The Capetian cadet dynasty of Charles of Anjou — distinct from the Plantagenets — that ruled Naples, Hungary, and Poland.
The dynasty began with Charles of Anjou, a younger brother of the French king Louis IX, who was granted the county of Anjou as a Capetian appanage. Invited by the papacy to destroy the Hohenstaufen, Charles conquered the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, defeating Manfred at Benevento in 1266 and the boy Conradin in 1268.
This made the Capetian Angevins a great Mediterranean power — a line entirely separate from the earlier Angevins of the House of Plantagenet, despite the shared name of Anjou.
Charles’s harsh rule provoked the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, a rebellion that drove the Angevins out of the island of Sicily and handed it to the Crown of Aragon, though they kept the mainland Kingdom of Naples. From Naples the dynasty pursued ambitions across Italy, the Balkans, and central Europe.
Its branches married into the ruling houses of Hungary and elsewhere, spreading Capetian Angevin power far beyond Italy.
When the Árpád dynasty of Hungary died out in 1301, an Angevin claimant, Charles Robert, eventually secured the Hungarian throne. His son Louis I the Great ruled Hungary powerfully for forty years and, by inheritance from his uncle, also became king of Poland in 1370.
Under Louis I the Capetian Angevins were among the most powerful rulers in Europe, holding Hungary, Poland, and claims stretching to Naples.
Louis I left no son. His daughter Mary took Hungary and his daughter Jadwiga was crowned "king" of Poland; Jadwiga’s marriage in 1386 to the Lithuanian grand duke Jogaila founded the Jagiellonian dynasty and united Poland with Lithuania. The Neapolitan branch struggled on until the mid-fifteenth century.
The dynasty thus shaped the destiny of three kingdoms, and through Jadwiga it handed the Polish crown to the house that would dominate central Europe for the next two centuries.