Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500

by Jeffrey Anderson

  Lest Niccolo be seen as a sinister éminence grise whose influence and power at the Neapolitan court are somehow unsavoury, it is worth noting that Niccolo’s son Lorenzo had remained in the Regno (as Angevin southern Italy was known) and led a highly successful resistance to the Hungarians from the castle of Melfi. When it was announced in May 1348 that Johanna and Louis would return to Naples to reclaim their throne, Lorenzo was instrumental in working with the Neapolitan nobility, and the mercenary forces they employed, to secure the Regno for them. His actions were certainly more effective militarily than anything Louis of Taranto had done to oppose the Hungarians, though perhaps this is uncharitable given that Louis had been a vital support to Johanna in Avignon, even if it were only to secure his own power as her husband. Niccolo also rallied the Guelf allies of the Angevins in northern Italy, particularly Florence, which as we have seen had flirted with Louis the Great when he arrived in Italy.

  The Black Death

  Johanna and her allies were active in organizing opposition to Louis the Great and preparing for her return to Naples, but her greatest assistance came from the single biggest disaster of the Middle Ages, the Black Death. The great plague first appeared in Sicily in October 1347 and spread through the Regno, and although it did not end the invasion, it drove Louis the Great back to Hungary for a time. He kidnapped Johanna’s son Charles Martel from the papal legate and took him to Hungary, earning him further opprobrium and accusations of cruelty, especially when the baby died shortly after arriving in Hungary. As Charles Martel was Andrew’s son – despite some of Johanna’s detractors arguing that he was the product of one of her many adulterous affairs – there is no reason to believe Louis bore responsibility for his death, aside from having snatched him from his home to die in a foreign land.

  Estimates of the plague’s death toll are one-third to one-half the population of Europe, with some regions more affected than others, but the entire continent was stricken. There are numerous contemporary accounts of the plague, many of which were rhetorical exercises rewriting descriptions of previous plagues, but it is clear that the plague was horrific. Perhaps the most notable was by Boccaccio in his introduction to the Decameron, where his description of unburied corpses and families turning on each other is largely taken from an account of a plague written by Paul the Deacon in the 8th century, although it may also be accurate:

  I say, then, that the years [of the era] of the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God had attained to the number of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, when into the notable city of Florence, fair over every other of Italy, there came the death-dealing pestilence …

  … in men and women alike there appeared, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, whereof some waxed of the bigness of a common apple, others like unto an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils. From these two parts the aforesaid death-bearing plague-boils proceeded, in brief space, to appear and come indifferently in every part of the body; wherefrom, after awhile, the fashion of the contagion began to change into black or livid blotches, which showed themselves in many [first] on the arms and about the thighs and [after spread to] every other part of the person, in some large and sparse and in others small and thick-sown; and like as the plague-boils had been first (and yet were) a very certain token of coming death, even so were these for every one to whom they came …

  The condition of the common people (and belike, in great part, of the middle class also) was yet more pitiable to behold, for that these, for the most part retained by hope or poverty in their houses and abiding in their own quarters, sickened by the thousand daily and being altogether untended and unsuccoured, died well nigh all without recourse. Many breathed their last in the open street, whilst other many, for all they died in their houses, made it known to the neighbours that they were dead rather by the stench of their rotting bodies than otherwise; and of these and others who died all about the whole city was full …

  The consecrated ground sufficing not to the burial of the vast multitude of corpses aforesaid, which daily and well nigh hourly came carried in crowds to every church,—especially if it were sought to give each his own place, according to ancient usance,—there were made throughout the churchyards, after every other part was full, vast trenches, wherein those who came after were laid by the hundred and being heaped up therein by layers, as goods are stowed aboard ship, were covered with a little earth, till such time as they reached the top of the trench.56

  Certainly many people felt that the world was coming to an end, and troops of flagellants took to the streets trying to atone for the sin that could cause such divine vengeance, in some cases becoming violent anti-clerical and anti-governmental mobs.

