At this point Robert judged the situation sufficiently dire to recall Charles home to prepare for the expected invasion. The duke of Calabria, together with his pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter and all their court, rode out of Florence, leaving the city under the protection of a viceroy and a standing army of a hundred thousand soldiers, and headed grimly for Naples, resigned to war.
But as so often happened in the Middle Ages, a mixture of politics, vanity, and accident intervened. The pope, hearing of Louis’ Roman coronation, repaid the insult by issuing a bull from Avignon deposing him as emperor. In retaliation, Louis signed a proclamation deposing the pope and set up a new one of his own choosing in Rome. Then, instead of marching out of the city to join forces with the Sicilians, Louis, perhaps responding to the criticism voiced by Villani, stayed in Rome in order to organize a second coronation for himself, this time by his puppet pope. The festivities surrounding this second coronation so depleted the emperor’s financial resources that he was no longer able to pay his army, and so, when the citizens of Rome finally rebelled against him in August 1328, he was forced to retreat to Germany. His pope fled to Pisa before falling into enemy hands and spent his remaining days in captivity in France. Ghibelline prospects in the region were further damaged by the sudden death of Castruccio and by the failure of the Sicilians to organize an offensive in time to coordinate with imperial forces. By 1330, Naples was no longer threatened, Rome had once again consented to the absentee leadership of the pope in Avignon, and everything was as it had been before. The Florentine elders even reinstated the sumptuary laws.
The ignominious retreat of the emperor would have been regarded as an unqualified triumph for the Neapolitans had it not been marred by tragedy: the premature death of the duke of Calabria upon his return to Naples. Joanna’s father died on November 9, 1328, not of an ambush by enemies in the rushed journey home, nor of a wound or fall sustained in preparing for war, but of a fever contracted from overexerting himself in the heat at his favorite sport, falconry. The crown prince was laid to rest in a tomb at the church of Santa Chiara in one of the “horse stalls” he had earlier ridiculed. To his father’s great grief—“The crown has fallen from my head,” Robert is reputed to have mourned—the witty rejoinder Robert had made to his son had come to pass, or perhaps the chroniclers, as sometimes happened, supplied this prophetic response after the fact.
When their mother, Marie of Valois, died three years later and was laid to rest in yet another of the stalls of Santa Chiara, Joanna and her younger sister, Maria, found themselves orphaned. As a result, the children were brought up at the magnificent court of their paternal grandfather, Robert, king of Naples, and his second wife, Sancia of Majorca.
CHAPTER II
The Court of Robert the Wise
No influence in Joanna’s life matched that of her grandparents King Robert and Queen Sancia. From the vulnerable age of five, Joanna lived with these two potent, charismatic, but utterly dissimilar personalities and their extended court at the grand pleasure palace of the Castel Nuovo. Everything that the future queen of Naples would come to believe about love, life, deportment, education, literature, religion, piety, and especially, the responsibilities of royalty and the role of the sovereign in society, was shaped during this period, either through direct instruction on the part of her grandparents or through observation of their behavior. No school could have offered a more thorough preparation for majesty than the royal court of Naples. The dazzling spectrum of medieval inconsistency was on display during the years of Joanna’s youth. At once opulent and austere, secular and saintly, voluptuous and celibate, honorable and treacherous, the characters of Robert and Sancia embodied these seemingly irreconcilable contradictions.
Robert was a man of illustrious reputation, much admired throughout Europe for his devotion to learning, his prowess at expanding his dominions at his neighbors’ (and the emperor’s) expense, and his ability to manage such far-flung and diverse territories as Naples and Provence. He was universally referred to as “Robert the Wise,” a sobriquet acquired not out of respect for his judgment, but rather for his ability to compose and deliver some three hundred sermons in Latin, a talent that eluded his counterparts on the other thrones of Europe. Ironically, Boccaccio reported that, as a child, Robert much preferred to throw stones than to study. A contemporary who knew the family went so far as to call him a dullard. Robert refused to learn to read until someone in the household hit upon the idea of teaching him, not with the pious psalms of an ordinary psalter, which was how most medieval children learned their letters, but with the inspired merriment of Aesop’s Fables. The scheme worked; Robert learned to read and, eventually, to love books. During his reign he amassed a great library and was known for his patronage of scholars and writers. “Who in Italy and indeed throughout Europe is more outstanding than Robert?” wrote Petrarch to a friend in 1339.
Robert’s life had been changed forever when his father, Charles the Lame (later King Charles II of Naples), eldest son of family patriarch Charles of Anjou, lost a battle for Sicily and was captured by the king of Aragon. Wishing to extricate himself from captivity, Charles the Lame arranged in 1288 for three of his younger sons—Louis, age fourteen, Robert, age ten, and Raymond Berenger, age seven—to take his place in prison until a treaty could be arranged.
