Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/521

 INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE 471 the son of a charcoal-seller of Troyes in Champagne, offered the Sicilian crown to Charles of Anjou, brother of the French king. Manfred was defeated and slain in 1266 and two years later the young Conradin, the last representative of the Hohenstaufen line, was captured and executed. Charles of Anjou was not able to hold the entire Sicilian kingdom of Frederick II, however. After a few years the Sicilians rose against his French troops and Division into officials, who were massacred in the "Sicilian two king- Vespers" of 1282. Eventually the island of Sic- Sicily and ily passed as a separate kingdom to a younger Na P les branch of the royal line in Aragon, and the House of Anjou had to be content with southern Italy, or the Kingdom of Naples. The Papacy had thus triumphed over the Hohenstaufens and had prevented the growth of a strong national state in Italy, just as it had done earlier in the case of the Abuses re- Lombard kings. But this political triumph had suiting in been purchased at a great price. To raise the necessary money and troops, and to secure the support of influential persons and families against the Hohenstaufens, the popes had had to tax the clergy heavily and to sell church offices or bestow them upon unsuitable candidates. So while Gregory VII had begun the struggle with the Empire in order to root simony out of the Church by attacking lay investiture and by securing local freedom of election, Inno- cent IV, in order to defeat Frederick, had taken the appoint- ment to many ecclesiastical benefices away from the local clergy into his own hands and had condoned, if not actually practiced, simony in making his appointments. He regarded such appointments or " provisions" as a necessary but only temporary evil, but the practice was continued by his suc- cessors, and the Papacy kept demanding more and more taxes and filling more and more church offices with its own candidates. Outwardly it might seem that the pope had even more power toward the close of the thirteenth century than at its beginning under Innocent III. But this heavy taxation of