Kingdom of Naples

A conqueror crowned at Benevento

formationDrafted from Ellesmere, History of the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1850)

The Kingdom of Naples begins, in one sense, as an ending: the collapse of the last Hohenstaufen ruler of the old Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Manfred, an illegitimate son of Emperor Frederick II, had held the crown against a hostile papacy for years, but the papal court, unable to defeat him directly, offered the kingdom instead to Charles of Anjou, a younger brother of the King of France, in exchange for an annual tribute and a free hand to unseat Manfred by force.

An army that could not afford to wait

Charles crossed the Alps in the autumn of 1265 with an army of French and Italian troops and was crowned at the Vatican on the 6th of January 1266, but winter and short supplies left him no real choice but to force a decision quickly or disband his own army. He advanced south through Ceperano and San Germano, meeting little resistance, until he reached Benevento, where Manfred had gathered Germans, Apulians and the Muslim soldiers of Lucera - men who, hated everywhere else in the kingdom, had remained loyal to him alone.

Ellesmere, History of the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1850) · Bernard Gagnon · CC0

A body flung to the dogs

The battle was hard-fought, but the French carried the field, and Manfred, rather than flee, rode into the thick of the fighting and was killed among the slain. His own soldiers raised a pile of stones over his body on the battlefield, but even that rough burial was denied him: the papal legate travelling with Charles's army refused Manfred a Christian grave as an excommunicate, and his remains were, according to the poet who later placed him in Purgatory rather than Hell, left exposed by the River Verde outside the kingdom's own border. Naples itself welcomed the victor without a fight, and within weeks the whole of Sicily, Apulia and Calabria had submitted to Angevin rule - all but the Muslim garrison of Lucera, which held out alone.

The Sicilian Vespers

formationDrafted from Ellesmere, History of the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1850)

Sixteen years of Angevin rule left Sicily heavily taxed and administered by French officials who treated the island's own nobility and common people alike with open contempt. Palermo, the ancient capital, had suffered worst of all: its Justiciary and his subordinates had recently grown bolder still, dragging citizens from a church during Holy Week itself to collect unpaid taxes while the congregation looked on. By the spring of 1282 the kingdom's barons and townspeople alike needed only a spark.

A search that went too far

That spark came on Easter Tuesday, the 31st of March, at the festival of Santo Spirito outside Palermo's walls, where crowds of citizens had gathered among the spring flowers to picnic, dance and prepare for evening prayers. French soldiers mingling in the crowd, "to keep the peace" as they put it, began searching young men for hidden weapons and making free with the women present. When a soldier named Drouet seized a young married woman and searched her under the pretext of a weapons check, her husband cried "Death to the French!" and a young bystander - his name never recorded - drew a knife and killed Drouet on the spot.

Ellesmere, History of the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1850) · Francesco Hayez · Public domain

A city, then an island, in open revolt

The cry spread through the crowd and then through the whole city within hours: French soldiers and settlers were hunted down and killed wherever they could be found, reportedly including some Sicilian women who had married Frenchmen. Within weeks nearly every town in Sicily had followed Palermo's example, and Charles's viceroy and his officials were driven from the island entirely. Charles retained the mainland - Naples, Apulia, Calabria, the Abruzzi - but never recovered Sicily itself, whose own rebels turned instead to Peter III of Aragon, married to Manfred's daughter, to defend the independence the Vespers had won them. What had been one Kingdom of Sicily was, in practice if not yet in treaty, now two.

A peace that drew a permanent line

expansionDrafted from Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729)

Twenty years of intermittent war followed the Vespers, waged across Sicily and the wider Mediterranean between the Angevin claimants to the whole kingdom and the Aragonese dynasty the island had chosen for itself. By 1302 both sides were exhausted: Charles of Valois, brother of the King of France and by then leading the Angevin war effort, found his own army starving and diseased outside Sicily's fortified towns, while King Frederick of Sicily, though undefeated in the field, governed a kingdom too poor to sustain the war much longer.

