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The Angevin monarch made to blind to three Manfred's children males and, in
1268, captured and made to decapitate to Conradin that -like grandson of Federico
II- was the last hereditary male of the house Hohenstaufen. The succession line
goes then to Constance, who offered refuge in Aragon to the supporters’ families of
her father, the Lanza, the Lauria and the Procida.
A fleet of the Aragonese crown, supervised by Corrado Lanza, covers in 1279 the
African coasts to restore the feudal sovereignty of Aragon on Tunisia, that the death
of the emir Muhammad I al-Mustansir had debilitated. Later, in 1281, Peter III
armed a fleet to invade Tunisia and requested newly elected pope Martín IV a bull
that the military operation was declaring like crossed; but the pope, of origin
French and supporter of Carlos de Anjou, denied it to him.
When the fleet was preparing to weigh anchor, would took place in Sicily the events
known like "Sicilian day before" that provoked the expulsion of the island, after a
big slaughter, of the French. The Sicilian sent then an embassy to Peter III offering
him the Sicilian crown, to which had a right thanks to his marriage. The Aragonese
king put then his fleet in the direction of Sicily, where arrived on August 30, 1282
and where king was crowned in the city of Palermo. Immediately he sent an
embassy to Carlos de Anjou, who was in Messina, urging him to admit him as a
king of Sicily and to leave the island. The defeat of the Angevin fleet in Nicoreta, in
hands of Admiral Roger de Lauria, forced Carlos to leave Messina and to shelter in
his kingdom of Naples. Pope Martín IV answered to the Sicilian coronation of
Pedro III with his excommunication (November 9, 1282) and his deposition like
king of Aragon (December 21, 1283), offering the crown to the second son of the
king of France, Carlos de Valois, whom invested on February 27, 1284, and
declaring a crusade against Aragon.
The situation of Peter III was completely unstable, since not only he had face up to
the French invasion that was prepared to the north of the Pyrenees, but he had face
up to serious problems inside his kingdoms arisen by the economic needs that the
conquest of Sicily provoked.
Peter III the Big solves the internal problems granting, in 1283, the formation of
the Aragonese Union and taking an oath to the "General Privilege" that was
defending the privileges of the nobility; also he granted to the County of Barcelona
the constitution “Una vegada l´any” in the courts celebrated in Barcelona between
1283 and 1284.
Solved the interior problems, he could center his attention on the French invasion,
which supervised by the proper French king Felipe III took in 1285 the city of
Gerona, for immediately having to move back when the Aragonese fleet returned of
Sicily supervised by Roger de Lauria and inflicted on the French squadron an entire
The Hohenstaufen Dynasty - Page 159 of 200