Conclusion: Why ’s History Matters

Anna Maria Rao

The growing fields of global history and world history urge us to ques- tion the relevance of the history of specific territories or cities.1 To para- phrase a recent historiographical study, we might ask why Naples’s history ­matters.2 Eighteenth-century observers did not doubt the geo-political impor- tance of southern or why for centuries conquerors coveted it: it was a country rich in natural resources and favored by a gentle climate that increased the indolence of its inhabitants but also rendered the land fertile; and it marked a European frontier, a political and religious outpost jutting into the Mediterranean. By the 18th century, these were commonplace considerations which we find repeated in diplomatic and narrative sources, correspondences, diaries, and travel journals. Thanks in part to those reflections, Naples and its kingdom continued to occupy a prominent position in early modern European political developments and in the struggle for continental hegemony that had involved European states since the 15th century. Between 1793 and 1795, the agents sent to Italy by the new French Republic born of the Revolution confirmed the importance of Naples for Mediterranean politics, itself crucial to French commerce; they underscored Naples’s natural, artistic, and archeological wealth; however, they also claimed that France would engage in a war of liberation rather than a war of conquest, as had occurred with the inva- sion led by Charles VIII three centuries earlier. After the invested Roger the Norman as king of Sicily in 1130, the southern kingdom remained Italy’s only great monarchy—the Regno by definition—until 1718, when the Duke of Savoy also became king of Sar- dinia, a much smaller monarchy.3 This monarchical character, originating

1 Van Berkel and de Goei, International Relevance. 2 Tosh, Why History Matters. 3 Sicily and Sardinia were also kingdoms since the Middle Ages (Naples and Sicily, united in the kingdom formed in 1130, split in 1282 after the Vespers), but Sardinia never had a resident sovereign, and Sicily lost its resident monarchs after 1410. After the Spanish Succession War, the Duke of Savoy received, in 1713, the island (and title of king) of Sic- ily, which in 1718 he was forced to exchange for the island (and title of king) of Sardinia. 478 anna maria rao from papal power, helped make the southern kingdom crucial in Euro- pean and Mediterranean history. The southern kingdom was the object of contention between papacy and empire and later the site of wars among the emerging European modern states. These states were attracted not only by the geographic and natural factors mentioned above but also by the opportunity to find in the kingdom, and especially in its capital, offices and pensions for their clients and followers, and soldiers and money for their wars. This was thus a prestigious kingdom, which explains why Elizabeth Far- nese, second wife of Philip V of Spain, moved heaven and earth to secure its crown for her son Charles. With the coming of Charles of Bourbon in 1734, the kingdom again had its own king, who lived in its capital city. His arrival was greeted enthusiastically by most of the nobility, who were eager to have a royal court in Naples, by the administrative elites, who hoped their power within the new state would further increase, and by the masses, who hoped to enjoy lower taxation. Many also hoped that the new king would finally sever the feudal dependency that had tied the kingdom to the papacy ever since King Roger’s investiture. The advent of Charles of Bourbon also appeared to many outside Naples as an opportunity to limit the role of the church in Italian social and cul- tural life. In March 1736 Pietro Giannone, the champion of Neapolitan jurisdictionalism (the doctrine of enhanced royal jurisdiction aimed at limiting ecclesiastic influence), having been expelled from Naples, , and , was arrested in , where he died in prison in 1748. The Piedmontese nobleman Alberto Radicati di Passerano, on the other hand, saw in the new king of Naples a possible leader who could unite Italy, lead the fight against clergy and papacy (which he regarded as the principal causes of Italy’s woes), and initiate the kind of religious reform that in other European countries had allowed the arts, sciences, and commerce to flourish.4 This tension between the political reality of war and conquest and recur- rent utopian impulses (from Tommaso Campanella to Pietro Giannone, and later still to Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca) forms part of the fascina- tion and importance of the kingdom’s history. Naples became the king- dom’s capital under the Angevins. Its position as the capital of a ­kingdom

From the 15th through the 17th century, when Italians spoke of the Regno (kingdom), they always and only meant the . 4 Venturi, Settecento, 24–28.