano Lancia, or, according to some of his accusers, with that seduced Envoy, whose fidelity to Conradin, his own and his son’s blood attested, is surely to revel in gratuitous suspicion. At all events, if the purposed first move was, to seat Conradin on the Sicilian throne, any ulterior scheme could not affect his conduct in the present expedition.

The general exultation at Rome was heightened by tidings from Sicily. Federigo Lancia, after sailing along the Neapolitan coast, everywhere alarming Charles’s officers and partisans and arousing the discontented to thoughts of action, had turned to Sicily and anchored off Milazzo. Capece and Don Fadrique, with the loyal insurgents, had now superior numbers, and a decisive blow might, at that moment, have been struck, had the authority been concentrated in a single hand. But neither Don Fadrique, as a prince, and leader of a band of auxiliaries, alike independent and important, nor Lancia, as Admiral of the Pisan fleet, was willing to acknowledge the superior authority claimed by Conrad Capece, as the Lieutenant appointed by the young King, whilst, according to some chroniclers, another Conrad, the Conte di Alba, Frederic of Antioch’s son, autonomically assumed the title of Viceroy. The four Chiefs differed as to the course to be pursued, and the consequent delay gave time for a Provencal fleet of twenty-two sail, under the command of Robert Lavenu, a Provencal legist, suddenly transformed into an admiral, to arrive. A squadron of Charles’s, stationed in the harbour of Messina, immediately joined the new comers.

At sea, the superiority was now on the side of the French; who knew that, on land, Capece was unable to control even the insurrection that he had called into existence, or to repress the prevalent anarchy. They therefore held themselves superior on both elements, on the one to a fleet inferior in numbers, on the other, to a disorderly mob of royalists; and eagerly they prepared to engage on land and at sea simultaneously. But the approach of danger had banished dissension and jealousy from amongst the leaders of Conradin’s forces; and, as eagerly as the French, they prepared for the double encounter. The 11th of August was fixed, it might almost seem by common consent, for the struggle. The naval action took the lead, and for a while, ruin lowered over the rightful cause. One half of the Pisan fleet attacked the Provençal, the other the Messinese vessels; the first division, manifestly unequal to the Provençaux, was maintaining its ground with difficulty, when the second, to the consternation of their friends on shore, and the exuberant joy of their enemies everywhere, giving way before the Messinese, fled, impetuously pursued. The French fancied the victory theirs; but it was the old stratagem of the one Horatius against the three, unequally wounded, Curiatii. The impetuosity of pursuit scattered the Messinese; and upon this had the veteran sailors of Pisa reckoned. They now turned upon their pursuers, assailed the dispersed ships singly, or in small detachments, successively captured or sunk them, and then hastened to assist their countrymen against the Provençaux. But their assistance was no longer needed. The courage of the lawyer-admiral being cooled by the disaster of his allies, he had already fled, and few indeed of Charles’s Provencal ships escaped capture or destruction. Puyregard, dispirited by the issue of the naval battle, abandoned all thoughts of engaging, and retreated, as fast as was consistent with good order, to protection within the walls of Messina. Had the victors been discreet, he might have found that an unsafe asylum; inasmuch as the Messinese were even then meditating to seek in French property compensation for the loss of their navy, by delivering up the town, upon condition of being so compensated, to the officers of their lawful, hereditary King. But the Pisans, their selfishness uncured even by experience of its baneful consequences, would not let slip an opportunity of crippling the mercantile marine of a rival, though that rival was about to become a friend. Favoured by the wind, they set the captured vessels on fire, in a position whence they drifted into the port of Messina, against the merchantmen there moored, and close to houses built along the shore. The flames caught the shipping and the houses on the quay, doing great damage; and the citizens, thus irritated against the allies of him to whom they were about to swear allegiance, were half reconciled to their French masters. But, if Conradin thus failed at once to win Messina, the rest of Sicily was indisputably his; for his Pisan fleet rode mistress of the sea, and the French soldiers lurked, in very doubtful security, behind the walls of towns, mostly hostile to them.

When Rome heard these glad tidings, Conradin was preparing to prosecute his enterprise, but not by the road which treason had two years before opened to his enemy. Don Henrique knew that Charles had concentrated his defensive efforts upon the pass, which, had bribery failed, he could not, he was well aware, without an immense cost of time, labour, and blood, if with it, have forced. Conradin’s Council resolved, therefore, to avoid the strongly guarded road by Ceperano and the bridge over the Garigliano, attempting the next pass of the mountain range, at all practicable for an army. This pass was, in many respects, preferable, though by nature far more difficult, and therefore, perhaps, neglected by Charles. Lying fifty miles east of Ceperano, it led into the Abruzzi, towards the very part of the kingdom, where insurrection in favour of the heir of the Suevo-Norman Kings, might most confidently be expected; viz., the Capitanata, where Saracens and their Christian confederates were already in arms.

Upon the 18th of August, just a week after his naval victory, Conradin, hitherto successful beyond all reasonable calculation, even to the utmost of his inviters’ promises, and reinforced by his Spanish kinsman’s band of veterans, quitted Rome to consummate his daring enterprise. He marched up the fair valley of the Teverone, passing Tivoli, to Cursoli. Thence, with painful toil, but unopposed by man, and contending only against natural obstacles, the little army penetrated into the very heart of the mountains. They struggled through gorges and ravines, barely admitting two abreast, between the torrent and the vertically rising rock, along the side of precipices, up and down sheep, or rather goat tracks, of steepness well nigh perpendicular, in short through difficulties analogous to those that had impeded Manfred's flight, but more superable in broad daylight and with abundant assistance.

At length, all were surmounted. The royal youth stood upon the summit of the last, loftiest, and most abrupt range, with the beautiful land, for which he came to fight, outspread beneath his gaze. In the distance, encircled by cultivated fields intermixed with vineyards, with groves of fig, olive, and orange, lay the fair lake of Celano, reflecting the bright blue of a southern sky, whilst, in every cosy nook of the surrounding mountains, nestled a village, and upon many a boldly projecting crag, half way to the summit, perched another. The road to Sulmone seemed open before him, and, at Sulmone, he was to find himself in the midst of the most loyal subjects of his forefathers. The boy-hero felt his daring adventure achieved, felt one ancestral crown already upon his brow. But, as he descended from the Apennine ridge, he learned that actually open the Sulmone road was not; that Charles was hurrying, with what troops he could upon the sudden emergency collect, to oppose his further progress. Therefore passing Tagliacozzo, one of the just described mountain nests, he encamped not far from Scurcola, upon a plain, the extent of which, nearly inclosed as it was by the mountains, afforded a decided advantage to his army, superior in numbers, especially in cavalry, to that which was coming against him. His camp was strongly posted; protected by a stream, the Salto, and by the inaccessibility of the sheltering mountains.

Charles, expecting Conradin’s advance by the same pass though which he himself had invaded Apulia, and therefore, relying upon the time required to break through the defences there accumulated, had remained before Luceria, devoting his attention to the siege. And justly did he esteem crushing the Saracen insurrection, ere headed by the Prince it proclaimed, a main object. But, having too long delayed his attack, Don Henrique’s strategy baffled him. The intelligence, that his adversary had chosen a road guarded only by natural difficulties, surprised, but did not perplex him. The measures to be thereon taken were self-evident; and instantly raising the siege, he hastened northward by forced marches, to encounter the invaders, ere they could join the Capitanata insurgents.

