In the final decades of the fourteenth and first few years of the fifteenth centuries, scions of the second house of Anjou engaged in what can only be described as an obsession with the conquest of the “Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.” The story of this ultimately futile quest provides one of the more colorful chapters in late-medieval political history, cutting across national and religious boundaries in its recounting of transalpine invasions by massive armies, papal plot and counterplot, betrayal, and only momentary glory. For all the French money and lives lost in the enterprise, almost nothing remains today to remind the world of what happened in southern Italy at that time.