THE MEDITERRANEAN IN THE AGE OF JAMES II OF ARAGONincluding the forces of all the great Military Orders.^11 He
could hardly launch a crusade while the rebels were still in-
stalled on the mainland of southern Italy. Indeed, his struggle
with Frederick seemed only to possess greater justice since
the Sicilians were preventing him from going east to save
Acre or recover the Holy Land. The only blows he could
strike were those of his officials who rounded up and sold
the Muslims of Lucera. Mter the treaty of Caltabellotta in
1302 appeals continued to arrive from the east, but Charles
II was by now engaged in active expansion in north-western
Italy. The Levant had become a distraction, however great
the shock of the fall of Acre; Charles's elaborate crusade
plans came to nothing. Meanwhile Serbs and Greeks whittled
away Angevin power in the Balkans, where the Angevins lost
much of their past influence in Albania, gaining however
rights in the Peloponnese (Achaia) when Charles's son Philip
married into the family of the deposed Latin emperors of
Constantinople.
Shadowy territorial rights in Achaia were matched by
extension in other areas too. Charles II took willing advant-
age of appeals by the towns of Piedmont, where Charles
I's authority had earlier fallen apart; he intruded Angevin
administrators into Piedmont, and they worked hard to win
the submission of the great local lords such as the marquis
of Saluzzo. Between 1303 and 1;)09 the 'county of Piedmont'
became a political_ and administrative reality as it had never
been before. As Emile Leonard said, 'Charles I was con-
tent to let himself be recognised as seigneur of this town or
that; Charles II, on the contrary, was going to bring together
into organic unity the lands he aspired to reconquer, and to
make of them a real principality'.^12 His aim was as much to
protect the frontiers of Provence as to strengthen his posi-
tion in northern Italy. But there too the Angevins managed
to consolidate their alliances in the years after the peace
of Caltabellotta. Robert, Charles II's third son, was busy in
Tuscany against such Ghibelline strongholds as Pistoia. He
- S. Schein, Fideles Crucis. The Papacy, the West and the recovery of the Holy
Land, 1274-1314 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 107-11, who is, however, more
doubtful about the sincerity of the king's commitment than I am, but
there were clearly ups and downs in his devotion to the crusade. - E. Leonard, Les Angevins de Naples (Paris, 1954); Italian edn, Gli Angioini
di Napoli (Milan, 1967), p. 247.