Terms that ended a war without erasing a defeat

Negotiators for both sides met and, on the 19th of August 1302, concluded a peace on terms generous enough to satisfy even the losing Angevin side's own pride. Frederick would remain King of Sicily for his lifetime, but could not use the royal title of "King of Sicily" itself - only "King of Trinacria," a deliberately antiquarian name for the island - and the crown would revert to the Angevin line, specifically to Charles II's own heirs, upon his death. Prisoners on both sides were freed without ransom, and Frederick was to marry Charles's own daughter Leonora, sealing the peace with a dynastic tie between the two royal houses that had just spent two decades trying to destroy one another.

A treaty that outlived its own terms

In practice the reversion clause never took effect: Frederick's own line held Sicily for generations after his death, in defiance of the peace's letter. What the 1302 settlement did accomplish, and permanently, was formalize the split the Vespers had already made real twenty years earlier - Sicily and the mainland now had two separate kings, two separate courts, and two separate futures, with Naples confirmed as the seat of the Angevin crown that no longer ruled the island whose name it still, in diplomatic memory, claimed to hold.

Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729) · Wolfgang Moroder · CC BY-SA 3.0

The wisest queen, and a cord in the dark

peakDrafted from Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729)

Joanna I inherited the throne of Naples as a girl of sixteen in 1343, raised at her grandfather King Robert's own court alongside a prudent and respected queen, Sancia. Her own long reign, spanning nearly four decades, would eventually earn her the praise of the two most eminent lawyers of her age, who called her the wisest queen ever to sit on a throne - a verdict grounded in the laws she herself left behind, all aimed at restoring the discipline of courts and magistracies that had slipped during her grandfather's final years.

Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729) · Sailko · CC BY 3.0

A husband strangled in his own palace

That reputation survived a scandal that would have ended a lesser monarch's rule. Joanna's first husband, Andrew of Hungary, was young, resented by the Neapolitan court, and - by his own Hungarian retinue's account - poorly treated by it in turn. On the night of 18 September 1345, while the royal couple lodged at Aversa, a gentleman summoned Andrew from the queen's own bedchamber with word of urgent business; in the hall beyond, a cord was thrown around his neck, and he was strangled and thrown from a window while his own Hungarian guard slept off the night's wine. No one in the city dared ask who was responsible. Popular suspicion fell on Joanna herself for years afterward, and even generations later some historians still repeated the charge - but Giannone himself, weighing the praise later legal scholars gave her without qualification, judged that the best-informed men of her own age believed her innocent of her husband's murder.

A reign that outlasted the scandal

Whatever the truth of Andrew's death, it did not end Joanna's own rule. She married twice more, navigated the interests of Hungary, Provence, Avignon and her own restless Neapolitan barons for another thirty-seven years, and administered a kingdom that, by the account of the jurists who served under her, was as well and justly governed as any in Europe of her age - the high-water mark of Angevin Naples before the crisis that would end her own life.

Smothered at Muro

contractionDrafted from Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729)

Joanna I had no surviving son, and in her final years she settled the succession on Charles of Durazzo, a cousin she and her third husband had raised at their own court and married to her niece. It was a fatal misjudgment. When Joanna, in a late dispute over the wider politics of the Papal Schism, tried to adopt a rival heir instead, Charles moved first: he marched on Naples, and the city and its barons swore their allegiance to him in the archbishop's own palace before Joanna could organize any resistance.

A letter asking how she should die

Charles placed guards around the queen and, within days, sent her under guard to the remote castle of Muro in the Basilicata, while her adopted heir Otho was confined separately. He then wrote to the King of Hungary - whose own brother, Andrew, Joanna had been suspected of having murdered thirty-seven years earlier - to ask how she should be dealt with. The answer that came back was that she should be treated exactly as Andrew himself had been.

Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729) · Alf.picerno · CC BY-SA 4.0

A body displayed for seven days

In 1382, Charles had Joanna smothered with a bolster in her cell at Muro. Her body was carried to Naples and left unburied and on public display for seven days in the Church of Santa Chiara, a deliberate message to whatever support her own partisans still had, before she was finally buried near her grandfather's tomb without ceremony. Giannone, writing nearly three and a half centuries later, still felt the need to defend her reputation once more: whatever charge had shadowed her over Andrew's death, he wrote, nothing in the rest of her life gave any honest witness cause to think her anything but blameless. Her murder opened four decades of rival Angevin claims to the throne she left behind - a succession crisis that would end only when a foreign king took the kingdom by force.

Through the aqueduct

contractionDrafted from Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729)

The decades after Joanna I's murder saw the Angevin succession contested by rival branches of her own family, and by the 1420s the childless queen Joanna II had adopted first one foreign prince and then another as her heir, finally settling on René of Anjou. René's own claim was contested from the start by Alfonso V of Aragon, already king of Sicily, and the war between them dragged on for years - until Alfonso's patient diplomacy began peeling away René's own commanders one by one, most importantly the condottiere Antonio Caldora, whose desertion in 1441 left René's own position in the kingdom badly weakened.

A priest, an island, and eighty thousand crowns

Fortune then handed Alfonso a stroke of luck disguised as a trifle: in 1442 a priest on the small island of Capri offered to surrender it to him without a fight. The gain seemed minor until a French supply galley, mistaking Capri for still being in René's hands, put in there and was captured along with eighty thousand crowns meant to keep René's own war effort funded - a loss René could not make good.

A city taken from beneath its own streets

Alfonso pressed his advantage, besieging Naples itself and reducing the outlying towns of Pozzuoli and Torre del Greco one by one. The city held out under a garrison too thin to properly man its own walls, until Alfonso's own soldiers found a way in through the city's Roman-era aqueduct and opened its gates from within on the 2nd of June, 1442.

Alfonso's own troops began to sack the city in the heat of the moment, but the king himself rode through the streets at the head of a mounted guard and threatened death to any soldier who harmed a citizen, cutting the pillage short after only four hours. René fled by ship to Florence, then to the papal court, and finally home to France, ending a century and a half of native Angevin rule and uniting Naples with Sicily and Aragon under a single Iberian crown for the first time since the Vespers had split them.

Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729) · Marco Ober · CC BY-SA 4.0

Naples, Italy · Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729) · Sailko · CC BY 3.0

Betrayed by both crowns

contractionDrafted from Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729)

Alfonso the Magnanimous's own united crown of Naples, Sicily and Aragon did not survive his death intact: he left Naples to an illegitimate son, Ferrante, while Sicily and Aragon passed instead to his brother. Six decades later, in 1500, King Louis XII of France and King Ferdinand of Aragon - a cousin of Naples's own reigning King Frederick, Ferrante's successor - concluded a secret treaty at Granada to invade and divide Frederick's kingdom between them, while both continued to profess friendship to Frederick himself.

Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729) · Adriano Fiorentino · CC0

A bull dividing a kingdom that did not yet know it

Pope Alexander VI, no friend to Frederick after an earlier marriage proposal had been refused, issued a bull on the 25th of June, 1501, formally depriving Frederick of his throne and splitting the kingdom between Louis, who took Naples itself and the title of king, and Ferdinand, who took Calabria and Apulia under the lesser style of Duke. Frederick learned of the partition only as French troops under Aubigny were already marching on his own territory, and belatedly appealed to Ferdinand for the help Ferdinand had secretly agreed to deny him. Capua fell to a brutal French sack in July; Naples itself surrendered on terms days later, and Frederick, choosing exile in France over any further resistance, gave up his crown for a French duchy and a pension.

