By the year 1268, the Norman line of kings in Sicily had ended, made abundantly clear by the beheading of the last of them, young King Conradin, in the Naples marketplace. The struggle between that old line of rulers and the invading French line from Anjou – the Angevins – was won by Charles I. He enjoyed the support of his subjects throughout France and northern Italy, but more importantly by Pope Urban IV whose power often exceeded the religious realm and stretched into affairs of state.
Charles was not from Sicily, and he did not live in Sicily, but he financed his various military endeavors on the taxes that he levied on the people of the island. The Sicilians came to think of themselves as nothing more than a remote treasury to be raided by the king whenever he chose to wage a war so
