The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  The greatest scandal of a reign that eventually produced far more than its share of them occurred two days before the pope sent separate warnings to both husband and wife not to delay their joint coronation further. It never happened. Instead, during the night of September 18, 1345, King Andrew was brutally murdered at a royal hunting retreat just north of Naples, strangled like a common criminal and thrown from a window. All our evidence agrees that his pregnant wife remained in her room ("like a dead cat,” said one chronicler) after her husband was enticed outside and immediately assaulted by numerous thugs. Joanna's subsequent behavior scarcely inspired confidence. A few weeks later she requested papal permission to remarry her first cousin, Robert of Taranto. By early 1346, however, she preferred his younger brother Louis. Since both men were widely considered major suspects in her first husband's murder, her reputation suffered permanent damage, even though an official inquiry by the papacy eventually absolved her of any responsibility.

  The papacy's attitude toward Joanna's second marriage is highly instructive. By summer 1347 she was cohabiting with Louis in her palace. Next January, abandoning her young son by Andrew, they fled together to her French possessions in order to escape from the king of Hungary, who had invaded Naples to avenge his brother's murder (Louis's brother Robert was captured and imprisoned in Hungary for several years). Joanna and Louis of Taranto had two daughters, including one born in June 1348 while she was arranging the sale of Avignon in order to finance their return to Naples. After considerable delay Clement finally granted a dispensation in May 1352 to legalize their marriage and approved her second husband's coronation at Naples. As with Andrew of Hungary, the papacy insisted on upholding an essential clause of King Robert's testament by excluding the new king in favor of Joanna's younger sister if his wife predeceased him without leaving heirs. Joanna regained a minor share in government, an official seal, and a sizable staff of attendants; but her husband undeniably ruled, and his name preceded hers on their decrees and coins.

  Ten years later Queen Joanna buried her second husband. At the age of thirty-six she was finally in full possession of her inheritance. “The Queen enjoys governing,” noted the archbishop of Naples. “She wishes to do everything, because she has waited a long time for this moment.” When the French king proposed his son as a suitor, she composed a polite refusal, arguing from personal experience that marriages to cousins were sterile, and she had sworn to have no more. But Joanna had no surviving children. Her best surviving contemporary portrait (only two are known) adorns a chapel in Capri and depicts her praying to the Virgin, presumably for a male heir. Joanna's lack of offspring dictated a third marriage. She soon asked permission from the papal nuncio at Naples to marry a prince much younger than herself from the minor kingdom of Mallorca, a man who had recently escaped after a long imprisonment. When Avignon again recommended the French candidate, she replied, “After all, marriages are free, and I don't see why this doesn't apply, especially to the detriment of my own freedom.”15

  About this time, Boccaccio returned to Naples, a city he loved, carrying an almost completed manuscript with a novel twist on Plutarch: a collection of lives of illustrious women. Boccaccio dedicated it to another noblewoman, while telling her that he originally intended it for Joanna, and added a final essay, the only one about a living woman, extolling the queen of Sicily and Jerusalem. It begins by describing her, correctly, as “more renowned than any other woman of our time for lineage, power and character” and as governing “a mighty realm of the sort not usually ruled by women.” Boccaccio avoided naming any of her husbands and ended by calling her “a singular glory of Italy … never seen previously in any nation.” Although composed very early in her long personal reign, it remains her most durable monument, surviving in numerous manuscripts and being reprinted many times during the Renaissance.16

  Joanna avoided any suggestion of a coronation for her third husband. He soon began quarrelling incessantly with both the Neapolitan baronage and his wife, who avoided giving him any important military responsibilities. After experiencing a miscarriage in 1365, Joanna encouraged him to go abroad to claim his own throne. Although the range of documentation for her personal reign does not equal that for Navarre, there is every reason to believe she now ruled as autonomously as her grandfather had; surviving records indicate that she governed her French possessions effectively. Much evidence shows that throughout her personal reign she also collaborated loyally with her pontifical suzerains until the schism erupted in 1378. Joanna even provided them military aid, sending ten ships in 1367 to escort the pope back to Italy (the other Italian naval powers combined sent only thirteen). The following year Joanna became the first woman ever awarded the Golden Rose, which the papacy usually reserved for crusading knights.

