An interrupted war? The Crown of Aragon, the first war for Naples, and its continuation in the 1420s

7th International Conference of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, Interruptions & Disruptions in the Medieval Mediterranean, 400–1500 (Crete, July 11 –15, 2022)In 1421, Queen Joanna II of Naples (1414-35) named King Alfonso V of Aragon (1416-58) as her son and heir against the Papal candidate Duke Louis III of Anjou (1417-34). The following war lasted until 1423, when Louis obtained the Queen¿s support, and Alfonso set sail for Barcelona due to the increasing tensions in the Iberian Peninsula. As broadly accepted by scholarship, therefore, the war for the conquest of Naples stopped for a decade. But did these events actually interrupt the war? This paper suggests that ¿ by relying on a group of trustworthy officers and merchants ¿ King Alfonso continued the war against the Angevin through the Kingdom of Sicily. Archival sources clearly attest that in the 1420s the island constantly supplied the Catalan-Aragonese fleet and army in Italy thanks to continuous movement of people, monies, and supplies across the Tyrrhenian Sea. Rather than stopping, the war for Naples thus continued with frequent interruptions and restarts, taking the shape of a naval guerrilla warfare