tage in dealing with the pope. After long
negotiations he accepted the Sicilian and Neapolitan crowns, and in 1264
he sent a first expedition of Provencals to Italy; he also collected a
large army and navy in Provence and France with the help of King Louis,
and by an alliance with the cities of Lombardy was able to send part of
his force overland. Pope Clement IV. confirmed the Sicilian agreement on
conditions even more favourable to Charles, who sailed in 1265, and
conferred on the expedition all the privileges of a crusade. After
narrowly escaping capture by Manfred's fleet he reached Rome safely,
where he was crowned king of the Two Sicilies. The land army arrived
soon afterwards, and on the 26th of February 1266 Charles encountered
Manfred at Benevento, where after a hard-fought battle Manfred was
defeated and killed, and the whole kingdom was soon in Charles's
possession. Then Conradin, Frederick's grandson and last legitimate
descendant of the Hohenstaufen, came into Italy, where he found many
partisans among the Ghibellines of Lombardy and Tuscany, and among
Manfred's former adherents in the south. He gathered a large army
consisting partly of Germans and Saracens, but was totally defeated by
Charles at Tagliacozzo (23rd of August 1268); taken prisoner, he was
tried as a rebel and executed at Naples. Charles, in a spirit of the
most vindictive cruelty, had large numbers of Conradin's barons put to
death and their estates confiscated, and the whole population of several
towns massacred.

He was now one of the most powerful sovereigns of Europe, for besides
ruling over Provence and Anjou and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, he
was imperial vicar of Tuscany, lord of many cities of Lombardy and
Piedmont, and as the pope's favourite practically arbiter of the papal
states, especially during the interregnum between the death of Clement
IV. (1268) and the election of Gregory X. (1272). But his ambition was
by no means satisfied, and he even aspired to the crown of the East
Roman empire. In 1272 he took part with Louis IX. in a crusade to north
Africa, where the French king died of fever, and Charles, after
defeating the soldan of Tunis, returned to Sicily. The election of
Rudolph of Habsburg as German king after a long interregnum, and that of
Nicholas III. to the Holy See (1277), diminished Charles's power, for
the new pope set himself to compose the difference between Guelphs and
Ghibellines in the Italian cities, but