  After her third husband died in 1375, why, one might ask, did Joanna feel the need to marry yet again? By now she was far beyond childbearing age and had experienced three unsatisfactory marriages. Nevertheless, both she and her papal suzerain agreed that she needed a reliable soldier without too much political baggage, and Gregory XI advised her to marry the younger son of a German duke, Otto of Brunswick. Even older than Joanna, he had been a mercenary commander in Italy for thirty years and had once married the widowed second wife of her third husband's father. Her negotiators denied him royal rank and excluded him from the succession; his bride's wedding gift was a principality confiscated from a rebellious vassal. Otto sailed to Naples on four galleys loaned by Neapolitan barons, and they were married about a year after her third husband's death. It was undeniably a scandalous mésalliance; Gregory sent a circular letter emphasizing that the queen had freely chosen him and advised her subjects to honor him as her “true husband.” However, the marriage proved a useful political expedient. Joanna's final husband served her faithfully until her death, then continued to serve under her successors.

  Joanna I, the first woman to put Dei Gratia Regina on a few of her coins, left an abundant numismatic legacy, more of it from her French territories than from southern Italy. Her most ornate coins, called golden queens (Reines d'or), directly imitated French royal souveraines and show her full length, holding both sword and scepter like a male king. The first version, from 1370, shows Joanna wearing a long dress, but another struck only two years later shows her wearing a coat of armor with bare legs like a man. No fewer than 316 of her gold coins of the latter type were found in a single Parisian hoard, and this design was reused by her male successor in Provence, who changed only the name.17

  As Elizabeth Casteen has pointed out, Joanna's change of papal obedience at the beginning of the Great Schism in 1378 proved disastrous: it not only destroyed her carefully reconstructed reputation for piety, but also led directly to her deposition, imprisonment, and death. She shifted her allegiance to Avignon after the new Roman pope, who knew Naples well, reportedly told her ambassadors that her kingdom “had been poorly led and governed for a long time by a woman, and he wanted to give it a man to lead and govern … and wanted the queen to enter a religious order of her choice.”18 The succession to Joanna's large possessions soon became linked with the schism. After her three children all died young, she had adopted the orphaned son of a first cousin as her heir. After repudiating the Roman pope for his Avignon rival, she replaced him with a French prince. In June 1381 Joanna legally transformed her new heir into her biological son and named him coruler throughout her territories. But her original heir, already crowned at Rome exactly three days earlier by the rival pope, invaded Joanna's kingdom. Outmaneuvering her fourth husband, he soon captured both of them at Naples and forced her to abdicate before her new heir could intervene. By the time his French rival invaded Italy, the original heir had moved Joanna to a remote fortress; when his enemy approached the kingdom, he had the old queen killed. Joanna's body was taken back to Naples and exhibited at the foot of the splendid mausoleum she had built for her grandfather.

  As the first autonomous female sovereign to rule a large European state
for a long period, Joanna I set many precedents. She had more marriages than any other female monarch in European history. She was Europe's first heiress to break tradition by subordinating her last two husbands, whose names are omitted on her coins or official documents. Joanna also set some dubious precedents. She was the first modern heiress (but not the last) to be accused of murdering her husband. She became the first female monarch to be deposed and the only one to be murdered afterwards—both by her adopted heir. Her biography inspired a theatrical performance at Marie Antoinette's court in the 1780s, but it seems rich enough to furnish sufficient plots for several operas, films, or television series.19