Allies who could not share the spoils

The victors soon fell to fighting each other over the partition's own unclear boundaries, since the treaty had never precisely defined which provinces belonged to which crown. War between France and Spain over the disputed territory dragged on for two more years, until Gonzalo de Córdoba - the Spanish commander already known across Europe simply as "the Great Captain" - broke a French army in the field despite a peace already agreed upon by the two kings' own representatives, choosing military advantage over a truce he judged not yet binding. He marched directly on Naples, and on the 14th of May, 1503, entered the city to wide rejoicing, receiving its oath of allegiance to King Ferdinand of Aragon the following day. Naples would not have a king who actually resided within it again for more than two centuries, its Aragonese throne folded permanently into the wider Spanish crown Ferdinand ruled alongside Castile.

No Inquisition in our city

contractionDrafted from Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729)

Don Pedro de Toledo governed Naples as viceroy for more than twenty years from 1532, reforming its courts and building the long avenue that still carries his name, but the achievement he is remembered for in the city's own popular memory is different: his attempt, at the Emperor Charles V's direction, to introduce the Spanish Inquisition, and the revolt that stopped him.

Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729) · Elliott Brown · CC BY 2.0

An edict torn from the cathedral door

Rumors of the Inquisition's coming had circulated for years before an edict actually appeared, posted on the doors of Naples Cathedral one day in Lent 1547. A crowd tore it down within hours. Toledo, summoning the city's own elected officials, downplayed the matter and blamed the unrest on mob disorder rather than address the Inquisition directly - a evasion the Neapolitans read correctly. When a second, far more explicit edict went up on 11 May, the city rose in earnest. Crowds ran through the streets shouting "To arms, to arms," tore down the notice, and forced out the city's own sitting officials as suspected collaborators with the viceroy, replacing them with men the mob trusted. Toledo, enraged, returned to Naples and ordered the ringleaders prosecuted - among them Tommaso Anello, a prominent citizen of the Mercato district who had personally torn the first edict from the cathedral door, and whose given name a very different Neapolitan revolutionary would echo exactly a century later.

Cannon fired on the city that bore his name

The confrontation escalated further when Spanish garrison troops, brought into the city under Toledo's orders, opened fire on a crowd near Castel Nuovo and pursued them through the streets, killing indiscriminately; the enraged population rang the alarm bell of San Lorenzo, and Naples's own royal forts answered by cannonading the city they were meant to defend. Toledo accused the city of open rebellion; the city's own deputies accused him of turning Spanish arms against his sovereign's subjects as if Naples belonged to a hostile power rather than the Emperor's own crown. The city's leading jurists ruled that armed resistance to an "incensed minister" was not rebellion against the King himself, and the standoff ended without the Inquisition ever being formally established in Naples - one of the few outright popular victories the viceroyalty's subjects won against Madrid's authority in two centuries of Spanish rule, and a memory of resistance to arbitrary viceregal power that the city would draw on again when Masaniello's own revolt broke out a hundred years later.

Ten days of Masaniello

contractionDrafted from Howell, An Exact History of the Late Revolutions in Naples (1650)

By 1647 a century and a half of Spanish viceregal rule had loaded Naples with taxes on nearly every article of daily life, and a long-standing gabelle on fruit had become a particular grievance among the city's own fruit-sellers and their customers. On the 7th of July that year, a twenty-four-year-old fisherman and fish-seller from the Piazza del Mercato named Tomaso Aniello - known to everyone as Masaniello - turned a routine shopkeepers' protest against the fruit tax into something the viceroy's own government could not contain.

A crowd taught its own slogans

Masaniello had spent days coaching the boys of the market quarter to chant fixed prices for oil, bread, cheese and meat alongside a carefully balanced cry of loyalty and defiance: long life to God, the Virgin, the Pope and the King of Spain, and death to bad government. When a scuffle broke out between fruit-sellers refusing to pay the gabelle and the official sent to enforce it, Masaniello threw himself into the crowd, and what had been a market dispute became, within hours, a citywide uprising against the tax collectors and the households of the wealthy who had profited from farming the gabelle.