Upon the 22d of August, he reached the mountains, girdling the plain on which Conradin was encamped; and pitched his tents in a strong position, upon a height commanding the road to Sulmone, and within a mile of Alba, a town seated upon an insulated rock, that protected, or threatened, his right flank. From Conradin’s camp he was here nearly three miles distant.

Conradin, immediately arraying his little army, offered battle, which, under any circumstances, was not likely, at the close of a series of forced marches, to be immediately accepted. But Charles was numerically too weak to encounter his enemy upon even ground; whilst his position was too strong to be assaulted, even with a greater superiority of numbers than Conradin possessed. The rival hosts, that decided the fate of a kingdom, have been variously estimated, Charles’s at 3000 or 6000 men, Conradin’s at 5000, 9000, 10,000, and even 16,000, the probability being that 5000 and 10,000, respectively, come nearest the truth. The rivals gazed idly at each other, till darkness induced the invader to retire into his camp. In the night, Charles learned, that a deputation from Aquila was carrying presents and the keys of the city to Conradin’s camp. To avert the desertion of a town locally important, he instantly mounted, and almost unattended, galloped thither; by flatteries, promises, and threats, he secured the fidelity of Aquila, and the stores in its warehouses for his use, and was in his tent again before dawn.

In the morning Conradin again offered battle, dividing his army into two bodies; the one composed of Don Henrique’s band, of the Lombards under Galvano Lancia, and of the Tuscans, under Conte Donoratico, the Pisan, the whole seemingly commanded by the Infante; the second, of his Germans under himself and Frederic. Still Charles remained immoveable. To him, alarmed at the evident disparity betwixt his forces and Conradin’s, to accept or decline an engagement, appeared equally fraught with ruin; since, in the first case, defeat seemed inevitable, in the second, he laid the heart of the kingdom, where the Saracens were in arms, open to the claimant of his crown.

Unfortunately for the last heir of the Norman Kings, as of the Swabian and Franconian Emperors, and for those whose hopes rested upon him, the Sieur Alard de St. Valery, a veteran Crusader, having landed in Italy, on his return from the Holy Land, had deemed paying his respects to the brother of his King, an indispensable piece of courtesy in a French knight; and was then in the camp for this purpose. To him, as to an experienced compatriot, the French prince applied for counsel in his perplexity; and St. Valery pronounced that, unless a battle were there fought and won, the kingdom was lost; that victory by open force was impossible; and, that the only stratagem which he thought offered a chance of success, besides being most hazardous, could offer that chance only through secrecy so impenetrable, that not even to the King himself might it be disclosed. The command of the army must be transferred, wholly and unrestrictedly to him who devised it. Charles, in his despair, caught at any chance of relief; and trusting to the veteran’s skill, he surrendered the command of the army, thus unrestrictedly, to him, pledging himself the first to implicit obedience.

St. Valery then selected 800 of the best knights, with the King and Earl Robert at their head, whom he reserved for future secret disposal. The rest of the army he divided into two bodies; the one, consisting of Provençals, Lombards, and a few Romans, under Gaucelme and l’Étendart, he ordered to descend into the plain, and by attemping to possess themselves of the bridge over the Salto, invite an attack; the other, of Frenchmen, under Marechal Cousance, to occupy the slope of the hill, and not succour their comrades until they saw them reduced to the last extremity. He further ordered both Leaders not to resist too obstinately, but to fly, keeping their people together as well as they could, and returning to the field, with all the men they could rally, the moment the slackening of the pursuit should give them an opportunity of so doing. To conceal from both friend and foe the King’s absence from the field, Cousance, who nearly resembled him in figure, was directed to wear the ensigns of royalty. These corps despatched to their posts, St. Valery ensconced himself, with Charles and his 800 knights, in a mountain gorge, where, from the formation of the ground and the position of the wood upon the heights above them, they were completely hidden, both from their adversaries, and from the inhabitants of Alba and Scarcola, who were known warmly to favour their hereditary prince.

The first division had hurried down to the plain and attempted to obtain possession of the bridge, which from the stream’s running between them and the hostile troops, seemed to be no unreasonable military object. Of course the attempt, from the inadequate force of the assailants, failed; when Don Henrique crossing the little river by several fords, fell upon these disordered troops, overpowered them by his numbers, routed, and pursued them, as St. Valery had concluded that he would, with a wild impetuosity, that altogether lost sight of the yet unbroken hostile array. Cousance was, nevertheless, in full view; having advanced, according to his orders, at the last moment, to support his defeated friends. Him the Germans encountered, and in a short, but sharp conflict, he was slain; when his French troops, who, deceived as was intended, by his accoutrements, mistook him for Charles, deeming all lost, fled in their turn. The Germans did not, like their more impetuous southern allies, pursue; but, after remaining awhile in order of battle upon the ground, believing the victory theirs, the usurper slain, and the kingdom won, withdrew, hot and weary but exulting, to their tents.

When the first division was put to flight, Charles had been impatient to break out of his ambush and support them; but St. Valery reminded him of his vowed obedience, and he submitted. When the like fate befel the second, he could hardly be restrained. Even this iron-hearted man wept hot tears of rage and shame, wildly exclaiming, that tamely to see his whole army annihilated was as absurd as infamous. But Su Valery forcibly withheld him, asking: “And what could 800 men do against thousands, upon their guard, and fired with success? Wait till the southern blood of the Italians and Spaniards shall, in the frantic ardour of pursuit, have hurried them beyond reach of the sound of battle; till northern phlegm and inability to endure the burning rays of an August sun in Apulia, shall have driven these Germans, after plundering the dead, to seek relief from a temperature, so uncongenial to their frames, in disencumbering themselves of their burthensome armour, in the bath and the banquet, or in sleep. Then will our little band be more than a match for their numbers; then will your rival be slain, or a captive in your hands?⁵

Charles yielded to the argument; and, as St. Valery had but too wisely foreseen, Conradin, satisfied that not only was the victory his, but his enemy annihilated, and his task accomplished, permitted his Germans to collect the booty and seek rest and refreshment, after the heat and toil of the day. “Now is the time!” cried St. Valery; and bursting with his little troop from their concealment, he galloped upon the hostile camp. Even this sight did not warn the recent victors to prepare for new strife, as, unobservant from a sense of security, they imagined the approaching squadron to be part of Don Henriquez’s men, returning from the pursuit. It was not till the troop of French knights fell upon them like a thunderbolt, dealing death and destruction around, that a possibility of danger was suspected. Vainly then did Conradin, Frederic, and the other chiefs, endeavour to reunite and array the scattered victors, urging them to snatch up whatever weapon came to hand, and defend their lives. What could unarmed, disordered, and bewildered men effect? All fled, hurrying their leaders, who were absorbed in their fruitless efforts to rally the fugitives, along with them in their flight.

Now would the French Knights fain have either pursued the flying Germans, or plundered the camp; Charles himself being very reluctant, to see the competitor for his crown escape his grasp. But the veteran Crusader was not to be caught in the snare he himself had successfully Bet for another. He knew that the Spanish prince must ere long return, with numbers far superior to his troop, though he hoped in a good deal of careless disorder: to balance which superiority, to profit by which disorder, the troop must remain in battle array, upon the ground previously occupied by the Germans. He trusted thus for the second time within a few hours, to dupe his antagonists with the semblance of friends.

