In southern Italy, Manfred for a while was successful.  In 1259 he married Helena, the daughter of Michael of Cyprus and AEtolia, a maiden of seventeen years, and famed far and wide for her loveliness.  So beautiful were the bridal pair, and such were the attractions of their court, which, as in Frederick’s time, was the favorite resort of distinguished poets and lovely women, that a bard of the times declared, “Paradise has once more appeared upon earth.”

Manfred, like his father and his brother Enzio, was a poet, being classed among the Minnesingers.  His marriage gave him the alliance of Greece, and the marriage of Constance, his daughter by a former wife, to Peter of Aragon, gained him the friendship of Spain.  Strengthened by these alliances, he was able to send aid to the Ghibellines in Lombardy, who again became victorious.

The Guelphs, alarmed at Manfred’s growing power, now raised a Frenchman to the papal throne, who induced Charles of Anjou, the brother of the French monarch, to strike for the crown of southern Italy.  Charles, a gloomy, cold-blooded and cruel prince, gladly accepted the pope’s suggestions, and followed by a powerful body of French knights and soldiers of fortune, set sail for Naples in 1266.  Manfred had unluckily lost the whole of his fleet in a storm, and was not able to oppose this threatening invasion, which landed in Italy in his despite.

Nor was he more fortunate with his land army.  The clergy, in the interest of the Guelph faction, tampered with his soldiers and sowed treason in his camp.  No sooner had Charles landed, than a mountain pass intrusted to the defence of Riccardo di Caseta was treacherously abandoned, and the French army allowed to advance unmolested as far as Benevento, where the two armies met.

In the battle that followed, Manfred defended himself gallantly, but, despite all his efforts, was worsted, and threw himself desperately into the thick of the fight, where he fell, covered with wounds.  The bigoted victor refused him honorable burial, on the score of heresy, but the French soldiers, nobler-hearted than their leader, and touched by the beauty and valor of their unfortunate opponent, cast each of them a stone upon his body, which was thus buried under a mound which the natives still know as the “rock of roses.”

The wife and children of Manfred met with a pitiable fate.  On learning of the sad death of her husband Helena sought safety in flight, with her daughter Beatrice and her three infant sons, Henry, Frederick, and Anselino; but she was betrayed to Charles, who threw her into a dungeon, in which she soon languished and died.  Of her children, her daughter Beatrice was afterwards rescued by Peter of Aragon, who exchanged for her a son of Charles of Anjou, whom he held prisoner; but the three boys were given over to the cruellest fate.  Immured in a narrow dungeon, and loaded with chains, they remained thus half-naked, ill-fed, and untaught for the period of thirty-one years.  Not until 1297 were they released from their chains and allowed to be visited by a priest and a physician.  Charles of Anjou, meanwhile, filled with the spirit of cruelty and ambition, sought to destroy every vestige of the Hohenstauffen rule in southern Italy, the scene of Frederick’s long and lustrous reign.