Rome, Italy · Howell, An Exact History of the Late Revolutions in Naples (1650) · Galleria Spada, Rome · Public domain

An unelected captain-general

For the next several days Masaniello, backed by a self-organized militia of armed boys and market people, effectively ran the city in the viceroy's own name, forcing the abolition of the fruit gabelle and negotiating directly with the Spanish viceroy and the city's own archbishop from a position no elected office had ever given a fisherman before. But the strain told quickly: contemporaries described him within days making wild, erratic public displays - throwing himself fully clothed into the sea, brandishing his sword at imagined enemies - that cost him the confidence of the same people who had followed him.

Shot dead at his own altar

On the tenth day, with armed bands already forming in the viceroy's own favor, Masaniello took refuge in the Church of Carmine to hear Mass on its feast day, telling the archbishop he sensed the people were about to abandon him and asking only for a solemn procession before he died. Not long after, a group of armed men found him nearly alone in the church cloister and shot him four times. His last words, by the account of a witness who set the whole episode down within months, were a cry against "ungrateful traitors." His head was cut off and paraded on a lance through streets that, ten days earlier, had cried his name as their liberator.

Four hundred thousand in six months

contractionDrafted from Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729)

Naples had survived wars, banditry, Turkish raids, drought and earthquakes in the decade after Masaniello's revolt, but 1656 brought a catastrophe that made all of it look minor by comparison: a plague that killed roughly 400,000 people in the capital alone within six months, a toll the chronicler Giannone contrasted directly with an earlier sixteenth-century epidemic that had taken almost two years to carry off a sixth as many.

A cover-up that let the plague spread

The contagion arrived, by most accounts, aboard a ship of soldiers from plague-stricken Sardinia that was given clean bills of health despite standing quarantine orders - whether through the harbor guards' negligence or the Viceroy's own order to avoid delaying the troops is disputed. The first deaths were misattributed to fevers and apoplexy by physicians reluctant to name the real cause; one doctor who insisted publicly that the disease was pestilential was thrown into a dungeon on the Viceroy's orders and released only, as a mercy, to go home and die. The Archbishop, Cardinal Filomarino, eventually felt compelled to warn the Viceroy directly that more caution was needed, but the Count of Castrillo, anxious not to interrupt reinforcements he was sending to the ongoing war in Milan, tried to suppress the reports rather than act on them until the disease was already spreading through the city's poorest quarters.

Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729) · Domenico Gargiulo · Public domain

A hermitage built by a dying city

As the epidemic worsened, panicked Neapolitans turned to public penance and construction: acting on a dead nun's prophecy that a hermitage built on the slope of San Martino's hill would end the plague, nobles and commoners alike stripped themselves of jewelry and turned out in crowds to dig, carry stone, and donate gold, silver and copper by the barrel-load - a mass mobilization that, by bringing thousands of infected and uninfected citizens into close contact, almost certainly spread the contagion faster than it slowed it. Rumors spread that the plague was a deliberate Spanish reprisal for the Masaniello revolt, since the wealthier quarters where the Spanish garrison lived remained largely untouched while the poorest wards were devastated; mobs hunted for supposed poison-spreaders in the streets, adding lynchings to the epidemic's own death toll before the disease finally ran its course and a new viceroy was sent to govern what was left of the city.

A weakened kingdom passed to a new crown

The plague permanently altered Naples's demographic weight within the Spanish system at exactly the moment Spain's own global power was entering its long decline. When the Spanish Habsburg line finally died out with Charles II in 1700, the War of the Spanish Succession that followed transferred the Kingdom of Naples not to independence but to a new set of foreign masters, the Austrian Habsburgs, in 1707 - one viceroyalty succeeding another without the throne ever returning to a resident king, a condition that would not end until a Spanish Bourbon prince finally won it back by force at Bitonto in 1734.