As St. Valery expected, Don Henrique, after having so unfortunately, if scarce imprudently, pursued the flying foe to a considerable distance, halted to return; and took a somewhat divergent line, for the purpose of seizing, perhaps of appropriating the plunder of Charles’s camp. As he and his men looked down from the tented eminence, they saw a troop in order of battle on the plain, but mistook them, as St. Valery intended they should, for the equally victorious German division, and descended the hill in heedless confusion, to rejoice with their comrades in the common triumph. Again not till their weapons gave incontrovertible proof of enmity was the identity of the band mistrusted.

But Don Henrique’s corps, if surprised and in some confusion, was not unarmed, and the princely Condottiere was too experienced a soldier to be easily thrown off his bias. A glance showed him the disastrous fact, and with the exclamation: “If fortune have cruelly turned against us, our swords must force her to turn again!” he arrayed bis men for a second engagement. His ranks were soon ordered, and his numbers still so superior to those of the French victors, that St. Valery, for the third time this day, had recourse to stratagem. He now told Charles that he would himself fly, with a portion of their troop, taking the direction in which their two divisions had fled before, until the Italians and Spaniards, again falling into the previous snare, should, by their heedless pursuit, again so break their ranks and scatter themselves, as to enable the pursuing King to attack them at disadvantage; when he, on his part, would turn upon them, reinforced, he trusted, by their own fugitives; who, if returning, as ordered, might now be momentarily expected. The scheme was executed as devised, and again successfully. The imaginary victors, who again dreamt only of pursuing routed fugitives, were confounded at finding themselves between two onslaughts. War had, however, as before said, too long been the trade of Don Henrique and his band for a surprise to rob them of self-possession; they fought resolutely till the gradual rallying of all Charles’s fugitives round his standard, swelled his ranks to a degree nearly as disproportionate as before, though in the opposite direction. Half of Conradin’s army, depressed by the consciousness that the other half must have been vanquished, now had to contend against the whole of Charles’s. Don Henrique was overpowered, defeated, and, in his turn, put to flight.

That very evening the victorious King despatched the news of his victory to the Pope. In his letter he says: “The battle was harder fought and more sanguinary than that of Benevento. Whither Conradin, Frederic of Austria, and the Infante of Castile have fled, no one knows; but the charger of the latter has been recognised amongst the horses we have taken.”

If this last part of the account were not a misrepresentation, generated by the hope of a reward for good tidings, the prince must have changed his horse, in the idea that being supposed slain would facilitate his escape. For Don Henrique, when he abandoned the struggle as hopeless, rode off, well mounted and accompanied, altogether in such good plight, that, upon reaching the Abbey of Montecassino, he ventured to announce a complete victory gained by the young King and himself, over the usurper. But the shrewd Abbot at once perceived improbability, in the leader, next in command, as in rank, to Conradin himself, appearing as the herald of such a victory; and that at the head of so small a party. For so small was it, that, when suspicion was thus excited, the monks were able forcibly to detain the Infante and his company, until the truth should be ascertained. Having learned the real posture of affairs, the Abbot, by his proceedings, marked his opinion of his French Sovereign. He began by demanding and obtaining from the victorious King a solemn promise not to shed blood, so near akin to his own, as the Castilian Infante’s, and then delivered up his prisoners to him. The promise was kept; the King resisted the temptation to put his creditor cousin to death; but he shut him up in a prison, and in that prison the luckless Prince, Condottiere, and Roman Senator, was still pining, two and twenty years after the battle of Tagliacozzo.

Conradin and Frederic, when irresistibly borne away from the fatal field, made straight for Rome, where, as well from the zeal so lately displayed in favour of the heir of the Sicilies and of the Empire, as from the Senator’s influence, they trusted to find friendship and assistance. Upon their way thither, they were joined by Galvano Lancia and his son, by Doronatico, and other noble Ghibelines of Don Henrique’s division. The Senator’s deputy, Guido di Montefeltro, received -them as they expected, and a few Roman barons and principal citizens, whose interests were identified with theirs, expressed cordial sympathy and readiness to assist in remedying the late reverse. But the fickle multitude had shouted for Conradin triumphant, for Conradin at the head of an army that, defeating the usurper, was, by a single victory, to seat him upon his hereditary throne. Conradin, a fugitive, from a lost battle and a scattered army, was a different person; as different was the influence of the deputy, from that of the present Senator. Coldness and hesitation became apparent; the return of the Orsini and other expelled Guelphs was talked of; rumours of the approach of King Charles at the head of his victorious troops were circulated. Safety and support must, Conradin and his friends saw, be sought elsewhere.

In Sicily, they could defend themselves, and renew the war; the little party, therefore, directed their steps to the sea coast, which they reached at Astura. They there found a vessel ready to sail either for Sicily or for Pisa; which of them mattered little, since at Pisa they could easily obtain conveyance to their goal. They embarked, put to sea, and congratulated each other upon their escape—upon the certainty of accomplishing their immediate object But something about them, whether their number, their dress, their hurry, or their demeanour, had attracted notice in the small town, and their passage was reported to the Lord of Astura, who, conjecturing that the persons described must be fugitives from a lost battle,—whether the catastrophe of Tagliacozzo were yet known to him or not,—and fugitives, moreover, of high condition, instantly ordered a well-manned and well-armed galley to pursue and bring them back. Their very inferior trading craft was speedily overtaken, and ordered to put about. The crew was prompt to obey, and resistance, on the part of Conradin and his friends, impossible. The deepest despondency overwhelmed them at this check, just as they deemed all danger past. But when to the inquiry, “Who is the Lord of Astura?” the answer received was, “Giovanni Frangipani,” that despondency vanished.

No Italian family lay under greater obligations to Conradin’s ancestors, than the Frangipani. His great-grandmother, Constance, and his grandfather, Frederic II, had bestowed large domains upon the grandfather and granduncle of this Giovanni; Frederic II had further, as before mentioned, purchased allodial estates of the Lord of Astura’s father and uncle, when pressed for money, immediately and gratuitously granting them those estates in fief, and, besides rebuilding their houses and towers, destroyed in Roman troubles, had made the whole family ample compensation for all damage therein suffered. In addition to all these substantial favours, Giovanni himself had received knighthood from the Emperor’s own hand; a sacredly binding tie, in the code of chivalry. Neither had the Frangipani failed to profess the most devoted attachment to Frederic II. That, since the death of their imperial benefactor, they had done homage to Innocent IV, for the fiefs received from Frederic and his mother, weighed, in Conradin’s estimation, as a feather in the scale: so did the report that his cousin, Frederic’s uncle, Frederic the Combative, had been killed, perhaps unfairly, by a revengeful Frangipani, whom he had wronged. Without an apprehension, therefore, of any evil, beyond a slightly prolonged detention from the scene of action, Sicily, the party submitted to what they could not avoid.

