The Execution of Conradin: How Europe's Last Hohenstaufen King Died at Sixteen

In 1268 Charles of Anjou had 16-year-old King Conradin publicly beheaded in Naples, ending the Hohenstaufen dynasty and shocking medieval Europe.

1 August 2026 · Part of Medieval Germany and Famous Popes →

On 29 October 1268, a sixteen-year-old boy knelt in the marketplace of Naples and was beheaded before a crowd. His name was Conradin, and by blood he was Duke of Swabia and titular King of Jerusalem and Sicily, the last direct male heir of the House of Hohenstaufen — for a century the most powerful royal dynasty in Europe. His executioner, Charles of Anjou, had captured him ten weeks earlier after crushing his invasion army at the Battle of Tagliacozzo. The killing of a legitimate, crowned claimant by judicial sentence, rather than by imprisonment or ransom, was so far outside the customs of medieval warfare that it shocked contemporaries across the continent. Conradin's death did not just end one young man's life; it extinguished, almost at a stroke, the dynasty that had ruled Germany and much of Italy since the twelfth century, and it marked a definitive victory for the papacy in its two-hundred-year contest with the empire.

A Child's Inheritance

Conradin was born in March 1252 at Wolfstein Castle in Bavaria, the only son of the German king Conrad IV and Elisabeth of Bavaria. He was not yet two years old when his father died in 1254, leaving him titular ruler of an empire he had never seen. Real power in the Hohenstaufen lands passed to regents and, in the Kingdom of Sicily, to his father's illegitimate half-brother Manfred, who governed as regent before crowning himself king outright in 1258 on the strength of a false rumor that the boy had died.

The Hohenstaufens had spent generations locked in conflict with the papacy over the old question of whether emperors or popes held ultimate authority in Christendom — a struggle whose roots reached back to the Investiture Controversy of the eleventh century. Conradin's grandfather, the formidable Emperor Frederick II, had been excommunicated repeatedly and denounced by one pope as the Antichrist. By the 1260s the papacy had resolved to finish the Hohenstaufens for good. Pope Urban IV, and then his successor Clement IV, offered the crown of Sicily to Charles of Anjou, the ambitious younger brother of King Louis IX of France, in exchange for military conquest of the kingdom. Charles arrived in Italy in 1265 and marched south into the kingdom; in February 1266 he defeated and killed Manfred at the Battle of Benevento, taking the throne Manfred had claimed.

A Fifteen-Year-Old Claims His Crown

Manfred's death did not settle the matter. Ghibelline factions across Italy — the party that traditionally backed the empire against the papacy — appealed to the teenage Conradin, still in Bavaria, to come south and reclaim his hereditary kingdom. In 1267, at just fifteen, he crossed the Alps with an army drawn from German, Spanish, and Italian supporters, issuing a manifesto at Verona that laid out his claim to Sicily. Pope Clement IV excommunicated him that November, but Conradin's cause seemed, for a time, to be prospering: Sicily rose in revolt against Angevin rule, his fleet defeated Charles's ships, and in July 1268 he entered Rome to an enthusiastic popular welcome, backed by his ally Henry of Castile, the city's senator.

The decisive test came on 23 August 1268 at Tagliacozzo, in the hills of central Italy. Conradin's forces, including a contingent of Spanish knights, broke Charles's front line and seemed to have won the field — until a reserve division of veteran French knights, hidden behind a hill on the advice of the crusading veteran Erard of Valery, counterattacked once Conradin's men had scattered to plunder the field, turning apparent victory into a rout. Conradin fled the field, reached Rome, and then made for the coastal fortress of Astura, hoping to escape by sea to Sicily. Instead, the lord of Astura, calculating where his interests lay, seized him and handed him over to Charles's men.

Trial and Execution

Charles imprisoned Conradin in the Castel dell'Ovo in Naples, together with his close companion Frederick I, Margrave of Baden, and other captured supporters. What followed was, by the standards of thirteenth-century warfare, extraordinary: rather than simply holding his royal prisoner for ransom or lifelong confinement, as was customary even for defeated claimants, Charles had Conradin formally tried for treason. According to near-contemporary accounts, the panel of judges was reluctant to condemn a legitimate king to death, and only one — a Provençal jurist loyal to Charles — voted for execution. On the strength of that single vote, the court's protonotary, Robert of Bari, pronounced the sentence.

On 29 October 1268, Conradin and Frederick of Baden were beheaded in the public square of Naples. A later, much-repeated tradition holds that Pope Clement IV had counseled Charles that "Conradin's life means Charles's death, and Conradin's death means Charles's life" — but this chilling epigram appears only in sources written well after the event, and modern historians regard it as a later invention rather than something the pope actually said or wrote. What is certain is that Clement had excommunicated Conradin and never intervened to save him, whatever private reservations he may have held.

