the Sixth to the Twelfth Century, ed. and trans. Timothy Reuter. Amsterdam: North-Holland,
1978, pp. 137–202.CHARLES I
(1226–1285). Count of Anjou and king of Sicily. The brother of Louis IX, Charles was
intended for a career in the church, but the death of another brother, Jean, transformed his
life. In 1246, the crown decided to grant Charles an apanage of the counties of Anjou and
Maine, originally intended for Jean. Earlier that year, Charles had married Béatrice de
Provence, a marriage that gave him effective, although theoretically temporary, authority
in the county of Provence. Charles thus became an important territorial prince in both
northern and southern France. He made several efforts to consolidate and expand his
authority. For example, after his return in 1250 from his brother’s first crusade (1248–
54), he intervened in a succession crisis in Hainaut but failed to secure the county for
himself (Treaty of Péronne, 1256). He was more successful in maintaining his authority
in Provence despite the fierce independence of key Provençal cities, especially Marseille,
reduced by Charles to submission in the later 1250s, and the vigorous, sometimes
military, efforts of his mother-in-law and his wife’s sisters, the queens of England and
France, to secure their rights in the county after Béatrice’s death.
The main theater of Charles’s operations was Italy. It was he who accepted the
invitation of the papacy to deliver the Holy See from the Hohenstaufen threat in southern
Italy and Sicily in the 1260s and, in doing so, carved out a huge zone of influence for
himself in the central Mediterranean. Besides defeating the Hohenstaufen and becoming
king of Sicily in 1266 (though resistance continued until 1268), he became the effective
ruler (senator) of Rome, imperial vicar in Tuscany, protector and governor of several
important north Italian towns, overlord of Albania, and, after he took command of his
brother’s second crusade (1270), the possessor of important concessions in Tunisia.
In 1277, Charles secured the rights of Marie of Antioch to the throne of the kingdom
of Jerusalem, a symbolic indication of the scale of his ambitions in the Mediterranean.
Charles also began seriously to make preparations for the invasion of the Greek empire,
which had recently been reconquered by the Paleologoi after the Frankish domination
(1204–61) following the Fourth Crusade. He was thwarted in this final design by trouble
in Sicily, the great nativist uprising (1282) known as the Vespers. Moreover, the king of
Aragon, whose marriage to a Hohenstaufen princess gave him claims in Sicily, supported
the uprising. French royal aid to Charles, to counter that support, culminated in the
crusade against Aragon (1285), during which King Philip III of France, Charles’s
nephew, perished. Charles himself died early in the same year, leaving a much less able
son as his successor and a tangle of problems not fully resolved until the end of the
Middle Ages.
William Chester Jordan
[See also: ANJOU, HOUSES OF; SICILIAN VESPERS]
Baratier, Édouard, ed. Histoire de la Provence. Toulouse: Privat, 1969.
Jordan, Édouard. Les origines de la domination angevine en Italie. Paris: Picard, 1909.
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