Summary

Kingdom of Naples (Latin: Regnum Neapolitanum) is the name by which the ancient Italian state that existed from the 14th to the 19th century and covered all of southern Italy (excluding Sicily) is known in modern historiography.

Its official name was Regnum Siciliae citra Pharum, the meaning of which is "Kingdom of Sicily on this side of the Lighthouse," in reference to the Messina Lighthouse, and contrasted with the contemporary Regnum Siciliae ultra Pharum, that is, "Kingdom of Sicily beyond the Lighthouse," which extended over the entire island of Sicily. In Norman times, the entire Kingdom of Sicily was organized into two macro-areas: the first, which included the Sicilian and Calabrian territories, constituted the Kingdom of Sicily proper; the second, which included the remaining peninsular territories, constituted the Duchy of Apulia and the Principality of Capua, when the territory was an integral part of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily.

The latter state was established in 1130, with the conferral on Roger II of Altavilla of the title of Rex Siciliae by Antipope Anacletus II, a title confirmed in 1139 by Pope Innocent II. The new state thus insisted on all the territories of the Mezzogiorno, attesting itself as the most extensive of the ancient Italian states; its regulatory structure was definitively formalized as early as the Assizes of Ariano in 1140-1142. Thereafter, with the stipulation of the Peace of Caltabellotta in 1302, followed the formal division of the kingdom into two: Regnum Siciliae citra Pharum (known in historiography as the Kingdom of Naples) and Regnum Siciliae ultra Pharum (also known, for a brief period, as the Kingdom of Trinacria, and known in historiography as the Kingdom of Sicily). Therefore, this treaty can be considered the conventional founding act of the political entity known today as the Kingdom of Naples.

The kingdom, as a sovereign state, saw a great intellectual, economic, and civic flowering, both under the Angevin dynasty (1282-1442) and following the Aragonese conquest of the Neapolitan throne by Alfonso I. (At that time, the capital, Naples, was celebrated for the splendor of its court and the patronage of its rulers. In 1504, a united Spain defeated France in the context of the Italian Wars, and the Kingdom of Naples was from then on dynastically linked to the Hispanic monarchy along with that of Sicily, until 1707: both were governed as two separate viceroyships but with the label ultra et citra Pharum, and with the consequent historiographical and territorial distinction between the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sicily. Following the Peace of Utrecht the Neapolitan realm came to be administered, for a brief period (1713-1734), by the Habsburg monarchy of Austria. Although the two reunited kingdoms gained independence under Charles of Bourbon as early as 1735, the final legal unification of both kingdoms did not occur until December 1816, with the founding of the sovereign state of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

The territory of the Kingdom of Naples initially corresponded to the sum of those of the current Italian regions of Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Apulia, Basilicata, and Calabria, and also included some areas of today's southern and eastern Latium belonging until 1927 to Campania, that is, to the ancient province of Terra di Lavoro (Gaeta district and Sora district), and to Abruzzo.

The territorial unity of the South: Roger II and the Norman dynasty

The island of Sicily and the whole of southern Italy south of the Tronto and Liri rivers were the territories that formed the Kingdom of Sicily, formed de facto in 1127-1128 when the Count of Sicily, Roger II of Altavilla, unified under his rule the various Norman fiefdoms of southern Italy (Duchy of Apulia and Calabria) with Palermo as capital.

Under the title of King of Sicily he was acclaimed by the first session of the Sicilian parliament and subsequently crowned by Antipope Anacletus II as early as 1130; later legitimized, in 1139, by Pope Innocent II. At the end of the 12th century, following the defeat of Frederick Barbarossa, the Papal States had initiated with Pope Innocent III a policy of expansionism of temporal power; Pope Innocent IV, in line with his predecessor, claimed the feudal rights of the Church State over the Kingdom of Sicily, since the regal titles over the State had been assigned to the Normans (Roger II) by Innocent II.

Swabian dynasty period

However, when Henry VI, son of Barbarossa, married Constance of Hauteville, the last heir to the Kingdom of Sicily, the territory of the kingdom came under the Swabian crown, becoming a strategic center of the Hohenstaufen's imperial policy in Italy, particularly under Frederick II.

The Swabian ruler, in the dual position of Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, was one of the leading figures in medieval European history: he was mainly concerned with the Kingdom of Sicily, delegating to the Germanic princes part of his powers in the territories beyond the Alps. The sovereign's main ambition was to create a cohesive and efficient state: feudal nobility and cities were to answer solely to the king, in a highly centralized state governed by a capillary bureaucratic and administrative apparatus, which found its greatest expression in the constitutions of Melfi.

During Frederick II's reign, the new trade routes in the direction of Tuscany, Provence, and ultimately Europe, were always more advantageous and profitable than those in the southern Mediterranean, where trade was often hampered by Saracen interference and the inconstancy of several Islamic kingdoms. Frederick II founded the Studium in Naples, or the oldest state university in Europe, designed to train the minds of the kingdom's ruling class.

Upon Frederick's death (1250), his son Manfred assumed the regency of the kingdom. Widespread discontent and resistance from the baronial and city classes to the new ruler eventually resulted in a violent uprising against the impositions coming from the royal court. In this the rioters found support from Pope Innocent IV, who was eager to extend his authority in the Mezzogiorno. Both feudal lords and the typically urban class of bureaucrats, notaries and officials desired more independence and breathing space from monarchical centralism; therefore, Manfred attempted mediation. The new ruler addressed the conflicts with a determined policy of administrative decentralization that tended to integrate not only the baronial classes but also the cities into the management of the territory.

While not yielding to the demands for autonomy coming from the urban environment, the new ruler valued the function of cities as administrative poles much more than his father, also encouraging the urbanization of the barons; this led to the emergence, alongside the older baronial nobility, of a new urban bureaucratic class, which, with a view to social advancement, invested part of its earnings in the purchase of extensive landed estates. Such changes in the composition of the urban ruling class also induced new relations between the cities and the crown, heralding the profound transformations of the later Angevin age.

Manfred also continued to legitimize Ghibelline policies, directly controlling the "Apostolica Legazia di Sicilia," a political-legal body in which the administration of dioceses and ecclesiastical patrimony was directly managed by the sovereign, hereditary and without papal mediation. During these years Pope Innocent IV supported a series of revolts in Campania and Apulia that led to the direct intervention of Emperor Conrad IV, Manfred's elder half-brother, who finally brought the kingdom back under imperial jurisdiction. Conrad IV was succeeded by his son Conradin of Swabia, and while the latter was still a minor, the government of Sicily and the Apostolic Legation was taken over by Manfred: he, excommunicated several times for disagreements with the papacy, went so far as to proclaim himself king of Sicily.

When Innocent IV died, the new French-born pope Urban IV, claiming feudal rights over the Kingdom of Sicily and fearing the possibility of the kingdom's final union with the Holy Roman Empire, summoned Charles of Anjou, count of Anjou, Maine and Provence, and brother of the king of France, Louis IX, to Italy: in 1266 the bishop of Rome appointed him rex Siciliae. The new ruler from France then set out to conquer the kingdom, defeating first Manfred at the Battle of Benevento, and then Conradin of Swabia at Tagliacozzo on August 23, 1268.

The Hohenstaufen, whose male line had died out with Corradino, were eliminated from the Italian political scene while the Angevins secured the crown of the Kingdom of Sicily. The defeat of Corradino, however, was the premise of important developments, because the Sicilian cities, which had welcomed Charles of Anjou benevolently after the Battle of Benevento, had again switched to supporting the Ghibelline side. The anti-Angevin turn on the island, motivated by the excessive fiscal pressure of the new government, had no immediate political consequences, but it was the first step toward the subsequent War of the Vespers.

The great financial speculation that the war had entailed (the Angevins had indebted themselves to Guelph bankers in Florence), led to a series of new taxations and levies throughout the kingdom, which were added to those the king imposed when he had to finance a series of military campaigns in the East, in the hope of subjecting the remnants of the ancient Byzantine empire to his rule.

The advent of Charles I on the throne, who became king through Papal investiture and by right of conquest, did not, however, mark a real break with the rule of the Swabian dynasty sovereigns, but took place within a framework of substantial stability of monarchical institutions and in particular of the fiscal system. The strengthening of the governmental apparatus implemented earlier by Frederick II in fact offered the Angevin dynasty a solid state structure on which to rest its power. The first king of Angevin origin preserved without discontinuity the elective magistracies of the royal apparatus and in the central administration integrated already existing structures with institutions traditionally operating in the French monarchy.

The legacy of the organization of the Frederician state, reused by Charles I, however, again presented the problem of the joint opposition of the cities and the feudal nobility-the same forces that during Manfred's reign had supported the French dynasty against the Swabians. The Angevin ruler, despite reminders from the Pope, ruled with strong absolutism, heedless of the claims of the nobility and the urban class, which he never consulted except for the increase in taxation due to the war against Corradino.

With the death of Corradino at the hands of the Angevins, the Swabian rights to the throne of Sicily passed to one of Manfred's daughters-Constance of Hohenstaufen, who had married the King of Aragon Peter III on July 15, 1262. The Ghibelline party of Sicily that had previously organized around the Hohenstaufen Swabians, greatly displeased with the Angevin dynasty's sovereignty over the island, sought the support of Constance and the Aragonese to organize a revolt against the established power.

Thus began the revolt of the Vespers. This has long been considered the expression of a spontaneous popular rebellion against the burden of taxation and the tyrannical rule "of the Angevin mala Signoria," as Dante Alighieri called it; but this interpretation has now given way to an assessment more attentive to the complexity of events and the multiplicity of actors on the field.

A central role must undoubtedly be attributed to the initiative of the aristocracy strengthened in the Swabian age, more firmly rooted in Sicily, which felt its own positions of power threatened by the choices of the new ruler: the preference given by the Angevins to Naples, their very close ties with the Pope and the Florentine merchants, and the tendency to entrust important government functions to men from the peninsular South.

Prominent among these opponents in terms of activism were the emigrant aristocratic families who, after the execution of the young Corradino, had had to relinquish rights and property, but who enjoyed the support of the Ghibelline cities of central and northern Italy. Moreover, with the loss of Sicily's centrality, the productive and commercial forces, which had at first supported the Angevin expedition, also found themselves in sharp contrast to the growing hegemony of the peninsular Mezzogiorno.

Also not to be underestimated is the interference of external agents such as the Aragonese monarchy, at that time in great opposition to the Franco-Angevin bloc, the Ghibelline cities, and even the Byzantine empire, which was greatly concerned by the expansionist plans of Charles, who had already wrested Corfu and Durazzo from him by then parts of the Kingdom of Sicily.

The Wars of the Vespers

The popular anti-Angevin uprising began in Palermo on March 31, 1282 and spread throughout Sicily. Peter III of Aragon landed in Trapani in August 1282 and defeated the army of Charles of Anjou during the Siege of Messina, which lasted a full 5 months from May to September 1282. The Sicilian Parliament crowned Peter and his wife Constance, daughter of Manfred; in fact, from that moment there were two sovereigns with the title "king of Sicily": the Aragonese, by investiture of the Sicilian Parliament, and the Angevin, by papal investiture.

On September 26, 1282, Charles of Anjou finally escaped from the field of arms in Calabria. A few months later, the reigning pope Martin IV excommunicated Peter III. Nonetheless, it was no longer possible for Charles to return to the Sicilian archipelago, and the Angevin royal seat was itinerant between Capua and Apulia for several years, until with Charles I's successor, Charles II of Anjou, Naples was finally chosen as the new seat of the monarchy and central institutions on the continent. With Charles II the dynasty had its fixed seat in the Maschio Angioino.

The Angevin administration

Although Angevin ambitions in Sicily were inhibited by numerous military defeats, Charles I aimed to consolidate his power in the continental part of the kingdom, grafting onto the previous Guelph baronial policy some of the reforms that the old Swabian state was already implementing to strengthen the territorial unity of the Mezzogiorno. From the first Lombard invasions much of the kingdom's economy, in the principality of Capua, in Abruzzo and in the Contado di Molise, was run by Benedictine monasteries (Casauria, San Vincenzo al Volturno, Montevergine, Montecassino), which in many cases had increased their privileges to the point of becoming true local lordships, with territorial sovereignty and often in contrast with neighboring secular feudal lords. The Norman invasion first, the struggles between the antipope Anacletus II, supported among others by the Benedictines, and Pope Innocent II, and finally the birth of the kingdom of Sicily undermined the foundations of the Benedictine feudal tradition.

After 1138, having defeated Anacletus II, Innocent II and the Norman dynasties stimulated Cistercian monasticism in southern Italy; many Benedictine monasteries were converted to the new rule, which, by limiting the accumulation of material goods to the resources needed for artisanal and agricultural production, precluded the possibility for the new cenobia to establish feudal estates and lordships: the new order therefore invested resources in agrarian reforms (land reclamation, tillage, granges), crafts, mechanics and social welfare, with valetudinaria (hospitals), pharmacies and rural churches.