The Battle of Bitonto

contractionDrafted from Horner, History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1734-1825 (1858)

Spanish viceregal rule over Naples gave way, after the War of the Spanish Succession, to an Austrian Habsburg viceroyalty in 1707 - a change of masters that left the kingdom's own status as somebody else's dependency unaltered. That changed in 1734, when the War of the Polish Succession gave Philip V of Spain's son, the Infant Charles, an opening to claim Naples and Sicily for the House of Bourbon in his own right rather than as a Spanish province.

A rout in a single morning

Charles landed in Puglia with a Spanish army and moved to secure the kingdom's own submission, while the Austrian garrison commander, Prince Belmonte, withdrew his outnumbered force of some eight thousand German soldiers to Bitonto, a fortified town whose walls and ditches he judged easier to defend than Bari. On the morning of the 25th of May, 1734, the Spanish commander Montemar deployed a larger, more experienced force against him; a feigned retreat drew no pursuit, but when Montemar committed his infantry and cavalry to open battle, the Austrian cavalry broke and fled toward Bari almost at once, and the rest of Belmonte's army collapsed within the same morning. Bitonto itself surrendered that same day, and the news alone was enough to bring the rest of Puglia's fortresses over to Charles without further fighting.

A prince proclaimed king of a reunited crown

Weeks later, on the 15th of June, Charles published his father's own decree ceding all Spanish claims on the Sicilies to him outright, and had himself proclaimed King of the Two Sicilies - not as a Spanish viceroy or an Austrian dependency, but as sovereign of a kingdom independent of both crowns for the first time since Gonzalo de Córdoba had taken Naples for Ferdinand of Aragon more than two centuries earlier. The city's own victory festivities were marred within weeks by a collapsed viewing platform that killed and wounded hundreds of spectators, a grim footnote to a reign that would otherwise open a fresh chapter of independent Neapolitan kingship.

Horner, History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1734-1825 (1858) · follower of Giuseppe Bonito · Public domain

Two crowns become one

endDrafted from Horner, History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1734-1825 (1858)

Independent Bourbon rule lasted seven decades before Napoleon's own wars reached the kingdom. In February 1806 a French army under Masséna crossed the Garigliano, meeting resistance only at the fortresses of Gaeta and Capua, and reached Naples within a week; the Bourbon court had already fled to Sicily under British protection. Napoleon's brother Joseph Bonaparte made his formal entry into the city on the 15th of February, styling himself Prince of France and Lieutenant of the Emperor, and two years later, when Joseph moved on to the throne of Spain, Napoleon's own brother-in-law Joachim Murat took his place. For a decade the mainland kingdom and the Bourbon court exiled on its own island answered to two separate crowns for the first time since 1734.

Horner, History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1734-1825 (1858) · Antoine-Jean Gros · Public domain

A restoration on someone else's terms

Murat's own fall in 1815, after he gambled his throne on backing Napoleon during the Hundred Days, let King Ferdinand return to a Naples the Congress of Vienna's diplomacy, rather than any Neapolitan choice, had arranged for him. Austria's own price for restoring him was explicit: no political persecution of Murat's former officials, recognition of the sales of state property and honors Joseph and Murat had granted, and the continued payment of the debts and pensions the French decade had created. Much of the Napoleonic kingdom's own legal and administrative architecture - a unified civil and penal code chief among it - survived the restoration essentially intact, whatever the returning court's own instincts toward the old order might otherwise have preferred.

