Social Mobility and Funerary Monuments in the First Half of the Fourteenth-Century in Santa Chiara, Naples

A church building of explicitly Angevin patronage, Santa Chiara in Naples, founded in 1310 by Robert the Wise and his wife Sancia of Mallorca, is an eloquent testimony of royal burial: King Robert’s tomb (1343) stands right behind the high altar; however, Santa Chiara was not concerned only with monarchs. Ten chapels around the nave host tombs of court’s figures. This paper is focused on a few of them. Raimondo de Cabannis with his son Perrotto, and the ‘architect’ Gagliardo Primario. Raimondo was an ‘Ethiopian’ slave then included into the nerve centre of the Angevin kingdom, awarding of high profile bureaucratic offices. By examining de Cabannis and Gagliardo’s funerary monuments and their context, a social history of the burials, drawn on literary and documentary sources, is the ultimate object of this paper, which aims to illustrate the ties that bound the nonroyal people buried in Santa Chiara to the Angevin monarchs, at the time of Naples’s establishment as capital and royal seat.