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Everything is
related to Naples
Number 147 in
this series. Link to
all items here.
(To my dear
friends, Charles & Jeanne Manfred. They came all
the way to Sorrento this summer, but I was unable to
see them.)
Miniature
of the Coronation of Manfred, from
the Giovanni Villani Chronicle, Vatican Library   his started as
a search for one of those invented places in fiction that
have become metaphorical—you know...from Utopia to Shangri-La
with whistle-stops in Ruritania and the Duchy of Grand
Fenwick. (I refuse to do your homework for you, but if you
send me the correct references—i.e., author/date/work for those
places I've just named, I'll send you
an absolutely imaginary ticket to the fictional dream
getaway of your choice!)* I wanted
a make-believe postage-stamp-sized nation carved high in
the Gabardine spur of the Apennines in southern Italy
sometime in the Middle Ages, conjured up as a dark place
for tales of medieval intrigue, mystery and treachery.
Alas, I could find no such invention, no flight of fancy,
no alternate history (one perhaps in which the Pope
converts to Islam in the 1200s, leading to the founding of
the Capri Caliphate). (On the other hand, I do live in
Naples, so in terms of dark places of medieval intrigue,
mystery and treachery, maybe we're doing all right on our
own.)I thought I had found such a place some time ago when my friends, the Manfreds of Hollywood, and erstwhile residents of Sorrento told me some time ago that they were here for a while and fully intended to go over and check out the "north forty" and see how much acreage the Italian state owes them by now, lo, after many centuries of said deadbeat state's neglecting and dodging of earnest letters from Los Angeles and the Manfreds' legal fleagles, Dewey, Fleeceham & Howe. "Oh?" says I. "And where might that be?" "Manfredonia." Har. Chuckle. Good one. You almost had me there. Manfredonia. (I thought of my favorite such fictional place, Freedonia, ("Land of the Spree and the Home of the Knave!") from the 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup and my favorite scene, in which Groucho starts pelting Mrs. Teasdale with fruit when she starts to bellow the Freedonian national anthem. "Sorry," says Groucho. "We can't stop till the fruit runs out." Hail, Freedonia, indeed. And the same for Manfredonia. Pick me up a check for Matthewstan while you're at it!  Of course, as I am
mortified to report, there really was—and still is—a Manfredonia,
built by and named for one of my Hollywood Manfred's
great-greats. It's a coastal town in the province of
Foggia in the modern Italian region of Apulia (green area
on map), just below the spur of the boot of Italy, Monte
Gargano, on the Adriatic. The current population is just
under 60,000. The area is very historic and, according to
legend, was settled as "Sipontum" in ancient times by the
Greeks, indeed, by none other than Diomedes, one of the
great warriors in the Iliad.
Even for Italy, the area overflows with conspicuous
history; Sipontum is just a few miles north of a small
village with the curious name of Canne della Battaglia [Canne of the
Battle] (now
part of the nearby town of Barletta). It is on the Ofanto
river, the site where in 216 BC Hannibal pulled off one of
the greatest tactical feats in military history,
inflicting a massive defeat on the numerically superior
armies of Rome at the Battle of Cannae. Sipontum then
became a Roman colony in 189 BC. Much later, in the 1100s
it was an important Norman county. The old city of Siponto
was abandoned after the 1223 earthquake and the swamping
up of that part of the coast. Modern Manfredonia was built
by King Manfred between 1256–1263, just north of the ruins
of ancient Sipontum. He planned a city with fortifications
and broad, straight streets as his father, Frederick II of
Hohenstaufen, had done in similar ventures before and was
no doubt intent on fulfilling his father's dream of
reconstituting the Holy Roman Empire as a grand Ghibelline
(anti-papal) enterprise centered in the south.(Frederick
was a tireless builder of towns and fortresses. See this link for more.)
Manfredonia has collected many legends and stories about
itself, this one from an interesting volume called The Land of Manfred, Prince
of Tarentum and King of Sicily. Rambles in Remote Parts
of Southern Italy, by Janet Ross (London, John
Murray, Albermarle St. 1889).
This bust of King Manfred is by
contemporary Bulgarian sculptor, Darin Lazarov and is on the premises of the Manfredonia city hall.  Manfred. The historical Manfred
(1232-1266) was born in Venosa in the southern Italian
province of Potenza, about 100 miles south of Naples. He
was a natural son of the emperor Frederick
II of Hohenstaufen (d. 1250), one of the most
powerful of all Holy Roman Emperors. Manfred's mother was
Frederick's lover, the Piemontese noblewoman, Bianca
Lancia (or Lanzia), whom Frederick married on her
deathbed, no doubt to legitimize the son, Manfred. Sources
say that Frederick regarded Manfred as legitimate and as
his "favorite son."The quickest gloss over the change from Hohenstaufen to Angevin dynasties in southern Italy is simply to say that Frederick's death was followed by a few decades of struggle between his descendents and French Angevin usurpers (plus the pope) to see who got the kingdom of Sicily (all of southern Italy). That might pass a short-answer quiz, but it leaves out a lot of the juicy stuff. Actually, Frederick had provided in his will for an orderly transition of imperial power (to his half-brother, Conrad IV) as well as of royal power in Sicily (to Manfred, who would rule Sicily as a representative of the new emperor). Manfred apparently acted loyally and acknowledged Conrad when the latter showed up in Siponto in 1252 to see how things were going down south. Together they solidified the still-Hohenstaufen state but had a falling out. Conrad then died in 1254, leaving his imperial throne to his young child, Conradin, with Manfred acting as a regent. This set the stage for open and armed intervention by Papal and Angevin troops to move on the kingdom of Sicily. The war that followed started out well for Manfred. Within a few years he was crowned King of Sicily and even lay claim to the Holy Roman Imperial crown when the rumor circulated that Conradin had died (untrue). The battlefield, however, settled matters once and for all; Manfred's army met French and Papal forces near Benevento in February, 1266. (This is where the soundtrack starts playing Schumann's Manfred Overture behind the battle; it is the most über-romantic piece of über-German Romanticism ever über-composed. It's an anachronism, yes, but when you're slinging battle-axes and armor around, it sure beats Hildegarde von Bingen.) Manfred lost and was killed in battle. The Angevins took the kingdom and mopped up by executing the child-king, Conradin, by beheading him at Piazza Mercato in Naples. Manfred's short reign as the last Hohenstaufen king of Sicily was, thus, from 1258-66. Sources of the day have praised him as intelligent and magnanimous. Their praise was often high-flown and Ross cites some of it in her Land of Manfred book:
Yet, it was too little time to know if Manfred was really a "chip off the old block" of Frederick II. Maybe, maybe not. He finished some of his father's manuscripts, inherited Frederick's bent for polyculturalism, remaining on good terms—and utilizing—the Hohenstaufen garrision of Muslim (!) troops at Lucera. His short life has been romanticized (overly, no doubt) in music and literature (Byron's poem, Manfred, uses the name but the character is unrelated to the historical Manfred.) In the Divina Commedia, Manfred puts in an appearance in Canto III of Purgatorio so pope-baiter Dante can get in some licks by turning Manfred into a martyr to the evils of papal expansionism. Manfred's city has survived attempts at toponomastic vandalism; the victorious Angevins wanted to call it Sypontum Novellum (New Sypontum). Ho-hum. It remains Manfredonia. According to many travel writers, people in the south still have (or at least had) some sense of Manfred, "their king." Ross closes her book with this:
(There is an additional excerpt from Ross' The Land of Manfred at this link to the Through the Eyes of...section of the Around Naples Encyclopedia.)
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