Conradin of Hohenstaufen Hawking, in the Codex Manesse
Conradin shown hawking as 'King Conradin the Younger' in the Codex Manesse (Heidelberg, Cpg 848, fol. 7r), illuminated some forty years after his death. He is in the manuscript as a poet: two of his songs are preserved there, written by a boy who was beheaded at sixteen.
The last Hohenstaufen came south in 1268 to claim the Sicilian inheritance Charles of Anjou had taken with papal backing. He was defeated at Tagliacozzo, handed over by a nobleman he had trusted, tried on a charge of treason that assumed the crown was already Charles's, and executed in the market square of Naples on 29 October 1268. Contemporaries were shocked less by the war than by the trial. See how Europe's last Hohenstaufen king died at sixteen.
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