ABSTRACT
When Emperor Frederick II died in Castel Fiorentino in 1250, Innocent IV had lost his major opponent. ‘Let heaven exult and the earth rejoice’, the pope wrote to the people of Sicily, that ‘this terrible thunderstorm’ that was the reign of the Staufer had ended. 1 For many years after, the popes would resist the Hohenstaufen party and their various pretenders, sons and grandsons of the emperor, and their claims to the crown of Sicily and the empire. When, in 1268, Conradin, the emperor’s grandson and the last hope of the Hohenstaufen party, came south to fight Charles of Anjou, the king of Sicily by the grace of the Holy See, Pope Clement IV once more called the people of Italy to arms against ‘Frederick and his wretched offspring’, 2 to save Italy once more ‘from the raving madness of Frederick and his sons’. 3 ‘For now’, Clement wrote, ‘this breed of vipers has spawned a youthful kinglet, by the name of Conradin, a student of slander, who like the smallest infected twig contracted his malice from the tree’s infested root.’ 4
