ABSTRACT
Making peace with the Sienese in April 1271, Charles I of Anjou described himself as ‘most glorious king of Sicily, Duke of Apulia, Prince of Capua, Senator of Rome, count of Anjou, Provence and Forcalquier, vicar-general of the Roman empire in Tuscany through the Holy Roman Church. Grandiloquent though this was, by its omissions it revealed clearly the weakness of Charles position in Italy north of the Regno. Well before he turned his eyes to the Regno, Charles had looked to Piedmont as offering a land route between Nice and the markets of Lombardy. The land corridor between Provence and the Regno had to wait the reign of Charles II to be re-established. In the meantime, they supplied ships for Charles’s crossing to Rome in 1265; individual Genoese contributed substantially to the conquest of the Regno. Tuscany, where Charles was to be most successful, must have seemed the most obviously hostile part of Italy in 1265.