When brought before Giovanni Frangipani, Conradin announced himself, and called upon his captor to testify his gratitude for the favours which Suevo-Norman sovereigns had conferred upon his family, by protecting Frederic Il’s grandson, the rightful heir of the Sicilies, and helping him to join the friends upholding his cause in the island. He promised abundantly to guerdon whatever assistance he might obtain from him, and, according to some accounts, offered to marry his daughter. But the Lord of Astura was inaccessible to generous motives or a sense of duty; and in matters of interest, either held a daughter’s very subordinate to his own; or was simply governed by the old saw, touching the relative value of birds in the hand and in the bush. A party of Charles’s troops had tracked the fugitives to Astura, and to their leader, Frangipani sold his prisoners; the price he bargained for being four considerable fiefs, which the leader in question undertook that Charles should bestow upon the traitor. Frangipani delivered up Conradin and his companions, and obtained in remuneration, not the promised four, but one fief, near Benevento. The reader must not, on account of the date of the subsequent transaction, lose the small satisfaction of knowing that in Charles’s war with the Aragonese, some years later, the latter conjointly with the Sicilians, destroyed Astura and killed Giovanni Frangipani.

The prisoners were immediately carried to Naples, and the indignities to which they were subjected upon their road thither, were calculated to forewarn them of the fate there awaiting them. In the first instance, however, their arrival was felt by them as a relief, for, though shut up in prison, they do not appear to have been ill used, or denied each other’s society. Conradin and Frederic were certainly confined together.

The whole of the continental portion of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with the single exception of Luceria— which held out till the next year—now submitted in gloomy despondency to the conqueror. Those who had favoured the vanquished heir, studied to dissemble, or, where that was hopeless, to expiate the offence. But hardly could hypocrisy conciliate the ruthless as rapacious Charles, who, even if he had not a morbid pleasure in bloodshed, looked to confiscation as a source of profit. His treatment of prisoners of war, when from his rapid and easy success he could not be peculiarly irritated, has been seen; those now taken he considered as rebels not entitled to the character of prisoners of war; and a few specimens of his mode of dealing with them will suffice to show his disposition.

Alba had rashly avowed her joy, when, upon the fatal day of Tagliacozzo, the victory had appeared to be Conradin’s. When all was lost, she attempted no defence; but the prompt throwing open of her gates could not avert punishment, amounting to destruction, so complete, that down to the present day, only a mass of ruins marks the site of a once thriving, now obliterated town. The citizens of Potenza, guilty of a similar crime, thought to evade a similar lot by murdering all their nobles, as though they alone had been guilty of loyalty to the hereditary monarch, actually constraining the Guelph population to disguise their sentiments. Falsehood, backed by massacre, availed but in part; the town, if not demolished, was sacked; numbers of the citizens were executed, and their houses demolished. The baseness of Corneto was more successful. Her crime was, having given up French horses to the partisans of Conradin. The magistrates now invited the best citizens to the castle, to consult upon the line of conduct to be adopted; made them prisoners as they sat at supper, and sent them, 106 in number, to the King, as the side authors of the iniquitous act. Charles immediately ordered the execution of 103, and the remaining three to be carried to Melfi. What he proposed there doing with them, is uncertain; inasmuch as they, apprehending that death was to be preceded by torture, or merely wishing to disappoint the murderer of their friends, whatever his purpose, flung themselves down a precipice on the way thither. Charles’s thirst of blood was now so far assuaged, that Corneto was spared; but this was the limit of his mercy. Throughout the continental provinces all who had, in any way, betrayed good will towards Conradin, the lowest as well as the highest, were diligently sought out, and either mutilated, or put to death, or reduced to beggary by the confiscation of all they J assessed. Such of the Roman citizens as, having dutifully followed their Senator to the field, had been made prisoners, he for the further indulgence of his sanguinary nature, called rebels; and as such, first ordered their feet to be cwt off, then, shutting them all up together in one building, set it on fire, reducing it and them to ashes.

Could Conradin have reached Sicily with nis friends, the war might have ended differently; he might at least have kept possession of the island, as once more a separate kingdom. But the tidings of defeat, followed by those, yet more disheartening, of the capture of him for whom the struggle was making, crushed the sprit of all. Hence, upon l’Étendart’s landing with a large body of French troops, the contest was abandoned; not discreetly, by treaty, providing for the safety of all, but individually, as cowardice and treachery prompted. The example of both was set at Augusta, which, whilst bravely defending itself, was, by some traitors amongst the citizens, surreptitiously delivered up to l’Étendart. They had their well merited reward. Neither rank, age, nor sex escaped; he cut betrayed and betrayers alike to pieces. And, when the brutal appetite of the soldiery for blood, was sated, when their arms actually ached with slaughter, l’Étendart sent for stout executioners, whom he commanded, as though death were too mild a punishment for resistance to an usurper, to enhance its pangs by previous or concomitant torture; and he stimulated their ferocity with wine, whenever they seemed weary, or sickened at the task assigned them. Not a soul was left alive in Augusta.

The leaders themselves now despaired. Don Fadrique got on board a Pisan ship, and thus, with Federico Lancia, effected his escape. Conrad, Conte d’Alba, was taken prisoner: but, fortunately for him, his wife, Beatrice Lancia, held some captured relations of a Cardinal, securely guarded in a castle that still owned her as its mistress. She announced her immovable determination to treat them as her husband should be treated; and by the Pope’s earnest intervention in their behalf, Conrad was exchanged for them; retiring into private life, upon the ruin of his kindred, he is heard of no more. Capece alone, with his Germans and Tuscans, remained unsubdued, or, more correctly, still free at Contorbe; for subdued the spirit of his troops was, and they bargained with l’Étendart for their own safety, as the price of delivering their general into his hands. When the traitors prepared to execute their part of the nefarious bargain, they found Capece standing in the porch of a church. Instead of seeking the protection of sanctuary within the sacred edifice, he thus calmly addressed them: “I am aware of your intentions, and am willing to sacrifice myself for you; but take you care that your own safety be thereby really insured. Crime grows bolder with success, and, after my death, French perfidy is as likely, as not, to destroy every one of you.” The emotion, which the heroic generosity of these words could not but excite, was insufficient to revive the courage or change the purpose of the spiritless Judas-soldiers. One of the ringleaders answered: “Lord General, we cannot all be saved; and delivering you up purchases the liberty of all the rest; so do not strive against us. Besides, we fully hope you will be pardoned, as l’Étendart has promised us, that if he gets Contorbe without losing a man, he will do his utmost for you.” Capece made no reply, but mounting his horse, rode with them into the enemy's camp.

And how did l’Étendart keep his promise to the mutineers? A worthy officer of Charles of Anjou, he instantly put out Capece’s eyes, and then sent him, blinded and betrayed, to Catanea, to be there hanged upon the seashore. Two more of the Capece brothers, were, after the same fashion, executed at Naples, by the King’s own command; but it is some little solace, amidst such horrors, to learn, that tyranny did not extirpate this noble race. Not only is the name found in subsequent history; the family exists at the present day, still bearing upon their coat of arms, or as the motto to their crest, the Swabian name, in witness of ancestral, indomitable loyalty, through a period of perfidy and treason. The lot of the troops who sold their Commander is not known; they would, probably, be enlisted or massacred by Charles, accordingly as be did, or did not, want soldiers.

Clement, who in the first instance had rejoiced, like, not the self-entitled Father of Christendom, but, a partisan, at Conradin’s defeat and capture, was, by these executions, recalled to sentiments more consonant with the character he claimed. Again he remonstrated with his chosen royal vassal, earnestly imploring him to be merciful towards his surviving captives. But mercy was alien to Charles; and the only effect of the Pope’s rebukes and admonitions, was to superinduce hypocrisy upon his original cruelty. He endeavoured to transfer the responsibility from his own to other shoulders, assuring his Holiness, that the fate of the pretender to his crown should be judicially determined, by an unimpassioned, impartial tribunal.