  Two Older Women Rule Independently

  After Joanna I's death, two other childless women also managed to rule European kingdoms autonomously. First, after her son died in 1386, Margaret of Denmark made the transition from regent to de facto monarch of two Scandinavian kingdoms, and she folded her husband's kingdom into her father's so tightly that Denmark would continue to govern Norway for many centuries; then, shortly after Margaret died, Joanna II of Naples inherited the Italian (but not the French) parts of Joanna I's possessions from her childless brother Ladislas in 1414. Each woman would govern alone for many years. Margaret, only twenty-seven when her husband died, apparently never considered remarriage; Joanna II remarried, but after a few years she drove her new husband from her kingdom. When they first acquired monarchical status Margaret was thirty-three and Joanna II forty-five. Their maturity probably helped both women to govern successfully during an age replete with adolescent royal heiresses; after all, Joanna I did not govern autonomously until the age of thirty-six, and Blanche of Navarre, the only married late medieval heiress to become a monarch beyond the age of thirty-five, was also the only one who managed most of her kingdom's routine business.

  “As a female historian,” notes Vivian Etting, the recent biographer of Margaret of Denmark, “I must admit that women who climb to the summit of power usually are just as ambitious and ruthless as their male colleagues,” and her subject seems an illustrious predecessor of Margaret Thatcher, another Iron Lady who shares her name. Little is known about how Margaret persuaded Danish magnates in 1376 to overturn her father's treaty giving his kingdom to an older grandson by his older daughter, except that Margaret showered some of them with gifts. One of the stranger aspects of her Danish coup was the complete lack of involvement by her husband, the king of Norway. When Hanseatic merchants requested her to confirm their Norwegian privileges after her husband's death in 1380, she informed them that these privileges “had died with the king.” In Denmark she consolidated power during the 1380s by refusing to name successors to its virtual viceroy (drost) or its field commander (marsk) after they died. Both had served her loyally. She also dismissed the governor of Scania (now part of southern Sweden) for disloyalty, and again appointed no successor. Margaret put talented foreigners in key positions: her military commander at a decisive battle came from Pomerania, and she employed a German as Norway's chancellor.20

  Margaret's determination to hold power became evident in 1386 after the sudden death of her seventeen-year-old son deprived her of any legal claim to govern either Denmark or Norway. Her father's original heir, her Mecklenburg nephew, immediately claimed the Danish crown. However, Denmark's old drost needed exactly one week to arrange Margaret's election by various notables as “Almighty lady and husband and guardian for the whole kingdom of Denmark.” This unprecedented document constituted sovereignty in everything but name; it made her a de jure regent for an indefinite period, “until the day when she and we agree to elect and appoint a king, with her and our advice.” Four provincial assemblies soon confirmed this remarkable arrangement. This tactic was then imitated in Norway, which, unlike Denmark, was a hereditary kingdom. The archbishop of Norway, whose name headed the list of notables at the Danish meeting, soon summoned his kingdom's royal council. Overlooking the rules of succession which favored the king of Sweden, they named Margaret “Mighty Lady and Righteous Husband of Norway … in all the days of her life.”21

  Now ruler of two kingdoms, she intrigued to dethrone another Mecklenburg enemy from the Swedish throne, but she also needed to name a successor. For that purpose she chose a six-year-old grandson of her older sister, a Pomeranian princeling named Bugislav. His father brought him to Denmark, where Margaret adopted him and renamed him Erik. Six months later her troops defeated the Swedish king, capturing him and his son. Margaret kept the king imprisoned for almost six years. After this success, by 1391 she was using a privy seal with all three Scandinavian crowns. Nevertheless she still needed prolonged negotiations with the Hanseatic League before gaining control of Stockholm. The road finally lay open to the Union of Kalmar, which in 1397 unified the three Scandinavian crowns for a second and last time.

  Margaret of Denmark micromanaged her adopted successor, arranging his marriage to an English princess and sending her twenty-three-year-old heir an eight-page set of personally written instructions for his first independent state journey to Norway. She also had a man who claimed to be her dead son extradited from Prussia and executed after smashing his official state seal in his presence (almost four centuries later, Catherine II did this to Pugachev).22 The only privilege of sovereignty this remarkable female ruler did not exercise was to issue coins bearing her name in any of her three kingdoms. No matter how powerless she was in practical terms, every fourteenth-century royal heiress had her name and title on coins; but they had legitimate claims, which Margaret, despite all her power and her royal father, lacked.

