THE ·wESTERN MEDITERRANEAN KI:--JGDOMS 1200-1500his death in 1285, though after the loss of Sicily the tribute
')<-)
was reduced to only 5,000 ounces per annum.-· Later on,
Robert diligently paid the pope what was due, despite heavy
war costs: 'When military success began to wane and the
Angevin domains contracted, and when revenue itself con-
tracted, the crown became able to hold its deficit, to reduce
it gradually, and finally to extinguish it.' On the other hand,
Robert's abilities were not matched by those of his successors,
under whom the Regno became the battle ground of mercen-
ary compames.
The effects of these difficulties on the population at large
are hard to estimate; the picture is distorted by the ravages
of plague, which first reached Sicily in 134 7. The loss of
millions of records during the Second World War - in the
German destruction of the Naples archive in 1943 - means
that the social history of the Regno in the fourteenth century
cannot now be written. Romola Caggese alone made use of
the Angevin registers to illustrate the violent tenor of rural
life: royal protection of merchants and pilgrims often worked
better in theory than in practice. Tough landlords, such as
the Teutonic Knights, found their pastures invaded by the
peasantry of the Barletta region (1313). The lord of Cast-
roprignano complained not merely that his peasants refused
to pay their rents and perform their services, but that he
and his family had been attacked, and his bailiff killed. But
the peasant case was precisely that many of the labour ser-
vices were a novelty; he imposed on his peasants the duty
to help repair his castle and his mills; the lord was himself
guilty of grabbing royal land. It is difficult to know how typical
these cases were of Robert's Regno, or of Europe as a whole.^10
Certainly, it was the baronage that exploited weaknesses in
royal power to enhance its regional authority; the monarchy's
own liberality to favoured subjects, such as Nicola Acciaiuoli,
further eroded royal control of the provinces. The tendency
persisted to dream of the reconquest of Sicily as the solution
to all the kingdom's ills.
- W. Percy, The rroenues of the Kingdom of Sicily under Charles I of Anjou,
1266-1285, and their relationship to the 1/e.1jwrs (repr. from Princeton
doctoral dissertation, 1964, by University Microfilms). - R.H. Hilton, Bond men made free. Medieval peasant movements and the
English rising of^1381 (London, 1973), pp. 110-12, certainly assumes
that he can generalise to the rest of Europe from these cases; Caggese,
Roberto rJ:Il.ngiri, vol. 1, pp. 233-73.