The immediate cause of these evils was the disputed succession to the crown of Naples, which we have formerly seen convulsing Italy, and which it will require a brief digression and the annexed table to explain. The Norman knights who in the eleventh century visited Lower Italy in a crusade against the Saracens, soon contrived to make that country their own. One of them, Robert Guiscard, by his valour and talents acquired a supremacy in which he was succeeded by his nephew Roger, who had by similar means made himself master of Sicily. In 1130, the latter procured from Innocent II. the investiture of a kingdom nearly equal in extent to that of the Two Sicilies in our day, which, during next century, passed by marriage into the line of the Hohenstaufen emperors of Germany. But the same incurable jealousies, which gave rise to the Guelphic and Ghibelline parties, made the popes look with little favour on their new neighbours, who however maintained their ground for three generations, notwithstanding repeated offers of a competing investiture, by successive pontiffs, to various English and French princes. The crown, thus sent a-begging, was at length accepted by Charles Count of Anjou and Provence, seventh son of Louis VIII. of France, who, in 1266, defeated and slew Manfred, the last monarch of the Hohenstaufen line, and assuming the title of Charles I., founded the first Angevine dynasty. But in consequence of the brutal behaviour of his soldiery, he lost Sicily in a revolt, during which there occurred, in 1282, the massacre of the French, known as the Sicilian vespers. On this opening, Alfonso III. of Aragon put in a claim through his mother, a daughter of Manfred, and having established himself as King of Sicily, that title continued in his successors, and was ultimately reunited to the crown of Naples. The first house of Anjou, however, maintained themselves upon the throne of Naples for about one hundred and seventy years, notwithstanding the testamentary disposition of the maligned and unfortunate Queen Joanna I., who, in 1382, bequeathed that kingdom and the county of Provence to Louis I., second son of John II. of Anjou.