1265, Charles’s army from Provence passed through
Piedmont and Lombardy without opposition. Charles
moved into Campania in January 1266 without a fi ght.
Betrayed and deserted by the Sicilian barons, Manfred
died bravely on the plain of Grandella near Benevento
on 26 February 1266. He was buried outside Benevento,
but the archbishop of Cosenza later had his remains dis-
interred and removed from the kingdom to an unmarked
grave near Garigliano.
Manfred’s fall may have been inevitable. The pa-
pacy was determined to extinguish the Hohenstaufen
dynasty, and Charles of Anjou was a hard and relentless
campaigner, whose talents and war chest were equal to
his greed and ambition. The fi ckle Sicilian barons who
betrayed Manfred did not prosper as a result. After
slaughtering Manfred’s adherents, Charles replaced
the treasonous barons with his own French supporters.
Charles exploited the effi cient Sicilian fi scal apparatus
to bleed the kingdom white, but he returned none of the
good government that had accompanied the Normans’
and the Hohenstaufen’s exactions. Commerce fell into
the hands of Venetian and Genoese merchants and
Tuscan bankers, and wealth fl owed to the Angevins or
migrated from the Mezzogiorno altogether. The power-
ful, well-ordered, and prosperous kingdom of Sicily
gave way to bad government and chronic poverty.
Manfred was an active patron of poets and scientists
and a scholar in his own right. He sponsored and perhaps
engaged in the translation of Greek and Arab treatises on
philosophy. He revised and commented on the De arte
venandi cum avibus of Frederick II, which the emperor
had dedicated to him. In the Commedia, Dante depicts
Manfred at the base of the mount of Purgatory with a
band of souls who had repented their sins at the mo-
ment of death (Purgatory, 3.103–145). The legend of
Manfred’s heroic and pious end, which inspired Dante,
was turned to nationalist purposes in the nineteenth
century during the Risorgimento.
See also Frederick II
Further Reading
Edition
Capasso, Bartolommeo, ed. Historia diplomatica regnt Siciliae
inde ab anno 1250 ad annum 1266. Naples: Typographia
Regiae Universitacis, 1874.
Critical Studies
Abulafi a, David. Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor. London:
Allen Lane/Penguin, 1988. (See the fi nal chapter.)
Housley, Norman. The Italian Crusades: The Papal–Angevin
Alliance and the Crusades against Christian Lay Powers,
1254–1343. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982.
Leone, Gino. La salvazione dell’anima di Manfredi in Dante ad
opera di Dante nel III canto del Purgatorio. Matera: Monte-
murro, 1969. (Reprinted as Un re nel purgatorio: Manfredi di
Svevia—Dalla vita terrena all’oltretomba dantesco. Fasano:
Schena, 1994.)
Morghen, Raffaello. Il tramonto della potenza Sveva in Italia.
Rome: Tunninelli, 1936. (Reprinted as L’età degli svevi in
Italia. Palermo: Paiumbo, 1974.)
Nardi, Bruno. Il canto di Manfredi e il Liber de pomo sive De
morte Aristotilis. Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1964.
Pispisa, Enrico. Il regno di Manfredi: Proposte di interpretazione.
Messina: Sicania, 1991.
John LomaxMANRIQUE, JORGE
(ca. 1440–1479)
The reputation of Jorge Manrique has long rested
principally upon his Coplas por la muerte de su padre,
most familiar to English-speaking readers through
Longfellow’s translation. His poetic range extends,
however, beyond the serious mood of the Coplas to a
wide variety of compositions found in the late medieval
and fi fteenth-century cancioneros, in which Manrique
demonstrates a fl uent handling of the current verbal and
conceptual conventions of the genres and categories
involved. These include personal satire and various
approaches to conventional amorous themes, among
them verses in which a lady’s name is conveyed acrosti-
cally, and renderings of the traditional motif of love as
a siege (Escala de amor), a castle (Castillo de amor),
or membership of a religious order (Profesion que hizo
en la orden de amor). Critical evaluation of Manrique’s
verse has concentrated primarily upon the Coplas, but
the importance of his other writings is now generally
recognized.
Jorge Manrique’s life was marked by active involve-
ment in the politics of his day and their military exten-
sion. His family was prominent in the turbulent events of
the reign of Enrique IV; his father Rodrigo (1406–1476),
count of Paredes and a master of the Order of Santiago,
was involved in the abortive elevation of the puppet-
king Alfonso against Enrique (an event alluded to in
the Coplas). To Jorge fell the role of maintaining this
involvement in the next phase of the succession dispute,
and, having actively espoused the cause of Fernando and
Isabel he was fatally wounded in a minor action.
The military aspect of Manrique’s career fundamen-
tally marked his poetry; his work stands comparison
with that of any war poet of any period. Imagery drawn
from the experience and equipment of medieval warfare
abounds even in the amorous poems (it is, indeed, the
very foundation of Escala and Castillo, while isolated
images occur in other poems), and permeates the Co-
plas, where death is expressed in terms of an ambush
and an arrow, against whose force the strongest fortifi -
cations and armies are powerless and ineffective. The
tournament panoply of the warrior caste (among other
dimensions of its courtly existence such as music andMANRIQUE, JORGE