French monasticism then found support from the old Norman feudal lords, who could thus actively counter the temporal ambitions of the local clergy: On this compromise was grafted the policy of the new ruler Charles I; he founded by his own hand the Cistercian abbeys of Realvalle (Vallis Regalis) in Scafati and Santa Maria della Vittoria in Scurcola Marsicana, and fostered the filiations of the historic abbeys of Sambucina (Calabria), Sagittario (Basilicata), Sterpeto (Terra di Bari), Ferraria (principality of Capua), Arabona (Abruzzo) and Casamari (Papal States), while spreading the cult of the Assumption of Mary in the Mezzogiorno. He also granted new counties and duchies to French soldiers who supported his conquest of the Neapolitan area.

The main monastic centers of economic production had thus been freed from the administration of feudal estates, and the unity of the state, having eradicated Benedictine political authority, was now based on the ancient Norman baronies and the military set-up dating back to Frederick II. Charles I in fact preserved the ancient Frederician justicierates, increasing the power of their respective presidents: each province had a justicier who, in addition to being the head of an important court, with two courts, was also the apex of the management of the local financial patrimony and the administration of the treasury, derived from the taxation of the universitates (communes). Abruzzi was divided into Aprutium citra (many of the Swabian cities, such as Sulmona, Manfredonia and Melfi, lost their central role in the kingdom in favor of smaller cities or old decayed capitals such as Sansevero, Chieti and L'Aquila, while in the territories that had been Byzantine (Calabria, Apulia) the political order initiated by the Norman conquest was consolidated: peripheral administration, which the Greeks entrusted to a widespread system of cities and dioceses, between the patrimonium publicum of Byzantine officials and the p. ecclesiae of the bishops, from Cassanum to Gerace, from Barolum to Brundisium, was definitively replaced by the feudal order of the landed nobility. In the Mezzogiorno, the seats of the justices (Salerno, Cosenza, Catanzaro, Reggio, Taranto, Bari, Sansevero, Chieti, L'Aquila, and Capua) or of important archdioceses (Benevento and Acheruntia), as well as the new capital, remained the only inhabited centers endowed with political weight or financial, economic, and cultural activities.

However, Charles lost, by papal measures, the last regalia in the Neapolitan region, such as the sovereign's right to appoint royal administrators in dioceses with vacant sees: these privileges until then in the Mezzogiorno had survived the Gregorian reform, which established that only the pontiff should enjoy the power to appoint and depose bishops (libertas Ecclesiae).

On January 7, 1285, Charles I of Anjou died and was succeeded by Charles II. With this ruler's accession to the throne of Naples, royal policy took a turn: from that time on, as a result of the almost constant belligerence between the kingdoms of Sicily (Naples) and Trinacria (Sicily), the policy of the Angevin dynasty was primarily concerned with gaining a good consensus within the kingdom. In fact, privileges to the feudal nobility, indispensable to the war cause, were increased on the one hand, but on the other, as if to balance the implementation of feudal potentates, new freedoms and autonomies were granted by the sovereigns to the cities, in varying degrees according to their importance. These could now elect jurors, or judges with administrative and supervisory functions, and mayors, representatives of the population to the sovereign. Thus came to be created, in Naples and other urban realities of the Mezzogiorno, a growing conflict between the city nobility and the popolo grasso to whom, later, King Robert granted the possibility of entering directly into the administration of the state.

In some ways, a situation was created, at least in the main cities of the kingdom, resembling the contrast that also existed in the communes and lordships of central-northern Italy, but the king's peace acted as balancer and the figure of the sovereign as arbiter, since the king's authority was unquestionable anyway. Thus was configured a balancing game between city and rural-feudal realities skillfully managed by the monarchy, which under the aegis of Robert of Anjou came to regulate and sharply delineate the spheres of influence of feudal nobility, city and royal domain.

In Sicily, on the other hand, upon the death of Peter III, king of Aragon and Sicily, rule over the island was disputed by his two sons Alfonso III and James I of Sicily. The latter signed the Treaty of Anagni on June 12, 1295, ceding feudal rights over Sicily to Pope Boniface VIII: the pontiff in return granted James I Corsica and Sardinia, thus conferring sovereignty of Sicily on Charles II of Naples, heir to the title of rex Siciliae on the Angevin side.

Birth of the two kingdoms

The Treaty of Anagni, however, did not lead to a lasting peace; when James I left Sicily to rule Aragon, the Palermo throne was entrusted to his brother Frederick III, who led yet another rebellion for the island's independence and was later crowned king of Sicily by Boniface VIII. (To retain the royal title, for the first time recognized by the Holy See, he signed with Charles of Valois, called by Martin IV to restore order in Sicily, the Peace of Caltabellotta in 1302.

The stipulation of the Peace of Caltabellotta was followed by the formal distinction of two kingdoms of Sicily: Regnum Siciliae citra Pharum (Kingdom of Naples) and Regnum Siciliae ultra Pharum (Kingdom of Trinacria). Thus the long period of the Wars of the Vespers came to a definitive end. They were thus formally separated from the old Norman-Swabian Kingdom of Sicily, the Kingdom of Trinacria, under the control of the Aragonese with capital Palermo, and the Kingdom of Naples with capital Naples, under the control of the Angevins. Charles II at this point renounced his reconquest of Palermo and began a series of legislative and territorial interventions to adapt Naples to its role as the new capital of the state: he enlarged the city walls, reduced the tax burden and established the Grand Court of the Vicarage there.

In 1309 Charles II's son Robert of Anjou was crowned king of Naples by Clement V, still, however, with the title rex Siciliae, as well as rex Hierosolymae.

With this ruler the Angevin-Napolitan dynasty reached its apogee. Robert of Anjou, known as "the Wise Man" and "peacemaker of Italy," strengthened the hegemony of the Kingdom of Naples, placing himself and his realm at the head of the Guelph League, opposing the imperial claims of Henry VII and Ludwig the Bavarian on the rest of the peninsula, even succeeding through his shrewd and prudent policy to become lord of Genoa.

In 1313 the war between the Angevins and Aragonese resumed; the following year, the Sicilian parliament, disregarding the agreement signed in the Peace of Caltabellotta, confirmed Frederick with the title of king of Sicily and no longer of Trinacria, and recognized his son Peter as heir to the kingdom. Robert attempted the reconquest of Sicily following the joint attack by imperial and Aragonese forces on the Kingdom of Naples and the Guelph League. Although his troops came to occupy and sack Palermo, Trapani and Messina, the act was more punitive than one of concrete conquest; in fact, the Angevin ruler was unable to continue in a long war of attrition and was forced to give up.

Under his leadership, commercial activities intensified, lodges and guilds flourished, and Naples became the most vibrant city of the Late Middle Ages in Italy, thanks to the effect of mercantile activity around the new port, which became perhaps the busiest on the peninsula, attracting the localization of small and large commercial enterprises, operating in the fields of textiles and drapery, goldsmithing and spices. This was also due to the presence of Florentine, Genoese, Pisan and Venetian bankers, moneychangers and insurers, who were willing to take risks of no small magnitude in order to secure quick and substantial profits in moving the economy of an increasingly cosmopolitan capital.

Moreover, the ruler, in his constant function as arbiter between the nobility and the fat people, reduced the number of noble seats to limit their influence for the benefit of the populares.

During these years the city of Naples strengthened its political clout in the peninsula, even as it developed its humanistic vocation. Robert of Anjou was highly esteemed by his contemporary Italian intellectuals such as Villani, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Simone Martini. Petrarch himself wanted to be questioned by him in order to attain the laurel and called him "The wisest king since Solomon." In contrast, he never enjoyed the sympathies of the pro-imperial Dante Alighieri, who called him "King of a sermon."

The ruler gathered an important group of scholastic theologians in Naples in a school, not precluded from the influences of Averroism. He entrusted Nicholas Deoprepius of Reggio Calabria with the translation of the works of Aristotle and Galen for the library in Naples. From Calabria also came to the new capital Leonzio Pilato and the Basilian Barlaamo of Seminara, a celebrated theologian who dealt in those years in Italy with the doctrinal disputes that had arisen around the filioque and the Nicene creed: the monk was also in contact with Petrarch, whose Greek teacher he was, and Boccaccio, who met him precisely in Naples.

Also important from an artistic point of view was the opening of a Giotto school and Giotto's presence in the city to fresco the Palatine Chapel in the Maschio Angioino and numerous noble palaces, and under Robert of Anjou the Gothic style spread throughout the Kingdom; in Naples the King built the Basilica of Santa Chiara, the shrine of the Angevin dynasty. The Kingdom of Naples distinguished itself in that period by a completely original culture that combined Italic and Mediterranean elements with peculiarities from the courts of Central Europe, finding a synthesis between the cult of chivalric values, Provençal poetry and typically Italic artistic, poetic currents and customs.

The peace between the Angevins and the Aragonese.

King Robert designated his son Charles of Calabria as his heir, but after the latter's death, the ruler was forced to leave the throne to his young niece, Joan of Anjou, daughter of Charles. Meanwhile, a first peace agreement was reached between the Angevins and the Aragonese, called the "Peace of Catania" on November 8, 1347. But the war between Sicily and Naples would not end until August 20, 1372 after a full ninety years, with the Treaty of Avignon signed by Joan of Anjou and Frederick IV of Aragon with the assent of Pope Gregory XI. The treaty sanctioned the mutual recognition of the monarchies and their respective territories-Naples to the Angevins and Sicily to the Aragons, extending the recognition of royal titles to their respective lines of succession as well.

Robert's heir, Joan I of Naples, had married Andrew of Hungary, Duke of Calabria and brother of Hungary's King Louis I, both descendants of the Neapolitan Angevins (Charles II). Following a mysterious conspiracy Andrea was killed. To avenge his death, on November 3, 1347, the king of Hungary descended on Italy with the intention of ousting Joan I of Naples. Although the Hungarian ruler had repeatedly demanded from the Holy See the deposition of Joan I, the papal government, then residing in Avignon and politically linked to the French dynasty, always confirmed Joan's title despite the military expeditions the Hungarian king undertook to Italy. The queen of Naples, for her part, lacking uterine lineage, adopted Charles of Durazzo (grandson of Louis I of Hungary) as her son and heir to the throne until Naples, too, was directly involved in the political and dynastic clashes that followed the Western Schism: a pro-French party and a local party were directly pitted against each other at court and in the city, the former aligned in favor of the antipope Clement VII and headed by Queen Joan I, the latter in favor of the Neapolitan pope Urban VI, who found support from Charles of Durazzo and the Neapolitan aristocracy. Joan then deprived Charles of Durazzo of succession rights in favor of Louis I of Anjou, brother of the king of France, who was crowned king of Naples (rex Siciliae) by Clement VII in 1381. He, on the death of Joan I (killed by order of Charles of Durazzo himself in the Castle of Muro Lucano in 1382), however, descended unsuccessfully into Italy against Charles of Durazzo, and died there in 1384. Charles remained sole ruler, and left Naples to his children Ladislaus and Joanna to then travel to Hungary to claim the throne: in the transalpine kingdom he was assassinated in a conspiracy.

Before the two heirs Ladislaus and Joan reached maturity, the Campanian city fell to Louis I of Anjou's son Louis II, crowned king by Clement VII on November 1, 1389. The local nobility opposed the new ruler, and in 1399 Ladislaus I was able to assert his rights to the throne militarily by defeating the French king. The new king was able to restore Neapolitan hegemony in southern Italy by intervening directly in conflicts throughout the peninsula: in 1408, called by Pope Innocent VII to quell Ghibelline revolts in the papal capital, he occupied much of Latium and Umbria, obtaining the administration of the province of Campagna and Marittima, and then occupied Rome and Perugia under the pontificate of Gregory XII. In 1414, after finally defeating Louis II of Anjou, the last ruler at the head of a league organized by the antipope Alexander V and aimed at stemming Parthenopean expansionism, the king of Naples arrived at the gates of Florence. With his death, however, there were no successors to continue his endeavors, and the boundaries of the kingdom returned within the historical perimeter; Ladislaus' sister, however, Joan II of Naples, at the end of the Western Schism, obtained final recognition from the Holy See of the royal title for her family.

