| Content from Wikipedia under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license ⇔ Maps from OpenStreetMap under the ODbL license |
Kingdom of Naples
 | This article needs more citations. (April 2017) |
Kingdom of Naples Regno 'e Nàpule Regno di Napoli | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1282–1816 | |||||||||||||
 Flag of the Kingdom of Naples
 Coat of arms
| |||||||||||||
 In light orange, the Kingdom of Naples. In dark orange, territories held between 1441 and 1458 and between 1735 and 1802. In yellow, territories held between 1408 and 1414. In red, territories held between 1557 and 1800. | |||||||||||||
| Capital | Naples | ||||||||||||
| Common languages | Latin (until the 16th century)[1], Italian (official language of the administration and of studies from 1554)[2], Neapolitan and Sicilian (majority languages among the population)[3] Unofficial: French and Spanish (unofficial foreign languages, exclusive to the various courts)[4] | ||||||||||||
| Religion | Catholic | ||||||||||||
| Government | Monarchy | ||||||||||||
| King of Naples | |||||||||||||
| Historical era | Middle Ages and Contemporary | ||||||||||||
| 30 March 1282 | |||||||||||||
| 12 December 1816 | |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
The Kingdom of Naples (in Italian: Regno di Napoli, in Neapolitan Regno 'e Nàpule) was a kingdom that occupied the territories of the former Duchy of Naples, which existed until 1137 and was extinguished during the Norman conquest of Southern Italy; during some periods it was united to the Kingdom of Sicily.
In 1442 Alfonso V, King of Aragon, conquered Naples, which had been a dominion of the Angevin dynasty since 1266. From the 15th century, Naples was in the hands of Aragon, of France (for a brief period), of Spain and of Austria, and it was finally independent from 1734 until 1860, the year in which it was incorporated into unified Italy. As for Sicily, it was a dominion of the Norman dynasty of Hauteville from 1071, and it became a dominion of the Hohenstaufen in 1194, of the Angevin dynasty in 1266, and an Aragonese dominion from 1282.
The Kingdom of Naples was founded as a result of the partition of the Kingdom of Sicily, which included all the peninsular lands. Its official name was Regnum Siciliae citra Pharum, that is, "Kingdom of Sicily on the Strait of Messina" (Sicily "on this side" or "peninsular" Sicily), as opposed to Sicily proper, called "Beyond the Strait of Messina" ("ulterior" or "insular" Sicily).
History
Charles I
After the death of Innocent IV in 1254, the new French pope Clement IV, claiming seigneurial rights over the Kingdom of Sicily (on the basis of the first latifundia that the Church of Rome had owned on the island before the Arab domination), called Charles I of Anjou to Italy, and in 1266 the Bishop of Rome named him rex utriusque Siciliae. The new French sovereign then set out to conquer the Kingdom of Sicily, defeating first Manfred of Sicily at the Battle of Benevento (1266) and then Conradin of Hohenstaufen at the Battle of Tagliacozzo, on August 23, 1268.
The House of Hohenstaufen, whose male line became extinct with Conradin of Hohenstaufen, was temporarily removed from the Italian political scene, and the Angevins secured dominion over the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The fall of Conradin, however, was the beginning of important events, because the Sicilian cities, which had welcomed Charles I of Anjou benevolently after the Battle of Benevento (1266), went back to supporting the Swabian sovereign. The anti-Angevin revolt on the island, motivated by the excessive tax burden of the new French government, had no immediate political consequences, but it was the first step toward the later War of the Sicilian Vespers. The great financial speculation that the war had entailed (the Angevins were in debt to the Guelph bankers of Florence) led to a series of new assessments and gabelles throughout the kingdom, which were added to those the King imposed when he had to finance a series of uncertain military campaigns in the East, in the hope of bringing the remains of the former Eastern Roman Empire under his rule. Then, in 1267, Charles expelled the Ghibellines from Florence and, with the title of paciere of Tuscany, assumed the office of podestà in many communes, as well as that of Senator of Rome.
With the death of Conradin of Hohenstaufen, the Swabian rights over the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies passed to a daughter of Manfred of Hohenstaufen, Constance of Hohenstaufen, who on July 15, 1262 had married King Peter III of Aragon. The Ghibellines of Sicily, who had previously been organized around the Swabians and were deeply dissatisfied with the House of Anjou, sought the support of Constance and of the Aragonese to organize the revolt against the Angevins. The War of the Sicilian Vespers began in Palermo on March 31, 1282 and spread throughout Sicily, until in August Charles's army was defeated. The Sicilian populations named Peter III of Aragon and his wife Constance as their own sovereigns; in fact, from that moment there were two sovereigns with the title of King of Sicily: the Aragonese, by investiture of the Sicilian barons, who occupied the island, and the Frenchman, by papal investiture, in Sicilia Citerior.
On September 26, 1282 Charles of Anjou was definitively defeated by the Aragonese army in Sicilia Ulterior and, a few months later, Pope Martin IV excommunicated Peter III of Aragon; in spite of this, Charles was unable to return to the island, and the Angevin royal seat moved between Capua and Bari for a few years, until under Charles II of Anjou, Naples was chosen as the new Court of the monarchy and of the central institutions in Sicilia Citerior.