Professedly for this purpose, the King summoned an assembly of Apulian Barons, of Sindichi (Magistrates), or Deputies of Apulian towns,—selecting them from the provinces generally known as most Guelph in disposition—and of Judges and Doctors learned in the law, from all parts of the kingdom, to Naples, there constituting them a High Court of Justice. Before this tribunal he did not produce his prisoners; but in their absence, in the absence of any vicarious protector of their interests, he laid a sort of indictment against Conradin, accusing him of sins against the Church, of rebellion and high treason against his lawful King; whereby he and all his accomplices, i. e., his friends and fellow captives, had incurred the penalty of death.

The whole Court was horror-stricken at hearing the accusations, upon which judgment was to be pronounced; but, mindful of the King’s savage cruelty, the members looked at each other in mute dismay, shrinking alike from what they saw was expected of them, and from giving utterance to their real sentiments. At length, a Doctor of Laws, Guido da Suzara, so called from his birthplace, Suzara, in the present duchy of Modena, arose. He had been Professor of Law at Modena, Bologna, at almost every Italian University; and in his lectures had, with bold severity, reprobated the arbitrary use of torture, then habitual. He now, with a firmness befitting the high office of an expounder and teacher of law and justice, thus spoke: “Conradin came hither not as a rebel or robber, but fully convinced of his right to the crown. He has committed no crime, having only endeavoured, by open war, to recover the hereditary kingdom of his ancestors. He is a prisoner of war—taken, moreover, not as an assailant, but as a fugitive—and to treat prisoners of war mercifully, is enjoined by all laws, human and divine.”

This valiant assertion of truth, law, and justice, appears to have so astonished Charles, as to throw him quite off his guard. Forgetting his hypocritical professions of noninterference, he impatiently exclaimed, that Conradin was guilty of sacrilege, his troops having burnt convents— equally forgetting, it should seem, the similar far worse deeds of his own army at Benevento. Again Guido fearlessly spoke, asking: “What proof is there that Conradin or his friends sanctioned the crime? Have not other armies done the same? And are not offences against the Church to be judged exclusively by the Church?”

Courage is almost as infectious as cowardice, and stimulated by Guido’s generous daring, the whole tribunal, with a single exception, solemnly acquitted Conradin and his friends. Respecting the identity of this one, resolutely time-serving, judge, some little uncertainty prevails. By most historians he is stated to have been Roberto di Bari, the Gran-Protonotario; a man represented as having been deficient alike in learning and m honesty; whilst more recent authors assert this single exception to have been a Provençal, whose name and condition are unknown, the Gran-Protonotario having merely, in his official capacity, pronounced the sentence which he had no share in determining. The older version, as will presently be seen, is most consonant with the subsequent circumstances of this iniquitous transaction. But whether an unknown Provencal, or the Gran-Protonotario, in slavish adulation of a dreaded tyrant, affirmed the guilt of the unfortunate prisoners of war, the tyrant, incensed at losing, through the virtue of his tribunal, the thick shroud he had hoped to cast over his sanguinary vengeance, eagerly caught at this transparent veil. He accepted the single servile voice, that had breathed the word Guilty, as delivering the unanimous verdict of the High Court of Justice, and at once, either in person, or through the official organ of Roberto di Bari, pronounced sentence of death upon the convicted rebels, Conradin and his accomplices.

Conradin and Frederic, unapprehensive of any worse fate than prolonged imprisonment, to young spirits bad enough, were playing at chess when their strange trial, and yet stranger doom, were announced to them. They received the unexpected intelligence with calm fortitude, and employed the brief span of life remaining to them, as did their fellow prisoners, in the duties of religion and the arrangement of their temporal affairs. Conradin confirmed his previous testamentary dispositions, bequeathing his German possessions to his maternal uncles; and in his will, as before intimated, there is no allusion to any matrimonial engagement, complete or contemplated.

The scaffold for this unprecedented execution was erected upon the sea shore, in a spot which now bears the name of Il Mercato—as though the sole Neapolitan market —and, according to some authorities, in front of a church, dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Cannel; according to others, upon the site where a coffee-house now stands. The whole district was then without the city walls, and either locality commanded a view of all the far-famed beauties of the Bay of Naples. Charles afterwards there built the castle named Del Carmine, because adjoining the Carmelite church and monastery, making the castle itself a piece of the wall, which he was then greatly extending, and which, by inclosing, made the whole theatre of the tragedy part of the town.

Upon the 29th of October, 1268, the day appointed for the performance of the last act, the open space in question was thronged with Neapolitans, eager, whether in sympathy with the victims or the executioner, to gaze upon an exciting spectacle. Conradin and his companions in misfortune, were now, little more than two months after the downfall of their proud hopes on the plain of Tagliacozzo, brought thither. The executioner, ready prepared for the discharge of his dreadful functions, awaited them upon the scaffold; the King, thirsting for the blood of a rival in his clutches, took his seat at the open window, or in the balcony, of a neighbouring fort; by his command, the Gran-Protonotario thus addressed the assembled multitude: “Men of Naples! this Conradin, the son of Conrad, came from Germany to seduce the Apulian and Sicilian nations; to reap a harvest not his own, lawlessly attacking our lawful sovereign. Favoured by accident, he was at first successful; but soon, by the energy of King Charles, was the victor vanquished; and be who held himself bound by no laws, has been brought bound before the tribunal of the monarch he strove to overthrow. Therefore, with the permission of the Clergy, and by the advice of Judges, and of Doctors learned in the Law, has sentence of death been passed upon him and his accomplices, as robbers, rebels, traitors, and seducers of the people to rebellion; and to prevent all possibility of further danger, they will immediately be executed in your presence.”

Although the multitude must surely have supposed the scaffold to be erected for an execution, the general murmur that arose seemed to indicate surprise, as well as horror, at a doom, contrary alike to law and to justice. But fear of Charles predominated over indignation, and only a single voice dared to express the general feeling; but, at the impulse of regard for a wife’s father, strangely directed the storm of that indignation solely against the tool, sparing the tool’s employer. The misdirection is, however, some proof that the Protonotario was not a mere officer, discharging his official duty, but an active agent. The voice was that of the King’s son-in-law, Earl Robert de Bethune, heir of Flanders. He sprang forward, shouting: “Impudent, law-perverting scoundrel! How presumest thou to doom so noble, so princely a cavalier!” and drawing his sword as he spoke, ran the Protonotario through the body. The unrighteous Judge was carried away a seeming corpse, though whether he were actually killed is another of the points upon which authorities differ. The French knights applauded the deed, and Charles was fain to smother his wrath; but he was not frightened into justice. The doom remained unaltered.

Conradin now asked permission to say a few words; and obtaining it, with great self-possession spoke as follows: “As a sinner against God, I deserve death; but here I am unjustly condemned. I ask all those loyal vassals, over whose welfare my ancestors so paternally watched,—I ask all the princes of the earth, whether he who asserts his own and his people’s rights, be a criminal? And even were I one, upon what plea can the innocent men, who, unpledged to any other king, have faithfully adhered to me, be thus savagely punished?”

