Ladislas proved a born soldier of unflagging energy and purpose, so that he not only conquered his unruly baronage but made himself master of southern Italy, including Rome, from which with unusual Angevin hostility he drove the Pope. Here was a chance for bringing about the union of Italy under one ruler, and Ladislas certainly aimed at such an achievement, but apart from his military genius he was a typical despot of his day--cruel, unscrupulous, and pleasure-seeking as the Visconti--and when he died, still a young man, in 1414 few mourned his passing. His sister, Joanna II, who succeeded him, lacked his strength while exhibiting many of his vices. Like Joanna I she was false and fickle; like Joanna I she had no direct heirs, so that the original House of Anjou in Naples came to an end when she died. Many negotiations as to her successor took place during the latter years of her reign, and for some time it seemed as if the old queen would be content to accept Louis III of Anjou, at this time the representative of the Second Angevin House, but in a moment of caprice and anger she suddenly bestowed her favour instead on Alfonso V of Aragon and Sicily, and adopted him as her heir. Of course, being Joanna, she again changed her mind; but, though Alfonso pretended to accept his repudiation, the hard-headed Spaniard was not to be turned so easily from an acquisition that would forward Aragonese ambitions in the Mediterranean. Directly Joanna II died, Alfonso appeared off Naples with a fleet, and though he was taken prisoner in battle and sent as a prisoner to Filippo Maria Visconti at Milan, he acted with such diplomacy that he persuaded that despot, hitherto an ally of the Angevins, that it was much safer for Milan to have a Spanish rather than a French House reigning in Naples. This was the beginning of a firm alliance between Milan and Naples, for Alfonso, released from his captivity, succeeded in establishing himself in ‘the Kingdom’, where withdrawing his court from Aragon he founded a new capital that became a centre for learned and cultured Italians as of old in the days of Frederick II. We have dealt now with four of the five principal Italian states during the later Middle Ages. In Rome, to pick up the political threads, we must go back to the effects of the removal of the papal court to Avignon in 1308.[46] From the point of view of the Popes themselves, many of them Frenchmen by birth, there were considerable advantages to be gained by this change--not only safety from the invasions of Holy Roman Emperors aspiring to rule Italy, but also from the turbulence of Roman citizens and barons of the Campagna.