Although the Angevin ambitions in Sicilia Ulterior were thwarted by numerous defeats, Charles of Anjou sought to consolidate his own power in the continental part of the kingdom, based on the earlier Guelph feudal policy, together with some of the reforms the House of Hohenstaufen had already introduced, in order to strengthen the territorial unity of Sicilia Citerior. Since the first Lombard invasions, a good part of the kingdom's economy, in the Principality of Capua, in Abruzzo and in the County of Molise, had been managed by the Benedictine monasteries (Casauria, San Vincenzo al Volturno, Montevergine, Montecassino), which in many cases had increased their privileges to the point of becoming true local lordships, with territorial sovereignty and in contrast with the neighboring lay feudatories. First the Norman conquest of Southern Italy, then the struggles between Antipope Anacletus II, supported, among others, by the Benedictines, and Pope Innocent II, and finally the birth of the Kingdom of Sicily, undermined the foundations of the Benedictine feudal tradition. Around the 12th century, once Anacletus II had been defeated, Innocent II and the Normans encouraged Cistercian monasticism in Southern Italy; many Benedictine monasteries were converted to the new rule which, by limiting the accumulation of material goods to what was necessary for craft and agricultural production, excluded the possibility of the new cenobia constituting feudal patrimonies and lordships: the new order thus took on a character favorable to agrarian reforms (land reclamation, granges), crafts, mechanics and social assistance, with valetudinaria (hospitals), pharmacies and rural churches. French monasticism then found the support of the old Norman feudatories, who were thus able to actively counter the temporal ambitions of the local clergy: the policy of the new sovereign Charles of Anjou was founded on this compromise; by his own hand he founded the Cistercian abbeys of Realvalle (Vallis Recalis) in Scafati and Santa Maria della Vittoria in Scurcola Marsicana, and he favored the affiliations of the historic abbeys of Sambucina (Calabria), Sagittario (Basilicata), Sterpeto (Terra di Bari), Ferraria (Principality of Capua), Arabona (Abruzzo) and Casamari (Papal States), spreading at the same time the cult of the Assumption of Mary in the Mezzogiorno. He also granted new counties and duchies to the French soldiers who had supported his conquest of the Sicilian throne.
The main monastic centers of economic production were thus detached from the administration of feudal possessions, and the unity of the kingdom, once Benedictine political authority had come to an end, was then founded on the old Norman baronies and on the military reform of Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Charles of Anjou in fact preserved the old jurisdictions, increasing the power of their respective presidents: each province had a justiciar who, besides being the head of an important tribunal, with two courts, was also at the top of the management of the local financial patrimony and of the administration of the treasury, collected through the assessments of the universities (communes). Abruzzo was divided into Aprutium citra flumen Piscariae and Aprutium ultra flumen Piscariae; many of the Ghibelline cities such as Sulmona, Manfredonia or Melfi lost their central role in the kingdom in favor of smaller cities such as San Severo, Chieti or L'Aquila, while, in the territories that had been Greek (Calabria and Apulia), the political trend initiated by the Norman conquest of Southern Italy was consolidated: the peripheral administration that the Greeks entrusted to a capillary system of cities and dioceses, between the patrimonium publicum of the Byzantine officials and the p. ecclesiae of the bishops, from Cassanum to Gerace, from Barolum to Brindisi, was definitively replaced by the order of the landowning feudal nobility. In the Mezzogiorno, the seats of the jurisdictions or of important archdioceses (Benevento and Acheruntia), as well as the new capital, remained the only inhabited centers endowed with political weight or with financial, economic and cultural activities (Salerno, Cosenza, Catanzaro, Reggio Calabria, Taranto, Bari, San Severo, Chieti, L'Aquila and Capua). Charles nevertheless lost, through papal measures, the last regalia of the Sicilian throne, such as the sovereign's right to appoint the administrators of dioceses with a vacant see: until then in the Mezzogiorno, such privileges had survived the Gregorian Reform, according to which only the Supreme Pontiff was to enjoy the power to appoint and depose bishops (libertas Ecclesiae).
Charles II
On January 7, 1285 Charles I of Anjou died and was succeeded by Charles II of Anjou. He renounced the reconquest of Sicilia Ulterior and began a series of legislative and territorial measures to adapt Naples to the role of new capital of the State: he enlarged the city walls, reduced the tax burden and established the Great Court of the Vicaria.
Robert I
In 1309 the son of Charles II of Anjou, Robert, was crowned by Clement V as King of Sicilia Citerior, still with the title of Rex Siciliae, as well as with that of Rex Hierosolymae (King of Jerusalem). In 1372, Robert's granddaughter, Joanna I, and Frederick IV of Sicilia Ulterior signed a peace treaty that established the reciprocal recognition of the monarchies and of their respective territories: Sicilia Citerior to the Angevins and Sicilia Ulterior to the Aragonese, extending the recognition of the royal titles to their respective lines of succession as well. King Robert first designated Charles of Calabria as his heir, and after the latter's death, Joanna I of Sicilia Citerior, Charles's daughter.
In these years, the city of Naples strengthened its political weight on the peninsula, also through the development of its own humanistic vocation. Robert was highly esteemed by contemporary Italian intellectuals such as Villani, Petrarch and Boccaccio.
Joanna I
Robert's heiress, Joanna I, had married Andrew of Hungary, Duke of Calabria and brother of King Louis I of Hungary, both descendants of Charles II of Anjou. As a result of a mysterious conspiracy, Andrew died. To avenge his death, on November 3, 1347, the King of Hungary arrived in Sicilia Citerior, with the intention of marrying Joanna. The Hungarian sovereign repeatedly demanded from the Holy See the deposition of Joanna I; the papal government, then residing in Avignon and politically linked to the House of Anjou, confirmed Joanna's title despite the military expeditions that the King of Hungary sent to Italy.