A decree published a year after it was decided

The kingdom's own final act was administrative rather than military. Sicily had kept its own separate constitution since 1812, and Ferdinand's own ministers, resentful of the island's continued autonomy, spent the years after 1815 quietly persuading Britain that Sicily itself wanted new arrangements, using selectively edited petitions to make their case. The statute merging the two crowns had been substantially agreed at the Congress of Vienna itself, but its publication was withheld for more than a year, appearing only on the 1st of December, 1816: Ferdinand IV of Naples and Ferdinand III of Sicily became, in a single decree, King Ferdinand I of a single Kingdom of the Two Sicilies - no new dynasty, no war, and no ceremony beyond the stroke of a pen closing five and a half centuries of a mainland kingdom the Vespers had first split from the island in 1282.

A son of the people

afterlifeDrafted from Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy: June-November 1860 (1911)

The 1816 decree that fused Naples and Sicily into a single crown settled the throne's paperwork without settling the kingdom's politics. Both halves of the new state rose against the dynasty within four years - Naples in 1820, put down by an Austrian army; Sicily and then Naples again in 1848, put down by the king's own artillery, which earned Ferdinand II the nickname "King Bomba" for turning it on his own capital. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies survived both revolts, the second put down with an artillery bombardment thorough enough to leave Ferdinand II remembered afterward as "Bomba." It did not survive a third.

A dynasty nobody would defend

In the summer of 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi, at the head of an irregular volunteer force that had crossed from Sicily with barely a thousand men in May, marched up the Calabrian coast toward Naples with almost no resistance. The army meant to stop him would not fight for a king who had granted a constitution under pressure and was widely expected to revoke it the moment the pressure lifted; the citizens of Naples, remembering exactly what had followed the constitutions of 1820 and 1848, refused even to put their own names on the electoral rolls for fear the list would be used against them later. King Francis II fled the city by sea on 6 September, and the following morning a count drove along the main street standing up in his carriage, shouting to the citizens to gather at the station: the Dictator would arrive at midday.

The entry

Garibaldi came into Naples on 7 September with no army behind him at all. He arrived by train, escorted by a handful of old campaigners who had fought beside him in South America and Sicily, and the crowd that met him at the station swept aside the National Guard's own lines before the official address of welcome could even be finished. The carriage that finally carried him away from the crush went the wrong way by the official plan, passing directly under the loaded cannon of the Carmine fortress, still garrisoned by the king's own troops. Garibaldi stood up in the open carriage, folded his arms, and looked the gunners in the face. Some of them saluted. Nobody fired.

Naples, Italy · Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy: June-November 1860 (1911) · Museo Civico, Castel Nuovo, Naples · CC BY-SA 4.0

The mile-long quay beyond was packed with as many of the city's half million people as could find standing room, every window of the commercial buildings along it full of waving arms, every ship in the harbour crowded with sailors singing. Garibaldi, who had sat through the ride from the station largely still, stood up as the carriage reached the water and stayed standing, bareheaded, for the rest of the journey past two more royal garrisons that could have destroyed him and did not. "A son of the people," he wrote afterward of his own entrance, "accompanied by a few friends who called themselves his aides-de-camp, enter the proud capital acclaimed by its five hundred thousand inhabitants, whose fierce and irresistible will paralysed an entire army."

Two entrances, two months apart

What followed was a siege rather than a revolution: Francis II held out at Gaeta for months longer, and Garibaldi's own volunteers fought the last battles of the campaign on the Volturno before regular Piedmontese forces arrived to finish the war in the kingdom's name rather than the Dictator's own. On 7 November 1860, Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont made his own entry into the city that had already crowned Garibaldi with its acclaim two months earlier - riding in through pouring rain, with Garibaldi seated beside him in the same carriage, both men out of temper with each other over a slighted army review the day before. The rain ruined the triumphal arches built to greet them. The crowd's enthusiasm was unaffected.

The 1816 decree that had created the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had closed five and a half centuries of the mainland's separate history with no new dynasty, no war, and nothing beyond the stroke of a pen. Its own end, forty-four years later, was the opposite of that in every particular - fought over, celebrated in the streets, and sealed not by a decree withheld from publication but by two rival entrances into the same capital, a Dictator's and a king's, within two months of each other.