The Boy-King Beheaded In A Market Square

Conradin is one of the most tragic figures of the entire Middle Ages: a teenage king, the last heir of one of the greatest dynasties in Europe, publicly beheaded in a market square at the age of just sixteen, in an act so shocking that it horrified all of Christendom and echoed through European history for centuries afterward. To understand the tragedy, you have to understand the blood he carried. Conradin (the name is an affectionate diminutive, “little Conrad”) was born in 1252, the last legitimate male heir of the House of Hohenstaufen. This was one of the most powerful and glamorous dynasties of the medieval world; his grandfather had been the legendary Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, the “Wonder of the World,” a brilliant, terrifying ruler who had dominated Europe. But the Hohenstaufens had been locked in a generations-long, bitter war with the Papacy, and by the time little Conradin inherited his titles (Duke of Swabia, and the crowns of Sicily and Jerusalem) the dynasty’s power was crumbling. His father died when Conradin was barely two years old. And while the boy grew up in Germany, his rich southern kingdom of Sicily slipped away: first taken by his uncle Manfred, and then, when the Pope backed a French prince to seize it, conquered by that ruthless, ambitious Frenchman, Charles of Anjou, brother of the King of France.

Charles took the throne of Sicily and Naples by defeating and killing Conradin’s uncle in battle. But as long as a legitimate Hohenstaufen heir lived, Charles’s crown was not safe. And so, in 1267, the teenage Conradin, now fifteen and urged on by supporters across Italy who longed to throw off the French, made the fateful decision of his short life. He gathered an army and marched south, down through Italy, to reclaim the kingdom that was his birthright. He was welcomed with wild enthusiasm; the Italian cities that hated Charles greeted the golden Hohenstaufen boy as a liberator. For a moment, it looked possible. But on 23 August 1268, at the Battle of Tagliacozzo, Charles of Anjou’s experienced forces outmanoeuvred and crushed Conradin’s army. The boy-king fled the field, hoping to escape by sea, but he was betrayed by his own escort, taken prisoner, and handed over to the one man in the world who most needed him dead.

The Horror

What Charles of Anjou did next broke one of the deepest unwritten rules of medieval kingship. When kings and princes were captured in war, they were valuable: they were ransomed, imprisoned, held as hostages, married off. They were not killed. To execute a captured royal heir, a boy of sixteen, was virtually unthinkable, an act that violated the sacred code that protected royalty even in defeat. But Charles understood cold political logic. As long as Conradin lived, he would be a rallying point for every enemy Charles had. A chilling phrase came to be attached to the decision (“the death of Conradin is the life of Charles”), and Charles chose his own security over the boy’s life. He put Conradin on trial for treason before his own judges, a proceeding his enemies denounced as a sham designed to give murder the appearance of law, and condemned him to death.

On 29 October 1268, a huge crowd gathered in the market square of Naples, the Piazza del Mercato, drawn to witness something almost no one alive had ever seen: the public execution of a king. Conradin was led out onto the scaffold. He was sixteen years old. And he was not alone. Beside him stood his beloved, constant companion and friend, Frederick of Baden, himself barely nineteen, who was to die with him. The accounts tell that the boy-king met his death with a dignity that stunned the onlookers. Legend holds that Conradin, standing on the scaffold and looking out over the crowd, lamented the fate about to befall him, and then, in a final act of defiance, threw his glove out into the assembled people: a knight’s traditional challenge, a plea that someone, somewhere, would take up his cause and avenge his murder. Then he knelt. The executioner’s blade came down, and the last legitimate heir of the House of Hohenstaufen was beheaded. His young friend Frederick, it is said, died beside him; some accounts say he had to watch Conradin die first, then embraced his friend’s body before facing the blade himself. The dynasty of the “Wonder of the World” ended there, on a wooden scaffold, with the severed head of a sixteen-year-old boy.

The Modern Relic

The execution horrified medieval Europe and stained Charles of Anjou’s name forever. Far from securing peace, it helped sow the seeds of future rebellion, and many saw the brutal uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers, fourteen years later, when the people of Sicily rose up and massacred their French rulers, as a kind of delayed vengeance for the murdered boy-king. Conradin passed into legend as a romantic, tragic martyr, mourned for centuries, his story retold by poets and painters as the very image of doomed, innocent youth destroyed by ruthless power.

The relic is his tomb, and it still stands in the city where he died. Tradition says that Conradin’s mother, the grieving Elisabeth of Bavaria, travelled all the way to Naples with money to ransom her son, only to arrive after he had already been executed, and gave the money to the Carmelite friars to build a church where he could rest. Today, Conradin lies buried in the Basilica di Santa Maria del Carmine in Naples, at the edge of the Piazza del Mercato, the very square where his head was struck off. Inside, a moving marble statue of the young king, commissioned by the Bavarian crown prince and completed in 1847, marks his memory: the boy who would be king, rendered forever in white stone, a few steps from the spot where he died. You can walk into that church today, in the heart of Naples, and stand before the memorial to a sixteen-year-old whose only crime was the blood in his veins: the last of a great dynasty, executed to make a rival’s crown secure, whose thrown glove no one, in the end, was ever quite able to answer.

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