The Queen, for her part, adopted Charles of Durazzo (grandson of Louis I of Hungary) as her son and heir to the throne, until the political and dynastic conflicts that followed the Western Schism directly affected the kingdom: at court and in the capital, a Francophile party and a local party confronted each other, the first declared in favor of Clement VII (antipope) and headed by Queen Joanna; the second in favor of the Neapolitan Pope Urban VI, who found the support of Charles of Durazzo. Joanna then deprived the latter of his rights of succession in favor of Louis of Anjou, brother of the King of France, crowned King of Sicilia Citerior (rex Siciliae) by Clement VII in 1381. Louis moved to Italy upon the death of Joanna I, but he was unable to defeat Charles and died in 1384.
Charles III
Charles of Durazzo remained as sole sovereign and left the Kingdom of Sicilia Citerior to his children Ladislaus and Joanna in order to go to Hungary to claim the throne: in the transalpine kingdom he was assassinated in a conspiracy.
Louis II
Before the two heirs Ladislaus and Joanna came of age, the capital fell into the hands of the son of Louis I of Anjou, Louis II of Anjou, crowned King by Clement VII (antipope) on November 1, 1389. The local nobility harassed the new sovereign, and in 1399 Ladislaus was able to assert his rights to the throne militarily by defeating France.
Ladislaus I
The new King managed to restore Neapolitan hegemony in Italy by intervening directly in the conflicts throughout the Italian Peninsula: in 1408, called by Pope Innocent VII to put down the Ghibelline revolts in Rome, he occupied a good part of Lazio and of Umbria, obtained the administration of the Province of Campagna and Marittima, and then occupied Rome and Perugia, during the pontificate of Gregory XII. In 1414, after having definitively defeated Louis II of Anjou, the last sovereign at the head of a league organized by antipope Alexander V, he resumed Parthenopean expansionism and reached the gates of Florence. Upon his death there were no successors to carry on his undertakings, and the borders of the kingdom returned to their historic perimeter.
Joanna II
Succeeding Ladislaus I in 1414, his sister Joanna II married James of Bourbon on August 10, 1415. After her husband attempted to hold the royal title personally, a revolt in 1418 forced him to return to France, where he retired to a Franciscan monastery. Joanna remained as Monarch in 1419, but the French Angevins did not abandon their claims to the Neapolitan throne. Pope Martin V called Louis III of Anjou to Italy against Joanna, who refused to recognize the fiscal rights of the Papal States over her kingdom. The French threat brought Sicilia Citerior closer to the Crown of Aragon, so much so that the Queen adopted Alfonso V of Aragon as her son and heir when Naples found itself under siege by Louis's troops. The Aragonese liberated the capital in 1423, occupied the kingdom and drove away the French threat; relations with the local court, however, were not easy, so much so that Joanna, having expelled Alfonso V, upon her death left the kingdom as inheritance to the brother of Louis III, René of Anjou.
René I
With the death of Joanna II without heirs, the Kingdom of Sicilia Citerior was claimed by René of Anjou, who asserted sovereignty as brother of the adoptive son of the Queen of Sicilia Citerior, Louis III of Anjou, and by Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Aragon, King of Sardinia and King of Sicilia Ulterior, who was likewise an adoptive son of Joanna II. The war that broke out affected the interests of the other states of the peninsula, among them the lordship of Milan of Filippo Maria Visconti, which intervened first in favor of the Angevins (Battle of Ponza), and later definitively on the side of the House of Aragon.
Alfonso I (V of Aragon)
In 1441 Alfonso V of Aragon conquered Sicilia Citerior, reunifying the territory of the former Norman-Swabian State under his scepter, with the title of Rex Utriusque Siciliae, establishing the capital in Naples and imposing himself, not only militarily, on the Italian political stage. In this way the Kingdom of Naples was incorporated into the Crown of Aragon.
In 1447, Filippo Maria Visconti designated Alfonso as heir to the Duchy of Milan, formally increasing the patrimony of the Crown of Aragon. The nobility of the Lombard city, fearing annexation to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, proclaimed Milan an autonomous commune, establishing the Ambrosian Republic; the resulting Aragonese and Neapolitan claims were opposed by France, which in 1450 gave political support to Francesco Sforza to seize Milan and the duchy militarily. Ottoman expansionism, which threatened the borders of the Two Sicilies, prevented the House of Aragon from intervening against Milan, and Pope Nicholas V recognized Sforza as Duke of Milan.