Having succeeded Ladislaus in 1414 her sister Joan, she married James II of Bourbon on August 10, 1415: after her husband attempted to acquire the royal title personally, a revolt in 1418 forced him to return to France where he retired to a Franciscan monastery. Joan was the sole queen in 1419, but the expansionist aims in the Naples area of the Angevins of France did not cease. Pope Martin V called Louis III of Anjou to Italy against Joan, who did not want to recognize the fiscal rights of the Papal States over the kingdom of Naples. The French threat therefore brought the kingdom of Naples closer to the Aragonese court, so much so that the queen adopted Alfonso V of Aragon as her son and heir until Naples was under siege by Louis III's troops. When the Aragonese liberated the city in 1423, occupying the kingdom and averting the French threat, relations with the local court were not easy, so much so that Joan, having banished Alfonso V, bequeathed the kingdom upon his death to Renato of Anjou, brother of Louis III

With the heirless death of Joanna II of Anjou-Durazzo, the territory of the kingdom of Naples was disputed by Renato of Anjou, who claimed sovereignty as the brother of Louis of Anjou, adopted son of the queen of Naples Joanna II, and Alfonso V king of Trinacria, Sardinia and Aragon, previous adopted son later repudiated by the same queen. The ensuing war involved the interests of other states on the peninsula, including Filippo Maria Visconti's seigniory of Milan, which intervened first in favor of the Angevins (Battle of Ponza), then definitively with the Aragonese.

In 1442 Alfonso V conquered Naples and assumed its crown (Alfonso I of Naples), temporarily reuniting the two kingdoms in his person (the Kingdom of Sicily would revert to Aragon upon his death) and establishing himself in the Campanian city and imposing himself, not only militarily, on the Italian political scene.

Then, in 1447, Filippo Maria Visconti designated Alfonso heir to the duchy of Milan, formally enriching the heritage of the Aragonese crown. The nobility of the Lombard city, however, fearing annexation to the kingdom of Naples, proclaimed Milan a free commune and established the Ambrosian republic; the resulting Aragonese and Neapolitan claims were opposed by France, which in 1450 gave political support to Francesco Sforza to seize Milan and the duchy militarily. Ottoman expansionism, which threatened the borders of the kingdom of Naples, prevented the Neapolitans from intervening against Milan, and Pope Nicholas V first recognized Sforza as duke of Milan, then succeeded in involving Alfonso of Aragon in the Italic League, an alliance aimed at consolidating the new territorial arrangement of the peninsula.

The domestic politics of Alfonso I: humanism and centralism

The court of Naples was, in this era, one of the most refined and open to the cultural innovations of the Renaissance: Alfonso's guests were Lorenzo Valla, who during his very Neapolitan sojourn denounced the historical forgery of the Donation of Constantine, the humanist Antonio Beccadelli and the Greek Emanuele Crisolora. Alfonso is also credited with the reconstruction of Castel Nuovo. The administrative structure of the kingdom remained roughly the same as in the Angevin era: however, the powers of the ancient justicierati (Abruzzo Ultra and Citra, Contado di Molise, Terra di Lavoro, Capitanata, Principato Ultra and Citra, Basilicata, Terra di Bari, Terra d'Otranto, and Calabria Ultra and Citra) were downsized, which retained mainly political and military functions. Instead, the administration of justice was devolved in 1443 to baronial courts, in an attempt to bring the old feudal hierarchies back into the bureaucratic apparatus of the central state.

Another important step toward the achievement of territorial unity in the kingdom of Naples is considered to be the king's policy of encouraging pastoralism and transhumance: in 1447 Alfonso I passed a series of laws, including requiring Abruzzese and Molisian shepherds to winter within the Neapolitan borders, in the Tavoliere, where much of the cultivated land was also forcibly converted into pastureland. He also established, based first in Lucera and then in Foggia, the Dogana della mena delle pecore in Puglia and the very important network of sheep-tracks leading from Abruzzo (which from 1532 would have its own detachment of the Dogana, the Doganella d'Abruzzo) to Capitanata. These measures uplifted the economy of the inland towns between L'Aquila and Puglia: the economic resources associated with transhumant herding in the Abruzzi Apennines once dispersed into the Papal States, where herds had hitherto wintered.

With the Aragonese measures, transhumance-related activities involved, mainly within the national borders, local crafts, markets and boar forums between Lanciano, Castel di Sangro, Campobasso, Isernia, Boiano, Agnone, and Larino up to the Tavoliere, and the bureaucratic apparatus that arose around the customs house, predisposed to the maintenance of the sheep-tracks and the legal protection of the shepherds, became, on the model of the Castilian Concejo de la Mesta, the first popular base of the modern central state in the kingdom of Naples. To a lesser extent the same phenomenon occurred between Basilicata and Terra d'Otranto and the towns (Venosa, Ferrandina, Matera) linked to transhumance to Metaponto. Upon his death (1458) Alfonso divided the crowns again, leaving the Kingdom of Naples to his illegitimate son Ferdinand (legitimized by Pope Eugene IV and appointed duke of Calabria), while all other titles of the crown of Aragon, including the kingdom of Sicily, went to his brother John.

Don Ferrante

King Alfonso thus left behind a kingdom perfectly embedded in Italian politics. The succession of his son Ferdinand I of Naples, known as Don Ferrante, was supported by Francesco Sforza himself; the two new sovereigns together intervened in the republic of Florence and defeated the troops of the mercenary captain Bartolomeo Colleoni who were undermining local powers; in 1478 the Neapolitan troops intervened again in Tuscany to stem the consequences of the Pazzi conspiracy, and then in the Po Valley in 1484, allied with Florence and Milan, to impose the peace of Bagnolo on Venice.

Ferrante's power, however, was in serious danger of being threatened by the Campanian nobility during his regency; in 1485 between Basilicata and Salerno, Francesco Coppola count of Sarno and Antonello Sanseverino prince of Salerno, with the support of the Papal States and the republic of Venice, spearheaded a revolt with Guelph ambitions and Angevin feudal claims against the Aragonese government, which, by centralizing power in Naples, threatened the rural nobility. The revolt is known as the Conspiracy of the Barons, which was organized in the Malconsiglio castle in Miglionico and was eradicated in 1487 thanks to the intervention of Milan and Florence. For a short time the city of L'Aquila passed to the Papal State. Another parallel pro-Angevin conspiracy, between Abruzzo and Terra di Lavoro, was led by Giovanni della Rovere in the Duchy of Sora, which ended with the mediating intervention of Pope Alexander VI.

Despite the political upheavals, Ferrante continued his father Alfonso's patronage in the capital city of Naples: in 1458 he supported the founding of the Accademia Pontaniana, expanded the city walls, and built Porta Capuana. In 1465 the city hosted the Greek humanist Constantine Lascaris and the jurist Antonio D'Alessandro, as well as in the rest of the kingdom Francesco Filelfo, Giovanni Bessarione. At the court of Ferdinand's sons, however, humanistic interests took on a much more political character, decreeing among other things the final adoption of Tuscan as a literary language in Naples as well: the anthology of rhymes known as the Aragonese Collection, which Lorenzo de' Medici sent to the King of Naples Frederick I, in which Florentine was proposed to the Neapolitan court as a model of illustrious vernacular, of equal literary dignity with Latin, is from the second half of the 15th century. Neapolitan intellectuals embraced the Medici cultural program, reinterpreting the stereotypes of the Tuscan tradition in original ways. Following Boccaccio's example, Masuccio Salernitano had already drafted, around the middle of the fifteenth century, a collection of novellas in which satirical gimmicks were taken to extreme extremes, with invective against women and ecclesiastical hierarchies, so much so that his work was included in the Index of forbidden books by the Inquisition. A veritable literary canon was inaugurated instead by Jacopo Sannazaro who, in his prosimetrum Arcadia, for the first time expounded in vernacular and prose the pastoral and mythical topoi of Virgilian and Theocritean bucolic poetry, anticipating by centuries the tendency of the modern and contemporary novel to adopt a mythological-esoteric substratum as a poetic reference.

Sannazaro's bucolic inspiration also connoted itself as a counterbalance to the courtly stereotypes of the Petrarchists, the Provençal and Sicilian, or Stilnovism; and in the return to a pastoral poetics we can read a clear humanistic and philological opposition of classical mythology to the female icons of the Tuscan poets, including Dante and Petrarch, who veiledly expressed the political and social tendencies of the communes and lordships of Italy. Sannazaro then was also a model and inspiration for the poets of the Arcadian Academy, who took the name of their literary school from his novel.

As early as the first great plague epidemic (14th century) involving Europe, the cities and economy of the extreme Mezzogiorno were severely affected, so much so that the territory, which since the first Greek colonization had remained one of the most productive in the Mediterranean for centuries, became a vast depopulated countryside. The flat coastal territories (Metapontum plain, Sybaris, St. Euphemia), now abandoned, were swamped and infested with malaria, with the exception of the Seminara plain, where agricultural production alongside that of silk supported a weak economic activity linked to the city of Reggio.

In 1444 Isabella di Chiaromonte married Don Ferrante and brought as a dowry to the Neapolitan crown the principality of Taranto, which on the queen's death in 1465 was suppressed and permanently united with the kingdom. In 1458 the Albanian fighter Giorgio Castriota Scanderbeg arrived in the Mezzogiorno to support King Don Ferrante against the barons' revolt. Scanderbeg had already previously come to support the Aragonese crown in Naples during the reign of Alfonso I. The Albanian leader obtained a series of noble titles in Italy, and the attached feudal estates, which were a refuge for the first communities of Arbereschians: the Albanians, exiles following Muhammad II's defeat of the Christian party in the Balkans, settled in hitherto depopulated areas of Molise and Calabria.

A resurgence of economic activity in Apulia returned with the granting of the Duchy of Bari to Sforza Maria Sforza, son of Francesco Maria Sforza Duke of Milan, offered by Don Ferrante to confirm the alliance between Naples and the Lombard city. Having succeeded Ludovico il Moro to Sforza Maria, the Sforzeschi neglected the Apulian territories in favor of Lombardy, until the Moor ceded them to Isabella of Aragon, the rightful heir to the regency of Milan, in exchange for the Lombard duchy. The new duchess in Apulia began a policy of urban improvement of the city, which was followed by a slight economic recovery that lasted until the rule of her daughter Bona Sforza and the succession to the royal title of Naples by Charles V.

Don Ferrante was succeeded by his eldest son Alfonso II in 1494. In the same year Charles VIII of France descended on Italy to upset the delicate political balance that the cities of the peninsula had achieved in previous years. The occasion directly concerned the kingdom of Naples: Charles VIII boasted a distant kinship with the Angevin kings of Naples (his paternal grandmother was the daughter of Louis II, who attempted to wrest the Parthenopean throne from Charles of Durazzo and Ladislaus I), sufficient for him to claim the royal title. The duchy of Milan also sided with France: Ludovico Sforza, known as the Moor, had ousted the duchy's legitimate heirs Gian Galeazzo Sforza and his wife Isabella of Aragon, daughter of Alfonso II, who were married in the marriage by which Milan had sealed its alliance with the Aragonese crown. The new duke of Milan did not oppose Charles VIII, who headed against the Aragonese kingdom; avoiding resistance from Florence, the French king occupied Campania in thirteen days and shortly after entered Naples: all the provinces submitted to the new transalpine ruler, except for the cities of Gaeta, Tropea, Amantea and Reggio.

The Aragonese took refuge in Sicily and sought the support of Ferdinand the Catholic, who sent a contingent of troops led by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba that engaged the French array in battle in Calabria. However, French expansionism also prompted Pope Alexander VI and Maximilian of Hapsburg to form a league against Charles VIII to fight and finally defeat him at the Battle of Fornovo: at the end of the conflict, Spain occupied Calabria, while the Republic of Venice acquired the main ports on the Apulian coast (Manfredonia, Trani, Mola, Monopoli, Brindisi, Otranto, Polignano and Gallipoli). Alfonso II died during the wartime operations, in 1495, and Ferrandino inherited the throne, but he survived him for only one year without leaving any heirs, although he nevertheless managed to quickly reconstitute a new Neapolitan army that, to the cry of "Ferro! Ferro!" (derived from the "desperta ferro" of the almogàver) drove Charles VIII's French out of the Kingdom of Naples.

In 1496 Don Ferrante's son and brother of Alfonso II, Frederick I, became king and again faced French ambitions over Naples. Louis XII Duke of Orléans had inherited the kingdom of France after the death of Charles VIII; having King Ferdinand the Catholic of Aragon inherited the throne of Castile he entered into an agreement (Treaty of Granada, November 1500) with the French sovereigns claiming the throne of Naples, to partition Italy and oust the last Aragonese in the peninsula. Louis XII occupied the Duchy of Milan, where he captured Ludovico Sforza, and, in agreement with Ferdinand the Catholic, moved against Frederick I of Naples. The agreement between the French and Spanish had provided for the partition of the Kingdom of Naples between the two crowns: to the French sovereign, Abruzzi and Terra di Lavoro, as well as the title of rex Hierosolymae and, for the first time, rex Neapolis; to the Aragonese sovereign, Apulia and Calabria with the attached ducal titles. By that treaty on November 11, 1500, the title of rex Siciliae was declared forfeited by Pope Alexander VI and united with the Crown of Aragon.

