Kingdom of Naples

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Kingdom of Naples bore an official name that almost nobody used: the Kingdom of Sicily on this side of the lighthouse. That lighthouse was the Punta del Faro, the headland marking the Strait of Messina, and it split a centuries-long argument about who ruled what on either side of the water. From 1282 to 1816, the mainland territories south of the Papal States were governed by a succession of Angevin princes, Aragonese kings, Spanish viceroys, Austrian archdukes, Neapolitan Bourbons, and briefly a brother-in-law of Napoleon. The kingdom was never quite what its rulers called it, never entirely separate from the island it was named after, and never far from war. How did a revolt over taxation on a Tuesday night in Palermo create a kingdom that lasted more than five centuries? And what happened when one of the most populous territories in the Spanish Empire finally decided it could no longer afford to bankroll Hapsburg ambitions across Europe?

• 2. The Name Nobody Used

  ›

  When the Peace of Caltabellotta ended the War of the Sicilian Vespers in 1302, the diplomats agreed the mainland kingdom would be called the Kingdom of Sicily Citra Farum. Citra Farum simply means on this side of the Faro, a geographical description dressed up as a state title. Historians eventually settled on the Kingdom of Naples, after its capital city, and that name became near-universal in scholarship even though no government ever formally adopted it.

  The confusion deepened because the island across the strait kept the same name. For decades, two kingdoms both called themselves the Kingdom of Sicily, distinguishable only by noting whether you were speaking of the mainland or the island. The mainland kingdom was Sicily citra Farum; the island was Sicily ultra Farum, on the other side. When Alfonso the Magnanimous brought both territories under a single rule in 1442, this unwieldy geography became official usage, though his successor Ferdinand I preferred the blunter title King of Sicily, without any directional qualification.

  The Neapolitan intellectual Giuseppe Maria Galanti, writing in the 18th century, argued that the whole naming exercise was wrong and that Apulia was the more accurate national name for the territory. Nobody took him up on it. By the time both kingdoms finally merged in 1816, the combined state chose a different solution entirely, calling itself the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

• 3. The Angevin Inheritance

  ›

  Naples had been the capital of a duchy since the 7th century before Roger II of Sicily absorbed it in 1137. The Normans had been the first rulers to impose political unity across southern Italy, governing from Palermo, and their title of King of Sicily traced back to Antipope Anacletus II in 1130, later ratified by Pope Innocent II in 1139. Because the papacy had granted those titles, popes including Innocent III and Innocent IV claimed feudal rights over the kingdom. That claim would shadow every subsequent ruler.

  When the Sicilian Vespers uprising of 1282 forced Charles I of Sicily off the island, he kept the Italian mainland. His Angevin successors fought the Aragonese for Sicily until 1373, when Queen Joan I formally gave up the claim by the Treaty of Villeneuve. Joan's reign was already complicated; Louis the Great, the Angevin King of Hungary, had captured the kingdom several times between 1348 and 1352.

  Joan's larger mistake, in retrospect, was her choice of heir. Childless, she adopted Louis I, Duke of Anjou, passing over her cousin the Prince of Durazzo. That slight created a rival claimant. In 1382 the Prince of Durazzo had Joan murdered and seized the throne as Charles III of Naples. The two competing Angevin lines then spent decades contesting the kingdom, with the throne changing hands between them. Joanna II, who reigned from 1414 to 1435, twice adopted and repudiated Alfonso V of Aragon as her heir before ultimately settling the succession on René of Anjou, leaving the door open for Alfonso to contest that decision by force.

• 4. Spain Takes Control

  ›

  Alfonso V conquered Naples in 1442 and briefly reunified it with Sicily under Aragonese rule. At his death in 1458 the kingdoms separated again. Naples passed to his illegitimate son Ferdinand I, and the War of the Neapolitan Succession erupted almost immediately.

  Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494, citing an Angevin claim to Naples that his father had inherited in 1481 from Charles IV of Anjou. He expelled Alfonso II of Naples from the city in 1495, but Ferdinand II of Aragon backed his cousin's son Ferrantino, who recovered the throne. Ferrantino died in 1496 and his uncle Frederick IV succeeded him. Louis XII of France then reiterated the French claim, occupied Naples in 1501, and reached an agreement with Ferdinand of Aragon to partition the kingdom. The arrangement collapsed quickly over ownership of Neapolitan territories, and war resumed in 1502. Spanish troops led by Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordova pushed the French out of Calabria and Apulia entirely. Ferdinand was in full control of the kingdom by 1504.

  In 1544, Algerian corsairs sailed into the Bay of Naples and raided the city, taking an estimated 7,000 Neapolitan slaves. The episode illustrated how exposed the kingdom remained even under Spanish protection. France formally abandoned its claims to Naples by the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, and a cluster of five Tuscan coastal cities was added to the kingdom's territory under the Treaty of London in 1557 as the Stato dei Presidi.

• 5. The Cost of Empire

  ›

  By 1600, Naples had roughly 3 million inhabitants, making it the most populous holding of the Spanish Empire outside of Castile itself. That population was also the most heavily taxed. Spain used Naples as a financial engine: the kingdom dispatched troops to fight the Eighty Years' War in the Low Countries, paid about a third of military expenditures for the Spanish-controlled Duchy of Milan, and covered Spanish garrisons in Tuscany. The total bill ran to 800,000 ducats annually, approximately a third of the kingdom's revenues. Interest payments on the public debt consumed another 40 percent of tax income.

  The Franco-Spanish War from 1635 to 1659 made everything worse. Between 1631 and 1636 alone, Naples sent 53,500 soldiers and 3.5 million scudi to support the Spanish king. That contribution exceeded what Castile raised in the same period, despite Castile having twice the population. Naples provided 10,000 troops and 1,000 horses annually from 1630 to 1643, plus a 1 million ducat yearly subsidy. From 1612 to 1646, Neapolitan taxes tripled and the public debt quintupled. By the end, 57 percent of the kingdom's revenue went to interest payments, and 90 percent of taxes were being collected directly by state creditors, meaning the effective interest rate on borrowed money reached 70 percent annually.

  The state began selling whatever it could: prisons, forests, buildings, royal fortresses, and noble titles. In 1647 the people of Naples rose in revolt and established the Neapolitan Republic with French assistance. Spanish troops suppressed the uprising before the year was out, but the fiscal structure that had produced it remained unchanged.

• 6. The Bourbon Era and Napoleon

  ›

  The Treaty of Rastatt in 1714 transferred Naples from Spain to Charles VI, the Holy Roman Emperor. Austrian rule ended quickly. During the War of the Polish Succession in 1734, a Spanish army conquered both Naples and Sicily, and Charles, Duke of Parma, a younger son of King Philip V of Spain and the first Bourbon to rule in Spain, was installed as King of Naples and Sicily from 1735. When he inherited the Spanish throne in 1759, he passed Naples and Sicily to his younger son, Ferdinand IV.

  Ferdinand IV, as a Bourbon, was instinctively hostile to the French Revolution and to Napoleon. On the 29th of November 1798, Ferdinand briefly occupied Rome, effectively opening the War of the Second Coalition. French Revolutionary forces expelled him within the year. On the 23rd of December 1798, he fled Naples to Palermo as a French army advanced. In January 1799 the French installed a Parthenopaean Republic in Naples, but a peasant counter-revolution, inspired by the clergy, allowed Ferdinand to return to his capital. The Treaty of Florence in 1801 then compelled Ferdinand to grant France major concessions.

  Ferdinand's alliance with the Third Coalition against Napoleon in 1805 proved decisive in the wrong direction. After French victories at Austerlitz and at Campo Tenese over Neapolitan forces, Napoleon placed his brother Joseph on the throne of Naples in 1806, conferring the title Prince of Naples as a hereditary honor for Joseph's children and grandchildren. When Joseph was sent to Spain, Napoleon's sister Caroline and her husband Marshal Joachim Murat replaced him. Ferdinand held on in Sicily, where the British defended the island through the remainder of the Napoleonic Wars.