The court of Naples in this period was one of the most refined and most open to the cultural novelties of the Renaissance: among Alfonso's protégés were Lorenzo Valla, who exposed the historical falsity of the Donation of Constantine, the humanist Antonio Beccadelli and the Greek Manuel Chrysoloras. To Alfonso is also owed the reconstruction of the Castel Nuovo. The administrative orientation of the kingdom grosso modo continued that of the House of Anjou: the powers of the old jurisdictions were, however, scaled back (Abruzzo Ultra and Citra, County of Molise, Terra di Lavoro, Capitanata, Principato Ultra and Citra, Basilicata, Terra di Bari, Terra d'Otranto, Calabria Ultra and Citra), which retained predominantly political and military functions. On the other hand, in 1443, the administration of justice was returned to the feudal courts, in an attempt to convert the old feudal hierarchies into a bureaucratic apparatus of the central State. Another important step toward territorial unity in Sicilia Citerior is considered to be the policy of the King of renewing incentives for herding and transhumance: in 1447 Alfonso I of Sicilia Citerior issued a series of laws, among them the requirement that shepherds from Abruzzo and Molise winter within the Sicilian borders, in the Tavoliere, where many of the cultivated lands were transformed, even by force, into pastureland. He also established, with its seat first in Lucera and then in Foggia, the Customs House of the Sheep in Apulia and the very important network of droving roads leading from Abruzzo to the Capitanata. These measures transformed the economy of the inland towns between L'Aquila and Apulia: the economic returns linked to the transhumant herding of the Abruzzese Apennines had at one time been dispersed in the Papal States, where the flocks had until then wintered; with the Aragonese measures, the activities linked to transhumance developed predominantly within the borders of the kingdom, as did the local craft activities, the markets and the fairs between Lanciano, Castel di Sangro, Campobasso, Isernia, Boiano, Agnone, Larino and as far as the Tavoliere; and the bureaucratic apparatus organized around the customs house, set up for the maintenance of the roads and the legal protection of the shepherds, became, on the model of the Iberian Council of the Mesta, the first popular base of the modern centralized state in the Two Sicilies. To a lesser extent the same phenomenon occurred between Basilicata and the Terra d'Otranto and in the towns (Venosa, Ferrandina, Matera) linked to transhumance toward the Metaponto. Upon his death (1458) Alfonso again divided the crowns he had united, assigning to his son Ferrante the continental Italian territory (Kingdom of Sicily on this side of the Faro), while the Crown of Aragon and the islands went to his brother John II of Aragon.
Ferrante
King Alfonso the Magnanimous thus left a kingdom perfectly inserted into Italian politics. The succession of his son Ferdinand I of Sicilia Citerior, called Don Ferrante, was supported by Francesco Sforza himself; the two new sovereigns intervened in the Republic of Florence and defeated the troops of the mercenary Captain Bartolomeo Colleoni, who was attacking the local powers; in 1478 the Neapolitan troops intervened again in Tuscany to counter the consequences of the Pazzi conspiracy, and then in Padania in 1484, allied with Florence and Milan, to impose the Peace of Bagnolo on Venice.
The power of Don Ferrante, however, was in serious danger during his reign, as he was threatened by the nobility of Campania; in 1485, between Basilicata and Salerno, Francesco Coppola, Count of Sarno, and Antonello Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno, with the support of the Papal States and of the Republic of Venice, placed themselves at the head of a revolt with Guelph ambitions and Angevin feudal claims, against the House of Aragon which, by centralizing power in Naples, threatened the rural nobility. The revolt is known as the conspiracy of the barons and was put down in 1487 thanks to the intervention of Milan and Florence. For a brief period the city of L'Aquila passed to the Papal States. Another, parallel Francophile conspiracy, between Abruzzo and Terra di Lavoro, was led by Giovanni Della Rovere in the Duchy of Sora, and ended with the mediating intervention of Pope Alexander VI.
Despite the political conflicts, Don Ferrante continued his father Alfonso's patronage in the capital: in 1458 he supported the founding of the Accademia Pontaniana, enlarged the city walls and built Porta Capuana. In 1465 the capital hosted the Greek humanist Constantine Lascaris and the jurist Antonio D'Alessandro, and the rest of the kingdom hosted Francesco Filelfo and Giovanni Bessarione. At the court of Ferdinand's children, however, humanistic interests took on a much more political character, decreeing among other things the definitive adoption of the Tuscan dialect as the literary language in Naples as well: and from the second half of the 15th century there is the anthology of rhymes known as the Raccolta aragonese, which Lorenzo de Medici sent to King Frederick I of Sicilia Citerior, in which the Tuscan dialect was proposed to the Parthenopean court as the model of an illustrious vulgar tongue, of equal literary dignity with Classical Latin. The Neapolitan intellectuals embraced the Florentine cultural program, reinterpreting the stereotypes of the Tuscan tradition in an original way. Following the example of Boccaccio, Masuccio Salernitano had already produced, around the middle of the 1400s, a collection of novellas with invectives against women and the ecclesiastical hierarchies, so much so that his work was included in the Index of Prohibited Books by the Inquisition.
Ever since the first great epidemic, the plague of 1348, which shook Europe, the cities and the economy of the far Mezzogiorno were hard hit, to the point of turning that territory, which since Magna Graecia had for centuries been one of the most productive in the Mediterranean, into a vast depopulated countryside. The flat coastal territories (the plain of Metaponto, Sybaris, Sant'Eufemia) were abandoned, swampy and infested with malaria, with the exception of the plain of Seminara, where agricultural production and fishing sustained a weak economic activity linked to the city of Reggio Calabria.
In 1444 Isabella of Chiaromonte married Don Ferrante and brought as a dowry to the Neapolitan crown the principality of Taranto, which upon the Queen's death in 1465 was suppressed and definitively united to the kingdom. In 1458 the Albanian leader Georg Skanderbeg came to the Mezzogiorno to support King Don Ferrante in the revolt against the barons. Previously, Skanderbeg had already come to support the Aragonese crown in Naples during the reign of Alfonso the Magnanimous.
The Albanian mercenary obtained in Italy a series of noble titles and the attached feudal possessions, which were a refuge for the first communities of Albanians who, following the defeat that Mahomet II inflicted on the Christian side in the Balkans, settled in areas of Molise and Calabria that until then had been depopulated.