Murmurs and tears of sympathy responded to this appeal, but still fear of Charles was the predominant sentiment. Robert de Bethune had apparently expended his indignation, and no one stirred. Conradin then flung his glove amidst the crowd, requesting that it might be conveyed to his kinswoman, Constance, Crown-Princess of Aragon, and her husband Don Pedro, in token of his bequeathing his rights to her. It was picked up by Heinrich, Truchsess von Waldburg, brother or nephew of Conradin’s active as zealous episcopal guardian in Swabia, who, like a good knight and true, punctually fulfilled the Prince’s last wishes.  Conradin seems to have thus far cherished a hope of exciting the people to rise in rescue of himself and his friends; but if he had, he now saw that their very souls were too thoroughly enslaved. He abandoned the struggle, and prepared for death. He embraced all his fellow-sufferers, Frederic repeatedly; divested himself of his upper garment, and, raising his hands and eyes towards Heaven, cried: “Jesus Christ, Lord of all creatures, King of honour! if this cup may not pass from me, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” Then he knelt down, but immediately started up, with the exclamation: “Oh, mother mine! What grief must I cause thee!” This explosion of filial tenderness, for the only parent he had ever known, over, Conradin again knelt down, and calmly received the deathstroke.

When Frederic beheld the beloved head fall, he uttered a shriek so piteous, revealing anguish so intense, that the whole mass of spectators burst into tears. His own head was the next struck off, followed by Conte Donoratico’s; and here it must be observed, that, if any shadow of a plea could be alleged for sentencing Conradin, as a claimant of the crown, none could possibly apply to Frederic and Donoratico, both foreigners in the Sicilies, the one a German, prince, the other a nobleman, the citizen of a free state, which, if not absolutely independent, owed homage solely to the Empire. The Lancias, whose Apulian and Sicilian estates might give them, though Lombards, the character of rebels against the de facto king, were the next executed. Galvano had proffered 100,000 ounces of gold as ransom for his son and himself; but Charles, preferring the confiscation of his Apulian and Sicilian property, rejected the money; and, apparently through a mere desire to gloat on human suffering, ordered the son to be first slain. The fatal stroke is said to have been dealt the youth whilst actually clasped in his father’s arms. After the Lancias, one Swabian (again a foreigner,) and several Calabrian noblemen and knights were beheaded.

It is said that when this wholesale execution was over, the executioner’s own head was suddenly struck off, by a colleague provided for the express purpose; thus escaping the indecorum of a low-born man’s being enabled to boast of having shed such princely blood. The number of victims sacrificed upon this day is not accurately known; neither is that of the persons who suffered upon the several subsequent days of execution, nor yet the precise date of those subsequent sanguinary days. But, first and last, 1000 human lives are computed to have been left upon the scaffold. None, because excommunicated, being allowed to repose in consecrated ground, the seashore was their common grave<

With regard to Conradin at least, and those of his friends laid nearest him, this indignity was not permanent. According to the most general opinion, his mother Elizabeth, who had been gathering together a large sum of money, with which, as she trusted, to ransom him, arriving too late to make the hopeless attempt, purchased with the gold, now otherwise valueless, permission to build a church or chapel, and in it a tomb, over his remains The chur.ch was afterwards burnt down and rebuilt; the second church or chapel was in existence at the opening of the current century; in the early part of which, all respect for religion, as for the past, being extinct, it was destroyed to make room for the before-mentioned coffee house. But the monks of the Carmelite monastery show, behind the high altar of their own church, a tablet, attesting that Conradin and Frederic are there interred; though whether their un-distinguishable remains were removed thither from the demolished church, or only the tomb with the medallion effigy of Conradin, may be doubted.

This mockery of law and justice—as, however repugnant to each other the ideas of mockery and murder, this atrocious butchery under colour of a legal execution must be termed—with all its attendant circumstances, including the extinction, in the direct male line, of a dynasty as exalted in natural gifts as in station, commoting the Neapolitan heart and imagination, tradition has deepened and adorned the catastrophe by a touch of the marvellous. An eagle is reported to have shot down from the clouds at the very moment when Conradin’s head was severed from his body, dipped a wing in the gushing blood, and soared again skyward, out of human sight. The spot where the execution took place was averred to remain thenceforward wet, as a perpetual mourning over the flagitious deed.

These are mere legendary traditions; but one superstitious observance traditionally connected with Conradin’s fate is sanctioned by the authority of Dante, and also of Boccaccio, a courtier of the royal executioner’s grandson, and more than a courtier of his great-grand-daughter. The Sicilies cherished a popular belief, supposed to have been imported into Magna Grecia from the mother country, but said by these mighty Florentines to have equally reigned in Tuscany, that, by eating a soup, concocted for the nonce of certain specified ingredients, over or upon the body of a murdered person, the murderer, if not quite cleansed of guilt, was, as by a charm, protected from the vengeance of the slain man’s friends and kindred. A rumour makes Charles eat such a soup, over the mangled bodies of Conradin and his fellow sufferers. That Charles should be superstitious is not strange; but much so, that he should thus betray his own consciousness that his pretended judicial proceedings were a sanguinary farce. Conscious guilt must have stimulated the fear of vengeance, compelling this tacit confession.

Charles having by these executions nearly satisfied his appetite for blood, and, by the accompanying confiscations, temporarily at least, his rapacity, deemed it meet next to evince his gratitude where due. To Heaven, he offered the foundation and endowment of an abbey, which he erected upon the field of battle near Scurcola, dedicated to Our Lady of Victory, for the occupation of French monks. This abbey he appears to have likewise intended for a monument of his emulous patronage of the Arts, having employed Frederic H’s architect, Nicolo Pisano,—more likely Nicolo's son, Giovanni, or one of his scholars,—to design and build it. The attempt to commemorate either his artistic taste or his devout thankfulness, was unsuccessful; and to the excited imaginations of his subjects and contemporaries, the earthquake, which ere long overthrew the Abbey, leaving scarcely a fragment of the wall standing, appeared a special interposition of Providence, in rejection of a blood-stained offering.

Man certainly rejected his endeavours to repay the obligations he owned. He offered St. Valery a grant of two cities, Amalfi and Sorrento, in fief; when the Crusader coldly replied: “I want none of your fiefs. What I did was done for love of my own King, the pious Lewis IX, and for the honour of France”, and, quitting Naples, he went home. Charles next proposed to conciliate both Sicilies by an amnesty; but a read amnesty was alien to his nature, and this might better be denominated a Proscription. The victorious monarch, in professed clemency, promised future safety to the repentant partisans of Conradin; but excepting all Germans, Spaniards, and Pisans; that is to say, persons over whom he had no right of jurisdiction whatever, and whom he leniently contented himself with banishing from his dominions for ever; whilst assuring Sicilians, who, though not active rebels, had absented themselves through fear, that, unless they returned by a certain day, they likewise would be excepted from the amnesty. Within the week this amnesty was followed by another Rubric, as they are termed, which said: “Those who have borne arms against the King, or fled, or been already sentenced, or lived in rebellious towns, or concealed themselves, shall forthwith be seized by the officers of justice, their property confiscated, and themselves hanged. Whoever shall have harboured, concealed, conveyed away, or counselled any such person, is subjected to the same punishment.” But not even so was Charles’s thirst for vengeance satiated. Three years later, another Rubric declared, that, “The sons and daughters of outlawed persons shall not marry without the King’s permission, which will be granted only if the parents present themselves before the tribunals- And this condition, non-compliance with which was to doom the race to extinction, is unaccompanied by any intimation of mercy to such persons as should so present themselves!

