THE RISE AND FALL OF CHARLES OF ANJOUThe battle hung in the balance, and the slaughter was enorm-
ous, but in the end the Angevins triumphed.^9 Conradin
escaped but was taken prisoner. There followed in southern
Italy months of merciless repression of the king's enemies.
The victory of Tagliacozzo strengthened Charles not merely
against the Ghibellines and against Hohenstaufen sympath-
isers in the south; the victory made him seem irresistible in
all of Italy. Conradin's execution, after a show trial, brutally
sealed Charles's success.
Charles I needed only to apply relatively light pressure
after Tagliacozzo to find his position in northern Italy greatly
strengthened. The citizens of Rome re-elected him Senator,
an office he had held in 1263, with indecent haste: they
had actually feted Conradin shortly before the battle. Charles
installed his own 'vicar' as governor of Rome and introduced
important innovations in the administration of the city; build-
ing programmes also advanced Charles's stature among the
Romans, and Arnolfo di Cambio's life size statue of the king
was made in recognition of Charles's good government. Else-
where in Italy his touch was even lighter: he did not intrude
his own men into the government of the Guelf cities, but
simply placed over these towns a vicar-general responsible for
defending his interests and those of the Church. Diplomacy
brought him valuable victories too: the Genoese, for instance,
made peace with him as ruler of lands to which they greatly
needed commercial access; the Sienese, after a brief decade
of Ghibelline ascendancy, found themselves the victims of
a Guelf coup and had in future to live under a Florentine-
Angevin shadow.^111 But even Siena did not suffer from con-
tinuous direct interference. Charles reserved to himself the
choice of the podesta from a short-list of four candidates pre-
sented to him by the Sienese. He had learned by example or
by intuition the extreme danger of trying to fiddle ~th the
free government of the autonomous communes.^11 Edouard
- Runciman, Sicilian Vespers, pp. I27-32: Runciman at his best.
IO. G. Caro, CJ~?nova I' la supmmazia sul Mediterranpo (Italian translation of
Genua und die Miichte der Mittelmeer, Halle, I895-99; 2 vols, Genoa,
I974), vol. I, pp. I43-57, 170-8, I92, 207-27, for all aspects of
Charles's troubled relationship with Genoa.
II. D.P. Waley, Sima and the SienesP in the thirteenth century (Cambridge,
l99I), pp. ll4-I8;.J. Hook, Siena. A city and its history (London, I979),
p. I2; also W. Bowsky, A Medieval Commune. Siena under the Nine, 1287-
135 5 (Berkeley /Los Angeles, I981), for longer term developments.