On the other hand, the entrance of a French army under Charles of Anjou, called in by a French pope to conquer the Ghibelline realm of the Two Sicilies (1266), put a due share of wrong to the account of the Guelphs, the French power standing for something very like barbarism. Its first achievement was to exterminate the Saracen name and religion in Sicily. On its heels came a new irruption from Germany, in the person of Conradin, the claimant of the imperial succession, to whom joined themselves Pisa and Siena, in opposition to their big neighbour and enemy Florence, and the people of Rome itself, at quarrel with their Pope, who had left the city for Viterbo. By Conradin's defeat the French power became paramount; and then it was that the next pope, Gregory X, sought to restore the Ghibellines as counterpoise: a policy pursued by his successor, to the end, however, of substituting (1278) papal for imperial claims over Italy. Even Florence at his wish recalled her Ghibellines. But then came the forced election of another French pope, who acted wholly in the French interest, and re-exiled everywhere the Ghibellines: a process speedily followed in turn by the "Sicilian Vespers," involving the massacre and expulsion of the French, and introducing a Spanish king as representative of the imperial line. Again the Papacy encouraged the other power, relieving Charles II, as King of Naples, from his treaty oath, and set him upon making a war with Sicily, which dragged for twenty-four years. Such were the main political features of the Italy of Dante. The Papacy, becoming a prize of the leading Roman families, played a varying game as between the two monarchies of the south and their partisans in the north; and the minor cities, like the greater, underwent chronic revolutions. Still, so abundant was the Italian outflow of intellectual and inventive energy, so substantial was the general freedom of the cities, and so soundly was the average regimen founded on energetic agriculture and commerce, that wealth abounded on all hands.