administrative personnel, and a court which acted also as a focus for many cultural activities. These achievements are not negligible, although historians nowadays tend to emphasize more the self-interested nature of all this and, above all, the iron fiscal hand which gripped the kingdom at the expense of economic development. With Charles of Anjou the negative aspects persisted without being accompanied by the benefits. The establishment of a new foreign ruler, with a new foreign ruling class and yet further burdens of taxation for essentially non-Sicilian purposes such as the recovery of Byzantium, aroused deep resentment which in 1282 exploded in the bloody rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers and an invitation to Peter III of Aragon to take the throne. For ninety years a succession of mostly weak monarchs, Angevin in Naples, Aragonese on the island of Sicily, attempted to establish control over their own territory and to gain the upper hand in the conflict between the two. The damage to public order and royal authority was matched only by that to the economy, and much of the impoverishment of land and people of what was once the 'granary of Europe' was determined in this period. If Sicily had once benefited from being a meeting-point of Mediterranean cultures, now, with a succession of rulers interested in using it as, at most, a resource for their policies elsewhere, it was paying the price of that internationalism.

The consequences for Italy as a whole were no less important. The close alliance between the papacy and the Angevins provoked a rise in the fortunes of the pro-papal or Guelph party, and of Guelphism, throughout Italy. The Angevins were to be the rulers of Naples but also champions of the papal cause throughout the peninsula, and for a time it looked as if this alliance had the best chance of bringing some measure of peace and stability to the area's tortured political scene. But it was not to be; and a more ominous consequence of the introduction of first the Angevins and then the Aragonese into the peninsula was that the interest and claims in Italy of one foreign power, the emperor, were replaced by those of two others, altogether more modern in outlook, with whom the future of Europe in a sense lay. At the end of the fifteenth

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