THE \\'ESTERN MEDITERR-\NEAN KINGDOMS 1200-1500That, indeed, was the sum total of the political changes
that took place in fourteenth-century Sicily and southern
Italy, though the loss of power to the barons occurred earl-
ier on the island and was accentuated by the difficulties its
inhabitants experienced in restoring order and a sound eco-
nomy after the War of the Vespers. The centralised, powerful,
unitary Kingdom of Sicily had given way to two fractured
kingdoms of Sicily where the authority of the crown was
manipulated, often ruthlessly, to serve the interest of the
great lords in their provincial strongholds.
CONCLUSION
The internal divisions which tore apart fourteenth-century
Sicily were encouraged by the Angevins, whose invasions and
political machinations undid much of the work of recon-
struction attempted by Frederick III. The centralised mon-
archy of the Normans had always, perhaps, been an ideal
system, and the crown had not possessed quite that degree
of control over the localities which it claimed; but the four-
teenth century saw some sacred principles abandoned, not-
ably that of royal supervision over inheritance to the great
fiefs. It was the baronial families that now carved out their
own powerful regional domains on the island, replicating
within these territories the authority the crown had sought
to obtain over the entire island; and the monarchy was in-
creasingly reduced to the role of a cipher. To these difficult-
ies were added the devastating effects of warfare and the
Black Death, which hit Sicily in^134 7, just before it hit the
rest of Europe.
The emergence of strong regional power and the decay
of monarchic authority took longer on the mainland; but
in Angevin Naples Joanna I proved unable, despite the able
support of Nicola Acciaiuoli of Florence and of her second
husband Louis of Taranto, to prevent a descent into fac-
tionalism. Hungarian invasions, to avenge the defenestration
of her uncouth first husband Andrew of Hungary, stimulated
the fragmentation of the Regno, as did the serious tensions
unleashed by the papal schism of 1378. Joanna's murder
in 1382 did little to resolve the crisis, since her successor
was drawn rapidly into Hungarian affairs and met the same