The boys were trucked off to Cuirana, a lonely fortress high on a hill in Aragon. (Charles’s eldest son, Charles Martel, heir to the throne of Naples, and another son, Philip, later prince of Taranto, were spared this ordeal.) The children were watched by armed guards day and night. Expenses for the boys’ food and clothing fell to Charles, who frequently forgot to send their allowance. The warden of the castle in which they were confined, a cold, unfeeling man, did his duty without pity. “He seems to have tried to frighten the children by telling them if the king of Aragon ordered that they should be thrown down from the rock of Cuirana he would willingly carry out the command, a grim jest that strikes one as being a piece of unnecessary cruelty.” The brothers would remain in this place, under these conditions, for seven years, prompting “the tears and terrors of Robert and Raymond Berenger, and especially… those of the former who, of the three boys, appears to have felt their captivity in Aragon the most keenly.”
For solace, Robert turned to his older brother Louis and the one adult who showed him kindness, a Franciscan friar by the name of Francis le Brun, who had been the children’s tutor since early childhood and had compassionately accompanied them to their prison in Aragon to take charge of their schooling. Friar Francis was a member of an extremist sect of the Franciscan brotherhood called the Spirituals, mystics who took their vows of poverty much more seriously than did the rest of their order. After seven years of Francis’s tutelage, Robert’s older brother Louis developed a tendency for lying on the cold floor all night in a paroxysm of ecstatic prayer and was secretly tonsured and ordained a priest. While not prepared to go that far, Robert maintained an affection for the Spirituals that survived his Aragon imprisonment. This is also, undoubtedly, where he learned the Latin for all those sermons.
In 1295, with the help of the papacy, a settlement was finally hammered out between Naples and Aragon. Charles the Lame was recognized and crowned king of Sicily by the pope, and the island was formally returned to Angevin rule. The king of Aragon, James II, was compensated for his loss by the annexation of Sardinia and Corsica, a consolation prize from the church. To cement the deal and discourage future aggression, a double wedding, admirable in its symmetry, was arranged: James II would marry Robert’s sister Blanche, and Robert’s older brother Louis would marry James II’s sister, Violante. Upon the execution of these two marriages, the hostages would be released.
Charles the Lame himself led his daughter Blanche’s wedding party to Spain, where he discovered that, while in captivity, Louis had taken a vow of celibacy and had developed such an aversion to women that he could not eat in their presence and would not even kiss his mother after an abs
ence of seven years. Charles was forced to make a last-minute switch in the wedding arrangements and reluctantly sent Robert to the altar in his brother’s place. There was nothing to do about it; somebody had to marry Violante.
Robert returned to Naples in the company of his father, brothers, and Violante. There was great joy on their arrival, but much had changed during Robert’s absence. His younger brother Philip, closest to him in age, had grown to manhood, and the brothers had to become reacquainted. Spared the trauma of imprisonment, Philip had managed to impress his father as an able soldier and statesman, and as a reward, Charles had named him prince of Taranto and vicar-general of Sicily. Nor was Philip the only sibling with whom Robert had to contend. His parents had greatly expanded the family during his captivity; Robert now had three new brothers as well as three new sisters.
Tragedy had also struck the family. Both his eldest brother, Charles Martel, the heir to the throne, and his brother’s wife, Clemencia, had died of illness six months before Robert’s return. By right of primogeniture, which stated that inheritance was passed through the firstborn, Charles Martel’s eldest son, Carobert, should have been acknowledged as the new crown prince of Naples upon the death of his father. But the orphaned Carobert was only seven years old when his father died, and Charles the Lame worried that Naples needed a strong adult ruler to succeed to the throne. Already the Sicilians, who had not been consulted during the negotiations between Naples and Aragon, had rebelled against the terms of the treaty and had elected James II’s younger brother Frederick III as their king. Frederick, tickled at this blow to his older brother’s prestige, had accepted the honor, raised an army, and was in the process of consolidating his hold on the island. Charles the Lame had not gone through two decades of painstaking negotiation to hand Sicily over to a renegade branch of the Aragonese crown. Frederick III’s challenge to Neapolitan authority had to be met, and not by a seven-year-old.
As the second-born son, Louis was the natural candidate to become his father’s heir, but the deeply religious Louis would have none of it. Charles ordered him to dress in the rich fabrics and gorgeous raiment of state; Louis wore a plain white friar’s robe with a hood. His father insisted he ride, though Spiritual Franciscans were supposed to walk barefoot; Louis obstinately chose as his mount a lowly mule instead of a horse. When Louis absolutely refused to eat off the silver plates used during banquets, Charles finally gave up. In a ceremony at the Castel Nuovo in 1296, Louis publicly renounced his rights of inheritance in favor of Robert and soon afterward was accepted into the church. To get the inconvenient Carobert out of the way, Charles assigned him the lesser kingdom of Hungary, which was part of the dowry Charles’s wife, Mary, had brought with her, and hustled him off to grow up and govern his new realm in the company of a small army. The pope’s approval further legitimized what might otherwise have been construed as an unscrupulous usurpation of Carobert’s rights, and that was how Robert, the little stone thrower, got to be heir to the throne of Naples.