  Joanna II, a childless widow, was the oldest woman who ever acquired a European kingdom when she inherited Naples from her brother. Although she remained on her throne for twenty years, her reign ranks among the most obscure of any late medieval woman sovereign. Unlike that of Joanna I, her government left no documentary evidence outside Italy to compensate for the destruction of the Neapolitan archives in 1943. Joanna II, like her better-known predecessor, collaborated successfully with the papacy and also built a mausoleum for the man who had made her his heir. But she also repeated some of her predecessor's political mistakes in selecting husbands and adopted heirs.23

  Joanna II's worst political error was her remarriage to a French nobleman, Jacques de Bourbon, in 1415. Although their prenuptial contract, like Joanna I's final marriage, refused him royal authority, he arrived with a military entourage, claimed royal rank, and soon made her a virtual prisoner. By 1416 she had reversed the situation through a mixture of cunning and bribery, fomenting a rising by local barons that liberated her and imprisoned him instead. By winter 1418 the Roman pope officially acknowledged Joanna II's sovereignty, and his legate performed her coronation in January 1419. A few months later her husband escaped from captivity and soon returned to France, where he eventually retired to a monastery.

  For fifteen years Joanna II governed her kingdom alone. Like Joanna I and Margaret of Scandinavia, she employed ministers from nonaristocratic backgrounds, but the succession question also bedeviled her reign. Joanna II revoked her first adopted heir in 1423 but subsequently revoked her new heir in 1433 for her original choice before changing her mind again two months later. Joanna II's death in 1435 provoked sixty years of sporadic aggression from her adopted French successor and his heirs, while her original Aragonese heir and his descendants governed her kingdom (ironically, one of them left his wife in charge of his own kingdom for over twenty years). Joanna II also left the largest surviving statue of any early European female monarch. It sits alongside one of her brother in the Neapolitan chapel which she endowed, near a smaller monument (with an epitaph by Lorenzo Valla) to the only notable murder victim of her reign: her long-serving principal minister, Ser Gianni Carraciolo.

  Four Young Royal Heiresses

  Between 1377 and 1384 four young heiresses, all between the ages of ten and sixteen, claimed thrones in widely dispersed kingdoms: Sicily, Hungary, Portugal, and Poland.24 Relatively little is known about them; for exa
mple, it is unclear when Portugal's heiress died, although her place of burial is known.25 None of their final testaments survives, if indeed they bothered to make any, and no published documentary base as rich as that from Navarre survives in any of their kingdoms. Nevertheless, all four satisfy both fundamental criteria for identifying authentic female sovereigns: each woman left behind a handful of coins with her name followed by “D.G. Reg.” and a few original signed documents.

  These four contemporaneous heiresses have some interesting distinctions. Two full sisters acquired separate royal thrones in Hungary and Poland, a unique occurrence in European history, and each promptly made suitably impressive royal seals. Three girls inherited before the age of twelve; in Portugal and Hungary, their widowed mothers closely supervised their actions and arranged their marriages. All four heiresses were married to men of princely rank, one in Poland exactly at the canonical minimum age of twelve and another in Portugal even earlier. All four husbands carried out the ordinary business of government in their kingdoms; in other words, by the end of the fourteenth century the Navarrese solution of 1328 had already been repeated elsewhere four times (or five, counting Joanna I's second marriage).

  However, this solution failed everywhere except in Navarre. Despite their early marriages, none of these four heiresses produced a surviving heir to her kingdom. One, whose husband already had a son by a previous marriage, remained childless; the others had only one child each, and all three (like Joanna I's three children) died in infancy. The childless heiress had already been deposed five years before her husband's death; the husbands of the other three outlived them. All three men had enjoyed official coronations in their wife's capital and therefore continued to rule her kingdom after her death as legitimate sovereigns. Unsurprisingly, all three widowers promptly remarried, but only one eventually founded a new dynasty, an accomplishment which took him twenty-five years and required three more wives.