In August 1501 the French entered Naples; Frederick I of Naples took refuge in Ischia and finally ceded his sovereignty to the king of France in exchange for some fiefs in Anjou. Although both kings successfully occupied the kingdom, they could not agree on the implementation of the treaty to partition the kingdom: the fate of Capitanata and the Contado di Molise, over whose territories both French and Spanish claimed sovereignty, remained undefined. Having inherited the kingdom of Castile from Philip the Fair, the new Spanish king sought a second agreement, with Louis XII, whereby the titles of king of Naples and duke of Apulia and Calabria would go to Louis' daughter Claudia and Charles of Habsburg, her betrothed (1502).

However, the Spanish troops occupying Calabria and Apulia, led by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba and loyal to Ferdinand the Catholic, did not respect the new agreements and drove the French out of the Mezzogiorno, which was left with Gaeta alone until their final defeat at the Battle of Garigliano in December 1503. The peace treaties that followed were never final, except that it was at least established that the title of king of Naples belonged to Charles of Habsburg and his betrothed Claudia. Ferdinand the Catholic, however, continued to own the kingdom, considering himself heir apparent to his uncle Alfonso I of Naples and the ancient Aragonese crown of Sicily.

Spanish viceroys

The Aragonese royal house that had become indigenous to Italy had died out with Frederick I, and the kingdom of Naples fell under the control of the Spanish royals, who ruled it through viceroys. Southern Italy remained the direct possession of the Iberian rulers until the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1713). The new administrative structure, although highly centralized, rested on the old feudal system: the barons thus had the opportunity to strengthen their authority and land privileges, while the clergy saw their political and moral power increase. The most important administrative bodies were based in Naples and were the Collateral Council, similar to the Council of Aragon, the supreme body in the exercise of legal functions (composed of the viceroy and three jurisconsults), the Camera della Sommaria, the Tribunal of the Vicarage and the Tribunal of the Sacred Royal Council.

It was Ferdinand the Catholic who, holding the titles of King of Naples and Sicily, appointed viceroy Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, who had until then been Grand Captain of the Neapolitan army, entrusting him in his stead with the same powers as a king. At the same time the title of Grand Captain lapsed and the command of the royal troops of Naples was entrusted to the Count of Tagliacozzo Fabrizio I Colonna with the appointment of Grand Constable and the task of leading an expedition to Apulia, against Venice, which was occupying some Adriatic ports. The military operation ended successfully and the Apulian ports returned in 1509 to the Kingdom of Naples. King Ferdinand also re-established funding for the University of Naples by arranging a monthly contribution from his personal treasury of 2,000 ducats a year, a privilege later confirmed by his successor Charles V.

Succeeding de Córdoba was first Juan de Aragón, who enacted a series of laws against corruption, fought cronyism, and banned gambling and usury, and then Raimondo de Cardona, who in 1510 sought to reintroduce the Spanish Inquisition in Naples and the first restrictive measures against Jews.

Charles V

Charles V, the son of Philip the Fair and Joan the Mad, through a complicated system of inheritance and kinship, soon found himself ruling a vast empire: from his father he obtained Burgundy and Flanders, from his mother in 1516 Spain, Cuba, the kingdom of Naples (for the first time under the title of rex Neapolis), the Kingdom of Sicily and Sardinia, as well as two years later the Austrian dominions from his grandfather Maximilian of Habsburg.

The kingdom of France once again came to threaten Naples and Charles V's rule over the Mezzogiorno: the French, after seizing the duchy of Milan from Ludovico il Moro's son Maximilian, were defeated and driven out of Lombardy by Charles V (1515). The King of France Francis I in 1526 then entered into a league, sealed by Clement VII and called the Holy League, with Venice and Florence to drive the Spaniards out of Naples. After an initial defeat of the league in Rome, the French responded with the intervention in Italy of Odet de Foix, who pushed into the Kingdom of Naples besieging Melfi (the event will go down in history as "Bloody Easter") and the capital itself, while the Serenissima occupied Otranto and Manfredonia. In the midst of the full force of the military campaign of invasion by the troops of Francis I, King of France, came the episode of the siege in the summer of 1528 of the city Catanzaro, which remained loyal to Emperor Charles V and stood as a last bulwark against the advancing invaders. While Naples, in fact, was being encircled by sea and land, Catanzaro was besieged by soldiers under the orders of Simone de Tebaldi, Count of Capaccio, and Francesco di Loria, Lord of Tortorella, who had descended in arms into Calabria to occupy, subdue, and govern it in the name of Francis I.

The fortified city was besieged in the first days of June and withstood for about three months the assaults under the walls and facing the battles in the open field with courage and skill; at the end of August, in fact, the besieging troops had to retreat, thus sanctioning the victory of the City of the Three Hills, as Catanzaro is called, which Simone de Tebaldi himself, who had retired to Apulia, called "Cità assai bona et forte." During the siege, which, no doubt, contributed to the maintenance of the Kingdom of Naples to Emperor Charles V, an oxidional coin worth one carlin was struck in Catanzaro. In those same days, the Genoese fleet, initially allied with the French, came into the pay of Charles V, and the siege of Naples turned into yet another defeat of Spain's enemies, which then led to Clement VII's recognition of the imperial title of King Charles. Venice finally lost its possessions in Apulia (1528).

In 1542 Viceroy Pedro of Toledo issued the decree of expulsion for the Jews from the kingdom of Naples. The last communities that had already settled between Brindisi and Rome since the great diaspora of the 2nd century disappeared from the urban realities in which they had found a home. In the ports of the Apulian coast and in the main cities of Calabria, as well as with some weak presences in Terra di Lavoro, after the crisis of the cenobitic economy in the 16th century, the Jews were the only efficient source of financial and commercial activities: in addition to the exclusive privilege, granted by the local administrations, of exercising money lending, their communities managed important sectors of the silk trade, a relic of that Mediterranean economic system that in the Mezzogiorno survived the barbarian invasions and feudalism.

France's hostilities against Spanish dominions in Italy, however, did not cease: Henry II, son of Francis I of France, urged on by Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno, allied with the Ottoman Turks; in the summer of 1552 the Turkish fleet under the command of Sinan Pasha surprised the imperial fleet, under the command of Andrea Doria and Don Giovanni de Mendoza, off Ponza, defeating it. The French fleet, however, failed to rejoin the Turkish fleet, and the goal of the Neapolitan invasion failed.

In 1555, following a series of defeats in Europe, Charles abdicated and divided his dominions between Philip II, to whom he left Spain, the colonies of America, the Spanish Netherlands, the kingdom of Naples, the kingdom of Sicily and Sardinia, and Ferdinand I of Habsburg to whom went Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and the title of emperor.

The viceroyships that followed under the reign of Philip II were mostly marked by warlike operations that did not bring prosperity to the people of Naples. Exacerbating the situation was the pestilence that spread throughout Italy around 1575, the year Íñigo López de Hurtado de Mendoza was appointed viceroy. Naples, as a port city, was extremely exposed to the spread of the disease, and its main economic activities were undermined at the base. In the same years the ships of the Ottoman sultan Murad III landed first in Trebisacce, Calabria, then in Apulia, plundering the main ports of the Ionian and Adriatic seas. It was necessary to increase the militarization of the coasts, so de Mendoza had a new arsenal built in the port of Santa Lucia to a design by Vincenzo Casali. He also forbade public officials from weaving sacramental ties and religious kinships.

With the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis traditional historiography designates the end of French ambitions in the Italian peninsula. The climate of religious reform that involved at the time both Lutheran opposition to the papacy in Rome and the Catholic church itself, in the territories of the viceroyalty of Naples was contextualized in the growth of the civil authority of the clergy and ecclesiastical hierarchies. In 1524, in Rome Gian Pietro Carafa, then bishop of Chieti, had founded the congregation of the Theatines (from Teate, Chieti's ancient name), which soon spread throughout the kingdom, later joined by the Jesuit colleges, which were for centuries the only cultural reference for the provinces of southern Italy. The Council of Trent by imposing new rules on the dioceses, such as the obligation for bishops, parish priests and abbots to reside in their own seat, the establishment of diocesan seminaries, inquisition tribunals and, later, frumentari monti, transformed the dioceses of the viceroyalty of Naples into real organs of power, strongly rooted in the territory and the provinces, since they were the only social, legal and cultural support for the control of the civil order. Other monastic orders that were very successful in Naples during these years include the Discalced Carmelites, the Teresian Sisters, the Brothers of Charity, the Camaldolese, and the Congregation of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri.

De Castro, Téllez-Girón I, Juan de Zúñiga y Avellaneda and the revolt in Calabria.

On July 16, 1599, the new viceroy Fernando Ruiz de Castro arrived in Naples. His work was limited mainly to military operations against the Turkish incursions into Calabria by Amurat Rais and Sinan Pasha.

In the same year of his appointment as viceroy, the Dominican Thomas Campanella, who in The City of the Sun outlined a communitarian state based on a supposed natural religion, organized a conspiracy against Fernando Ruiz de Castro in the hope of establishing a republic with its capital in Stilo (Mons Pinguis). The Calabrian philosopher and astrologer had already been a prisoner of the Holy Office and confined to Calabria: here with the doctrinal and philosophical support of the eschatological Joachimite tradition he took the first steps to persuade monks and religious to adhere to his revolutionary ambitions, fomenting a conspiracy that spread to involve not only the entire Dominican order of Calabrie, but also local minor orders such as Augustinians and Franciscans, and the main dioceses from Cassano to Reggio Calabria.

It was the first revolt in Europe to take sides against the Jesuit order and their growing spiritual and secular authority. The conspiracy was quelled and Campanella, who posed as a madman, escaped burning at the stake and life imprisonment. A few years earlier (1576) another Dominican, the philosopher Giordano Bruno, whose speculations and theses were later admired by various scholars in Lutheran Europe, was also being tried for heresy in Naples.

De Castro also inaugurated a policy focused on state funding for the construction of various public works: under the direction of architect Domenico Fontana, in Naples he ordered the construction of the new royal palace in what is now Piazza del Plebiscito. Characterized mainly by urban works was the tenure of Pedro Téllez-Girón y de la Cueva: he fixed the road system of the capital and the Apulian provinces.

He was succeeded by Juan de Zúñiga y Avellaneda, whose government was geared toward restoring order in the provinces: he curbed brigandage in the Abruzzi with the support of the Papal States and in Capitanata; he modernized the road system between Naples and the Land of Bari. In 1593 Ottomans attempting to invade Sicily were stopped by his army.

Philip III of Spain and the viceroyships of de Guzmán, Pimentel and Pedro Fernandez de Castro

When Philip II was succeeded to the Spanish throne by his son, Philip III, the administration of the viceroyalty of Naples was entrusted to Enrique de Guzmán, count of Olivares. The kingdom of Spain was at its height, uniting the crown of Aragon, with its Italian dominions, with that of Castile and Portugal. In Naples, the Spanish government was weakly active in the urban planning of the capital: the construction of the Neptune fountain (under the direction of architect Domenico Fontana), a monument to Charles I of Anjou, and the arrangement of the road system date back to de Guzmán.

The other government that operated actively with a fair amount of political and economic activity in the kingdom of Naples was that of Viceroy Juan Alonso Pimentel de Herrera. The new ruler still had to defend the southern territories from Turkish naval incursions and quell the first revolts against fiscalism, which in the capital were beginning to threaten the palace. To prevent Ottoman aggression he led a war against Durres, destroying the city and the port in which Turkish and Albanian privateers who often attacked the kingdom's coasts found asylum. In Naples he tried to combat delinquency, which was on the rise in those years, even against papal regulations, opposing the right of asylum that Catholic houses of worship guaranteed: for this some of his officials were excommunicated.

Pimentel's strongly national policy, however, also affected various urban and architectural works: he built avenues and widened roads, from Poggioreale to Via Chiaja; in Porto Longone, in the Presidi State he ordered the construction of the imposing fortress.

Pimentel was followed in 1610 by Pedro Fernández de Castro, whose interventions were mainly concentrated in the city of Naples, whose urban redevelopment was entrusted to the Royal Architect Domenico Fontana, whose most important work was the construction of the Royal Palace. He ordered the reconstruction of the university, whose lectures since the beginning of Spanish rule had been housed in the city's various cloisters, financing a new building (Palazzo dei Regi Studi, now home to the National Archaeological Museum of Naples) commissioning the renovation of a cavalry barracks from architect Giulio Cesare Fontana and modernizing the system of teaching and professorships.

The Accademia degli Oziosi flourished under his regency, which Marino and Della Porta, among others, joined. He built the Jesuit college named after St. Francis Xavier and a complex of factories near Porta Nolana. In the Terra di Lavoro he began the first reclamation works of the Volturno plain, entrusting Fontana with the Regi Lagni project, the work of canalizing and putting the waters of the river Clanio between Castel Volturno and Villa Literno on a regular basis, where until then marshes and coastal lakes (such as Lake Patria) had made much of the Campania Felix of the Romans an unhealthy and depopulated territory.

The death of Philip III and the governments under Philip IV and Charles II.