A proof, stronger even than his massacres, of the utter heartlessness of Charles, is, perhaps, the deliberate publication of this sanguinary amnesty as an act of grace and clemency, in honour ot his second nuptials. For not long had the vain, rather than ambitious, Beatrice, rejoiced in her title and dignity of Queen. She died in July of the preceding year, 1267; and her widower had lost no time, what the barest decency required, in negotiating another marriage. One, if not two, matrimonial overtures had, after much consultation with the Pope, been made and failed, before he selected and obtained the hand of Marguerite, daughter of Eudes, Comte de Nevers.

This treaty was concluded, and the lady on her way to join him, during the process of extermination just related; and, in this sanguinary month of October, she was entertained at Milan with the honours due to the Sovereign’s consort. Milan was all anxiety to atone for not having stopped Conradin on his passage through Lombardy; being now as meanly subservient to the usurping King of the Sicilies, to whose crown she owed no allegiance, as she had been refractory, first to the rigorous, and latterly to the very moderate, demands of Emperors whom she acknowledged her Sovereigns. Milan, as if renouncing her republican aspiration, proclaimed Charles, Lord of Lombardy; and Clement, forgetting alike his disapprobation of savage cruelty, and all apprehension of a Sicilian monarch’s power, extended his Imperial Vicariate over the whole of Italy.

Frederic II’s only surviving legitimate child was a daughter of his third marriage, Margaret, Margravine of Misnia, whose lot was, after a different fashion, as sad as that of any of her race. The reader might expect to see her husband, Margrave Albert, upon the death of Conradin, assert her right, viz., his own, in default of male heirs, to inherit all her father’s dominions; or at least appeal to King Richard, against her murdered nephew’s bequest, alienating the German patrimony of the House of Hohenstaufen from the Hohenstaufen blood. But either the Margrave was brutalized by sensual indulgence into indifference to his own aggrandizement, and his children’s birthright; or he hated his ill-used, as well as neglected, imperial consort, and—because her’s—their sons, with an inveteracy, that rendered acquisitions valueless if due to her, and to be enjoyed by her offspring. When Margaret’s last hope of powerful protection expired upon a Neapolitan scaffold, her husband, instead of claiming her heritage, bribed a menial to steal at night, disguised as a demon, into her chamber and there strangle her. The man accepted, and promised to earn, the bribe; but, his heart failing him, he procrastinated. When at length, vehemently urged, and threatened by the impatient Margrave, he made his way to the couch where, calmly sleeping, lay the daughter of emperors and kings, the consort of his actual, and mother of his future, Sovereign, he was overwhelmed with horror at the crime he had engaged to commit, and, falling upon his knees, revealed to the death-doomed wife, the commands of her husband. This frightful discovery overpowering even her reluctance to forsake her children, Margaret resolved to fly.

She easily persuaded her appointed murderer to facilitate and share her escape; and whilst, with Rudolph von Varila —a son, probably of St. Elizabeth’s champion—he arranged and prepared it, sought the beds of her little sons, to bless, and, for the last time, kiss them. In her convulsive agony, she so marked the cheek of the eldest with her teeth, that he is known in history as Frederic of the bitten cheek. Margaret was lowered by ropes from the castle wall, with her converted assassin and two female attendants. But no longer had she mighty kinsmen at hand to receive “one so great and so forlorn;” and she wandered in helpless destitution, until the Abbot of Fulda offered her a conveyance to Frankfort-on-the-Maine. There, the citizens, in loyal affection to her father’s memory received and entertained her honourably. The wronged wife and broken-hearted mother did not long enjoy the filial solace of this tribute to the merits of her excommunicated father; the month of August, 1270, laying her in her grave. Her worthless widower immediately married his mistress, and spent the remainder of his life in. striving to disinherit his legitimate, in favour of an illegitimate son. In this he failed; but the constant civil wars produced by his endeavours, superseded in the minds of Margaret’s children all idea of laying claim to the heritage of her family, or accepting invitations from Italian Ghibelines.

Of the other female descendants of Frederic Barbarossa, Beatrice, Duchess of Meran, left an only Son, the last duke of that name. The extinction of the race of Andechs by his dying childless—as did, seemingly, the Margrave of Istria—appeared to their contemporaries the natural consequence of the blood-stained nuptials of Beatrice of Hohenstaufen with the Duke, his father, and strong proof of the complicity in guilt of her brother-in-law. A sister of the childless Duke, marrying a Comte de Châlons, carried some Meran and some Burgundian domains, to the French peer. The posterity of Philip’s eldest daughter, Cunegunda, Queen of Bohemia, vanished in the next century: that of her sisters, the Queen of Castile and the Duchess of Brabant, through females, still exist.

Manfred’s sons languished out their whole existence in prison; during most of the time, in irons, denied the aid of medicine, the consolations of religion, and, according to some accounts, deprived of sight This last calamity is, however, uncertain, except in regard to one of the brothers; as is the cause of that prince’s blindness, whether disease or crime; as, indeed, must be all details relative to persons whose intercourse was solely with their jailors. Even the dates, at which death set two of these luckless princes free, are so. But, in 1294, Charles of Anjou’s son, Charles II, being King, ordered their chains to be taken off, and a priest and a physician admitted to visit them. Nay, they appear, under him, to have once had a chance of liberty; Amari having discovered amongst old documents, an order, dated 1299, for their liberation, equipment, and despatch to Sicily, where Charles II must have thought of opposing them as rivals to their sister Constance, Queen of Aragon. In prison, nevertheless, they remained; and in prison the following year, thirty-four years after the fatal battle of Benevento, the blind prince died; probably the first of the three, as the eldest could not, in 1300, be more than forty years old.

Ten years prior to the family’s relief from its supererogatory evils, in 1284, Manfred’s youngest daughter, Beatrice, through her more fortunate sister, Constance, recovered her liberty. Charles II, during his father’s life, being taken prisoner in a sea fight by the Messinese, they were about to execute him in retaliation for Conradin, when Constance prevailed upon them to place him in her hands, and obtained the release of her sister in return for saving his life. Beatrice soon afterwards married the Marquess of Saluzzo. Manfred’s sister, the widowed Empress of Nicaea, was released with her niece, perhaps as not worth detaining.

A few words touching the conduct of the new King of the Sicilies towards his allies—that by which he taught his new subjects to regret their desertion of Manfred—has been shown, and the very imperfect retributive justice, with which Charles’s conduct was visited, will suitably close this history.

