Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by Nancy Goldstone
Author photograph by Emily Goldstone
Cover design by Lauren Harms; cover art: The Queen of Naples Praying to the Madonna and Child for an Heir, by Niccolò di Tommaso, circa late 1360s, lunette over the chapel door, Certosa di San Giacomo, Capri. Photograph © archivio dell’arte, pedicini photographers
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ISBN 978-0-316-52403-2
E3-20180703-JV-PC
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Genealogical Charts and Maps
The Trial
Epigraph
CHAPTER I The Kingdom of Naples
CHAPTER II The Court of Robert the Wise
CHAPTER III The Kingdom of Hungary
CHAPTER IV A Royal Apprenticeship
CHAPTER V The Foolish Legacy of Robert the Wise
CHAPTER VI Papal Politics
CHAPTER VII Nest of Vipers
CHAPTER VIII Under Siege
CHAPTER IX The World at War
CHAPTER X The Scales of Justice
CHAPTER XI The Return of the Queen
CHAPTER XII Foreign and Domestic Relations
CHAPTER XIII Queen of Sicily
CHAPTER XIV The Queen and Her Court
CHAPTER XV The Quest for an Heir
CHAPTER XVI Queen and Pope
CHAPTER XVII Six Funerals and a Wedding
CHAPTER XVIII The Great Schism
CHAPTER XIX The Fall of the Queen
Epilogue
Photos
Acknowledgments
Discover more Nancy Goldstone
About the Author
Books by Nancy Goldstone
Praise for The Lady Queen
A Brief Explanation of Fourteenth-Century Money
A Note on the Sources Cited and Used to Research The Lady Queen
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Illustration Credits
For my parents
The Trial
The Papal Court at Avignon, March 15, 1348—On this day, more than six hundred and fifty years ago, Joanna I, queen of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem and countess of Provence, stood trial for her life.
The entrance of the queen’s party into the old city earlier that morning had been marked by suspicion and fear. For the previous two months, Avignon had writhed in the grip of the Black Death, a pestilence so relentless and infernal that it has no modern equivalent. Thousands upon thousands had perished in agony; in the end, the city would lose half its population. The symptoms were terrifying. Victims maintained a high fever, spat blood, and developed painful inflammations under the arms and around the groin, which turned black—hence the name. There was no hope for the stricken. In almost every instance, those suffering from the disease died within five days. “The plague began with us in January and lasted seven months,” wrote Guy de Chauliac, a scholar and eyewitness. “[It] was extremely contagious… so that one caught it from another, not only through close proximity but also through receiving a glance from another. As a consequence, people died without assistance and were buried without priests.” The number of corpses was overwhelming. In desperation, the pope purchased a nearby field for burial, but even this measure was insufficient, and the pontiff was forced to sanctify the Rhône for this function. Joanna and her entourage were greeted that early-spring morning to the macabre vision of decomposing human remains floating with the current.
A crisis this severe naturally prompted speculation as to the source of the epidemic. The prevailing opinion, not unreasonably, was that it represented a punishment from God. The pope himself had admitted as much in a sermon where he had affirmed that the plague was evidence of the sinful state of the world. The populace tried to make amends; long lines of penitents, barefoot and dressed in sackcloth, paraded through the streets flagellating themselves. The pope held a special mass and distributed indulgences. Nothing worked. As the sickness continued to rage, some whispered that, rather than the general sinfulness of the world, one sin in particular was responsible for the Black Death. These rumors were given weight by Louis Sanctus of Beringen, chaplain to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. In a treatise titled Tractatus de Pestilentia, the cleric suggested Avignon was being penalized as a result of the actions of Joanna, queen of Naples, who had violated the word of God by murdering her husband, Prince Andrew of Hungary.
As a result, not even the plague could prevent the lower classes from spilling out into the narrow streets of the old city, jostling among themselves for a glimpse of the woman accused of one of the most infamous crimes in history. Nor was the tumult limited to commoners. From every balcony, incongruously strewn with flowers and draped in rich tapestries as befitted the occasion of a visiting monarch, peered the wary eyes of Avignon’s aristocracy, each nobleman and woman dressed as elaborately as lineage and circumstance could afford.
The crowds were not disappointed. In the Middle Ages, royalty understood the need for spectacle, both as a distraction from the cares of everyday life and as a means of reinforcing authority. Because of the rumors, the queen’s need to impress took on even greater urgency. A battery of thirty knights on horseback, wearing highly polished chain mail and armed with lances and brightly colored pennants emblazoned with their families’ coat of arms, clattered down the streets. They were followed by Joanna’s ladies-in-waiting, some reclining in litters, others sitting upright in side chairs, their ornate headdresses fashionably embellished with braided ropes of false hair made of yellow silk, the exaggerated points of their shoes just visible beneath the hems of their gowns.
