THE ORIGINS OF THE SICILIAN KINGDOMfinancial emergency; there is no record of either give-and-take
with the king or legal opposition to him.:;Croce wrote in a spirit of political idealism; but it remains
difficult to escape from some of the problems he posed:
above all, the decline from the well-articulated system of rule
historians have identified in Norman Sicily and southern
Italy, in the twelfth century, to the disorder of Angevin Italy
only two centuries later, when much of the Norman fabric
of government crumbled. So too the wealthy kings of the
twelfth century, whose display certainly aroused much envy,
were succeeded by relatively impoverished rulers who tided
over their financial problems by taking massive loans from
foreign bankers. Such contrasts are easily over-drawn, and
it should not be supposed that southern Italian kings lost
their well-established influence in Italian and Mediterranean
politics; they made many attempts to maintain past glories,
often on an ever greater scale. But to do so cost money; and,
amid the strains of government crises and rebellions, it was
less easy to live as a magnificent monarch in the thirteenth
than in the twelfth century.
When Croce talked of 'decline' he did not mean decline
in international significance: the rulers of southern Italy in
the thirteenth century were actively involved in imperial pol-
itics in Germany and northern Italy, even after the death of
Frederick II, in plans to reconquer the Empire of Constan-
tinople, in crusades to recover the Kingdom of Jerusalem,
to establish and uphold supremacy in northern Italy, whether
in alliance with or as opponents of the papacy and its Guelf
allies. Frederick II issued his Constitutions of Melfi for the
kingdom of Sicily, but the law code glories in his titles of
Roman Emperor, king of Jerusalem, king of Aries. Charles
I of Anjou, when he died in 1285, bore among his titles
those of King of Jerusalem, King of Sicily, King of Albania,
Count of Provence, Count of Piedmont.^4 But it was to his
conquest of the Kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy that
Charles and his heirs owed much of their influence in the
Mediterranean. It is necessary to look at the origins and
resources of their south Italian state.
- Croce, Kingdom of Naples, p. 18.
- David Abulafia, Frederick II. A medieval emperor (London, 1988), p. 204.