In Apulia there was a recovery of economic activities with the granting of the Duchy of Bari to Sforza Maria Sforza, son of Francesco Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, offered by Don Ferrante to confirm the alliance between Naples and the Lombard city.
Alfonso II
Don Ferrante was succeeded by his firstborn son Alfonso II of Sicilia Citerior in 1494. In the same year, Charles VIII of France came to Italy to upset the delicate political balance that the cities of the peninsula had achieved in the preceding years. The opportunity pointed directly at Sicilia Citerior; Charles had a distant kinship with the Angevin kings of Sicilia Citerior (his paternal grandmother was the daughter of Louis II of Anjou, who had tried to wrest the Parthenopean throne from Charles III of Sicilia Citerior and from Ladislaus), sufficient for him to be able to claim the royal title. The Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, who had snatched the duchy from its legitimate heirs, also declared himself on the side of France.
Charles IV (VIII of France)
The new Duke of Milan did not oppose Charles VIII of France, who moved against the House of Aragon; avoiding the resistance of the Republic of Florence, the French King occupied Campania in thirteen days and shortly afterward entered Naples: all the provinces submitted to the new sovereign, except the cities of Gaeta, Tropea, Amantea and Reggio Calabria. The Aragonese took refuge in Sicilia Ulterior and sought the support of Ferdinand the Catholic. French expansionism also pushed Pope Alexander VI and Maximilian of Austria to form a league against Charles VIII in order to fight him. The league finally defeated him at the Battle of Fornovo: at the end of the conflict, Spain occupied Calabria, while the Republic of Venice took possession of the main ports of the Apulian coast (Manfredonia, Trani, Mola, Monopoli, Brindisi, Otranto, Polignano and Gallipoli). Alfonso II of Sicilia Citerior died during the military operations, in 1495, and Ferrandino inherited the throne, but he survived him by only one year, leaving no heirs; in 1496 the son of Don Ferrante and brother of Alfonso II, Frederick I of Sicilia Citerior, became King, and he once again had to confront French ambitions over Naples.
Louis IV (XII of France)
Louis XII of France had inherited the French throne after the death of Charles VIII of France; since the King of Aragon, Ferdinand the Catholic, had come to the throne of Castile through his marriage to Isabella of Castile, he reached an agreement with the French sovereigns claiming the throne of Sicilia Citerior to divide Italy between them.
.svg)
Louis occupied the Duchy of Milan, where he captured Ludovico Sforza, and, in agreement with Ferdinand, turned against Frederick; an agreement between the French and the Spanish had provided for the partition of Sicilia Citerior between the two crowns: Abruzzo and Terra di Lavoro, together with the title of Rex Hierosolymae and, for the first time, of Rex Neapolis, would pass to the French sovereign, while Apulia and Calabria, with the attached ducal titles, would be obtained by the Spanish sovereign. With that treaty, on November 11, 1500 the title of Rex Siciliae was declared lapsed by Pope Alexander VI and united to the Crown of Aragon. Frederick I of Sicilia Citerior took refuge in Ischia and finally ceded his own sovereignty to the King of France, in exchange for some fiefs in metropolitan France. Although the two allied kings carried out the occupation of the kingdom, they did not agree on the interpretation of the partition treaty, and the fate of the Capitanata and of Molise, whose sovereignty both the French and the Spanish claimed, remained undefined. Once the Crown of Castile had been inherited by Philip the Handsome, the new Spanish King sought a second agreement with Louis XII of France, under which the titles of King of Naples and Duke of Apulia and Calabria would go to Louis's daughter, Claude, and to Charles V, her betrothed (1502).
Ferdinand II
The Spanish troops occupying Calabria and Apulia, commanded by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba and loyal to Ferdinand the Catholic, did not respect the new agreements and expelled the French from the Mezzogiorno, who were left with only Gaeta until their definitive defeat at the Battle of the Garigliano. The peace treaties that followed were never definitive, but they did at least establish that the title of King of Naples would await Charles I of Spain and his future wife Claude. Ferdinand, however, wanted to possess the kingdom, considering himself the legitimate heir of his uncle Alfonso I of the Two Sicilies and of the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Regnum Utriusque Siciliae).
The Aragonese royal house that had become Italian had died out with Frederick, and Naples fell under the control of Spain, which established a Viceroyalty. Southern Italy would remain a possession of the Spanish sovereigns for the following 210 years, until the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1713). The new administrative structure, strongly centralized, rested on the old feudal system: the barons thus found a way to strengthen their own authority and privileges, while the clergy saw its political and moral power increase. The most important administrative bodies had their seat in Naples and were: the Collateral Council, similar to the Council of Aragon, the supreme body in the exercise of judicial functions (composed of the Viceroy and three jurisconsults); the Tribunal of the Vicaria and the Tribunal of the Sacred Royal Council.
Ferdinand the Catholic, holder of the titles of King of Naples and King of Sicily, appointed as Viceroy the man who until then had been the great captain of the Neapolitan army, Fernández de Córdoba, granting him the powers of the King. At the same time, Fernández de Córdoba relinquished the title of great captain, and command of the royal troops of Naples was entrusted to the Count of Tagliacozzo, Fabrizio Colonna, with the title of grand constable and the task of leading an expedition in Apulia against the Republic of Venice, which occupied some Adriatic ports. The military operation ended successfully, and the Apulian ports returned to the Kingdom of Naples in 1509. King Ferdinand also restored funding to the University of Naples, providing a monthly contribution from his personal treasury of two thousand ducats a year, a privilege later confirmed by his successor Charles III of Naples.