It was characterized mainly by military operations the government of Pedro Téllez-Girón y Velasco Guzmán y Tovar, who, in the war between Spain and Savoy over Monferrato, led an expedition against the republic of Venice, at that time an ally of the Savoy monarchy. The Neapolitan fleet besieged and sacked Trogir, Pula and Istria.

He was succeeded by Cardinal Antonio Zapata, amidst famines and revolts, and, after Philip III's death, Antonio Álvarez de Toledo y Beaumont de Navarra and Fernando Afán de Ribera, who had to deal with the problems of increasingly widespread and entrenched brigandage in the provinces. They were followed by Manuel de Acevedo y Zúñiga, who financed the fortification of the ports of Barletta, Ortona, Baia and Gaeta, with a government heavily involved in the economic support of the army and fleet. The sharp impoverishment of the state treasury led, under the administration of Ramiro Núñez de Guzmán, to a devolution of the administration of the royal domains to the barons' courts, and the consequent growth of feudal powers. Under the reign of Charles II, one recalls the viceroyships of Fernando Fajardo y Álvarez de Toledo and Francisco de Benavides, with policies committed to containing now endemic problems such as brigandage, clientelism, inflation, and food shortages.

Literary and scientific culture in seventeenth-century Naples.

The humanistic and Christian tradition was the only reference for the first revolutionary ambitions of a national character that began to emerge, for the first time in Europe, between Rome and Naples, in the irrationalism of the Baroque, in popular urbanism (Spanish quarters), in religious mysticism and in political and philosophical speculation. If in the countryside a strong return to the feudal order led control of art and culture back to the seminaries and dioceses, Naples was the first city in Italy where the first literary forms of intolerance to the cultural climate that followed the Counter-Reformation were born, albeit disorganized and ignored by governments.

Accetto, Marino and Basile, the first in Italian literature, transgressed the poetic paradigms that took the works of Tasso as their model, and with a strong subversive thrust with regard to the artistic canons of their contemporaries in Italy, they rejected the study of the classics as an example of harmony and style and the aesthetic and linguistic theories of the purists, which arose with the doctrinal re-proposition of scholastic and liturgical Latin (Chiabrera, Accademia della Crusca, Accademia del Cimento).

These were the years when, in the Neapolitan commedia dell'arte, Pulcinella, the most famous mask of southern popular inventiveness, came to prominence. The Cosentine Tommaso Cornelio, trained in the Telesian and Cosentinian tradition (a pupil of Marcus Aurelius Severinus), a professor of mathematics and medicine, brought to Naples in the second half of the 17th century the philosophy and mathematics of Descartes and Galilei, as well as the physics and atomistic ethics of Gassendi, constituting, in contrast to the local Thomistic and Galenic tradition, the basis of the future schools of modern Neapolitan thought.

Similar in ambition to Campanella, but driven by reasons of an economic nature, under the viceroyalty of the Duke of Arcos Rodríguez Ponce de León, Masaniello led a revolt in 1647 against the heavy local tax burden. He succeeded in obtaining from the viceroy the establishment of a popular government and, for himself, the title of Captain General of the loyal people, until he was later killed by the rioters themselves. Gennaro Annese took his place, who gave a broader scope to the revolt, which took on an anti-feudal and anti-Spanish character and precise political and social connotations and also secessionist, on a par with what had happened, a few years earlier, in Portugal and Catalonia. For Rosario Villari, too, the ultimate goal of the revolt was independence from Spain, which could downsize the kingdom's feudal society. "What raged in southern Italy in 1647-1648," writes the Calabrian historian, "was essentially a peasant war, the largest and most impetuous that western Europe had known in the seventeenth century." Naples would attempt to place itself at the head of the movement, setting as its goal independence "as a prerequisite and indispensable condition for a downsizing of feudal power and a new political and social balance in the kingdom." In October 1647 Gennaro Annese, with the support of Julius Mazarin and Henry II of Guise, proclaimed the Republic. The new government was short-lived: although the revolts had spread to the countryside, in the spring of 1648 Spanish troops led by Don John of Austria restored the previous regime.

The eastern provinces: Terra di Bari, Terra d'Otranto and Calabrie

From the 16th century, the stabilization of the Adriatic borders after the Battle of Lepanto and the end of Turkish threats on the Italian coast led, with rare exceptions to a period of relative tranquility in southern Italy, during which barons and feudal lords were able to exploit ancient land rights to consolidate economic and productive privileges.

Between the 16th and 17th centuries there arose in Apulia and Calabria that closed and provincial economy that would characterize the regions until the Unification of Italy: agriculture for the first time became subsistence; the only products destined for export were oil and silk, whose stable, cyclical and repetitive production times could not escape the control of the landed aristocracy. Thus between Terra di Bari and Terra d'Otranto oil production increased relative prosperity, evidenced by the widespread system of rural masserie and, in the city, the flourishing of urban and architectural works (Lecce Baroque). After the loss of the Serenissima's dominions in the Mediterranean, the ports of Brindisi and Otranto remained a valuable market for Venice for the supply of agri-food products, lost among others were also the markets of Ortona and Lanciano after the conversion of the Abruzzi territories to a pastoral economy. Very similar was the condition of the Calabrians whose provinces, lacking competitive trade outlets and ports, saw partial development in the Cosenza area alone.

Around the wealthier classes flourished a particular type of humanism, strongly conservative, characterized by the worship of the classical Latin tradition, rhetoric and law. Even before the birth of seminaries, priests and lay aristocrats were subsidizing centers of culture that constituted, in Apulia and Calabria, the only form of civil modernization that the administrative and bureaucratic innovations of the Aragonese kingdom required, while the economy and territory remained excluded from the changes taking place in the rest of Europe.

By the 15th century, the last traces of the Greek cultural and social tradition disappeared: in 1467 the diocese of Hieracium abandoned the use of the Greek rite in the liturgy in favor of Latin; similarly in 1571 the diocese of Rossano, in 1580 the archdiocese of Reggio, in 1586 the archdiocese of Siponto, and shortly after that of Otranto. The Latinization of the territory that began with the Normans, continued with the Angevins, found its completion in the 17th century, in parallel with the strong centralization of power in the hands of the landed aristocracy, between Reggio and Cosenza. In these years Campanella involved these dioceses, with the support of eastern astrological and philosophical speculations, in the revolt against Spanish rule and the Jesuit order; these were also the years of the great development of the Carthusian monasteries of Padula and Santo Stefano, and of the birth of the Accademia Cosentina, which would see among its students and masters Bernardino Telesio and Sebezio Amilio.

The succession of Charles II and the end of Spanish rule.

As early as 1693 in Naples, as in the rest of the dominions of the Habsburgs of Spain, discussions began about the fate of the reign of Charles II, who was leaving the states of his crown without direct heirs. It was on this occasion that a politically organized civic consciousness began to emerge in southern Italy, transversally composed of both aristocrats and small town merchants and artisans, arrayed against the privileges and tax immunities of the clergy (the related legal current is known to historians as Neapolitan anti-curialism) and ambitious to confront banditry. This sort of party in 1700, upon the death of Charles II, opposed the Spanish ruler's will designating Philip V of Bourbon, Duke of Anjou, as heir to the Spanish and Neapolitan crowns, supporting instead the claims of Leopold I of Habsburg, who considered Archduke Charles of Habsburg (later emperor under the name Charles VI) as the legitimate heir. This political disagreement led the pro-Austrian Neapolitan party to an explicit anti-Spanish stance, followed by the revolt known as the Macchia conspiracy, which later failed. After the political crisis the Spanish government attempted through repression to restore order to the kingdom, while the financial crisis was increasingly disastrous. In 1702 the Banco dell'Annunziata went bankrupt; during these years Philip V, on a trip to Naples, pardoned the debts of the universities in 1701. The last viceroys on behalf of Spain were Luis Francisco de la Cerda y Aragón, engaged in curbing banditry and smuggling, and Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco y Zúñiga, Marquis of Villena whose term of government was prevented by the war and then the Austrian occupation of 1707.

The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 ended the War of the Spanish Succession: under the agreements sanctioned by the signatories, the kingdom of Naples with Sardinia ended up under the control of Charles VI of Habsburg; the kingdom of Sicily, on the other hand, went to the Savoy family, reestablishing the territorial identity of the rex Siciliae crown, with the condition that, once the male lineage of the Savoy family was extinguished, the island and the attached royal title would revert to the Spanish crown. With the Peace of Rastatt, a year later Louis XIV of France also recognized the Habsburg dominions in Italy. In 1718 Philip V of Spain attempted to reestablish his rule in Naples and Sicily with the support of his prime minister Giulio Alberoni: however, Britain, France, Austria and the United Provinces intervened directly against Spain, which defeated Philip V's fleet at the Battle of Cape Passero. The Treaty of the Hague (1720) that concluded the War of the Fourfold Alliance (to which the Battle of Cape Passero is an element) decreed the handover of the Kingdom of Sicily to the Habsburgs: while maintaining itself as a separate state entity, it passed together with Naples under the Austrian crown while Sardinia became the possession of the Savoy dukes, with the birth of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Charles of Bourbon was designated heir to the throne in the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza.

The beginning of Austrian rule, although forced to deal with a disastrous financial situation, marked a profound reform in the political hierarchies of the Neapolitan state, which was followed by a discreet development of Enlightenment and reformist principles. Works by Spinoza, Giansenius, and Pascal, as well as Cartesian texts, were henceforth available in Naples, and expressions of culture returned in direct contrast to the city's clergy, on the road of Neapolitan anti-Curialism already opened by such famous jurists as Francesco d'Andrea, Giuseppe Valletta, and Costantino Grimaldi. During the Austrian viceroyalty, in 1721, Pietro Giannone published his most famous text, the Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples), a very important cultural reference for the Neapolitan state, which became famous throughout Europe (admired by Montesquieu) for the way it reproposed Machiavellism in modern terms and subordinated canon law to civil law. Excommunicated by the archbishop of Naples, he found refuge in Vienna, unable to return to southern Italy. In this environment, between Naples and Cilento, also lived Giovan Battista Vico, who, in 1725, published the first edition of his Principles of a New Science, and Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina, a scholar in Naples of canon law, who founded in Rome, with Christina of Sweden, the academy of Arcadia, reintroducing the secular reading of the classics. His pupil Metastasio precisely in Naples formed on Tasso and Marino the poetic innovations that gave Italian melodrama international fame.

The first Austrian viceroys were Georg Adam von Martinitz (1614-1714) and Virico Daun, followed by the administration of Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani, who, favorable to the anti-Curial Neapolitan circles, implemented the first policy of financial recovery, attempting to reduce government expenditures and to the seizure of the annuities of southern feudal lords who were contumacious as a result of the Austrian occupation The viceroys who succeeded him (Carlo Borromeo Arese and Daun in his second term) found a slight positive balance in the kingdom's revenues, thanks in part to the balance of expenditures that military operations had required. In 1728 Viceroy Michele Federico Althann established the public Banco di San Carlo, to finance private mercantilist entrepreneurship, buy back public debt dues and liquidate ecclesiastical manomorta The viceroy himself earned the enmity of the Jesuits for tolerating the publication of the works of the anti-Curialists Giannone and Grimaldi.

A new invasion attempt, however, by Philip V of Spain, although it ended in the latter's defeat, brought the kingdom's budget back into deficit again: the problem persisted throughout the subsequent period of Austrian rule; in 1731 Aloys Thomas Raimund promoted the establishment of a "Council of Universities" to control the budgets of the small towns in the provinces, along with the Council of Numeration for the reorganization of financial administrations, established in 1732. However, the new land registries were obstructed by landowners and the clergy, who wanted to avert the government's intentions to tax church property. The last of the Austrian viceroys, Giulio Visconti Borromeo Arese, saw the Bourbon invasion and subsequent war, but left the new rulers with a much better financial situation than that left by the Spanish viceroys.

Charles of Bourbon

The reform policy that began tepidly under the viceroyalty of Charles VI of Habsburg was taken up by the crown of the Bourbons, who undertook a series of administrative and political innovations, extending them to the entire territory of the kingdom. Charles of Bourbon, formerly duke of Parma and Piacenza, son of Philip V king of Spain and Elisabeth Farnese, following the Battle of Bitonto, conquered the kingdom of Naples and entered the city on May 10, 1734; he was crowned Rex utriusque Siciliae on July 3, 1735 in Palermo Cathedral. The Infante's conquest of the two kingdoms was made possible by the maneuvers of the Queen of Spain, who, taking advantage of the War of Polish Succession in which France and Spain were fighting the Holy Roman Empire, claimed for her son the provinces of southern Italy, obtained in 1734 following the Battle of Bitonto. With Charles, the Kingdom of Naples saw the birth of the new Bourbon dynasty of Naples. On June 8, 1735 Charles replaced the Collateral Council with the Royal Chamber of Santa Chiara, also entrusting the formation of the government to the Count of Santisteban and appointing Bernardo Tanucci as minister of justice.

