Alfonso II (4 November 1448 – 18 December 1495) was Duke of Calabria and ruled as King of Naples from 25 January 1494 to 23 January 1495. He was a soldier and a patron of Renaissance architecture and the arts.
Heir to his father Ferdinand I's Kingdom of Naples, Alfonso held the dukedom of Calabria for most of his life. In the 1480s, Alfonso commanded the Neapolitan forces in Tuscany in 1478–1479. He helped reverse the Ottoman invasion of Otranto in Apulia in 1480–1481, and against the Republic of Venice in 1484. In 1486, Alfonso's repressive conduct towards the Neapolitan nobility prompted a revolt; the violent excesses of suppressing this uprising further discredited Alfonso and King Ferdinand. Under Alfonso's patronage, the city of Naples was remodelled with new churches, straightened roads, and an aqueduct supplying fountains.
Alfonso became King of Naples in 1494 on his father's death. Within a year, he was forced by the approaching army of Charles VIII of France to abdicate; he was succeeded by his son Ferdinand II of Naples. Alfonso went into an Olivetan monastery at Mazara del Vallo, on Sicily, where he survived until 18 December 1495.
Born in Naples, Alfonso was the eldest child of Ferdinand I of Naples by his first wife, Isabella of Clermont. In 1463, when Alfonso was fifteen, his maternal great uncle Giovanni Antonio del Balzo Orsini, Prince of Taranto, died, and he obtained some lands from the inheritance. When his mother died in 1465, he succeeded to her feudal claims, including the title King of Jerusalem.
Alfonso's education was at his father's humanist court. His tutor between 1468 and 1475 was the humanist Giovanni Pontano, whose De principe describes the proper virtues and manner of life becoming to a prince; the work took the form of letter of advice to the twenty-year old Alfonso, then Duke of Calabria, in 1468. Pontano dedicated a further treatise on courage, De fortitudine, to Alfonso in 1481, after his victory over the Ottoman invasion of Otranto, and remained close as his personal secretary until Alfonso's abdication.
As a condottiero, Alfonso fought in the most important wars of the age, such the war following the Pazzi Conspiracy (1478–1480) and the War of Ferrara (1482–1484). Alfonso had shown himself a skilled and determined soldier, helping his father in the suppression of the conspiracy of the barons (1485) and in the defense of the Kingdom's territory against the Papal claims.
When his father died, the kingdom's finances were exhausted and the invasion of Italy by King Charles VIII of France was imminent. Instigated by Lodovico Sforza, who wished to stir up trouble to allow him to seize power in Milan, and with papal support, Charles decided to reassert the Angevin claim to Naples. He invaded Italy in September 1494 and was able to move swiftly south along the peninsula. Alfonso managed to regain the support of Pope Alexander VI, who invited Charles to devote his effort against the Turks instead. Alfonso was crowned on 8 May 1494 by the papal legate Juan de Borja Lanzol de Romaní, el mayor.
Charles, however, did not relent; by early 1495 Charles was approaching Naples, after having defeated Florence and the Neapolitan fleet under Alfonso's brother Frederick at Porto Venere. Alfonso, terrified by a series of portents, as well as unusual dreams and despised by Neapolitans, he abdicated in favor of his son, Ferdinand II. He then fled to a Sicilian monastery. He died in Messina later that year.
At a young age he was described by ladies and ambassadors as a very handsome young man, "So pretty you couldn't say", but "so alive that he couldn't sit still for half an hour". Doctors and ambassadors were surprised by his physical endurance, as he was able to keep himself healthy while eating and drinking very little and often in a hurry, being continuously busy in different activities during the day and resting a few hours at night, which he spent continuously with his wife.
He was nicknamed "the Guercio" by the people because he had his left eye marked, but it is not known whether from illness, from injury or from birth. According to other historians, this was instead because of his grim look and the habit of looking crooked. Francesco Pansa judges instead that he was squinting.
He had exceptional military skills and spent most of his life on the battlefields, leading a soldier's life. Andrea Bernardi says that, following the death of the famous leader Roberto Sanseverino, Alfonso remained the first armigero of Italy.
However, he was greatly feared and hated by the Neapolitan people for his "most cruel insults and offenses", for the most heinous crimes, such as "violating virgins, taking other women for his pleasure", and practicing the "detestable and abominable vice of sodomy."
For example, the anonymous author of the Chronicum venetum – but it should be remembered that the Venetians were sworn enemies of the Neapolitans and of the Aragonese in particular – wrote that "wanting to narrate the tyranny, cruelty, lustful and dishonest appetites, betrayals, assassinations, and murders of King Ferrante and of Alfonso d'Aragona, his eldest son, Duke of Calabria, father of betrayals, conservative of rebels, a great book would not be enough for me: I believe that Nero was a saint among these tyrants."
Beyond the possible exaggerations of enemy faction, many episodes of Alfonso's life confirm these aspects of his character, such as the fact that he expropriated numerous lands without offering any compensation to the legitimate owners (who, it is said, died of pain) for the construction of the villa of Poggio Reale, and that in the same way he evicted the nuns of La Maddalena for the construction of the villa called La Duchesca. He also obtained for the Como family (his friends) the splendid garden that Francesco Scannasorice owned adjacent to their palace. Scannasorice had refused numerous times to cede the garden to the Como, despite generous offers of money, but he did not dare to refuse the fearsome Duke of Calabria. The Neapolitans were so terrified of him that at the death of King Ferrante they all ran to barricade themselves in their houses, shouting "inside! inside!", not even if they were chased by enemies. His wife Ippolita Maria Sforza herself experienced his cruelty. When newly married, jealous of her husband, she sent her own trusted servant, Donato, to keep an eye on Alfonso in his travels. Alfonso's reaction towards Donato was of such recklessness that Ippolita wrote to her mother: "This thing about Donato that I will never forget [...] not a wound to the heart, but I think it opened in the middle, so much was my pain and it will be".
It was no coincidence that, when the situation of the kingdom became desperate, Alfonso decided to abdicate in favor of his son, since he was so hated for his vices and cruelty as Ferrandino loved for his virtues and justice.
The Successi tragici et amorosi, by Silvio Ascanio Corona, is a seventeenth-century collection of novels revealing the purported secrets of the Aragonese court of Naples. It states that Alfonso had many mistresses, like his father Ferrante.
His first mistress was Isabella Stanza, bridesmaid of his mother Isabella of Chiaramonte; the relationship, however, did not last long. As soon as his mother – a very chaste and very religious woman – had a hint of the relationship, she married Isabella to Giovan Battista Rota, a nobleman very fond of the Aragonese faction, and thus separated her from Alfonso.
After her, Alfonso had his best-known mistress, Trogia Gazzella, whom he openly displayed in court, and who bore him two illegitimate children.