Córdoba was succeeded first by John of Aragon, who promulgated a series of laws against corruption, fought clientelism, and prohibited gambling and usury, and then by Raimundo de Cardona, who in 1510 introduced the Inquisition into Naples and the first restrictive measures against the Jews.
Charles I of Spain, Charles III of Naples
Charles I of Spain, or Charles III of Naples, son of Philip the Handsome and Joanna the Mad, through a complicated system of inheritance and kinship, soon found himself ruling a vast empire: from his father he obtained Burgundy and Flanders; from his mother, in 1516, Castile, Aragon, the first settlements in America, the Kingdom of Naples (for the first time with the title of Rex Neapolis), Sicily and Sardinia; and furthermore, two years later, the Holy Roman Empire of his grandfather Maximilian, as Charles V of Habsburg.
The Kingdom of France, once again, came to threaten Naples and Emperor Charles's dominion over the Mezzogiorno: the French, after having conquered the Duchy of Milan from the son of Ludovico il Moro, Maximilian, were defeated and expelled from Lombardy by Charles V after the battles of Bicocca and Pavia. King Francis I of France in 1526 then entered into a league, blessed by Pope Clement VII, called the holy league, with Venice and Florence, to expel the Spanish from Naples. After an initial defeat of the league in Rome, the French responded with the intervention in Italy of Odet de Foix, who reached Naples and besieged the city, while the Most Serene Republic of Venice occupied Otranto and Manfredonia. When the Genoese fleet, allied with the French, went over to the side of Charles V, the siege of Naples turned into yet another defeat for the enemies of Spain, which then led to the recognition by Clement VII of the imperial title of King Charles I of Spain. Venice definitively lost its possessions in Apulia (1528). France's hostilities against Spanish rule in Italy, however, did not cease: Henry II of France, son of Francis I of France, at the request of Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno, allied himself with the Ottoman Empire; in the summer of 1552 the Turkish fleet under the command of Sinan Pasha surprised the imperial fleet, commanded by Andrea Doria and Juan de Mendoza, off Ponza, defeating it.
The French fleet, however, together with the Turkish one, did not manage to achieve the objective of invading the Neapolitan kingdom. In 1555, after a series of defeats in Europe, Charles abdicated and divided his dominions between Philip II, to whom he left Spain, the colonies in America, the Spanish Netherlands, the Kingdom of Naples, the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Sardinia, and Ferdinand I of Austria, to whom he left Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and the title of emperor.
Philip II
In 1556, Philip II created the Council of Italy, bringing into it Naples and the Kingdom of Sicily (to which the State of Milan would later be added), which until then had been under the Supreme Council of the Crown of Aragon.
On July 16, 1599 the new Viceroy, Fernando Ruiz de Castro, arrived in Naples. His work was mainly limited to military operations against the Turkish incursions of Amurat Rais and Sinan Pasha in Calabria.
In the same year as his appointment as Viceroy, the Dominican Tommaso Campanella, who in "The City of the Sun" outlined a communitarian state based on a supposed natural religion, organized a conspiracy against Fernando Ruiz de Castro in the hope of establishing a republic with its capital at Stilo (Mons Pinguis). The Calabrian philosopher and astrologer had already been a prisoner of the Holy Office and confined in Calabria: there, with the doctrinal and philosophical support of the Joachimite eschatological tradition, he took the first steps to persuade monks and religious to join his revolutionary ambitions, fomenting a conspiracy that nearly managed to shake not only the Dominican order of all Calabria, but also the local minor orders such as the Augustinians and Franciscans, and the main dioceses from Cassano to Reggio Calabria. It was the first revolt in Europe to declare itself against the order of the Jesuits and its growing spiritual and secular authority. The conspiracy was put down, and Campanella feigned madness. A few years earlier (1576), another Dominican, the philosopher Giordano Bruno, had also been tried for heresy in Naples; his speculations and theses were later admired by various scholars of Lutheran Europe.
Ruiz de Castro also inaugurated a policy centered on state financing for the construction of various public works: in Naples he ordered the construction of the new royal palace in the present-day Piazza del Plebiscito. The term of Pedro Téllez-Girón y de la Cueva was mainly characterized by urban works: he built and organized the road system of the capital and of the Apulian provinces. He was succeeded by Juan de Zúñiga Avellaneda y Bazán, whose government was directed at restoring order in the provinces: he suppressed banditry in the Abruzzo with the support of the Papal States and in the Capitanata; he modernized the roads between Naples and the Terra di Bari. In 1593 his army defeated the Ottomans, who had tried to invade Sicily.
Philip III
When Philip III succeeded his father Philip II of Spain on the throne, the administration of the Viceroyalty of Naples was entrusted to Enrique de Guzmán, Count of Olivares. The Kingdom of Spain was at the height of its splendor, uniting the Crown of Aragon and its Italian dominions with the Crown of Castile and the Kingdom of Portugal. In Naples the Spanish government was not very active in the urban works of the capital: Guzmán promoted the construction of the Fountain of Neptune, a monument to Charles I of Anjou, and the organization of the road system.
