E-Spania ()
Prouver la légitimité d’une succession, le cas du royaume de Naples au XVe siècle
Abstract
This contribution reconstructs a long-distance controversy between the two contenders for the title of King of Naples after the heirless death of the last Angevin queen, Joan II. Louis of Anjou and later his brother René, received pontifical support. The other candidate, Alfonso of Aragon, eventually won the contest in 1442. Each side would seek the support of the Basel Conciliar Assembly by submitting texts to it, so as to demonstrate and provide evidence of its rightful claim. Until now, the coherence of this documentary body had escaped historians, because of the historiographical fragmentation of studies devoted to the Aragonese rulers and the Angevins of Naples. The defence of Angevin rights is ensured by a text preserved in the Latin manuscript 6262A of the National Library of France, whose traditional attribution to Pietro Ursuleo, a simple copyist, I correct in favour of Raymond Talon, Bishop of Sisteron, whom René of Anjou sent to the Council of Basel. This text, circulated to the court of Alfonso of Aragon, provoked a response in the form of a genealogical libellum commissioned by the baile of the Kingdom of Valencia, and entrusted to the care of a Valencian notary, Pau Rosell. All the known manuscripts of these texts are mentioned here, but above all I analyse the strategies their authors implement in order to provide evidence when the legitimacy of a sovereign is at stake. Talon and Rosell fight on the legal field, the former using the form of a university quaestio, and the latter a genealogical libellum. Raymond Talon demonstrates the Angevins’ rights by citing the papal investiture bulls they obtained; Pau Rosell establishes that Alfonso of Aragon is the most direct possible descendant of the Norman kings of the kingdom of Sicily, and of emperor Frederick II. The formal disparity should not obscure the remarkable similarities in the rhetoric used, each author claiming to establish the truth by quoting documents of authority, while passing over the opponent’s arguments as well as arguments deemed legally weak, such as the adoptions (arrogationes) made by Queen Joan II.
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