Kingdom of Naples

The mainland half of a kingdom that split in a massacre, and the largest Italian state for five centuries. The Sicilian Vespers of 1282 - a rising in Palermo against Charles of Anjou's French administration that began, by tradition, at the hour of evening prayer - drove the Angevins off the island but not off the mainland, leaving two kingdoms both called Sicily and the northern one known in practice as Naples. Angevin, then Aragonese, then Spanish, then Austrian, then Bourbon rulers followed, so the kingdom was governed from elsewhere for most of its existence, with viceroys and an absentee court. Naples itself became one of Europe's largest cities, at times second only to Paris, with an enormous poor population and a brilliant intellectual life - Vico, Pergolesi, and the conservatoires that gave the word its musical sense. Masaniello's revolt in 1647 briefly took the city. The Bourbons excavated Pompeii and Herculaneum from 1738. Garibaldi's thousand took the kingdom in 1860 and a plebiscite folded it into Italy, a settlement southern Italians have argued about since. The brigand war that followed lasted years. The kingdom covered all of mainland southern Italy. Naples was its capital throughout and remains Italy's third largest city. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies formally united it with the island in 1816. Its historic centre is a World Heritage site. Pizza in its modern form was developed there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Vesuvius overlooks the bay and has erupted many times since burying Pompeii.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history