The kingdom did not have effective autonomy from Spain until the Peace of Vienna in 1738, which ended the War of Polish Succession. Because of the repeated wars and the risks Naples faced, Tanucci hypothesized moving the capital to Melfi (formerly the capital of Norman rule), seeing it as a highly strategic point: located in the continental zone, protected by the mountains and far from threats from the open sea.

In August 1744 Charles's army, still strong with the presence of Spanish troops, defeated at the Battle of Velletri the Austrians who were attempting to retake the kingdom. The precarious situation of the Bourbon crown over the kingdom of Naples was matched by an ambiguous policy of Charles: he at the beginning of his rule tried to pander to the political positions of the ecclesiastical hierarchies, favoring the establishment in Palermo of a tribunal of the Inquisition and not opposing the excommunication of Pietro Giannone. However, when the end of hostilities in Europe averted threats to his royal title, he appointed Bernardo Tanucci as prime minister, whose policy was immediately directed at curbing ecclesiastical privileges: in 1741, the right of asylum in churches and other immunities to the clergy were drastically reduced by a concordat; ecclesiastical property was subjected to taxation. Similar successes, however, did not occur in the fight against feudalism in the peripheral provinces of the kingdom. As early as 1740, in fact, royal consulates of commerce had been established, at the suggestion of the Junta de commerce appointed a few years earlier, for the purpose of fostering the liberalization of the economy and securing the civil justice that feudal lords were unable to guarantee. Present in all the major cities of the kingdom (even more than one per province), the consulates were subject to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Magistrate of Commerce in Naples. Yet the opposition of the baronial class was so compact and well-organized that within a few years it resulted in the substantial failure of the initiative.

The reforms, however, while restoring the old cadastral systems, succeeded in imposing taxation on ecclesiastical property equal to half the ordinary taxation of the laity while feudal property remained bound to the tax system of the adoa. The exchequer benefited from the new measures and at the same time there was a noticeable development of the economy, increased agricultural production and related trade. In 1755 the first chair of economics in Europe, called the chair of commerce and mechanics, was established at the University of Naples. The courses (in Italian rather than Latin) were taught by Antonio Genovesi who, having lost his chair of theology following accusations against him of atheism, continued his studies in economics and ethics. His successes inaugurated a more radical intervention project to be carried out in the Terra di Lavoro. The first step involved the construction of the Royal Palace of Caserta and the urban modernization of the city of the same name, which was rebuilt on the rationalist designs of Luigi Vanvitelli. In the same years in the heart of the kingdom's capital, on the other hand, Giuseppe Sammartino was creating the famous sculptural complex in the Sansevero Chapel: the extremely formal care and stylistic modernization with which his works were endowed generated controversy in Neapolitan Catholic circles, which were accustomed to the artistic achievements of Mannerism and Baroque.

At the royal palace in Portici, which was to have been Charles's residence before the construction of the Royal Palace of Caserta, the king established the archaeological museum in which artifacts from the recent excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii were collected. For the first time in Italy since the establishment of the ghetto in Rome, a law was enacted in Naples in these years to grant the Jews, expelled from the kingdom two centuries earlier, the same rights of citizenship (with the exception of the possibility of owning feudal titles) reserved until then for Catholics.

King Ferdinand IV

In 1759 King Ferdinand VI of Spain died leaving no direct heirs. First in the line of succession was his brother Charles of Bourbon, who, respecting the treaty between the two kingdoms that stipulated that the two crowns should never be united, had to choose a successor for the two kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. The one who until then had been considered the heir to the Throne, Philip, born June 13, 1747, would be put under observation for two weeks by a committee of high officials, magistrates and six physicians to assess his mental state. Their verdict was his complete imbecility, thus excluding him from the succession. His second son Charles Anthony, born in 1748, would instead follow his father as heir to the Spanish throne. The choice therefore fell to the third-born Ferdinand, born Jan. 12, 1751, who assumed the title Ferdinand IV of Naples.

At his birth a country noblewoman named Agnese Rivelli, belonging to the nobility of Muro Lucano, was chosen as his nurse. It had become customary in the court of Naples, taking an example from that of Spain, to place a commoner of the same age beside the prince. He, called a menino, was to be scolded instead of the prince, who in this way was to understand that, if he one day became king, should he make mistakes during his rule, evil would fall on the entire people. Agnese Rivelli introduced her son Gennaro Rivelli to the royals for this. This would become Ferdinand's inseparable friend and in fact Ferdinand prevented the menino from being scolded in his place, close even in the tragic events of the Revolution. It would in fact be Gennaro Rivelli at Cardinal Ruffo's side who would lead the army of the Holy Faith in the Counter-Revolution to reconquer the kingdom.

These were the words of Charles of Bourbon at the time of his abdication: "I humbly commend to God the Infante Ferdinand, who at this very instant becomes my successor. To him I leave the kingdom of Naples with my paternal blessing, entrusting him with the task of defending the Catholic religion and commending to him justice, clemency, care, and love for the people, who having faithfully served and obeyed me, are entitled to the benevolence of my royal family." Ferdinand was then only 8 years old, and for this a Council of Regency was formed by Charles himself. Principal exponents were Domenico Cattaneo, Prince of San Nicandro and Marquis Bernardo Tanucci, the latter the head of the Regency Council. During the Regency period and in the following one, it was mainly Tanucci who held the reins of the Kingdom and continued the reforms begun in the Carolingian era. In the legal field, much progress was made possible by the support given to Minister Tanucci by Gaetano Filangieri, who, with his work "Science of Legislation" (begun in 1777), can be considered among the precursors of modern law. In 1767 the king issued the act of expulsion against the Jesuits from the territory of the kingdom, which resulted in the alienation of their property, convents and centers of culture, six years before Pope Clement XIV decreed the suppression of the order.

Meanwhile, Ferdinand instead spent his days playing with his friend Gennaro, dressing up and mingling with the commoners, who treated him and spoke to him in absolute freedom. On January 12, 1767 Ferdinand, having reached the age of 16, became king with full powers. On that same day the Council of Regency became the Council of State. At the time of the ceremony, however, Ferdinand was not to be found. He in fact, oblivious to the important event, was with his beloved Liparites, a select corps of pupils with whom he played at war. In fact it was still the Tanucci who ruled. He, continuing to maintain relations with the now former king of Naples and Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, organized repeated attempts to marry Ferdinand to an Austrian archduchess, getting him engaged to several of the empress's daughters, all of whom, however, died before the wedding. Eventually her efforts bore fruit, resolving, however, in the end of her political career.

Indeed, in 1768 Ferdinand married Maria Carolina of Habsburg-Lorraine, daughter of Empress Maria Theresa and sister of France's Queen Marie Antoinette. As was customary before the marriage, a marriage contract was drawn up, which stipulated that Maria Carolina should attend the Council of State once she gave birth to the male heir. The following year Ferdinand IV would meet his brother-in-law Pietro Leopoldo, then Grand Duke of Tuscany, as well as Carolina's brother and husband of Ferdinand's sister Maria Luisa. Often Ferdinand, due to his ignorance, remained silent for a long time.

In these same years Masonic associations developed, which based their ideals on the freedom and equality of every individual. This is not frowned upon by Maria Carolina, who like other rulers considers her title divine, but unlike others and like her family believes that among her duties must be the happiness of her people; they were opposed, however, by conservatives, including Tanucci. He, however, saw his prestige diminish in 1775 when Maria Carolina, after giving birth to her first male child, Charles Titus, joined the Council of State. Maria Carolina would participate more actively in political life than her husband and often replaced him.

In 1776 Tanucci marked his last success by becoming the promoter of the abolition of a symbolic act of vassalage, the chinea tribute, which formally made the kingdom of Naples a tributary state of the pontiff of Rome. In 1777 the minister was replaced by the Sicilian Marquis of Sambuca, a man more agreeable to Maria Carolina, whom Tanucci himself had brought to Naples. As for Ferdinand, on July 14, 1796 he declared suppressed the Duchy of Sora, along with the Stato dei Presidi the last vestiges of Renaissance lordships in Italy, and arranged the compensation to be paid to Duke Antonio II Boncompagni. He also became personally involved in the policy of territorial reform inaugurated by his father: in Terra di Lavoro he ordered the construction of the industrial colony of San Leucio (1789), an interesting experiment in social legislation and manufacturing development.

In 1778 John Acton, a naval man from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which Queen Maria Carolina had wrested from her brother Leopold, arrived in Naples. The royals of Naples and Sicily were to review agreements with third states on fishing, merchant shipping and warfare, and eliminate the Aragonese institutions. In 1783 it became known that the prime minister Marquis della Sambuca had been profiting from the treasury in every possible way, for example by buying back at little cost all the estates expropriated from the Jesuits in Palermo. Despite this, his rule lasted until 1784, when it was discovered that he was one of many who spread the news that John Acton and Maria Carolina were lovers. Whether this was true was never known, the fact remains that Maria Carolina convinced Ferdinand that it was false instead. Seventy-one-year-old Marquis Domenico Caracciolo, formerly viceroy of Sicily, became prime minister, while John Acton became royal adviser. Acton himself would succeed Caracciolo on July 16, 1789, the day of his death.

A useful tool that is a source of a great deal of data is the Court News City News, published in 1789.

In 1793 the Jacobin-inspired Neapolitan Patriotic Society will be founded, which will be dismantled the following year when 8 affiliates are sentenced to death.

All these events paved the way for the Neapolitan Republic of 1799. In fact, Maria Carolina, who in the early years of her reign had been sensitive to the demands of renewal and moderately favorable to the promotion of individual freedoms, made an abrupt reversal after the French Revolution, which resulted in open repression upon news of the beheading of the French rulers and conversely expressed itself in Neapolitan support for the British military presence in the Mediterranean Sea. The repressive measures led to an irremediable rift between the monarchy and the intellectual class; the punishments affected not only democrats, but also reformists of sure monarchical faith, who thus did not hesitate to embrace the republican cause in 1799. The advance of French troops into Italy began with General Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in 1796. In 1798 French ships took Malta; earlier, in January 1798, the French had also occupied Rome.Maria Carolina's decision, supported by British Admiral Horatio Nelson and Ambassador William Hamilton, to join the second anti-French coalition and authorize the military intervention of Neapolitan troops in the Papal States ended in disaster. The Neapolitan army, led by Austrian General Karl Mack and consisting of about 116,000 men, after initially reaching Rome, suffered a series of heavy defeats and disintegrated in retreat. The Kingdom was thus opened to invasion by the French Army of Naples under General Jean Étienne Championnet.

The Neapolitan Republic and the Bourbon reconquest

On December 22, 1798, King Ferdinand IV fled to Palermo, leaving the government to the marquis of Laino Francesco Pignatelli, with the title of vicar-general, and in Naples the only weak popular resistance of the Lazzari against the transalpine military. From the popular uprisings, which had meanwhile spread as far as Abruzzo, Pignatelli, however, did not gather organized resistance, and on January 11, 1799, he signed the armistice of Sparanise, after the French had occupied Capua.

Thirteen days later, on January 22, 1799 in Naples, the so-called Neapolitan patriots proclaimed the birth of a new state, the Neapolitan Republic, anticipating the French plan to establish an occupation government in the Neapolitan Mezzogiorno. French commander Jean Étienne Championnet, who had entered the capital, approved the patriots' institutions and recognized the pharmacist Charles Lauberg as head of the republic. Lauberg then, strengthened by French support, during these years founded together with Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca the Monitore Napoletano, a famous newspaper of revolutionary and republican propaganda.

The new government also directly participated in the French revolutionary experience by sending its own representation, called the Neapolitan deputation, to the directorate in Paris, and immediately attempted innovations such as the subversion of feudalism, the Jansenist project of creating a national church independent of the bishop of Rome, and the constitutional project of the Republic carried out by Mario Pagano, which, although it remained unimplemented, is considered an important document that anticipated the foundations of modern Italian law, particularly the judiciary.

As early as January 23, 1799, the General Instructions of the Provisional Government of the Neapolitan Republic to the Patriots, a kind of first program of government, were issued. The political projects, however, failed to find practical implementation in the mere five months of the Republic's life; on June 13, 1799, in fact, the Sanfedist popular army organized around Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo reconquered the Mezzogiorno, returning the territories of the kingdom to the exiled Bourbon monarchy in Palermo. After the Bourbon reconquest, the seat of the court officially remained in Sicily, but as early as the summer of 1799 administrative bodies such as the Giunta di Governo, Giunta di Stato and Giunta Ecclesiastica were set up in Naples; the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs was entrusted to Acton, who managed its offices still from Palermo. In the following months a junta appointed by Ferdinand I began trials against the republicans. 124 pro-Giacobini, including Pagano, Cristoforo Grossi, la Fonseca, Pasquale Baffi, Domenico Cirillo, Giuseppe Leonardo Albanese, Ignazio Ciaia, Nicola Palomba, Luisa Sanfelice and Michele Granata, were sentenced to death.

