Manfred

Manfred is the King of Sicily whose defeat and death at the Battle of Benevento overturn the political order surrounding Beritola Caracciola and her family. He is not an active character in the events that follow, but his fall begins the chain of dispossession, flight, and separation that drives their story; the later revolt against Charles I of Anjou gives that history a further reversal.

Kingship and the Battle of Benevento

After the death of Emperor Frederick II, Manfred was crowned King of Sicily and stood at the height of his power. Arrighetto Capece, a Neapolitan nobleman, held the governance of the island under him. The political order changed abruptly when Charles I of Anjou overcame and killed Manfred at the Battle of Benevento. Sicily then passed into Charles’s possession, and Arrighetto, mistrusting the loyalty of the Sicilians to their new ruler, prepared to flee rather than become a subject of his lord’s enemy.

The consequences of Manfred’s fall

Arrighetto’s intended flight was discovered before he could escape. He and many other friends and servants of Manfred were taken prisoner and delivered to Charles, leaving Beritola without news of her husband and fearful of what had become of him. Pregnant and poor, she abandoned her possessions and fled by sea with her young son Giusfredi; a second son, Scacciato, was born after she reached Lipari. Manfred’s defeat thus functions as the political cause of a family rupture that spreads across years and places, even though the king himself does not re-enter the action.

A remembered ruler in a later reversal

Manfred’s name returns when the story’s political situation changes again. Fourteen years after leaving Sicily, Giusfredi—then living under the name Giannotto and imprisoned in Lunigiana—hears that King Pedro of Aragon has raised Sicily against Charles and taken the island from him. The news makes him recall that his father had once ruled there in Manfred’s lifetime, and he reveals his own identity and parentage to his gaoler. In this way, Manfred’s reign supplies the measure of the family’s lost status, while the revolt against Charles creates the opening through which Giusfredi’s origins can be recognized and his fortunes begin to change.