  After Napoleon's defeat in 1814, Murat negotiated with Austria to keep the throne. His position was precarious: Britain was hostile, and Austria's support was unreliable. When Napoleon returned for the Hundred Days in 1815, Murat joined him and issued the Rimini Proclamation, hoping that an alliance with Italian nationalists might save his kingdom. The Neapolitan War ended with an Austrian victory at the Battle of Tolentino. Murat fled, and Ferdinand IV was restored. Murat attempted to retake the throne but was captured and executed by firing squad in Pizzo, Calabria. In 1816, the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sicily merged into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

• 7. Scholars and Scientists

  ›

  Aloysius Lilius, born around 1510, was among the most consequential figures produced by the kingdom: he was the principal creator of the Gregorian calendar, the system that most of the world still uses to mark the days. His contemporary Giordano Bruno, born in 1548, advanced the Copernican model and was tried for heresy, a collision between the kingdom's intellectual energy and Rome's authority.

  Giambattista della Porta, born in 1535, was a Renaissance polymath who wrote Magia Naturalis, a wide-ranging inquiry into natural phenomena. Giovanni Battista Zupi, born around 1590, became the first astronomer to observe the phases of Mercury. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, born in 1608, extended Galileo's practice of testing hypotheses against observation into studies of the moons of Jupiter, animal mechanics, plant physiology, and the microscopic structure of blood.

  The tradition extended into medicine. Trotula, active in the 11th and 12th centuries, was an early pioneer of women's medicine. Domenico Cotugno, born in 1736, provided the first clinical definitions of cerebrospinal fluid and sciatica. Agostino Scilla, born in 1609, founded the modern scientific study of fossils. Annibale de Gasparis, born in 1819, discovered multiple asteroids. The list runs from the 11th century to the 19th, crossing medicine, astronomy, botany, mathematics, and philosophy. Vincenzo Cerulli, born in 1859, discovered the minor planet 704 Interamnia, a piece of work carried out long after the Kingdom of Naples had ceased to exist but rooted in the scientific culture it had sustained.

• 8. Life in the Kingdom

  ›

  The Italian historian Benedetto Croce traced a famous saying about Naples to a letter written in 1539 by Bernardino Daniello and sent to Alessandro Corvino: Naples was "a paradise inhabited by devils." In 1592 the phrase appeared outside Italy for the first time, in a letter by Sir Henry Wotton. In 1707 the German author Johann Andreas Bühel published an entire essay on the subject titled Regnum Neapolitanum Paradisus Est, Sed A Diabolis Habitatus. Croce noted that the saying was applied differently across the centuries, sometimes pointing to urban vice, sometimes to the alleged rudeness or mischievousness of the population.

  British travelers in the 18th and 19th centuries recorded a street custom that drew their attention: spaghetti eaten with bare hands in the streets of Naples. The practice became a tourist attraction. Visitors would give small change to the lazzaroni, who would rush to buy spaghetti and eat it in the open air. The custom survived the kingdom itself and appeared in Italian cinema well into the 20th century, including in the 1954 film Poverty and Nobility starring Totò.

  The kingdom's linguistic landscape was equally varied. Italian served as the official language for administration and education, but daily life ran on a range of dialects: Neapolitan in Campania, Calabrian in the south, Sicilian on the island. Greek-speaking minorities lived in Calabria and Puglia. Albanian speakers were present in Sicily and Calabria. Jewish communities in Naples and Palermo participated actively in commercial life until expulsion edicts in the 16th century, first under Ferdinand the Catholic in 1510 and then under Charles V in 1541, reduced those communities to near invisibility. The 13th-century chronicler Salimbene de Adam recorded a regional speech habit that distinguished Apulians and Sicilians, who used the familiar tu even when addressing the emperor, from Lombards, who used the courtesy pronoun voi even when speaking to a child.