The execution appalled many who heard of it. Even chroniclers with no love for the Hohenstaufens described the killing of a boy-king as a stain on Charles's reputation, and later medieval and Romantic writers turned Conradin into a tragic figure, the subject of poems, paintings, and, in the nineteenth century, a marble memorial erected in Naples by the Bavarian crown prince Maximilian.

Chronology

Why the Execution Mattered

Conradin's death ended the direct male line of the Hohenstaufen dynasty that had produced emperors, kings, and some of the era's most sophisticated courts, most notably that of his grandfather Frederick II in Sicily. In the German lands, the vacancy at the top of Hohenstaufen power contributed to what historians call the Great Interregnum, a period without an effective, universally recognized king of Germany that lasted until the election of Rudolf of Habsburg in 1273 — the founder of a dynasty that would eventually eclipse anything the Hohenstaufens had achieved. It was a pattern familiar elsewhere in the medieval world: dynasties that seemed unshakeable could unravel with startling speed once a single contested succession broke their line, as the near-contemporary implosion of the Mongol Golden Horde's ruling house would also demonstrate a century later.

In Italy, Charles of Anjou now held the Kingdom of Sicily uncontested, at least for a time. But the resentment his French administration provoked among Sicilians erupted in 1282 in the uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers, which drove Angevin officials from the island and opened the door to the kingdom of Aragon, whose king Peter III had married Manfred's daughter Constance and pressed her hereditary claim. The Mediterranean politics of dynastic marriage and inherited claim that shaped Aragon's court culture in the decades that followed, explored in the story of courtly rivalry in fourteenth-century Aragon, trace their roots directly back to Conradin's failed campaign and Charles's harsh justice.

The execution also set an uncomfortable precedent. Kingdom of Sicily itself had seen its share of succession crises in the preceding century — the instability that gripped the island under the young King William II in 1177 shows how fragile royal authority there could be even under a native Norman dynasty — but none of those crises had ended with a crowned claimant's public beheading. Two centuries later, England's Wars of the Roses would produce its own share of dynastic bloodletting, including the near-total destruction of the House of York's senior line chronicled in the marriage politics of the Yorkist court; Conradin's execution stands as one of the starkest early examples of medieval rulers treating a rival's royal blood as no protection at all once political necessity demanded otherwise. It was, in that sense, closer in spirit to the era's politically driven judicial proceedings, such as the heresy trials that purged Cathar resistance in southern France, than to the conventions of chivalric warfare that supposedly governed how nobles treated captured enemies.

Conclusion

Conradin's brief, doomed campaign to reclaim his grandfather's kingdom lasted barely a year from his crossing of the Alps to his death in the Naples marketplace. Yet few single events in the thirteenth century carried such lasting consequences. His execution closed the book on one of medieval Europe's great royal houses, cemented papal alliance with the Angevins as the dominant force in southern Italy, and left a vacancy in Germany that reshaped imperial politics for a generation. That a sixteen-year-old boy, guilty of nothing more than pressing an inherited claim, paid for these outcomes with his head remained, for centuries afterward, one of the most vivid symbols of how ruthlessly medieval power politics could override the era's own supposed codes of noble conduct.

Frequently asked questions

Who was Conradin? Conradin (1252–1268) was the last direct male heir of the House of Hohenstaufen, titular Duke of Swabia and King of Jerusalem and Sicily. He was the grandson of Emperor Frederick II and son of Conrad IV of Germany, and he spent his short life trying to claim the Sicilian throne his family had lost to Charles of Anjou.

Why was Conradin executed instead of ransomed or imprisoned? Captured royal claimants in medieval Europe were usually held for ransom or life imprisonment rather than killed, since royal blood was normally seen as its own protection. Charles of Anjou instead had Conradin tried for treason and beheaded, a decision contemporaries found shocking precisely because it broke with that convention and eliminated any future Hohenstaufen threat to his rule.

Did the pope order Conradin's execution? There is no reliable evidence that Pope Clement IV ordered or explicitly approved the killing. The famous line attributing the decision to his counsel is a later literary invention, though Clement had excommunicated Conradin and made no effort to intervene on his behalf.

What happened to the Hohenstaufen dynasty after Conradin's death? With Conradin's execution, the direct male line of the Hohenstaufens ended. Some family claims persisted through female relatives and Manfred's illegitimate descendants, but none regained power, and Germany entered a period of contested, weak central kingship — the Great Interregnum — until Rudolf of Habsburg's election in 1273.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate links in Recommended reading — and in Further reading on older articles — may earn Writesides of History a commission at no extra cost to you.

From the archive