The royal reaction and the first restoration

By the late summer of 1799 the number of former Jacobins captured and imprisoned numbered 1396. In the meantime, the government of Naples had been entrusted by Ferdinand IV to Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, who was elected lieutenant and captain general of the Kingdom of Citerranean Sicily on the occasion, with a title that unofficially anticipated the future designation of Kingdom of the Two Sicilies that first Murat and, after the Congress of Vienna, Ferdinand IV used to designate the kingdom. The restored monarchy, seeking the unconditional support of the clergy and seeing itself threatened by the legal and administrative innovations that in part the Bourbons themselves had brought to Naples as early as the 18th century, was characterized by an obscurantist turn: it immediately put its political designs into practice, not least by the physical elimination of leading republican exponents and by ostracism toward those who had gained celebrity during the republic. At the same time, in order to bring back within the new conservative policy even those priests and monks who, on more or less Jansenist positions, had previously adhered to the revolution, the new government instructed, by means of dispatches and official letters, the bishops directly to control all religious institutes in their respective dioceses so that Tridentine orthodoxy would be respected everywhere. King Ferdinand took refuge in Palermo while remaining king of Sicily.

On September 27, 1799, the Neapolitan army conquered Rome, ending the revolutionary republican experience in the Papal States as well, thus reinstating the papal principality there. In 1801 the Neapolitan military interventions, in an attempt to reach the Cisalpine Republic, went as far as Siena, where they clashed unsuccessfully with Joachim Murat's French occupation troops. The defeat of the Bourbon troops was followed by the armistice of Foligno on February 18, 1801, and later by the peace of Florence between the sovereigns of Naples and Napoleon; during these years a series of pardons were also enacted that allowed many Neapolitan Jacobins to escape from prison. With the Peace of Amiens, on the other hand, stipulated by the European powers in 1802, the Mezzogiorno was provisionally freed of French, British and Russian troops, and the Bourbon court from Palermo returned to officially settle in Naples. Two years later the doors of the kingdom were reopened to the Jesuits, while as early as 1805 the French returned to occupy the kingdom, stationing a military garrison in Apulia.

Joseph Bonaparte

The next five years saw the Kingdom follow a seesaw policy toward Napoleonic France, which, although now hegemonic on the continent, remained essentially on the defensive on the seas: this situation did not allow the Neapolitan Kingdom, strategically positioned in the Mediterranean, to maintain a strict neutrality in the all-out conflict between the French and British, who in turn threatened to invade and conquer Sicily.

After the victory of Austerlitz on December 2, 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte finally settled the accounts with Naples: he promoted the occupation of the Neapolitan area, successfully led by Gouvion-Saint Cyr and Reynier, and thus declared the Bourbon dynasty, which on April 11 of the same year had joined the third anti-French coalition, blatantly hostile to Napoleon, to have fallen. Ferdinand with his court returned to Palermo, under English protection. The French emperor then appointed his brother Joseph "King of Naples." Meanwhile, in the provinces of the Mezzogiorno (especially in Basilicata and Calabria), anti-Napoleonic resistance returned to organization: among the various captains of the pro-Bourbon insurgents (among whom were both professional soldiers and common bandits) stood out, in Calabria and Terra di Lavoro, the brigand from Itri Michele Pezza, known as Fra Diavolo, and in Basilicata Colonel Alessandro Mandarini from Maratea. The repression of the anti-French movement was entrusted, principally, to Generals André Massena and Jean Maximilien Lamarque, who succeeded in putting the brakes on the rebellion, albeit with extremely cruel expedients, as happened, for example, in the so-called massacre of Lauria, perpetrated by Massena's soldiers.

Under a predominantly foreign administration, composed of the Corsican Cristoforo Saliceti, Andrea Miot and Pier Luigi Roederer, radical reforms such as the subversion of feudalism and the suppression of the regular orders were once again attempted and finally largely implemented; in addition, the land tax and a new cadastre onciario were instituted.

The fight against feudalism was also effective thanks to the contribution of Giuseppe Zurlo and the jurists making up the special Commission, which, chaired by Davide Winspeare (already in the service of the Bourbons as mediator between the court of Palermo and the French troops in the Mezzogiorno), was tasked with settling disputes between municipalities and barons, and eventually succeeded in producing a clean break with the past and thus the birth of bourgeois property even in the Kingdom of Naples, later supported by Joachim Murat himself. Alongside a series of reforms that also involved the tax and legal system, the new government established the kingdom's first system of provinces, districts and districts, with civil organization, headed respectively by an intendant, a subintendent and a governor, later a justice of the peace. The new provinces were Abruzzo Ultra I, Abruzzo Ultra II, Abruzzo Citra, Molise (with chief town Campobasso), Capitanata (with chief town Foggia), Terra di Bari, Terra d'Otranto, Basilicata, Calabria Citra, Calabria Ultra, Principato Citra, Principato Ultra, Terra di Lavoro (with chief town Capua), and Naples. Finally, the alienation of the assets of the monasteries and feudal lords attracted a substantial number of French investors to Naples, the only ones able, along with the old local nobles, to have the necessary capital to purchase land and real estate. Following the example of the Legion of Honor in France, Joseph Bonaparte established the Royal Order of the Two Sicilies in Naples to bestow awards on the merits of new personalities who distinguished themselves in the reformed state.

Joachim Murat

Joseph Bonaparte, in 1808 destined to rule over Spain, was succeeded by Joachim Murat, who was crowned by Napoleon on August 1 of the same year, under the name Joachim Napoleon, King of the Two Sicilies, par la grace de Dieu et par la Constitution de l'Etat, in compliance with the Statute of Bayonne, which was granted to the Kingdom of Naples by Joseph Bonaparte. The new ruler immediately captured the goodwill of the citizens by freeing Capri from British occupation, dating back to 1805.

He then aggregated the district of Larino to the province of Molise. He founded, by decree of November 18, 1808, the Corps of Engineers of Bridges and Roads and initiated major public works not only in Naples (the Sanità Bridge, Via Posillipo, new excavations at Herculaneum, the Field of Mars), but also in the rest of the Kingdom: public lighting in Reggio di Calabria, the Borgo Nuovo project in Bari, the establishment of the San Carlo hospital in Potenza, garrisons located in the District of Lagonegro with monuments and public illuminations, plus the modernization of the road system in the mountains of Abruzzo. He was a promoter of the Code Napoleon, which came into force in the kingdom on January 1, 1809, a new system of civil legislation that, among other things, allowed divorce and civil marriage for the first time in Italy: the code immediately aroused controversy among the more conservative clergy, who saw the privilege of managing family policies, dating back to 1560, taken away from the parishes. In 1812, thanks to Murat's policies, the kingdom's first paper mill with a modern production system was set up near Isola del Liri, in the building of the suppressed Carmelite convent, by French industrialist Charles Anthony Beranger.

In 1808, the sovereign commissioned General Charles Antoine Manhès to suppress the resurgence of brigandage in the kingdom, distinguishing himself with such ferocious methods that he was nicknamed "The Exterminator" by the Calabrians. After taming the uprisings in Cilento and Abruzzi with little difficulty, Manhès set up his headquarters in Potenza, continuing his successful repressive activities in the remaining southern areas, especially in Basilicata and Calabria, provinces closer to Sicily, from which the brigands received support from the exiled Bourbon court.

In the summer of 1810 Murat attempted a landing in Sicily to reunite the island politically with the continent; he arrived in Scylla on June 3 of that year and remained there until July 5, when a large encampment was completed near Piale, a hamlet of Villa San Giovanni, where the king settled with the court, ministers and the highest civil and military offices. Then on Sept. 26, noting a difficult undertaking to conquer Sicily, Murat disposed of the Piale encampment and departed for the capital.

Thanks to the Statute of Baiona, the constitution by which Murat had been proclaimed King of the Two Sicilies by Napoleon, the new ruler considered himself freed from vassalage to the old French hierarchy, represented in Naples by many officials appointed by Joseph Bonaparte, and on the strength of this political line, he found greater support among the Neapolitan citizens, who also looked favorably on Murat's participation in various religious ceremonies and the royal grant of certain titles of the Royal Order of the Two Sicilies to Catholic bishops and priests. King Joachim took part until 1813 in the Napoleonic campaigns, but Bonaparte's political crisis was no obstacle to his international policy. He sought until the Congress of Vienna the support of the European powers, deploying Neapolitan troops even against France and the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, supporting instead the Austrian army descending south to conquer the Po Valley: on this occasion he occupied the Marches, Umbria and Emilia-Romagna as far as Modena and Reggio Emilia, which was well received by the local populations.

He retained the crown longer, but he was not rid of British hostility and the new France of Louis XVIII, enmities that prevented the invitation of a Neapolitan delegation to the Congress, and so any sanction to the Neapolitan occupation of Umbria, Marche and Legations, dating back to the campaign of 1814. This political uncertainty prompted the king to make a risky move: he made contact with Napoleon on the island of Elba and came to an agreement with the exiled emperor in preparation for the Hundred Days attempt. Murat initiated the Austro-Napolean War, attacking the allied states of the Austrian Empire; following this second military breakthrough, Murat launched the famous Proclamation of Rimini, a call for the union of the Italian peoples, conventionally considered the beginning of the Risorgimento. The united campaign, however, foundered on May 4, 1815, when the Austrians defeated him at the Battle of Tolentino: with the Treaty of Casalanza finally signed near Capua on May 20, 1815, by the Austrian and Murat generals, the kingdom of Naples returned to the Bourbon crown. Murat's epic ended with the last naval expedition that the general attempted from Corsica to Naples, which was then diverted to Calabria where, at Pizzo Calabro, Murat was captured and shot on the spot.

After the Restoration, with the return of the Bourbons to the throne of Naples in June 1815, Ferdinand merged the two kingdoms of Naples and Sicily in December 1816 into a single state entity, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which was to last until February 1861, when, following the Expedition of the Thousand and the military intervention of Piedmont, the Two Sicilies were annexed to the nascent Kingdom of Italy. The new kingdom retained the Napoleonic administrative system, following a line of government adopted by all the restored states, in which the strongly conservative Bourbon political program was inscribed in Naples. The Ministry of Police was entrusted to Antonio Capece Minutolo, Prince of Canosa, while that of Finance to Luigi de' Medici di Ottajano, belonging to the Medici branch of the Princes of Ottajano, and that of Justice and Ecclesiastical Affairs to Donato Tommasi, the main supporters of the Neapolitan Catholic restoration.

For the first time, moreover, the king, who had assumed the title Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, was open to political agreements with the Holy See, even going so far as to promote the concordat of Terracina, dated February 16, 1818, whereby the fiscal and legal privileges of the clergy in the Neapolitan area were definitively abolished, while strengthening their patrimonial rights and increasing their assets. The state was characterized by a strongly confessional policy, supporting the popular missions of the Passionists and Jesuits and the colleges of the Barnabites, which were anti-regalist in formation, and for the first time adopting the national religion as a pretext to quell popular uprisings (riots of '21).

Geography

From its formation until the unification of Italy, the territory occupied by the Kingdom of Naples remained included more or less always within the same boundaries, and territorial unity was only weakly threatened by feudalism (Principality of Taranto, Duchy of Sora, Duchy of Bari) and raids by Barbary corsairs. It occupied roughly the entire part of the Italian peninsula that is now known as the Mezzogiorno, from the Tronto and Liri rivers, from the Simbruini mountains in the north to the Cape of Otranto and Cape Spartivento. The long Apennine chain there was traditionally divided into the Abruzzi Apennines on the borders of the Papal States, the Neapolitan Apennines from Molise to Pollino, and the Calabrian Apennines from Sila to Aspromonte. Major rivers included the Garigliano and Volturno: the only navigable ones.

Belonging to the kingdom were the islands of the Campanian archipelago, the Ponzian and Tremiti islands, and the State of the Principalities. The state was divided into justizierati or provinces, headed by a justizier, around whom revolved a system of officials who helped in the administration of justice and the collection of tax revenues. Each capital city of the justicierati housed a court, a military garrison and a mint (not always active).

Administrative subdivision

A list of the twelve historical provinces of the Kingdom of Naples follows.

Equestrian orders

The kingdom of Naples partly inherited the coinage of the ancient Swabian-Norman kingdom of Sicily. The tarì was the oldest coin and in the kingdom it persisted until the modern age. In 1287 Charles I of Anjou decreed the birth of a new soldo, the carlin, minted in pure gold and silver. Charles II of Anjou again reformed the silver carlin by increasing its weight: the new coin was vulgarly known as the lily, from the heraldic lily of the House of Anjou that was depicted on it. Until Alfonso of Aragon (to whom we owe the gold ducats known as Alfonsini) no more gold coinage was issued, except for a few series of florins and bolognini under the reign of Joanna I of Naples. During Spanish rule the first scudi were coined, as well as more tarì, carlini and ducats. In 1684 Charles II ordered the minting of the first piasters. The whole complex monetary system was later preserved by the Bourbons and during the Napoleonic period, when the franc and lira were also introduced.

