Frederico Canaccini
1268: La Battaglia di Tagliacozzo
(Editori Laterza, 2019), 172 pp. €18.00
On 28 October 1268 a blonde teenager mounted the scaffold in Naples, followed by a number of German and Italian noblemen. According to some chronicles, he addressed the silent, even respectful, crowd which filled the square. He said he was the son of innocence, who had come to Italy to fight for his legitimate inheritance and begged for the lives of his companions- in vain. By all accounts he faced execution with exemplary courage. The axe fell. Thus died Conradin, the last legitimate male descendant of the fabled Emperor Frederick II at liberty. Charles of Anjou, the usurper he had come to Italy to fight, could at last feel secure on his Neapolitan throne. Or so he must have thought.
If Conradin did make the speech attributed to him (accounts vary), one wonders what language he spoke. As Federico Canaccini’s account of the events which led the young man to his fate makes clear, his upbringing had been entirely German. Even though he was the rightful ruler of Naples by hereditary succession, he was for years a marginal figure to most members of the loose alignment of city factions and local rulers conventionally labelled Ghibelline. Their champion was his uncle Manfred- himself also a usurping king of Naples who had displaced his then-infant nephew when the latter’s father Conrad IV died in 1254. Conradin only came into focus as a contender when Manfred fell in battle against Charles of Anjou, the papally-appointed leader of the equally loose Guelf alliance, at Benevento in 1266. The teenager was persuaded to enter the viper pit of Italian politics, a world of shady and shifting allegiances. Many of those begging him to intervene had previously ignored his claims, some of those who had fought on in his name had been on the losing Guelf side at the great Sienese Ghibelline triumph of Montaperti in 1260. One of his key commanders at Tagliacozzo, Enrique of Castile, had been on the Angevin side at Benevento before falling out with his cousin Charles, whom he came to hate so much that his personal feud arguably shaped the course of the battle. Pope Clement IV, institutionally hostile to the Staufen claims that Conradin personified and reliant on Angevin military muscle, was nevertheless also uneasy at Charles’ increasingly naked assertions of power in the Papacy’s central Italian backyard.
Canaccini gives a clear, if rather traditional, narrative of events as Conradin moved south through Italy from Ghibelline stronghold to Ghibelline stronghold- above all Siena, which funded his army and aided it to victory over local Angevin forces at Ponte a Valle in Tuscany. Rome, controlled by Enrique as Senator of the city, gave him a triumphal welcome in every sense of the term. It is harder to gain a sense of just how much agency Conradin himself had in the decision making processes surrounding his campaign or indeed to get a measure of the young man himself. He was clearly cultured- poems he wrote survive in the German language lyric tradition- and it is not hard to make him appear an attractive figure by comparison with the often brutal, suspicious and massively ambitious Charles of Anjou. One does however wonder how far Conradin even in his lifetime was something of a blank screen on to which his followers projected their hopes, and (as Canaccini notes) he may have had a cruel streak of his own as demonstrated by his decision to drag the captured Angevin knight Jean de Braiselve the length of Italy in chains to then execute him just before battle was joined at (or rather near) Tagliacozzo.
From a military history perspective, the battle is somewhat frustrating. From at least as far back as Dante’s time there was a sense that the Angevins won by underhand means with an ambush after Conradin’s army believed they had won and disbanded to loot. Charles certainly appears to have deliberately provoked Enrique into a frontal attack by kitting out one of his nobles in his own arms and armour in the forefront of the army as a visible target (the false Charles died in the assault). Canaccini himself wonders whether things went entirely to Angevin plan- if the trap was sprung as intended it was a very risky one indeed and one which involved serious casualties on the Angevin side while Charles’ strike force sat two to three kilometres distant waiting to intervene. One does wonder whether there was not a considerable element of post-event rationalisation of what happened, turning a bungled deployment into a tactical master stroke.
Conradin does not seem to have engaged in the fighting to any extent and made good his escape from the field, only to be captured later trying to make his escape by sea in murky circumstances which led to allegations of treason recycled and expanded on well into the nineteenth century. Indeed Canaccini’s account of the afterlife of the battle and Conradin’s execution makes for fascinating reading (though, perhaps unsurprisingly, he misses the fact that Conradin’s execution after a mockery of a trial was cited in the debates on what to do with Charles I after the Civil Wars in Britain). The execution added to the already lengthy charge sheet against Charles of Anjou in the eyes of his enemies, and damaged Clement IV’s reputation. In the longer run, Conradin was better remembered in Germany than Italy while Tagilacozzo was turned into a Franco-German battle. Conradin enjoyed a certain revival of interest in the Romantic era, becoming a minor lieu de memoire in Italian neo-Ghibelline and anti-clerical historiography- there is a slight whiff of Bonnie Prince Charlie about the way in which he was remembered in those circles. The King of Bavaria paid for a neo-classical tomb for Conradin in Naples. Perhaps predictably the sinister shadow of Heinrich Himmler falls across the story, with murky claims that the SS may (or may not) have succeeded in stealing Conradin’s remains shortly before Naples rose against German occupation. It would however be hard to claim that Conradin became a major reference point for history wars or cultural creativity in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.
Perhaps this was because Tagliacozzo was not the end of the story. The Ghibelline interest fell back on Costanza of Aragon, Manfed’s daughter, and the wars began again with the Sicilian uprising of 1282. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Tagliacozzo was that it was a battle for overlordship of southern Italy with hardly any south Italians on the field. Canaccini suggests that Conradin’s defeat marked a significant turning point in the destiny of Italy, even that the “Southern Question” which still marks Italian society and politics might have been avoided had it gone differently. This is less than convincing. Nevertheless his recounting of the events which ended on that October day in 1268 is well worth the read.
Brian Ditcham
Independent Scholar
