Charles II of Naples

Charles II, called the Lame (French le Boiteux, Italian lo Zoppo; 1254 – 5 May 1309), was King of Naples, King of Albania, Prince of Salerno, Prince of Achaea, Count of Provence and Forcalquier and Count of Anjou.

Biography

He was the son of Charles I of Anjou, who had conquered the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily in the 1260s. His mother was Beatrice of Provence.

During the Sicilian Vespers, he was captured by Roger of Lauria in the naval battle at Naples in 1284. When his father died in 1285, he was still a prisoner of Peter III of Aragon.

In 1288, King Edward I of England mediated to make peace, and Charles was freed on condition that he retain Naples alone. Sicily was left to the Aragonese. Charles was also to induce his cousin Charles of Valois to renounce, for twenty thousand pounds of silver, the kingdom of Aragon, which had been given to him by Pope Martin IV to punish Peter for having invaded Sicily, but which the Valois had never effectively occupied.

Charles was then released, leaving three of his sons and sixty Provençal nobles as hostages. He promised to pay 30,000 marks and to return as a prisoner if the conditions were not fulfilled within three years. He then went to Rieti, where the new pope, Nicholas IV, absolved him from all the conditions he had sworn to observe, crowned him King of Sicily in 1289, and excommunicated King Alfonso III of Aragon. Charles of Valois, in alliance with Castile, prepared to take possession of Aragon, reopening the Aragonese Crusade. Alfonso, being hard pressed, agreed to the conditions of the Treaty of Tarascon: he had to promise to withdraw the troops he had sent to help his brother James in Sicily, renounce all rights over the island, and pay a tribute to the Holy See.

Naples

Naples (/ˈneɪpəlz/; Italian: Napoli [ˈnaːpoli], Neapolitan: Napule [ˈnɑːpulə]; Latin: Neapolis; Ancient Greek: Νεάπολις, meaning "new city") is the capital of the Italian region Campania and the third-largest municipality in Italy, after Rome and Milan. In 2015, around 975,260 people lived within the city's administrative limits. The Metropolitan City of Naples had a population of 3,115,320. Naples is the 9th-most populous urban area in the European Union with a population of between 3 million and 3.7 million. About 4 million people live in the Naples metropolitan area, one of the largest metropolises on the Mediterranean Sea.

Naples is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Bronze Age Greek settlements were established in the Naples area in the second millennium BC. A larger colony – initially known as Parthenope, Παρθενόπη – developed on the Island of Megaride around the ninth century BC, at the end of the Greek Dark Ages. The city was refounded as Neápolis in the sixth century BC and became a lynchpin of Magna Graecia, playing a key role in the merging of Greek culture into Roman society and eventually becoming a cultural centre of the Roman Republic. Naples remained influential after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, serving as the capital city of the Kingdom of Naples between 1282 and 1816. Thereafter, in union with Sicily, it became the capital of the Two Sicilies until the unification of Italy in 1861. During the Neapolitan War of 1815, Naples strongly promoted Italian unification.

Charles II

Charles II may refer to: