13-14 ғасырлар Француз принці Шарль де Валуа

13/14th century French prince

Charles of Valois (12 March 1270 – 16 December 1325), the fourth son of King Philip III of France and Isabella of Aragon, was a member of the House of Capet and founder of the House of Valois, whose rule over France would start in 1328. Charles ruled several principalities. He held in appanage the counties of Valois, Alençon (1285), and Perche. Through his marriage to his first wife, Margaret, Countess of Anjou and Maine, he became Count of Anjou and Maine. Through his marriage to his second wife, Catherine I of Courtenay, Empress of Constantinople, he was titular Latin Emperor of Constantinople from 1301 to 1307, although he ruled from exile and only had authority over Crusader States in Greece. As the grandson of King Louis IX of France, Charles of Valois was a son, brother, brother in law and son in law of kings or queens (of France, Navarre, England and Naples). His descendants, the House of Valois, would become the royal house of France three years after his death, beginning with his eldest son King Philip VI of France.

Besides holding in appanage the counties of Valois, Alençon and Perche, Charles became in 1290 the Count of Anjou and of Maine by his first marriage with Margaret of Anjou, the eldest daughter of King Charles II of Naples, titular King of Sicily; by a second marriage that he contracted with the heiress of Emperor Baldwin II of Constantinople, last Latin emperor of Constantinople, he also had pretensions to the throne of Constantinople. From his early years, Charles of Valois dreamed of more and sought all his life for a crown he never obtained. Starting in 1284, Pope Martin IV recognized him as King of Aragon (under the vassalage of the Holy See), as the son of his mother, Isabella of Aragon, in opposition to King Peter III of Aragon, who after the conquest of the island of Sicily was an enemy of the Papacy. Charles hence married Margaret, the daughter of the Neapolitan king, in order to re enforce his position in Sicily which was supported by the Pope. Thanks to this Aragonese Crusade undertaken by his father King Philip III against the advice of his elder brother Philip the Fair, he believed he would win a kingdom and however won nothing but the ridicule of having been crowned with a cardinal's hat in 1285, which gave him the alias of the "King of the Cap." He would never dare to use the royal seal which was made on this occasion and had to renounce the title. Amid the Gascon and Franco Flemish Wars, Charles commanded effectively in Flanders in 1297.

Dreaming of an imperial crown, Charles married Catherine I of Courtenay in 1301, who was the titular Empress of Constantinople. The marriage drew Charles closer to the papacy, as his new marriage needed the connivance of Pope Boniface VIII. The pope saw Charles as a potential ally and tool to further papal influence; Boniface desired to re install a Catholic ruler on the throne of the Byzantine Empire and thus revive the Latin Empire, which Charles now had a claim to. The pope was also eager to end the nearly 20 year long war between the papacy, Angevin Naples, and Sicily, and so hoped to have Charles' army invade Sicily. Named papal vicar, Charles of Valois led a private French army into Italy. However, he soon lost himself in the complexity of Italian politics, namely the generational feud between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Local nobles and church officials used his army as a tool against their political rivals, and men under his command massacred a crowd in Florence. When his army landed on the shores of Sicily in May 1302, it faced heavy resistance from the Sicilian population. Charles' army pushed inland, but became mired in attritional warfare in the hot Sicilian summer; after a disastrous attempt to besiege Sciacca, Charles' army found itself out of supplies and surrounded on the southern coast of Sicily. Rather than see his army destroyed, Charles negotiated the Peace of Caltabellotta with the Sicilian leadership, thus ending the war of the Vespers. The Sicilian campaign had been a disaster; Charles' battered army had been forced to evacuate the island without having fought a major battle, and the treaty ended Angevin and papal attempts to re conquer Sicily.