17
Whether it was his blood or the plots formed against his life by the
barons which embittered and darkened his nature, it is certain that he
was equalled in ferocity by none among the princes of his time.
Jacob Burckhkardt, “The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy”
AS WELL AS the Emperor Frederick and King Manfred another royal ghost haunts this landscape, even if no Pugliese would ever wish to call King Ferrante an Apulian. “Besides hunting,” says Burckhardt, “his pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him, either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in the costume they wore in their lifetime. He would chuckle in talking of the captives with his friends, and made no secret whatever of the museum of mummies.” He is also credited with feeding prisoners to a pet crocodile, which he kept in a dungeon.
Ferrante’s coronation as King of mainland ‘Sicily’ (Naples) took place in the cathedral at Barletta on 4 February, 1459. In the know-ledge that everyone present was aware of his illegitimacy and being challenged for the crown by a rival, he made heralds throw silver coins into the crowd with an inscription stating that his cause was just; they had been minted out of reliquaries stolen from Monte Sant’ Angelo. A coronation banquet followed, in the hall of the great Hohenstaufen castle by the sea.
Meanwhile the Neapolitan Wars of the Roses dragged on. Ferrante’s father Alfonso of Aragon had routed his rival, Réné of Anjou – but Réné’s son, the Duke of Calabria, and the Angevin party remained extremely dangerous. In the circumstances Barletta was a good place for a coronation since it was near the Tavoliere, enabling Ferrante to get his hands on the revenue from the grazing tolls. He needed money desperately. John of Calabria had the support of France, and the French occupied Genoa, controlling its formidable fleet. He knew that the Regno’s haughty barons despised Ferrante as a young Catalan bastard who was widely rumoured to be the son of a Moorish slave. He also knew that the king’s brother-in-law, the Prince of Rossano, hated him for having committed incest with his sister. Even Ferrante’s uncle by marriage, the Prince of Tàranto, the greatest magnate in Apulia, was in close touch with the Angevins.
In autumn 1459 the Duke of Calabria landed north of Naples and many barons rose in rebellion. Even so, within a year Ferrante had almost beaten off the challenge, but then his army was unexpectedly defeated at the mouth of the River Sarno near Naples, and he fled with only twenty men-at-arms. He continued the struggle from Apulia, where in 1461 he suffered a fresh disaster, when large numbers of his troops and horses perished from thirst during a dreadful, waterless march across the Gargano. He took refuge in Barletta. Save for Trani, the rest of Apulia belonged to his enemies.
Both sides employed mercenaries, Iacopo Piccinino fighting for the Angevins, Alessandro Sforza for the king. By mid-summer 1461 the Prince of Tàranto occupied Andria, Giovinazzo and even Trani, while the Duke of Calabria held the Gargano. The tide soon turned, however, when Ferrante’s ally, George Castriota Skanderbeg, brought 800 tough Albanian veterans from across the Adriatic. In August the king besieged the castle of Orsara di Puglia near Troia. Calabria tried to relieve it, a skirmish turned into a pitched battle and suddenly the Angevins were routed beyond hope of recovery. The barons, including Tàranto and Rossano, changed sides. The rebellion was over.
“No one could ever tell what King Ferrante was thinking”, re-cords the French statesman Commynes. “Smiling in a friendly way, he would seize and destroy men... His kinsmen and close acquaintances have told me he knew neither mercy nor compassion.” After a show of reconciliation he had the Prince of Tàranto strangled and flung the Prince of Rossano into a dungeon, to await a nightmare death for a quarter of a century. He lured another old enemy, Iacopo Piccinino, to Naples, welcomed him like a brother, wined and dined him for a month, and then had him murdered – thrown from a window.
“Where money was concerned, he never showed pity or compassion for his people,” writes Commynes. He bred horses and pigs on a huge scale, his subjects being made to pasture his horses, lend him stallions and fatten his pigs. In oil-producing areas like Apulia, he bought the oil cheap, then forced the price up and compelled the public to buy it. He used the same method with corn. Loans were ruthlessly extracted from every rich nobleman.
Ferrante’s private life was equally swinish, especially after the death of his beautiful, highly intelligent queen, Isabella Chiaramonte. According to Commynes, “ he raped several women savagely.”
A paranoiac, he became as frightened of Turkish invasion as he was of revolts by his barons, and he added cannon-proof bastions to every castle on the Apulian coast. From his friend Skanderbeg, he realised that what had happened to Serbia and Albania might all too easily happen to Southern Italy, especially after the Turkish occupation of Òtranto in 1480.
The barons were terrified of his heir, the future King Alfonso II, who was even crueller than Ferrante. In 1485 a plot, the famous Congiura de’ Baroni (conspiracy of the barons), attracted many of the kingdom’s great dignitaries; they wanted Ferrante to be succeeded by his second son, the gentle Federigo. There was sporadic fighting during 1485–86, some of it in Apulia, and then the king made a peace which the plotters foolishly took at face-value.
One of the plot’s leaders was an Apulian baron, Francesco Coppolo from Gallipoli, Ferrante’s financial adviser, whom he had made Count of Sarno. The king invited several people involved in the plot to the marriage at Naples of Sarno’s son Marco to his own granddaughter. During the celebrations in the Castel Nuovo, all of them were arrested and beheaded soon after. A few months later several other magnates were seized, none of whom was ever seen again; according to Giannone, “it was generally believed that they had been strangled, put in sacks and thrown into the sea.” Among the victims were Ferrante’s brother-in-law, the Prince of Rossano, who had spent twenty-three years in prison, and Pirro del Balzo, Prince of Altamura.
Surprisingly, King Ferrante died a natural death in his own bed in 1494, after a stroke. He did so knowing that the French were about to invade the Regno and that his dynasty was doomed. The Apulians do not care to remember him, even if he was crowned at Barletta.