Under the cover of darkness on 20 November 1423, the fleet of Alfonso V “the Magnanimous” of Aragon (reigned in Aragon 1416-1458; reigned in Naples 1442-1458) sailed to the city of Marseille and began firing on its wooden homes, monasteries, and port. Alfonso – king of Aragon and claimant to the throne of Naples – besieged the city as an act of revenge against Queen Johanna II of Naples due to the crisis of succession in Naples. Johanna, as a childless queen, adopted Alfonso as her heir in 1421 with the intention of passing her throne to the Crown of Aragon upon her death. After Alfonso’s attempts to abduct her between 1421 and 1423, Johanna revoked Alfonso’s adoption and, instead, made her cousin, Louis III of Anjou, her heir. As an act of revenge, Alfonso’s ships laid siege to Johanna’s territory in Marseille and stole the relic of Saint Louis of Toulouse, Johanna’s relative and a symbol of her dynasty. While this event and its broader consequences may seem like a skirmish between two Christian rulers between Italy and Iberia, Alfonso used his foothold in southern Italy to foster an image of himself as a crusader and a humanist king. For him – as well as other fifteenth century Aragonese kings – taking over territories in and beyond the Iberian Peninsula was associated with the concept of the “Reconquista” and the notion of crusading. As Alfonso crafted an image for himself in art, culture, and on coins, he presented himself as a beacon of kingship and Iberian culture in the heartland of southern Italy.[1]

Prior to the sack of Marseille, Alfonso travelled to Naples to officially be appointed as Johanna’s heir in a lavish ceremony. His position inside Naples drew fear in the hearts of Johanna and her supporters due, in part, to Alfonso’s focus on ridding the city of Johanna’s kinsman, Louis of Anjou, and making Naples into the seat of a new Aragonese kingdom. During this moment in the history of southern Italy, the cities of Palermo, Salerno, Naples, Catania, and Messina remained as multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious centres of life. For the Aragonese, and later Spain, taking hold of these cities was important for building on claims to sovereignty outside of the borders of the Iberian Peninsula and the Pyrenees. Between 1282 and 1442, the Crown of Aragon laid claim to cities in Italy in an effort to control the shipping routes and thrones of the central Mediterranean world.[2] As the geographic centre of Mediterranean life and a region rich in wheat, sugar, and wine (as well as other goods), controlling the entire southern half of the Italian Peninsula was central to maintaining lasting political control of the sea. As scholars such as Sarah Davis-Secord and Stephen R. Epstein have shown in their studies of premodern southern Italy, the region’s economic interests and geography made controlling Naples central to building an empire in the Mediterranean due to its place between the Near East and the Iberian Peninsula.[3]

            With this context in mind, Alfonso’s presence in Marseille and southern Italy was about taking control of the region and making an image for himself as a humanist and crusader king. Following Alfonso’s burning of Marseille in 1423, he returned to Aragon and his brother, Pere, remained in Naples to bolster his claim and prevent the further encroachment of Genoese ships from taking control of the city. Between 1423 and 1432, Alfonso remained in Aragon with the hope of regaining Johanna’s favor to resume his place as her only heir. It was not until after her death in 1435 that Alfonso could mount a second invasion of Naples and oust her chosen successor, René of Anjou.[4] Alfonso’s second invasion would prove unsuccessful since it ended with his own capture by Neapolitan forces and his imprisonment in Milan.

Following Alfonso’s release from Milan – due, in part, to his alliance with the Sforza rulers of Milan – he once again returned to Naples to besiege the city and the nearby towns of Gaeta and Sorrento. After taking control of many of the cities of the Kingdom of Naples by 1441, Alfonso and his supporters were able to lay siege to Naples itself and drive King René north to Aix-en-Provence. After twenty years of conquest, imprisonment, and naval warfare, the Aragonese were finally able to bring Naples into the Crown and end the rule of the Angevin dynasty in the Italian South. As the newly triumphant king of Naples, Alfonso moved his court from the city of Barcelona to Naples – where it remained for the duration of his life. Barcelona, Valencia, and his remaining Iberian territories were governed by his wife, Maria of Castile, as his lieutenant general (vicarial generalis) until his 1458 death.[5]

As a new Italian king, Alfonso worked hard to present himself as a humanist and Renaissance leader. While scholars such as Alan Ryder, John Paul Heil, and Jerry Bentley have studied the ways in which Alfonso, as both a conqueror and a king, used art, humanist culture, and literature to establish his control of southern Italy, it is important to consider how this image was used in respect to the crusades in Iberian lands and the broader Mediterranean.[6]

Since the election of the Trastámara family in Aragon in the aftermath of the Aragonese Interregnum (1410-1412), the Trastámara leaned into the image of themselves as conquerors of the Iberian frontier and in opposition to the remaining Emirs in the Emirate of Granada. As king of Naples, Alfonso’s position as one of the three Christian rulers in Iberia carried over into how he presented himself in art, on coins, and in manuscripts in Italian libraries. Like many other Renaissance kings in Italy and broader Western Europe, Alfonso had coins minted that represented him in the style of a Roman emperor with his profile on display. In several surviving stone sculptures, portraits, and coins now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Library, and the Archive of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona, Alfonso can be seen wearing armour and looking like both a Medici statesman and a Roman Emperor:

