Naples

The Sicilian Vespers of 1282 cost the Angevins the island, but Naples stayed the capital of their mainland kingdom, and through the 14th century its court drew Tuscan bankers, Giotto, Boccaccio and Petrarch. In 1442 Alfonso of Aragon took the city from the last Angevin king, René, and gathered humanists around the new dynasty. After the Italian Wars the kingdom fell to Spain in 1503, and for two centuries Naples was governed by viceroys, the greatest of them Pedro Álvarez de Toledo, who rebuilt much of the city.

Under Spanish rule Naples grew into the largest city on the Mediterranean, second in Europe only to Paris. In 1647 a new tax on fruit, the staple food of the poor, set off the revolt of the fisherman Masaniello, which proclaimed a short-lived republic before Spanish rule returned, and in 1656 plague killed about half of its 300,000 people. Austria took the kingdom in 1707, but in 1734 the Bourbon prince Charles conquered it, and Naples became once more the capital of a king of its own.