Economy

Thanks to this international outreach, the kingdom experienced various mercantile relations, which subsequently enabled during the Aragonese period a new appreciable economic growth. In particular, trade flourished with the Iberian Peninsula, the Adriatic, the North Sea and the Baltic thanks to privileged relations with the Hanseatic League. Gaeta, Naples, Reggio Calabria and the ports of Apulia were the most important trading outlets of the kingdom, linking the inland provinces with Aragon, France, and, through Bari, Trani, Brindisi and Taranto, with the East, the Holy Land and the territories of Venice. Thus it was also that Apulia became an important supply center for European markets of typically Mediterranean products such as oil and wine, while in Calabria, in Reggio, the market and cultivation of silk, introduced in Byzantine times, could survive.

From the Aragonese age, sheep farming became another of the kingdom's fundamental resources: between Abruzzo and Capitanata, the production of raw wool destined for Florentine markets, of lace and, in Molise, handicrafts related to ironworking (knives, bells), became until the beginning of the modern age the most important industries inserted into the needs of European markets. With the development of industrialization, the kingdom of Naples was involved in the processes of modernization of production and trade exchange systems: one recalls the development of the paper industry in Sora and Venafro (Terra di Lavoro), silk in Caserta and Reggio Calabria, textiles in San Leucio, Salerno, Pagani and Sarno, iron and steel in Mongiana, Ferdinandea and Razzona di Cardinale in Calabria, metalmechanics in the Naples basin, shipbuilding in Naples and Castellammare di Stabia, coral processing in Torre del Greco, and soap in Castellammare di Stabia, Marciano and Pozzuoli.

Despite the difficult historical conditions, which at times caused the exclusion of the kingdom of Naples from the main lines of economic development, the port of the capital and the city of Naples itself, occupying a strategic and central position in the Mediterranean, were for centuries among the liveliest and most active economic centers in Europe, so much so that they attracted merchants and bankers from all the major European cities. Trade also developed against the hostilities of the Turks whose raids were a heavy inhibitor to the naval economy and maritime trade, a factor that made it necessary to strengthen the navy and merchant navy in the Bourbon era.

Religion

In contrast, a discreet coexistence of different customs, religions, faiths and doctrines that were at war elsewhere was possible in the territories of the kingdom of Naples, thanks to the central position of the Mezzogiorno in the Mediterranean. From the beginning of Angevin rule Catholicism was imposed in Naples as the religion of the state and of the rulers, and the Catholic church found the consent of most of the population. At the birth of the kingdom several wars resulted in the defeat and subsequent banning of other religious denominations to which minorities and foreign settlers adhered: Judaism, Islam and the Orthodox Church. In Calabria and Apulia until the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation, the use of the Greek rite and the Nicene Creed (symbol recited without filioque) survived. The reconversion of many of the Greek dioceses to the Latin tradition was initially entrusted to the Benedictines and Cistercians who gradually replaced the Basilian monasteries with their missions, then was encouraged and formalized by a series of provisions that followed the Council of Trent.

Another important religious minority were the Jewish communities: widespread in the main ports of Calabria, Apulia, and some towns in the Terra di Lavoro and the Campanian coast, they were expelled from the kingdom in 1542 and then readmitted, with full rights of citizenship, only under the rule of Charles of Bourbon, some two centuries later.

Catholic doctrinal control was exercised predominantly in the aristocratic hierarchies and jurisprudence and led on the other hand to the development of subversive philosophies and ethics in regard to the Church of Rome, secular and often anti-curialist: these doctrines arose on atomistic and Gassendian foundations and spread from the 17th century (philosophies brought to Naples by Thomas Cornelius) and then converged in a strongly local form of Jansenism in the 18th century.

Particularly widespread among the population throughout the kingdom was the cult of saints and martyrs, often invoked as protectors, thaumaturges, and healers, as well as devotion to the Virgin Mary (Conception, Annunciation, of the Well, Assumption). On the other hand, centers of vocation, ecumenism, and new monastic orders such as the Theatines, Redemptorists, and Celestines sprang up in the territories of the kingdom.

Languages

Little remained in the kingdom of Naples of the cultural flowering that Frederick II fostered in Palermo, giving, with the experience of the Sicilian language, literary dignity to Sicilian and Calabrian dialects and contributing, both directly and through the Sicilian-Tuscan poets celebrated by Dante, to the enrichment of the Tuscan language and literature of the time, the basis of contemporary Italian.

With the advent of the Angevin kingdom, the process of Latinization already successfully initiated by the Normans in Calabria was continued, as well as that of the progressive marginalization of the linguistic minorities of the Mezzogiorno through centralist policies and the use of Latin, which replaced Greek everywhere (which, however, survived in the liturgies of some Calabrian dioceses until the early 16th century). In the Angevin age if, in legal, administrative and teaching terms the hegemonic language was Latin, and in vehicular terms Neapolitan, at court, at least initially, the most formally prestigious language was French.

Already at the time of King Robert (1309-1343) and Queen Joanna I (1343-1381), however, there was an increase in the mercantile presence of the Florentines, who, with the rise to power of Niccolò Acciaiuoli (who became Grand Siniscalco in 1348) would play a leading political and cultural role in the kingdom. In fact, the circulation of literature in the Tuscan language dates from this period, and "the two vernaculars, Neapolitan and Florentine, will find themselves in close contact, not only in the varied environment of the court, but perhaps even more so in the area of commercial activities."

In the first decades of the fifteenth century, still in the Angevin era, the familiarity of some of the southern clergy with Greek, especially in Calabria, together with the arrival of Greek-speaking refugees leaving the Balkans that had fallen largely under Ottoman rule, encouraged a revival of humanistic studies in that language, in addition to those that had long been initiated in Latin, both in the Kingdom of Naples and in the rest of Italy.

In 1442 Alfonso V of Aragon took possession of the kingdom by surrounding himself with a host of Catalan, Aragonese and Castilian bureaucrats and officials, most of whom, however, left Naples upon his death. Alfonso, who was born and educated in Castile and belonged to a Castilian-speaking and Castilian-cultured family, the Trastámara, succeeded in creating a trilingual court that had Latin (the main language of the chancery), Neapolitan (the main language of public administration and internal affairs of the kingdom, alternating in specific areas with Tuscan) and Castilian (the bureaucratic language of the court and of the Iberian literati closest to the sovereign, occasionally alternating with Catalan) as its literary and administrative reference points.

A progressive and greater rapprochement to Italian (which was then still referred to as Tuscan or vernacular) took place with the accession to the throne of Ferrante (1458), the natural son of Alfonso the Magnanimous, and a great admirer of that language, coming from then on to be used more and more at court also because many of the kingdom's naturals entered the latter and the bureaucracy in increasing numbers, at the behest of the sovereign himself. Until 1458, the generalized use of Italian was limited to the drafting of a part of those documents that had to have a public circulation (convocations of the nobles of the kingdom, grants of statutes to the universities, etc.), an area in which Neapolitan still prevailed and, together with Latin and Catalan, in business correspondence (coupons, payments from the treasury to the army and the court, etc.).

With Ferrante I in power the Tuscan vernacular officially became one of the languages of the court as well as the main literary language of the kingdom along with Latin (just think of the group of "Petrarchan" poets, such as Pietro Iacopo De Jennaro, Giovanni Aloisio, etc.), gradually going on to replace (and from the mid-16th century onwards permanently) Neapolitan in the administrative sector and remained so during the rest of the Aragonese period. Catalan, at that time, was, as we have seen, used in business and commercial transactions with Italian and Latin, but it never became either court or administrative language. Its written use in business correspondence is witnessed until 1488. Nevertheless, a well-known songbook was composed in Catalan at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which was modeled after Petrarch, Dante and the classics, published in 1506 and 1509 (2nd edition, expanded). Its author was the Barcelonian Benet Garreth, better known as Chariteo, a high civil servant and member of the Alphonsine Academy.

The first decade of the sixteenth century holds an exceptional importance for the linguistic history of the Kingdom of Naples: the publication of a prosimeter of a pastoral character in the Italian language, Arcadia, composed in the late fifteenth century by the poet Jacopo Sannazzaro, the most influential literary personality of the Kingdom along with Giovanni Pontano, who, however, remained faithful to Latin until his death (1503). Arcadia was both the first masterpiece of the pastoral genre and the first masterpiece in the Italian language written by a native of the Kingdom of Naples. Publication, due to the well-known political events of the kingdom (which saw the decline of the House of Aragon and the occupation of the state by French troops, with Sannazzaro's abandonment of Naples, who wished to remain at his king's side, voluntarily accompanying him into exile), could not take place until 1504, although some manuscripts of the text began to circulate as early as the last decade of the 15th century.

Thanks to Arcadia, the Italianization (or Tuscanization, as it was still called at the time) took place not only of poetic genres other than love poetry but also of prose. The extraordinary success of this masterpiece, in Italy and beyond, was in fact at the origin, already in the Spanish viceroyal era, of a long series of editions that did not stop even at Sannazzaro's death, which occurred in 1530. Indeed, it was from that year " that a veritable fashion for the vernacular spread, and the name of Sannazzaro, especially in Naples, was paired with that of Bembo. "Neapolitan literati...from Sannazzaro's time willingly accepted the supremacy of the Florentine, a supremacy that was handed down from generation to generation from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries."

The supremacy of Italian as the main written, literary and administrative language of the kingdom of Naples, first together with Latin, then on its own, was further and definitely consolidated in the viceregal era. In the 17th century, if we take as a parameter the number of books published in that centuria and kept in the most important library in Naples (2,800 titles), Italian emerges as the first language with 1,500 titles (53.6 percent of the total) followed at some distance by Latin with 1,063 titles (38.8 percent of the total), while texts in Neapolitan number 16 (less than 1 percent). However, if the two main languages of culture at the time are Italian and Latin, " on the side of oral communication, dialect certainly retained its primacy," and not only as the language of the vast majority of the people of the kingdom (along with other local idioms of the southern and extreme southern type), but also of a certain number of bourgeois, intellectuals and aristocrats, finding locutors even at the Bourbon court during the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1816-1861).

Neapolitan also achieved literary dignity first with Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti and later in poetry (Cortese), music and lyric poetry, which could count on schools of the highest level. As for the Italian language, besides being the main written and administrative language, it remained, until the extinction of the kingdom (1816), the language of great literary figures, from Torquato Tasso to Basilio Puoti, via Giovan Battista Marino, of great philosophers, such as Giovan Battista Vico, and of jurists (Pietro Giannone) and economists, such as Antonio Genovesi: the latter was the first among the professors of the oldest faculty of Economics in Europe (opened in Naples at the behest of Charles of Bourbon) to give his lectures in Italian (higher education had in fact been given in the kingdom, until then, exclusively in Latin). His example was followed by other professors: Italian thus became not only the language of the university and of the capital's four conservatories (among the most prestigious in Europe) but also, de facto, the only official language of the state, having shared that role with Latin until then. However, Latin continued to survive, alone or side by side with Italian, in various cultural institutions spread throughout the kingdom, and which consisted mainly of schools of grammar, rhetoric, scholastic theology, Aristotelianism or Galenic medicine.

Sources

1. Kingdom of Naples
2. Regno di Napoli
3. ^ Motto presunto e non ufficiale. Una leggenda vuole che il motto del regno fosse Noxias herbas (Le male erbe), scelto da Carlo I d'Angiò in riferimento al rastrello presente sullo stemma, che avrebbe simboleggiato la cacciata della "malerba" sveva. Questa ipotesi è scartata da Giovanni Antonio Summonte, che in Dell'Historia della città, e regno di Napoli, su books.google.it, 26 marzo 2015 (archiviato dall'url originale il 26 marzo 2015). (1675) spiega che il rastrello (che in realtà è un lambello) stava ad indicare che gli Angioini erano un ramo cadetto dei Capetingi, dai quali ereditarono lo stemma con i gigli d'oro.
4. AA.VV., Atlante Storico Mondiale DeAgostini a cura di Cesare Salmaggi, Istituto Geografico De Agostini, Novara 1995
5. «Sandro Sticca: Plantus Mariae nella tradizone drammatica del Medioevo. Superivencia del latín en el Reino de Nápoles».
6. «Pietro Giannone: Storia civile del Regno di Napoli. Volume III. El uso del idioma italiano en el Reino de Nápoles».
7. «Enciclopedia Treccani: Storia della lingua italiana e del suo utilizzo negli Stati preunitari».
8. Самаркин В. В. Численность населения, его состав и размещение // Историческая география Западной Европы в средние века. — М.: Высшая школа, 1976. — С. 87.
9. Garms Cornides E. Il regno di Napoli e la monarchia austriaca, in Settecento napoletano. Sulle ali dell'aquila imperiale 1707-1734. — Electa Napoli, 1994. — С. 17-34.