Medieval protocol dictated the order of procession, and so Joanna, seated on a purebred white mare, led her entourage through the crooked passageways of the city. The queen wore a magnificent cloak of purple velvet trimmed in ermine and meticulously woven with gold thread in a recurring pattern of fleur-de-lis, symbol of the French crown from which she traced her lineage. Her horse was similarly attired in purple and fleur-de-lis, with a bridle and stirrups of gold. Although Joanna was an accomplished equestrian, on this occasion her mount was led by two grooms, as the queen needed her hands free to carry her orb and scepter, insignia of her royal status. Over her head was stretched a canopy of purple silk fringed in gold thread held aloft by four of her vassals.
The queen’s party had been met at the outskirts of the
city by an official delegation of senior church officials and government functionaries. Such was the gravity of the occasion that all eighteen cardinals of the Sacred College, formally attired in their traditional red hats and robes, appeared to escort her procession to the vast courtyard adjoining the Palace of the Pope.
This was the queen of Naples’s first glimpse of the great stone fortress designed to glorify the majesty of the church on earth. Still under construction, it was four times the size of any existing cathedral, dwarfing the Louvre in Paris and the Tower in London. Its vaulted ceilings rose two stories into the air, its towers, supplemented by spires, pierced to yet another story. The overall effect was one of soaring celestial grace combined with a monumental secular power. Here was a building constructed specifically to awe, to intimidate, to unnerve.
Joanna was offered the traditional refreshment of wine and pastry and then led inside the palace to the great hall of the consistory, the ceremonial public room on the ground floor customarily used by the pope to greet visiting royalty. It was a long room, very grand. One entire wall was masked by magnificent, life-size frescoes portraying the story of John the Baptist. These were the vivid creation of Matteo Giovannetti of Viterbo, the pictor papae (pope’s painter), a master artist imported from Italy. At the far end of the room was a two-tiered dais with two velvet-and-gold thrones placed at the center of the top tier. The pope, wearing his tiara and white robes, sat upon one of the thrones. The other remained empty. The lower tier of the dais was occupied by the cardinals, who were arrayed in a semicircle. Together with the pope they represented judge and jury.
Joanna, her mantle held by two pages, walked the long length of the hall until she reached the dais. The room was filled with spectators. “From the upper end of the spacious hall to the entrance appeared prelates, princes, nobles, and ambassadors of every European power,” wrote seventeenth-century church scholar Louis Maimbourg. Following protocol, the queen knelt on a cushion before the pope and kissed the gold cross embroidered on his slipper. Afterward he raised her up, kissed her on the mouth, and motioned for her to sit on the empty throne beside him. The pope then said a prayer and the room fell silent. The trial began.
The charges against the queen of Naples were read aloud in Latin, the only language recognized by the papal court. Joanna stood accused of conspiracy to commit murder. Her principal adversary, the powerful king of Hungary, brother of Prince Andrew, the victim, had earlier sent a squadron of ambassadors and lawyers to the pope to present Hungarian demands and evidence against the queen. It was common knowledge, they had argued, that Joanna and her husband had been estranged, and that her barons had tried to thwart his rule while he was alive. Additionally, the murder had taken place at one of the queen’s own palaces, and very nearly in her presence; worse, she had not shown the proper level of remorse and had been so slow to investigate the crime that it remained unsolved. Lastly, she had been recently married again, to a man rumored to have been her lover, without prior dispensation from the pope, as was required by papal law. For these great sins the king of Hungary insisted that justice be done—that Joanna be deposed as ruler of Naples in his favor and that she be sentenced to death for her crimes.
The pope and cardinals listened to the evidence and then turned to the woman seated on the throne. Joanna had brought with her two highly educated, extremely experienced advocates, the brilliant statesman Niccolò Acciaiuoli and his cousin the bishop of Florence. But the queen of Naples had previously asked for, and received, papal approval to address the court on her own behalf, a highly unusual proceeding, particularly as it meant speaking in Latin.
Joanna was under no illusions as to the magnitude of the forces working against her. At stake was her crown, her kingdom, and her head. She rose from her throne and began to answer the charges.
She was twenty-two years old.
Joanna, queen of Sicily and Jerusalem, is more renowned than any other woman of her time for lineage, power, and character.
—GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Famous Women, 1362
Giovanna Regina,
Grassa né magra, bella el viso tondo,
Dotata bene de la virtù divina,
D’Animo grato, benigno, giocondo.
(Queen Joanna,
Neither fat nor thin, her face an oval of harmonious art,
Well-favored with all of the divine virtues,
A gentle, gracious soul, generous and light of heart.)
—UNKNOWN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY POET Archivo Storico per le Province Napoletane
CHAPTER I
The Kingdom of Naples
This city [Naples]… is joyful, peaceful, rich, magnificent, and under a single ruler; and these are qualities (if I know you at all well) which are very pleasing to you.
