This was the signal for a general insurrection. The cry spread to the city: every house was searched, and every person whose dress, speech, appearance, proclaimed him a Frenchman was massacred without mercy. Neither old age, nor sex, nor infancy, was spared. And in those Sicilian vespers, over two thousand of the Provençal and Angevin nobles and their wives perished under the knives of the justly incensed Sicilians. When Charles heard of the massacre he burst into paroxysms of wrath. He is described as next having sat silent, gnawing the top of his sceptre, and then breaking forth into the most horrible vows of revenge. Nor was the Pope behindhand in threats. It was to the Pope that Naples and Sicily owed the incubus of Charles and his Provençals. Clement IV. indeed was dead; Martin IV. now sat in his chair; but though there was a change in the person of the Chief Pontiff, there was no change of mind and policy. The Palermitans sent an embassy to the Pope to deprecate his wrath, addressing him: “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us!” But even this adulation could not abate his rage. He proclaimed a crusade against the Sicilians. Heaven was promised to those who should draw the sword against them. Anathema was proclaimed against all who took their side. But Peter of Aragon was indifferent to this ecclesiastical bluster, and the Sicilians were desperate. In spite of the blessings and promises of the Pope, Charles encountered only disaster. His fleet was destroyed, his son, Charles of Salerno, was captured; his treasury was exhausted, and the principal nobility of Anjou and Provence had been decimated in the Sicilian vespers. He sank into despondency and died, 1285. Eventually, at the intercession of King Edward I. of England, the young prince, Charles the Lame, was released. He swore to pay 20,000 marks, and surrender his two sons as hostages till the sum was paid, and allow the claim to the Two Sicilies to drop. But no sooner was he freed than Pope Nicolas IV. annulled the treaty, released Charles of his oaths, and crowned him with his own hands. Charles did not surrender his sons, nor pay his ransom. “This decree of Nicolas,” says Dean Milman, “was the most monstrous exercise of the absolving power which had ever been advanced in the face of Christendom: it struck at the root of all chivalrous honour, at the faith of all treaties.” But Charles was fain to content himself with his counties of Provence and Anjou, and not allow himself to be drawn or impelled into wars by the Pope. In Provence he found wounds to staunch, ruins to repair. It is highly to his credit that he frankly accepted this difficult and not very brilliant part. He avoided war, paid his father’s debts, re-established his finances, and acquired in return the nickname of Charles the Miserly. After a reign of twenty-four years he died in 1309.