THE vv'ESTERN MEDITERRANEAN KINGDOMS 1200-1500Louis had an ambitious successor in Rene, duke of Anjou,
Provence and Lorraine, who gained strong support among
the powerful Neapolitan baronage. Alfonso sailed out with
a large fleet, to find his way blocked off the Ponza islands
by the Genoese navy. The battle of Ponza in August^1435
was a resounding military defeat; but it was turned by Alfonso
into a brilliant diplomatic victory. The king of Aragon fell
captive into Genoese hands, but Genoa was unable to keep
hold of him, since the city was subject to the higher author-
ity of Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, to whom Alfonso
was despatched. Filippo Maria found himself enchanted by
Alfonso, a man of considerable taste but also a capable nego-
tiator. Between them, captor and captive worked out a master
plan for the partition of the entire Italian peninsula, an old
Visconti dream. The price Filippo Maria paid was uproar in
Genoa, which became instead a focal point of opposition to
Alfonso and of support for Rene.^1 R Alfonso was soon back on
the battlefield, operating out of Gaeta on the northern edge
of the kingdom of Naples and the southern edge of the papal
state, where Pope Eugenius IV showed distinct preference
for Rene's claim.
On 2 June 1442 the long process of whittling away at the
Angevin possessions in southern Italy culminated in the
breakthrough into Naples, followed soon after by the defeat
in battle of the mercenary captains.^1 ~^1 The pope too had to
accept defeat, and came to terms a year later, even allowing
Alfonso temporary rights over the papal enclave at Benevento
in the heart of southern Italy. Alfonso's illegitimate son
Ferrante (Ferdinand) was recognised as heir to the throne
of Naples; the tribute payable by the king of Naples to the
pope was commuted into an annual gift of a white steed. Yet
in a sense the pope had not done badly out of this arrange-
ment: he had avoided the humiliation of Alfonso making
peace instead with the anti-pope, Felix V; and he had asserted
his formal authority over the kingdom of Naples.
Once he had installed himself permanently in southern
Italy in 1442, Alfonso treated his new kingdom as a spring-
board for more ambitious schemes in northern Italy, the
Balkans and even the eastern Mediterranean. All this cost a
- Ryder, Alfonso, pp. 205-7.
- Ibid., pp. 210-305.