Around the Web — The Ghost of Conradin: An Appeal for Ghibelline Catholicism

Originally published at The Imaginative Conservative, this article may be of interest to our readers.

On October the twenty-ninth of the year 1268, Christendom bore witness to an outrage perpetrated on the Piazza del Mercato in Naples. A beautiful and charismatic teenager, dressed in black in anticipation of his own burial, was beheaded by the executioner of Charles of Anjou, himself a prince of the Capetian Dynasty and the younger brother of King Louis IX of France. Charles had invaded Italy at the behest of the Roman Church and, as its champion, had seized the Kingdom of Sicily from the deceased emperor’s bastard son (Manfred) on the field of Benevento (1266). And now, by executing this boy, Charles believed that he had finally settled the disputed Crown of the Two Sicilies upon his brow. The judges and executioner were Charles’ men, but behind them was the pope, who allegedly urged Charles on to this act—ruthless even by the standards of the day—with fierce imprecations: Vita Conradini, mors Caroli; vita Caroli, mors Conradini! (“Conradin’s life spells your death; your life requires his death!”). The boy’s crime? He had led an army of imperial loyalists from Germany across the Alps—to Rome, where he scattered the pope and his court in flight and received an emperor’s homage from the people there—and thence southward, where he aimed at reclaiming the Kingdom that had come to him by right of inheritance. The official indictment of Conradin read out on the piazza charged him as a bandit and rebel. But the boy’s true crime—for which Pope Clement IV urged Charles to bring him to the headsman’s block—was in his blood: for Conradin was the grandson of Emperor Frederick II, Stupor Mundi, and the last representative of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, that “brood of vipers” to whose destruction the papacy had dedicated itself for the past thirty years. Continue reading