THE V\'ESTERN MEDITERRAI\'E.\N KINGDOMS 1200-1500the Lieutenant-General dealt with more local Spanish issues.
Representatives of the various kingdoms could be called to
Naples to attend the council when matters of general import
were raised; and the council could be enlarged into a virtual
parliament to discuss major Italian problems such as the peace
with Milan and the plans for crusades. Naples also became
the seat of a high court of appeal.ll In all this, Alfonso took
care not to irritate his Italian subjects by flooding the admin-
istration with Catalan officials; such as there were melted
away on hearing news of his death in 1458. Financial admin-
istration was undoubtedly compromised by the rapid squan-
dering of anything Alfonso had managed to raise either on
armies or on magnificent display; not for nothing was he to
become known as Alfonso the Magnanimous. His reception
for the Holy Roman emperor Frederick III von Habsburg,
who visited Alfonso in Naples in 1452, was of quite staggering
splendour, though of course there were ample political divi-
dends: this was the first occasion since Hohenstaufen times
- when emperor and Sicilian king were one and the same
- that an emperor had visited Naples, so that the stolid and
impressionable Frederick thereby conferred a seal of approval
on the kingdom's rulers.:l~
Still, Alfonso could not avoid his bankers totally. His admin-
istration in southern Italy sought to build on the ancient
bureaucratic structure of the Norman, Hohenstaufen and
early Angevin state, and to re-establish effective government
that would meet the king's financial needs through taxation.
Alan Ryder has argued that Alfonso's Naples was one of the
first 'modern states', meaning that it was administered by a
bureaucratic administration staffed by professionals, that the
crown was dominant over the nobles and the clergy, that its
income was derived from universal taxation, and that the
army of the kingdom was recruited and paid directly by the
31. A. Ryder, 'The evolution of imperial government in Naples under
Alfonso the Magnanimous', in JR. Hale,J.R.L. Highfield, B. Smalley,
eds, Europe in the late Middle Ages (London, 1965), pp. 332-57; cf. J.N.
Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250-1516, vol. 2, 1410-1516, Castil-
ian hegemony (Oxford, 1978), pp. 257-8.
32. Ryder, Alfonso, pp. 349-57. Bishop Stubbs described Frederick's
reign, rather uncharitably, as 'the longest and most boring in Ger-
man history'.