Charles, now uncontested King of the Sicilies, virtually sovereign of Tuscany and Lombardy, and having secured the fidelity of the House of Este by the grant of Ferrara and Reggio, showed himself indifferent to the general reprobation he had incurred. To papal censure he was then especially so, because, in addition to his confident trust that no Pope would destroy a former Pope’s work, Clement IV had, in one little month, followed Conradin to the tomb, and the Roman See was kept vacant three years, whilst the Cardinals were contending for it Charles, therefore, fearlessly imitating the conduct for which Frederic II and Manfred had been so inexorably excommunicated and persecuted, sought commercial advantages in the friendship of Moslem states, and entered into alliance even with the Mameluke Sultan, Bibars Bondocdar. He bad early called upon the King of Tunis to pay him the same tribute he had paid Manfred: but the African monarch, declaring himself tributary only to the heirs of King Roger, who had vanquished his ancestor, had both refused to pay the money, and permitted Don Fadrique to quit his service for Conradin’s. When, in 1269, Lewis IX applied to Charles for assistance in the new Crusade he was then projecting, the crafty politician saw, in his brother’s unsuspicious piety, the means of wringing the withheld tribute from the refractory Mohammedan. By representing the King of Tunis, as at heart a Christian, prevented by fear of his subjects from owning his conversion, who, could he, by the support of Crusaders, be induced to avow his faith, would be an invaluable ally against Egypt, Charles actually prevailed upon his brother to begin the recovery of Jerusalem by besieging Tunis.

The King of France accordingly Sailed for Tunis, and, upon the 18th of July, 1270, effected a landing. But, whilst awaiting the King of Sicily, with his quota of warrior-pilgrims, and before any real advantage had been gained, the reiterated fate of mediaeval northern hosts in southern climates, befel the Crusaders. The King and his army, sickening, became incapable of exertion; numbers died, and, upon the 24th of August, in his camp before Tunis, the sainted King himself expired. That very day, Charles landed with reinforcements, and assumed the command. He gave battle, won the victory, and opened a negotiation with his perverse tributary. He extorted from him, as the price of evacuating the Tunisian territory, large sums of money, under the name of arrears of tribute, together with a promise of future punctual payment.

This treaty was signed upon the 30th of October; and no sooner known, than the Crusaders, including the English Prince Edward, who had arrived pending the negotiation, quitting a spot to them so fatal, sailed for Sicily, there to discuss their next move. Upon the passage, the fleet suffered from a storm, in which the King of the Sicilies lost the vessel freighted with his booty. He sought compensation in reviving the odious feudal right of plundering wrecks, which he moreover put in force against the Genoese, whom he himself had, by a special compact, exempted from the brutal custom, against his own subjects, and even against Crusaders, whose ships and property had always, even when wrecking was most prevalent, been respected and spared. Such conduct was not likely to foster the brotherly harmony, the pleasure in anticipated mutual cooperation in the field, that might have counterbalanced the gloomy disposition, which, arising upon the loss of an honoured leader, inclined all to break up the expedition he had organized, and disperse each to his own business. The Crusade was postponed for three years, and the Crusaders disbanded; Lewis IX’s son, Philip III, hurrying home to take possession of his kingdom. Only Prince Edward, adhering, with his English company, to his original design, made straight for Palestine.

When, after three years’ vacancy, Gregory X was, A.D. 1271, seated in St. Peter’s chair, he sternly admonished his royal vassal to bridle both his savage cruelty and his rapacity, bidding him not degrade the kingly dignity by unkingly acts. But the only symptom of sensibility to papal rebuke discoverable in Charles, was a renewed endeavour to conceal the conduct, thus censured, from his censor. With this object he is said to have had poison administered to the most celebrated of scholastic philosophers, the Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, when journeying to the general Council held by Gregory X at Lyons, A.D. 1274, where, he feared, the Dominican would expose his tyranny. The murder, if really perpetrated, was unavailing; for Gregory learned enough to send his royal vassal a solemn warning, that the day would come when such tyranny would be visited by the judgment of God; to which Charles is reported to have answered: “What tyranny is, I know not; but this I know, that God, who has hitherto guided my steps, will still protect me.”

For eight years more, notwithstanding the rebukes and admonitions of Gregory and his successors, Adrian V and Nicholas III, Charles cherished this confidence; but the Easter of 1282, forcibly taught him a different lesson. A tyranny that was hardly endurable under the monarch’s own eye, in Apulia, when exercised by deputy, as in Sicily, became actually intolerable; and individual resentment prepared, with deliberate policy, to turn the accumulated and accumulating wrath to account. Giovanni di Procida was a nobleman of highly cultivated mind, who, having enjoyed the especial favour of Frederic II and Manfred, had supported Conradin. He had since seen his property therefore confiscated, whilst wife and daughter, either by violence or seduction, became the prey of French licentiousness. He thereupon quitted his native land, betaking himself to Aragon, where he soon gained the full confidence of his lamented liege Lord’s daughter Constance, and her husband. When Don Pedro, in 1276, succeeded to the crown, Procida easily persuaded him to prepare for claiming his Queen’s heritage, whenever opportunity should favour,—when, in Napoleon’s phrase, the pear should be ripe; and the ripening process the King committed wholly to the zealous exile. Procida, thus authorized, set actively to work. Visiting Sicily in disguise, he conspired with Sicilian Barons against the tyrant they all abhorred. Visiting Constantinople, he obtained pecuniary assistance from the Greek Emperor, who was glad so to occupy Charles at home, as to obstruct his supporting the pretensions of his son-in-law—Philip, Baldwin’s heir—to the Eastern Empire. Visiting Rome, he obtained the full sanction of the Pope, Nicholas III, indignant at a vassal of the Roman See, who presumed to neglect the remonstrances of his suzerain, the Pope. Thus successful, Procida returned to Aragon. With the Greek subsidy Pedro equipped an armament, and, as a cover to his ulterior design, sailing for Africa, threatened a Mohammedan state of the Barbary coast, whence he could at any instant repair to Sicily, when summoned by Procida.

But French outrage outran the conspirator’s cautious movements, exhausting the patience of the Sicilians before the final arrangements were completed. A gross public insult, offered by a French officer to a Palermitan bride, amidst the festivities of Easter Monday, provoked not alone her family and friends, but every Sicilian present, beyond all prudential considerations. The offender was cut down; the cry of “Death to the French!” resounded on all sides, and the massacre, known as the Sicilian Vespers, ensued. Every French man, woman, and child, even to the unborn mongrel offspring of French fathers were put to death, not sparing the Sicilian mothers. The numbers thus sacrificed to Sicilian vengeance are estimated at 8000; the fate of unknown individuals being decided by their pronunciation of the word ciceri, a feat which Gallic organs were deemed incapable of correctly achieving.

But those who had, by this terrific massacre, avenged the wrongs of many years, thought not of calling their lost King’s daughter to the throne. In fact, having risen without plan or premeditation, upon sudden provocation, they knew not well what use to make of their liberty. They first thought of a federal republic, under the suzerainty of the Roman See. But Nicholas was dead, and Martin IV, a Frenchman, raised by Charles’s intrigues to the papacy, refused thus to sanction rebellion against his vassal. All was disorder, till Procida, who, upon the first news of the explosion, had hastened to his intended scene of action, concerting his measures with his friends, gradually obtained the guidance of the prevalent anarchy. Don Pedro was then invited to take possession of his Queen’s patrimony, and secure it to her children; an invitation which he hastened to accept. Charles’s passionate efforts to recover the island were fruitless. Sicily remained to Constance and her posterity. Even the hereditary claim of the Bourbons, now upon the Sicilian throne, rests upon their descent from her, through Lewis XIV’s Queen, Maria Theresa of Spain.

BOOK V. CONCLUDING CHAPTER.

Political, Intellectual, and Social Condition of Europe in the second half of the Thirteenth Century.