  Yet it is also striking how ordinary life could go on in spite of the Black Death. Because of superior sanitation and cleanliness and generally more robust health, royalty were mostly spared, with only one monarch dying (Alfonso XI of Castile), and although many nobles and clerics did perish there was not complete institutional collapse. However, in such disordered circumstances Louis the Great was unable to sustain his domination of the Regno, and Johanna, Louis and Niccolo took advantage of this to return to Naples on 17 August 1348, where they formally entered the city with great pageantry and were met by welcoming crowds. There were many lasting repercussions from the plague, but administrative records trace the reinstatement of Angevin government in Naples with calm precision.

  Johanna’s Second Husband: Louis of Taranto

  These records are not complimentary to Louis of Taranto. Although he, asserting himself as the military commander of the Regno by virtue of his maleness, took charge of driving the Hungarian forces from the kingdom, he met with little success. Italy was already being tormented by the mercenary forces that would ravage it for the rest of the century, and Louis employed the German commander Werner of Urslingen, who had been an Angevin ally during Johanna’s Avignon exile, only for Werner to defect to the Hungarians. The independent forces commanded by the Neapolitan nobility and allied cities were much more effective, and in spite of Louis the Hungarian troops were gradually driven out, with the Regno largely secure by early 1349.57

  His military inadequacy did not hinder Louis, with Acciaiuoli’s support, from consolidating his position in the court. By mid-1349 he had assumed control of the government and Johanna begins to vanish from the records. Although Louis had not yet been crowned king, he was made Duke of Calabria and issued orders in his own name without reference to Johanna.

  Johanna fought back by writing to the pope and her Provençal supporters, and a legate arrived to assert papal authority over the kingdom. This reiteration of papal sovereignty, aimed at Louis the Great and meant to put a final end to the Hungarian occupation, was also a means of controlling Louis of Taranto. Johanna also profited from the disparate nature of Angevin possessions, in that Provence and Forcalquier were not part of the Regno, and she appealed to her Provençal subjects for support.

  Hugh des Baux, count of Avellino and member of a family that had been instrumental in governing Provence since the time of Charles of Anjou, brought a fleet of galleys under a papal flag and blockaded Naples, demanding that Louis of Taranto recognize that Provence was ruled solely by Johanna. A public declaration was also made that Johanna was a prisoner in the Castel Nuovo and Louis had tried to poison her, and Hugh was prepared to attack the castle to release her.

  Hugh’s intervention seemed highly effective, and he began negotiations with Louis the Great (who had returned to Italy when the plague subsided and was now at Aversa) for a final Hungarian withdrawal and a peace treaty. As usual, Louis of Taranto proved no match for a determined foe, and he abandoned his attempt to supplant Johanna. She now resumed control of Provence, appointed her own seneschal and wrote to the people of Marseilles to thank them for their loyalty and confirm that she alone ruled the county.

  Hugh’s treaty with Louis the Great stipulated that the
Hungarian king would return to Buda and await a final pronouncement from a papal tribunal on Johanna’s innocence or guilt in Andrew’s murder; if she were judged guilty she would be removed from the throne, and if innocent Louis the Great would make peace with Naples. Johanna and Louis of Taranto were to accompany Hugh des Baux to Provence to confirm the arrangements made for governing the county, and presumably also to be near Avignon in case they felt the need to influence the papal tribunal.

  However, Hugh des Baux, Johanna’s apparent saviour, now showed his true colours. He let Johanna and Louis begin their journey to Provence but stayed behind. He then captured Johanna’s sister Maria, widow of Charles of Durazzo, and forced her to marry his son Robert des Baux after, according to Matteo Villani, a forced consummation of the marriage. Bizarrely, Hugh then took ship with Robert and Maria and rejoined Johanna and Louis at Gaeta. Louis of Taranto boarded Hugh’s galley, stabbed Hugh and threw him overboard, but similarly to Hugh himself, rather than being a help to Johanna, he used his position of strength to strip Johanna of her power again.