In presenting himself as a Roman conqueror, Alfonso was both asserting his claim to Italy – as a Roman – and styling himself in a long history of conquerors in the Iberian “Reconquista” mythology.[7] By the mid-fifteenth century when Alfonso conquered and ruled Naples, thousands of Muslims and Jews were still living in the cities of southern Italy from the territory south of Rome to the island of Sicily. Much like the conquests of territory in Iberia that had Muslim and Jewish residents, the framing of Alfonso’s conquests in Italy must be understood in the context of broader Iberian efforts to “reconquer” territory and bring it under Christian rule. While the rulers of Angevin Italy were Christian themselves, many of their residents were neither Christian nor Latin. Alfonso’s image and sponsoring of classical texts in the Kingdom of Naples can be seen to represent himself as both a figure with a long-standing claim to the territory and one that viewed himself as a Christian conqueror. Much like his Spanish successors after the union of Aragon and Castile, fashioning himself as a Roman figure was both a way to assert a claim to sovereignty and a way to Christianize a formerly multireligious land.

Therefore, understanding Alfonso’s conquests and respective framing of himself as a “Renaissance figure” must be understood in this wider Iberian project of conquest and religious subordination. By the end of the fifteenth century when Alfonso’s branch of the Trastámara family united with the Castilian branch of the same family, the inquisition that would come to characterise early modern Spain was brought to the Italian Peninsula through Naples and Palermo. The Italian possessions of Alfonso’s that were carved out for Aragon between 1421 and 1442, became sites of religious violence, torture, forced conversion, and persecution of southern Italy’s once large Muslim and Jewish population. The reign of Alfonso as a conqueror and a new figure in southern Italian history, ultimately, became the first in a long history of Iberian rulers to persecute the once multicultural, multilinguistic, and multireligious spaces of the Italian South and the broader Crown of Aragon.

Further Reading:

Catlos, Brian A. Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050-1614. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Davis-Secord, Sarah. Where Three Worlds Met: Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean.Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017.

Earenfight, Theresa. "Maria of Castile, Ruler or Figurehead? A Preliminary Study in Aragonese             Queenship." Mediterranean Studies 4 (1994): 45-61.

Earenfight, Theresa. The King’s Other Body: Maria of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Epstein, Stephan R. An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

García Sanjuán, Alejandro. "Weaponizing Historical Knowledge: The Notion of Reconquista in Spanish Nationalism." Imago temporis: Medium Aevum: 14, 2020 (2020): 133-162.

Metcalfe, Alex. The Muslims of Medieval Italy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 

Ryder, Alan. Alfonso the Magnanimous: King of Aragon, Naples, and Sicily, 1396-1458. Oxford:   Oxford University Press, 1990.

Taylor, Julie. Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony of Lucera. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005.

[1] For more on the 1423 attack on Marseille see: Susan Alice McDonough, Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community in Late Medieval Marseille (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Abigail Agresta, The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022); Daniel Lord Smail, Imagined Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

[2] 1282 was the first year of the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282-1302) that pitted the Angevin rulers of Sicily against the invading Aragonese House of Barcelona. This war ended with a division of Southern Italy into two kingdoms: the Kingdom of Sicily (Trinacria) based on the island of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples based in the territory south of Lazio. While this war officially ended in 1302, the Angevin and Aragonese dynasties continued to fight in battles on and off throughout the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

[3] Sarah Davis-Secord, Where Three Worlds Met: Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017) and Stephan R. Epstein, An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[4] René became Johanna’s heir after the death of Louis III of Anjou in 1434. René was named her heir officially in her will and served both as king of Naples and count of Provence (where Marseille is) after her death.

[5] While Maria’s rule is outside of the scope of this blog, you can learn more about it in Theresa Earenfight’s 2010 monograph and 1994 article: Theresa Earenfight, The King’s Other Body: Maria of Castile and the Crown of Aragon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Theresa Earenfight, "Maria of Castile, Ruler or Figurehead? A Preliminary Study in Aragonese Queenship." Mediterranean Studies 4 (1994): 45-61.

[6] John-Paul Heil, "Assassinations, Mercenaries, and Alfonso V of Aragon as Crusader King in the Thought of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini." The Catholic Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2021): 325-348; Jerry H. Bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Alan Ryder, Alfonso the Magnanimous: King of Aragon, Naples, and Sicily, 1396-1458 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

[7] Modern scholars working in the fields of Islamic and Iberian history have shown how flawed and colonial the concept of a “Reconquista” is in scholarship. For an overview of this debate see: Jesús Torrecilla, "Spanish Identity: Nation, Myth, and History." Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 33, no. 2 (2009): 2; Alejandro García Sanjuán, "Weaponizing Historical Knowledge: The Notion of Reconquista in Spanish Nationalism." Imago temporis: Medium Aevum: 14, 2020 (2020): 133-162.