By the spring of 1282, various factors created a highly volatile situation in the western Mediterranean. A conflict might have been avoided had there been a powerful arbitrator in the western Mediterranean to interject itself between the parties. But by the late thirteenth century, no such entity existed and the resulting political vacuum virtually assured a war. Had France or the papacy been neutral, the conflict might have been averted, but the near pathological paranoia of the papacy toward the Hohenstaufen family had resulted in the insertion of one of the most powerful and ambitious men of the time into the region at the expense of papal spiritual and political authority. France was allied with Charles of Anjou and the papacy was highly sympathetic to the Angevins, if not directly controlled by Charles.
Charles of Anjou controlled what some have called an empire, but his heavy-handed management of the realm and the public unrest it generated, particularly in Sicily, undermined his authority. At the same time, an Iberian kingdom with dynastic and commercial designs on the very territories that the Angevins were struggling to control was expanding rapidly. The dynastic uncertainty in regards to Sicily following the death of Frederick II provided the final ingredient to an unstable mixture. These factors and the lack of any other powerful arbiter in the region, created an unstable concoction that needed only a spark to touch it off. On March 29, 1282, an Angevin soldier in Palermo struck that spark and ignited a vicious war that would rage for twenty years.
