Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/205

 THE WEST IN THE CRUSADING ERA I93 a great battle, and executed as a rebel against the lawful King of Sicily. This 'lawful King' was Charles of Anjou. It will not be forgotten that in the eleventh century the Norman Robert Guiscard and his kinsmen had conquered, and Charles of then received as fiefs from the pope, Southern Anjou. Italy and Sicily ; and that these dominions were combined in the Norman kingdom of the two Sicilies, that is, Sicily itself and the kingdom of Naples. This was the dominion which the emperor Henry VI. had added to his realms by marrying the heiress of the last Norman king. After the death of Conrad, the son of Frederick n., when his illegitimate brother Manfred held the Sicilian kingdom professedly on behalf of Conradin, the pope, Urban iv., who was a Frenchman, bestowed the crown, as being in the papal gift, on Charles, Count of Anjou and of Provence, the brother of King Louis ix. Hence it was Charles of Anjou who overthrew both Manfred and Conradin. The supremacy of the Swabian House of Hohen- staufen disappeared both in Italy and in Germany at the moment when the last crusade was starting. Had either Manfred or Conradin proved successful, the fortunes of the house might have been restored. In Italy its power had at least survived as long as Manfred The German lived. But in Germany there was something like Interregnum, chaos from the time of Conrad's death. It had now become the established right of seven German princes to elect the German king. All through the thirteenth century the German king had been so much occupied with Italy that he had ceased to exercise effective control in Germany. The seven electors had no desire to revive the Imperial power. Instead of choosing a German, half of them elected Richard of Corn- wall, brother of Henry in., King of England, and the other half chose Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile, who showed his wisdom by stopping at home, while Richard of Cornwall was absolutely powerless. Consequently, there was no controlling force in Germany where every man did that which was right in his own eyes according to his powers. At last the electors realised that some degree of efficiency was needed in a head of N