ROBERT THE WISE OF NAPLES, 1309-43most powerful Ghibelline family in Italy, the Visconti of Milan
and against the anti-papal champion, Castruccio Castracani,
who gained power at Lucca in 1314.^12 Disaster struck at Mon-
tecatini (August, 1315), when the Tuscan Ghibellines aided
by Matteo Visconti of Milan left members of the house of
Anjou dead on the battlefield. But Robert proved able just
to hold his position, exercising influence as leader of the
Guelf factions from Piedmont to Tuscany.
The creation of an Angevin seigneury in Genoa was per-
haps the most ambitious attempt at resistance to Matteo
Visconti and the Ghibelline revival. It signalled, also, the
inception of a close but uneasy relationship between Robert
and Pope John XXII (1316-34), an ambitious pontiffwhose
fulminations against his foes placed him in the same class as
Innocent IV or Boniface VIII. Like them, he was keen to use
the crusade as a weapon for the defence of papal interests
in Italy, preaching holy war against Milan and Sicily. This
determination to use the full force of papal armaments made
him a useful ally for Robert; but John's insistence on rigorous
respect for papal rights could also lead to tension between
the allies; John's remark that, vacante imperio, he could dis-
pose of the imperial county of Piedmont and could not
see by what right Robert assumed the right to control it was
perhaps good law, but it was also bad statesmanship. They
did not even agree on the fine points of theology: King
Robert's learned treatise on the Beatific Vision of the saints
clashed with John's eccentric views.^13 Essentially, though, it
was Robert who made the important military decisions in
Italy; and that was what mattered while the papacy was con-
fined to Avignon.
In Genoa the conflicts between noble factions were
expressed with an extreme bitterness and an extraordinary
persistence which threatened to undermine the city's trading
position and laid it open to attempts by outsiders to seize
sovereignty over the town. The Genoese had submitted
voluntarily to Henry VII (1311). But there were also Genoese
who saw salvation in the rise of the house of Anjou: members
- L. Green, Castruccio Castracani. A study on the origins and character of a
fourteenth-century Italian despotism (Oxford, 1986). - Robert d'Anjou, La vision !Jienheureuse. Traite envoye au papejean XXIL
ed. M. Dykmans (Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae, Rome, 1970).