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, 1344
Joanna I was born in 1326, eldest child of the heir to the Angevin kingdom of Naples, the largest and most prestigious sovereign entity in Italy. At its northernmost point, the realm jutted up past the great forests of Abruzzi and into the central mountain range of the Appenines. Its long eastern shore boasted an enviable number of ports, including Vieste and Brindisi, from which fast boats ran cargo, passengers, and armies across the Adriatic as a first stop toward such distant destinations as Hungary and wealthy, exotic Byzantium. At its western toe the important duchy of Calabria, on the Mediterranean, offered quick access to the lucrative trading posts on the island of Sicily. The kingdom took its name from its capital city of Naples, which housed the royal court, but this was a relatively recent designation. In 1266, when Joanna’s great-great-grandfather Charles of Anjou (from whence the name Angevin derived) first established the family’s claim to sovereignty by wresting the realm away from its former ruler, the domain had included the island of Sicily, and for this reason had originally been called the kingdom of Sicily. But in 1282, in an incident famously known as “The Sicilian Vespers” for having occurred at Easter, the people of Sicily rebelled against Charles’s harshly autocratic rule and instead invited the king of Aragon to reign in his place. Charles of Anjou’s descendants never accepted this diminution of their authority, however, and strove mightily to retake the island through both military and diplomatic means. As a result, during Joanna’s lifetime, the kingdom of Naples was still known, variously and confusingly, as the kingdom of Sicily, or, sometimes, as the kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Charles of Anjou, a man of little scruple and great ambition, was venerated as the founding patriarch of Joanna’s family, and his legacy and vision informed its every movement in the century after his death in 1285. He was the youngest brother of Louis IX, king of France, later Saint Louis. As a member of the French royal family, Charles had the opportunity to make an extremely fortuitous marriage. Joanna’s great-great-grandmother was Beatrice, countess of Provence, the youngest of a family of four sisters famous in their day for having all become queens. Charles then used his wife’s aid and resources to conquer his Italian realm so that thereafter the kingdom of Naples and the county of Provence were inextricably linked. Joanna was therefore destined at birth to inherit the prestigious title “countess of Provence” and to rule over this strategically important region as well.
Most men would have been content with administering these two domains, but Charles was fueled by the need to become more respected and powerful than his older brother Louis IX, in whose shadow he had lived the majority of his life. Supremely confident of his abilities, Charles dreamed of an empire that would rival that of the kingdom of France. Conveniently, one seemed to be available—the Byzantine Empire to the east, which incorporated the storied city of Constantinople, had been weakened by a series of incompetent rulers. Charles moved quickly to transform aspiration into reality. In May of 1267 he contracted to acquire the legal right to the principia of Achaia, on the western coast of Greece, as a stepping-stone toward invasion. Although he did not realize this ambition during his lifetime, he never relinquished his goal, and the scale
of his desire may be measured by his subsequent purchase, on March 18, 1277, of the title to the kingdom of Jerusalem, an honor for which he paid a thousand pounds of gold outright and an additional stipend of four thousand livres tournois annually. Charles was not a man to pay good money for an empty title; he believed himself or his descendants capable of capitalizing on this opportunity. Henceforth, all the Angevin sovereigns of Naples, including Joanna, were therefore also styled king (or queen) of Jerusalem, a durable reminder of their benefactor’s expectations.
Dreams of empire aside, the southern Italian kingdom conquered by Joanna’s great-great-grandfather was a place of profound physical beauty. A land of spectacular white cliffs and mysterious sea caves, of inviting beaches, fertile plains, and ancient forests, Naples was universally acclaimed for its scenery. A sixteenth-century notary referred to it as “an earthly paradise” in an official government report. The kingdom was also famous as the home of the baths of Baia, the most fashionable spa on the continent, a vacation spot that traced its celebrity back to the giddy days of Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire. “My lady, as you know, just the other side of Mount Falerno… lies the rocky coast of Baia high above the seashore, and no sight under the sun is more beautiful or more pleasant than this,” wrote Giovanni Boccaccio, a brilliant author and haunting storyteller from the period who knew Naples well. “It is surrounded by the most lovely mountains thick with trees and vineyards; in the valleys any game that can be hunted is available;… and for amusements, not far away… are the oracles of the Cumaean Sibyl… and the amphitheater where the ancient games convened.” Even Francesco Petrarch, the most important scholar of the fourteenth century, and a man who ordinarily scorned the pursuit of frivolous pleasure, was impressed by Baia. “I saw Baia… and do not recall a happier day in my life,” he wrote to his friend Cardinal Giovanni Colonna in a letter dated November 23, 1345. “I saw… everywhere mountains full of perforations and suspended on marble vaults gleaming with brilliant whiteness, and sculpted figures indicating with pointing hands what water is most appropriate for each part of the body. The appearance of the place and the labor devoted to its development caused me to marvel.”
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