Constance of Sicily

Constance of Sicily, often numbered Constance II to distinguish her from the twelfth-century queen and Holy Roman Empress of the same name, was born about 1249, the daughter of Manfred of Hohenstaufen, king of Sicily, and his first wife Beatrice of Savoy. Manfred, an illegitimate son of the Emperor Frederick II, had taken the Sicilian crown after the death of Conrad IV and kept a court in which Latin, Greek, and Arabic elements still mixed, even as the papacy worked to replace the Staufen with a dynasty more obedient to Rome. Beatrice of Savoy died while Constance was still a child; Manfred later married Helena Angelina Doukaina. Constance thus grew up as the only daughter of the Savoyard marriage and, after the military disasters of the 1260s, as a principal surviving carrier of the Hohenstaufen claim to the Sicilian regno. Her exact birthplace is not securely recorded.

In June 1262 she was married at Montpellier to Peter, infante of Aragon, son and heir of James I. The match was a deliberate Aragonese investment in the Sicilian succession. Four years later Manfred was defeated and killed by Charles of Anjou at Benevento; in 1268 Constance’s young kinsman Conradin was executed at Naples. With those deaths, Constance, living in the Crown of Aragon, became the leading legitimist heiress of Sicily. Peter succeeded as king of Aragon and of Valencia and as count of Barcelona in 1276, and Constance was thereafter queen consort of those realms.

The revolt known as the Sicilian Vespers, which began at Palermo in 1282, destroyed Angevin control of the island. Sicilian leaders offered the crown to Peter in right of his wife. Peter accepted, crossed to Sicily, and was acknowledged as king; Constance thus became queen of Sicily as well as of Aragon. She spent periods on the island during the long war that followed. Peter died in 1285. Their son Alfonso III inherited the Crown of Aragon, while another son, James, was left to rule Sicily. After Alfonso’s death in 1291, James succeeded in Aragon and later, under papal and Angevin pressure, agreed to abandon Sicily, a settlement many islanders rejected by raising Constance’s younger son Frederick as king (Frederick III of Sicily). Among her other children were Elizabeth, who married King Denis of Portugal and was later canonized, and Yolande, who married Robert, subsequently king of Naples.

As a widow Constance remained a dynastic intermediary between Catalonia and Sicily, residing at times in the island kingdom in support first of James and then of Frederick. In her last years she lived in the Crown of Aragon. She died at Barcelona on 9 April 1302 and was buried in the convent of Saint Francis in that city. She was not a member of a religious order in the formal sense, nor was she canonized; her importance is political rather than cultic. Through her marriage the Hohenstaufen claim to Sicily passed into the house of Barcelona, and the resulting Aragonese presence in Sicily reshaped western Mediterranean politics for the rest of the Middle Ages.