Another government that acted energetically, with a fair degree of political and economic activity in the Kingdom of Naples, was that of Viceroy Juan Alonso Pimentel de Herrera. The new Viceroy had to defend the territories of the Mezzogiorno from Turkish naval incursions and to appease the first revolts against taxation, which in the capital were beginning to threaten the palace. To forestall Ottoman aggressions he waged a war against Albania, destroying Durazzo, where the Turkish and Albanian pirates who attacked the coasts of the kingdom sought refuge. In Naples he tried to combat crime, which in those years was increasingly widespread, even against papal provisions, opposing the right of asylum guaranteed by Catholic places of worship: for this reason some of his officials were excommunicated.
Pimentel was followed in 1610 by Pedro Fernández de Castro, who intervened mainly in the City of Naples, neglecting the interior. He ordered the reconstruction of the university, financing a new building and modernizing the system of teaching and of the chairs. Under his regency the Accademia degli Oziosi flourished, to which Marino and Della Porta, among others, belonged. He built the Jesuit college called San Francesco Saverio and a complex of factories at the Porta Nolana. In Terra di Lavoro he began the first works of reclamation of the Volturno plain, entrusting Domenico Fontana with the project of the Regi Lagni.
Philip IV
After the death of Philip III of Spain, he was succeeded as King by his son Philip IV of Spain, and Antonio Álvarez de Toledo y Beaumont and Fernando Afán de Ribera y Enríquez served as Viceroys of Naples. They had to face the problem of banditry in the provinces, which was increasingly widespread and deep-rooted. They were followed by Manuel de Acevedo y Zúñiga, who financed the fortifications of the ports of Barletta, Baia and Gaeta, with a government strongly committed to the economic support of the army and the navy. The severe impoverishment of the state treasury led, under the administration of Ramiro Núñez de Guzmán, to the return of the royal domains to the power of the barons and to the consequent increase of feudal powers.
Charles VI (II of Spain)
Under his reign the viceroyalties of Fernando Fajardo y Álvarez de Toledo and of Francisco de Benavides are remembered, with policies committed to containing problems that were by then endemic, such as banditry, clientelism, inflation and hunger.
As early as 1693 in Naples, as in the rest of the Spanish dominions, people began to discuss the fate of the realm of Charles II of Spain (VI of Naples), who was leaving the States of his crown without direct heirs. On this occasion, a politically organized civic consciousness began to emerge in the Mezzogiorno, made up across the board of both aristocrats and small citizen merchants and craftsmen, declared against the privileges and fiscal immunities of the clergy (the related juridical current is known to historians as Neapolitan anticlericalism) and eager to confront banditry. This sort of party, upon the death of Charles VI in 1700, opposed the will of the Spanish sovereign that designated Philip V of Bourbon, Duke of Anjou, as heir to the Spanish and Neapolitan crowns, supporting instead the claim of Leopold I of Habsburg, whose legitimate heir was the future Emperor of Austria, Archduke Charles. This political position led the Neapolitan Germanophile party to an explicitly Hispanophobic role, followed by the revolt known as the Macchia conspiracy, which subsequently failed. After the political crisis, the Spanish government tried to restore order in the kingdom through repression, while the financial crisis was increasingly disastrous. In 1702 the Banco dell'Annunziata failed; in these years Philip V of Spain, traveling in Naples, in 1701 forgave the debts of the universities. The last Viceroys on behalf of Spain were Luis Francisco de la Cerda, committed to suppressing banditry and smuggling, and Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco, whose term of government was cut short by the war and the consequent Austrian occupation of 1706.
Latinization of Apulia and Calabria
From the 16th century, the stabilization of the Adriatic borders after the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and the end of the Turkish threats to the Italian coasts led, with rare exceptions, to a period of relative tranquility in Southern Italy, during which barons and feudatories were able to make use of the old seigneurial rights to consolidate economic and productive privileges.
Between the 16th and the 17th century, there emerged in Apulia and Calabria that closed, provincial economy which characterized these regions until the unification of Italy: agriculture became subsistence agriculture for the first time; the only products destined for export were oil and silk, whose stable, cyclical and repetitive production times could not escape the control of the feudal aristocracy. Thus, between Terra di Bari and Otranto, olive oil production increased a relative prosperity, attested by the capillary system of rural estates and, in the cities, by the reflowering of urban and architectural works (Lecce Baroque). After the loss of the dominions of the Most Serene Republic of Venice in the Mediterranean, the ports of Brindisi and Otranto remained a precious market for Venice for the supply of agri-food products. Very similar was the condition of Calabria, whose provinces, deprived of commercial outlets and competitive ports, saw partial development only in the area of Cosenza.
Around the wealthier classes there flourished a particular type of humanism, strongly conservative, characterized by the cult of the classical Latin tradition, of rhetoric and of law. Even before the birth of the seminaries, priests and lay aristocrats subsidized centers of culture which constituted, in Apulia and Calabria, the only form of civil modernization that the administrative and bureaucratic innovations of the House of Aragon demanded, while the economy and the territory remained excluded from the changes taking place in the rest of Europe.
From the 15th century the last traces of the Greek cultural and social tradition were disappearing: in 1467 the diocese of Hieracium abandoned the use of the Byzantine Rite in the liturgy in favor of the Latin Rite, in 1571 the diocese of Rossano, in 1580 the archdiocese of Reggio Calabria, in 1586 the archdiocese of Siponto and shortly afterward that of Otranto. The Latinization of the territory, begun with the Normans and continued with the Angevins, was completed in the 17th century, in parallel with the strong concentration of power in the hands of the feudal aristocracy, between Reggio and Cosenza. In these years Tommaso Campanella shook these dioceses, with the support of Eastern astrological and philosophical speculations, in the revolt against the Spanish domination of Italy and the Society of Jesus.
