of any conquests that they might make together, excepting only the city
of Constantinople itself.^99
Although Charles now had good reason to press forward with his
aggressive schemes in Greece and the Byzantine sphere, a series of
unexpected events soon obliged him to put them on hold. Thefirst and
far more serious problem, as we shall see, was an invasion of southern
Italy, led by‘the last of the Hohenstaufen’in the direct male line–that is,
by Frederick II’s grandson, Conradin.^100 By contrast, we have already
examined the second issue in some detail: thefinal crusade of Charles’s
elder brother, Louis IX, which came to grief before the walls of Tunis in
- It is worth noting that Charles is still sometimes regarded as the
‘evil demon’behind the crusade, who twisted his saintly brother’s ideal-
ism to serve his own ends. It would be better to observe that, quite
sensibly, Charles tried to derive what benefit he could from what was
very much Louis’s expedition, rather than his own–and that he was able
to do this most successfully when he was left to salvage what remained of
the enterprise after the French king’s death.^101
Even before the crusade, the groundwork was being laid for Charles to
press ahead with his schemes in the northern Balkans and Greece. In the
early 1270s, Charles assumed the title of‘king of Albania’, and he began
to make it a reality through his acquisition of key towns, such as Berat
and Durazzo.^102 Baldwin and Mary must have been excited by the fact
that the latter lay at the start of the Via Egnatia, which led all the way to
Constantinople itself. It is not an accident, then, that it was at around this
time, too, that the marriages agreed at Viterbofinally took place. The
Villehardouin nuptials led the way, and then, on 15 October 1273, Philip
of Courtenay married Beatrice of Anjou.^103 The wedding marked the
consummation of Baldwin and Mary’s alliance with the Angevins, and on
it they pinned their hopes for the future.
Hence, it seems rather appropriate that, soon after Philip’s marriage,
the‘old guard’began to give way. The father of the groom, Baldwin II,
died not long afterwards, and so Philip succeeded him as the new Latin
emperor in exile. Charles had Baldwin laid to rest in the cathedral of
(^99) For the treaties themselves, see‘Régestes des empereurs latins de Constantinople’, nos.
300 – 1.
(^100) Below,126.
(^101) For this, see esp. M. Lower,‘Louis IX, Charles of Anjou and the Tunis Crusade of
1270 ’,inThe Crusades: Medieval Worlds in Conflict, ed. T. Madden, J. Naus and V. Ryan
102 (Farnham, 2011), 173–93.
103 Dunbabin,Charles I of Anjou, 90.
Longnon,L’empire latin de Constantinople et la principautée de Morée, 240–3.
The Last Years of the Empress 123