Langue d'Oïl to Volgare Siciliano: Three Followers of Charles of Anjou

Abstract

Among the problems connected with the conquest of the kingdom of Sicily by Charles of Anjou in 1266, not the least interesting are those which concern the members of the nobility of northern France who formed a large part of his invading force. Setting out with the Pope's blessing as a crusading army against one of the last of the ‘nest of vipers’, they perhaps expected to go on to Jerusalem after conquering the kingdom in southern Italy. Most of them, however, remained to govern and defend it for its first two rulers. The main facts about what happened to them thereafter have been well known for some time: of the many knights who were given lands forfeited by those members of the native baronage who supported Conradin in 1268, only a few families (and most of these Provencal) survived after the early years of the fourteenth century to become absorbed into the greater Neapolitan nobility. The present article does not aim to give a complete explanation of the disappearance of the majority and the survival of only a minority of these families, but to examine three cases, where the documentation is unusually full.