THE V\'ESTERN MEDITERR-\1'\EAN KJNGDOMS 1200-1:100avoided Florence. He went to Rome, but the city was partly
occupied by Angevin troops. He was crowned amid street-
battles in June, 1311. The presence of an Angevin army,
hostile to his own forces, only helped Henry swing more
towards the Ghibelline groups who had his ear. It would
be interesting to know how he reacted to Dante's thunder-
ing letters, urging him to tame Florence and bring imperial
peace to Italy.^7 But it is clear that he reacted decisively against
Robert. His daughter would now be sent in marriage to the
Aragonese court in Sicily, that established focus of Ghibelline
interests. Frederick of Sicily became 'admiral of the empire'.
Pennington remarks: 'if Henry mi~judged the Italian polit-
ical situation badly, he committed an even graver error by
binding himself with the Aragonese king Frederick III, who
would prove a completely ineffective ally. •X Papal attempts at
mediation were rapidly set aside. Henry had no difficulty in
choosing the ideal targets for a war in defence of imperial
interests: Florence, which he besieged (1312-13) and the
kingdom of Naples. He demanded that Robert of Anjou
appear before him before three months were out on the
charge that he did treasonably support rebels fighting the
emperor in Tuscany and Lombardy, not to mention the city
of Rome itself, and that he did enter into treaties with the
emperor's enemies. Since by 26 April 1313 Robert had still
not appeared before the emperor, the Neapolitan king
was stripped of all imperial honours (such as the county of
Piedmont) and even of his throne. A savage touch was the
decision to condemn Robert to death by beheading, exactly
the punishment that his grandfather had imposed on the
last Hohenstaufen, Conradin.
The problem was how to justifY such grandiose claims
to suzerainty over the pope's vassal, the king of Naples.
There were several pamphleteers who insisted that Sicily
(i.e. Naples) was as much part of the emperor's jurisdiction
as anywhere else in the whole world: 'all the world is the
emperor's ... and I say that Sicily is especially part of the
empire'; for them, the view that the kingdom of Sicily is part
- Dante Alighieri, Monarchy and Three Political Letters, ed. and trans!. D.
Nicholl (London, 1954), pp. 97-115, for letters v, vi, vii. - Pennington, PrinrP and the Law, 1200-1600, p. 169.