Austrian rule
The Treaty of Utrecht, of 1713, put an end to the War of the Spanish Succession: according to the agreements signed, the Kingdom of Naples came under the control of Charles VI of the Holy Roman Empire, together with Sardinia; Sicily, on the other hand, passed to the House of Savoy, restoring the territorial identity of the crown of the Rex Siciliae, on the condition that, once the male line of the Savoy became extinct, the island and the attached royal title would be returned to the Spanish Crown. With the Peace of Rastatt, one year later Louis XIV of France also recognized the Austrian dominions in Italy. In 1718 Philip V of Spain attempted to restore his rule in Naples and Sicily with the support of his prime minister Giulio Alberoni: Great Britain, France, Austria and Holland, however, intervened directly against Spain, defeating the fleet of Philip V at the Battle of Cape Passaro. Later, the House of Austria and the House of Savoy exchanged the islands of Sicily and Sardinia; and Charles of Bourbon was designated heir to the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza.
The beginning of Austrian rule was marked by the need to face a disastrous financial situation, carrying out a profound reform of the political hierarchies of the Neapolitan State, which was followed by a fair development of Enlightenment and reforming principles. From then on there circulated in Naples the Cartesian texts and the works of Spinoza, Jansenius and Pascal, and the expressions of culture came into direct conflict with the city's clergy, along the path of Neapolitan anticlericalism already opened by famous jurists such as Francesco d'Andrea, Giuseppe Valletta and Costantino Grimaldi. During the Austrian viceroyalty, in 1721, Pietro Giannone published his most celebrated text, the Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, a very important cultural reference for the Neapolitan State, which became famous throughout Europe (admired by Montesquieu) for the way it reformulated Machiavellianism in modern terms and subordinated canon law to civil law. Excommunicated by the Archbishop of Naples, he found refuge in Vienna, without ever being able to return to Southern Italy.
The first Austrian Viceroys were Georg Adam von Martinitz and Wirich Daun, followed by the administration of Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani who, favorable to the Neapolitan anticlerical circles, carried out the first policy of financial recovery, attempting to reduce government spending and to sequester the revenues of the southern feudatories who, following the Austrian occupation, were contumacious. The Viceroys who succeeded him (Carlo Borromeo Arese and Daun in his second term) found a slight positive balance in the kingdom's revenues, thanks also to the settlement of the expenses that the military operations had occasioned. In 1728 Viceroy Michael Friederich Althann established the public Bank of San Carlo, to finance private enterprise of a mercantile character, redeem public debt securities and liquidate the ecclesiastical mortmain. The same Viceroy earned the enmity of the Jesuits for having tolerated the publication of the works of the anticlericals Giannone and Grimaldi.
A new attempted invasion by Philip V of Spain, although it ended in his defeat, brought the kingdom's balance back into deficit: the problem persisted throughout the rest of Austrian rule; in 1731 Aloys Thomas Raimund promoted the establishment of a Junta of the Universities to control the budgets of the small centers of the provinces. The new land registers were obstructed by the landowners and the clergy, who wanted to sabotage the government's intention of taxing ecclesiastical property. The last of the Austrian Viceroys, Giulio Borromeo Visconti, witnessed the Bourbon invasion and the ensuing war, leaving the new sovereigns, nevertheless, a financial situation much better than the one left by the Spanish Viceroys.
The Bourbons in the Two Sicilies
In 1734, Charles of Bourbon, at that time Duke of Parma and Piacenza and son of Philip V of Spain, after defeating the Austrians in the War of the Polish Succession, seized Naples with Spanish help, recovering the territory for the Bourbons, and was very soon recognized by France (by virtue of the First Family Compact). In 1737 he was also recognized by the Papal States and, subsequently, by the rest of the Italian States. In the Treaty of Vienna (1738) Austria recognized him as King in exchange for his renunciation of the duchies of Parma and Piacenza.
Charles VII of Bourbon and his wife Maria Amalia of Saxony were greatly loved by their subjects, and they worked to earn that affection. Shortly after being crowned, he brought reforms and modernity to his new country, soon achieving the unity of the people and their favor toward their King. Both he and his descendants succeeded in governing, reforming and modernizing the new State, and they furthermore achieved what very few rulers could, namely the love of their subjects, which no other dynasty had over the course of the centuries (except to a lesser degree), and which was openly displayed during the years of the Napoleonic invasion and during those following the fall of the Kingdom into the hands of the Savoy, to achieve the unification of Italy. In 1816, the son and successor of Charles VII (III of Spain) on the Neapolitan throne, Ferdinand IV, changed the name of the Kingdom, Naples-Sicily, to Two Sicilies.
Finally, Francis II, after losing the support of the people and suffering several defeats at the hands of the Redshirts of Garibaldi, was forced to capitulate and hand over his territories to Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1861, who would later become the new King of a unified Italy. With this conquest, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ceased to exist as an independent state.
References
- ↑ "Superivencia del latín en el Reino de Nápoles" (in español).
- ↑ "El uso del idioma italiano en el Reino de Nápoles" (in español).
- ↑ "Idiomas hablados en el Reino de Nápoles" (in español).
- ↑ "Idiomas foráneos en la corte napolitana" (in español).
- ↑ Alberto Montaner Frutos, El señal del rey de Aragón: Historia y significado, Zaragoza, Institución «Fernando el Católico», 1995, p. 185, PL. XVII. ISBN 84-7820-283-8.