  Louis appointed a new seneschal in Provence to take control of the county, then returned to Naples to be crowned jointly with Johanna at Pentecost 1352, giving official recognition to Louis’s position as the kingdom’s ruler and essentially overthrowing Johanna.58 However, in an example of poetic justice that might have pleased Boccaccio, Louis’s actions in seizing the kingdom immediately made him a lightning rod for criticism and allowed Johanna to be seen as a victim, not a murderess. Indeed, the papal tribunal had officially cleared her of Andrew’s murder, although contemporaries such as Matteo Villani chose to see this vindication not as innocence, but proof that Johanna was a weak woman who had been influenced or compelled into evil rather than acting through ‘corrupt intention’. This was possible because Johanna was no longer the monstrous husband-murderer and unnatural queen of 1345, but an oppressed wife with no political power.

  That Louis was an incompetent and unworthy king was plain from the start. Villani tells the story of Louis’s coronation and includes a bad omen:

  And after the coronation, the king rode through the city of Naples in royal vestments, mounted on a large and ponderous warhorse and escorted by his barons. As they were passing through the Petrucci gate on the street to the harbour, certain women, to do him honour and to celebrate, threw roses and perfumed flowers down to him through a window. The horse took fright and reared, and, while the noblemen who guided it struggled to bring it to the ground, the horse, which was heavy, broke the reins. King Louis, finding himself without reins astride the frightened horse immediately leaped deftly to the ground. And the crown fell from his head and broke into three pieces, losing three points … On this same day, one of his daughters died … Many people for this reason predicted dire things for the royal majesty.59

  The kingdom that Louis seized was still in a difficult position, but one of Louis’s first actions was to found an order of chivalry. This was not quite as frivolous as it might seem, since a chivalric order was a means of distributing patronage to the nobility and motivating a group of knights to defend the kingdom in its time of need. In 1353, Louis founded the ‘Order of the Holy Spirit’, better known as the ‘Order of the Knot’ from its insignia. There was a fashion for chivalric orders in the 14th and 15th centuries with a huge number being founded, including the Order of St George in Hungary (c1326), the Order of the Band in Castile (c1330), the Garter in England (1348), the Star in France (1351), the Golden Fleece in Burgundy (1430) and René of Anjou’s Order of the Crescent (1448), but with the notable exceptions of the Garter and the Golden Fleece, most did not outlive their founders.

  The Knot was based on the order of the Star, which Jean II founded to compete with Edward III’s order of the Garter. The Knot was meant to consist of a group of 300 knights who would advise the king and protect Naples, but their chief goal was to be the reconquest of Jerusalem for the Angevins as its titular king. As with most chivalric orders this goal doesn’t seem to have been taken very seriously, and the Knot served much more as a vehicle for chivalric pageantry, with explicit literary associations and conscious links to ancient Rome. Companions who distinguished themselves would be crowned with laurel like ancient Romans, and the headquarters of the order also had legendary Roman associations, since this was the Castel Dell’Ovo, or the castle of the oeuf enchanté du merveilleux peril as it was dramatically described in the statutes, playing up its reputed location near the cave where Virgil worked his enchantments and the legend of the magical egg. Like other orders, there would also be a book of adventures documenting the knights’ activities, and apparently Niccolo Acciaiuoli actually began writing the book, because Boccaccio mocked him for it – ‘he wrote in French of the deeds of the Knights of the Holy Spirit, in the style in which certain others in the past wrote of the Round Table. What laughable and entirely false matters were set down, he himself knows.’60

  The Knot’s most lasting legacy, and it is an impressive one, is that Louis commissioned a sumptuous illuminated manuscript of the order’s statutes that survives in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Cristoforo Orimina illuminated the manuscript, which has a complex and highly specific iconographical programme designed to emphasize Louis’s right to rule and his divine status as king, and demoting Johanna to a subordinate position. This is shown strikingly in the frontispiece, which depicts the Trinity enthroned in heaven with Louis and Johanna kneeling before them. Louis is on the right in the position of honour, and Louis wears a larger crown than Johanna and is flanked by an attendant holding a winged Angevin banner. Further illuminations in the manuscript show Louis ruling alone, receiving homage, dispensing justice and presiding over tournaments and banquets.61

  Given the turmoil attending Johanna and Louis’s reign, their previous flight from the kingdom and struggle to regain the throne, their reign saw one completely unexpected victory. Seventy years after the Sicilian Vespers, Niccolo Acciaiuloli was committed to the reconquest of Sicily, and despite the continued failures of Charles II and Robert the Wise to make any headway in this regard, under the troubled reign of Johanna and Louis the Angevins finally achieved limited success.

