This will had been dictated by dislike of her second cousin and adopted heir Charles Count of Durazzo, but it did not prevent him, his son Ladislaus, and his daughter the beautiful and dissolute Joanna II., from establishing a _de facto_ right to their heritage. Meanwhile Louis I., Louis II., and Louis III., their rivals of the second Angevine line, as it was called, persisted in styling themselves kings of Naples as well as of Jerusalem, and having patched up their defective title, by obtaining a recognition of their claims and investitures from several popes, they each invaded their titular kingdom. The first Angevine dynasty being about to close by the childless death of Joanna II., she was persuaded to terminate the struggle by settling her crown upon the second Angevine race, which at her death in 1435, was represented by Rénier, usually called René le Bon. The fatality of a disputed succession, with its attendant miseries, was however still in store for unhappy Naples. Joanna II. had already in 1421 adopted as her heir Alfonso V., King of Aragon and Sicily, who was likewise representative of whatever claims might have been transmitted from the old Norman dynasty, being in fact similar to those upon which his family had acquired Sicily before 1300. Eugene IV., at the same time, still further complicated this confusion, by interposing his right as over-lord, alleging that the investiture had, by failure of the reigning dynasty, lapsed to the Holy See. After ineffectually attempting by an invasion to vindicate his title against his rival of Aragon, René retired to his little state of Provence, to dedicate his life to literature and the arts, but especially to those chivalrous lyrics which, casting the halo of poetic romance around the troubadours and their times, have wreathed his brows with laurels far more enduring than the crown of Naples could have conferred. Yet he and his nephew Charles continued titular kings, until the latter, dying without surviving male issue in 1481, left all his property, and therewith his claims upon Lower Italy, to Louis XI. of France, his third cousin and nearest male heir, upon whose death in 1483, these passed to Charles VIII. Alfonso V., having repulsed the good René, had no further serious disturbance in his possession of Naples and Sicily, now once more united; but he being succeeded in these by a natural son Ferdinand I., his Spanish crown going to his brother John II., the already defective title of the house of Aragon to their Italian dominions on _terra firma_ was thereby further weakened, at a moment when they exchanged the competition of a petty and unwarlike prince for that of the powerful and ambitious monarch of France.