Sicilians vs. Anjevins, 1292

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 124-125:

For those who detested the House of Anjou and all it stood for, there was after the death of Conradin one rallying point: the court of King Peter III of Aragon. In 1262 Peter had married Manfred’s daughter Constance, who was now the sole representative in the south of the Hohenstaufen cause; and increasing numbers of refugees from Sicily and the Regno were finding their way to his court at Barcelona. Among them was one of the great conspirators of his age. His name was John of Procida. He had studied medicine in his native city of Salerno and, as the Emperor’s personal physician, had attended Frederick on his deathbed. Later he had entered the service of Manfred. He had fought with Conradin at Tagliacozzo, after which he had traveled to Germany with the intention of persuading another of Frederick II’s grandsons to invade Italy and restore the Hohenstaufen line. Only when this plan failed did he move with his two sons to Barcelona. Constance, he believed, was the one last hope. King Peter gave him a warm welcome and made him Chancellor of the kingdom, in which capacity he could concentrate on a great conspiracy to secure the Angevin downfall.

There is a remarkable legend, which appears in the works of both Petrarch and Boccaccio, to the effect that John then traveled in disguise around the courts of Europe to gain support for his cause, visiting the Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus in Constantinople and returning with vast quantities of Byzantine gold. It is almost certainly untrue: by this time he was nearly seventy, and in both the years in question, 1279 and 1280, his signature regularly appears on documents issuing from the Aragonese chancery. It may well be, however, that someone else—perhaps one of his sons—made the journeys in his name. There was certainly some contact between Barcelona and Constantinople, where Michael was aware that Charles of Anjou was at that very moment preparing a major expedition against his empire. He was consequently eager to take the immediate offensive, before that expedition could be launched. Peter, on the other hand, naturally advocated waiting until it was well on its way.

In fact the timing was in the hands of neither King nor Emperor, but of the Sicilians themselves. By 1282 the Angevins had made themselves cordially detested throughout the Regno, both for the severity of their taxation and for the arrogance of their conduct; and when on the evening of Easter Monday, March 30, 1282, a drunken French sergeant began importuning a Sicilian woman outside the church of Santo Spirito just as the bells were ringing for vespers, her countrymen’s anger boiled over. The sergeant was set upon by her husband and killed; the murder led to a riot, the riot to a massacre; 2,000 Frenchmen were dead by morning.

The rising spread like wildfire. On August 30 King Peter and his army landed at Trapani, arriving in Palermo three days later. The formal coronation for which he had hoped proved impossible: the Archbishop of Palermo was dead, the pro-Angevin Archbishop of Monreale had most sensibly disappeared; Peter had to be content with a simple proclamation of his kingship. This he acknowledged with a public promise to observe the rights and liberties of his new subjects, calling upon all the able-bodied men of Palermo and its surroundings to march with him to Messina, where the French were still holding out. The response, we are told, was immediate and enthusiastic. For all good Palermitans—who detested the Messinans and the French in equal measure—the opportunity was too good to resist.