  Not unexpectedly, the divided Aragonese dynasty that separately ruled Sicily, Aragon and Majorca had gone through its own vicissitudes in the intervening decades, and Sicily lacked military and political leadership. Acciaiuoli solicited the support of disaffected nobles in the island, then led Angevin forces across the strait to take Messina. Louis of Taranto joined him, and after somewhat desultory sieges of Palermo and Catania they managed to take control of portions of the island. Although the Angevins never controlled the entire island, their position was secure enough for Johanna and Louis to be crowned in Messina in October 1356. They entered the city in triumph and the coronation was attended with appropriate pomp, but no one, and most certainly not Johanna and Louis, would have believed that they were truly in a position to make good their claim to the island. However, if they lacked the reality of power in Sicily they did succeed in securing the phantom. In the peace treaty with Frederick of Aragon it was reaffirmed that he would never again call himself King of Sicily, instead continuing to use the title ‘King of Trinacria’ as confirmed in the Treaty of Caltabellota. Johanna and Louis secured their empty titles Queen and King of Sicily, and also ensured that when later rulers took the thrones of both Trinacria and Sicily – i.e. the actual island of Sicily and the so-called Kingdom of Sicily based in Naples – the kingdom would become known as the ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’.

  In addition to his success in Sicily, Niccolo defeated the brothers Louis and Robert of Durazzo (younger brothers of the murdered Charles of Durazzo) and drove them to Provence, where they took up with a mercenary company, that of the ‘Archpriest’ Arnaut de Cervole, and attacked Avignon. Niccolo also arranged the marriage of Johanna’s sister Maria to Philip of Taranto, Louis’s brother. Maria had procured the murder of Robert des Baux, the hated husband who had forced marriage on he
r through rape, but her freedom was of short duration, and this new marriage to Philip guaranteed a Taranto interest in the succession, as Louis and Johanna’s two daughters were now dead and Maria and her surviving daughters were the heirs to the throne.

  As Louis’s grip on the throne tightened his lack of ability became apparent. The Regno was still impoverished, divided and increasingly subject to attacks from the mercenary companies spawned by the Hundred Years War, and although anyone might have struggled to manage all these difficulties, Louis signally failed to deal with them. More importantly, he fell out with Niccolo Acciaiuoli, who had the ability to address the Regno’s problems but now lost royal backing. There was violent dissent from the nobility and Louis was drawn into conflicts with various nobles and communities within the kingdom. However, as Louis became a stereotypical ‘bad king’ so Johanna’s reputation continued to rise. Once Louis proved himself to be unfit, Johanna was transformed from the usurping murderess into the rightful queen who had been supplanted and whose return was longed for.

  Johanna too chose to illustrate this in an artistic programme comparable to Robert the Wise’s use of paintings emphasizing his ties to Louis of Toulouse, or Louis of Taranto’s illustration of his authority in the statutes of the Order of the Knot. Although Louis had driven her from government, Johanna participated in the traditional queenly role as a patron of religious foundations, and at the church of Santa Maria dell’Incoronata she commissioned a fresco cycle of the sacraments.

  Each of the sacraments is illustrated with an event from or connected to Johanna’s life, and it is clearly her life that is being celebrated, not Louis of Taranto’s. Baptism is represented by the baptism of the late Charles Martel, Confirmation by Johanna’s daughters receiving the rite, Holy Orders by the consecration of Louis of Toulouse, Marriage by the wedding of Johanna to Louis of Taranto, Communion by Johanna receiving the sacrament with a group of women and Extreme Unction by Louis himself receiving the sacrament (showing that the work was completed after his death). The iconographic programme displayed in the Incoronata shows Johanna wresting back control, perhaps initially in a symbolic sense, although this would soon become real.62