THE RISE AND FALL OF CHARLES OF ANJOUwho should rule the rural expanses between the towns), or
whether it was preferable to maintain a monarchy in the teeth
of papal opposition, a monarchy which was nothing less than
a Hohenstaufen restoration legitimised by the return of Queen
Constance to her ancestors' kingdom. Events during the War
of the Vespers suggest that the difference of opinion over
such a fundamental question was capable of shattering the
unity of the Sicilian resistance to the Angevins: Gualtiero da
Caltagirone, an early leader of the rebellion, was executed for
apparent contact with the Angevin enemy; and who had him
executed? Alaimo da Lentini, who was himself soon proved to
be in contact with the king of France, and whose fate was life
imprisonment in Catalonia after he had mistakenly accepted
an invitation to the court of King Peter in Barcelona during
- This was after a promising start as Captain of Messina
and Grand Justiciar of the Sicilian kingdom. Runciman,
delighting as ever in the gossip of the thirteenth century,
relates by way of the chronicle of Bartolomeo da Neocastro
how Alaimo's wife had made amorous advances to King Peter,
which the king rejected, and which then led her into a blind
fury against Queen Constance. She is said on one occasion
to have competed with the queen by having herself borne
a great distance through Palermo and out into the country-
side in a magnificent litter which was deliberately intended
to outshine that of the queen herself. More to the point,
Alaimo seems to represent that group of leaders who had
serious doubts about King Peter's party. Giovanni da Procida
was, after all, a south Italian and not a Sicilian, a perfect
example of that group of civil servants from the area of
Naples and Amalfi who were the focus of so much opposition
at the time of the revolt. Alaimo may also have reacted with
disappointment to the destruction unleashed within Sicily
by the shock troops of the king of Aragon, the almogavers,
who twenty years later were to win a particularly frightful
reputation in Greece. A third leader, Palmieri Abbate, did
not maintain his influence and drops out of sight after the
Catalan-Aragonese takeover.^46 In fact, in the two years after
the rebellion there were many defections to the Angevins, for
it was not at once clear how Peter of Aragon could lighten - Runciman, Sicilian Vespers, p. 276.