• Curradino, or Conradin, son of the Emperor Conrad IV , a beautiful youth of sixteen, who was beheaded in the square of Naples by order of Charles of Anjou, in 1268. Voltaire, in his rhymed chronology at the end of his Annales de l’Empire , says, “C’est en soixante-huit que la main d’un bourreau Dans Conradin son fils éteint un sang si beau.” Endeavoring to escape to Sicily after his defeat at Tagliacozzo, he was carried to Naples and imprisoned in the Castel deir Uovo. “Christendom heard with horror,” says Milman, History of Latin Christianity , Book XI Ch. 3, “that the royal brother of St. Louis, that the champion of the Church, after a mock trial, by the sentence of one judge, Robert di Lavena⁠—after an unanswerable pleading by Guido de Suzaria, a famous jurist⁠—had condemned the last heir of the Swabian house⁠—a rival king who had fought gallantly for his hereditary throne⁠—to be executed as a felon and a rebel on a public scaffold. So little did Conradin dread his fate, that, when his doom was announced, he was playing at chess with Frederick of Austria. ‘Slave,’ said Conradin to Robert of Bari, who read the fatal sentence, ‘do you dare to condemn as a criminal the son and heir of kings?