Of course, this bending of the rules of primogeniture did not go unnoticed by Robert’s brothers, and later, by Robert’s brothers’ wives. For if a third son could be king, why shouldn’t a fourth or fifth son, or even a sixth, aspire to the position as well?
The other powerful personality at the court of Naples during Joanna’s formative years was her step-grandmother, Robert’s second wife, Sancia of Majorca. Violante had died in 1302 after only five years of marriage (the wedding had been contracted in 1295 but the ceremony hadn’t taken place until 1297). Despite her short tenure, Violante nevertheless fulfilled the obligation for which she had been conscripted by leaving her husband two sons as potential heirs: Louis, who died in 1310, and Charles, future father of Joanna. Immediately after Violante’s death, Charles the Lame sought a new wife for Robert and settled on Sancia. His decision was heavily influenced (as, indeed, were most of his decisions) by his obsession to retake Sicily from Frederick III. Sancia was the eldest daughter of the king of Majorca, uncle of the king of Aragon. By affiancing Robert to Sancia, Charles the Lame enlisted a fresh accomplice in the struggle for Sicily. Ideally, he expected that, at some unspecified time in the future, Robert and his new father-in-law would launch a two-pronged assault against Frederick, Naples from the east and Majorca from the west. Robert was duly married to Sancia in 1304, and when Charles the Lame died in 1309, the pair were crowned king and queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily, with the full support of the pope in Avignon.
Very early into his second marriage, the new king must have realized that, while the Angevins had no doubt gained a military ally, and Naples a queen, he, Robert, had not truly secured a wife. Sancia’s most obvious and overpowering character trait was her extreme piety. The new queen of Naples hailed from a family that had been infected by the same strain of infatuation for the Spiritual Franciscans as had Robert’s older brother Louis. To the great chagrin of the king of Majorca, three of Sancia’s four brothers would eventually renounce their rights to his crown in order to join the mendicant friars.
Like her brothers, Sancia embraced the cause of the Spiritual Franciscans and, because she was a woman, that of their sister order, the Poor Clares, a religious movement founded in 1253 by Saint Clare of Assisi. Poor Clares were nuns who completely withdrew from society, devoting themselves to a life of poverty, denial, and sacrifice. The sisters owned no property, relying on what sustenance their brother friars could beg. Poor Clares wore their hair short and wore coarse gray robes and sandals in imitation of Saint Francis; they fasted regularly and never ate meat; they lived shut off from the world in high-walled convents. Most prohibitive was the strict rule regarding conversation. The women who entered a Clarissan convent took a vow of silence. Speaking was allowed for only one hour a day, and never on Fridays or at meals.
Sancia made no secret of her attraction to the order. She petitioned the pope as early as 1312 to be allowed to surround herself with Clarisses in the inner sanctum of her rooms at the Castel Nuovo. The pope wrote back granting her two such attendants, later raised to three. Penetrating this human barrier of sanctity for the purposes of procreation must have been daunting. Robert might just as well have married the king of Majorca for all the conjugal bliss he got out of his relationship with his wife. The situation did not improve with time. In 1316, Sancia asked the pope for a divorce so that she could herself become a Poor Clare and retire to a convent. She reiterated the request the following year, at which time, to augment her case, she accused Robert of cheating on her. The pope wrote back twice denying her suit and admonishing her to pay more attention to her husband. He also chastised Robert for his infidelity. It came as no surprise to anyone in Naples that the couple had no children.
In place of offspring, Sancia devoted herself to the Spiritual Franciscans, referring to them as her “sons” and herself as their “mother.” She conceived of herself as their protector and sought to establish Naples as a refuge for the movement. Her first act on becoming queen was to persuade Robert to begin work on Santa Chiara, the church Joanna’s father, Charles, would later denigrate as a horse stable. Sancia designed Santa Chiara to house a double convent, one for the Franciscans (or the Friars Minor, as they were called) and one for the Poor Clares.
The Spirituals certainly needed the help, as their uncompromising stance on poverty had run afoul of official church policy, which was to accumulate as much wealth as possible in the shortest time. This was particularly true of Pope John XXII, whose reign coincided with the first twenty years of Sancia’s. Notorious for taxing his flock unmercifully, selling papal offices to the highest bidder, and distributing high honors, including cardinalships, to family members, John slept on a pillow trimmed in fur and threw enormous, expensive parties, accounts of which have been preserved in the annals of the period. For the marriage of one of Pope John’s great-nieces, for example, the guests dined on “4,012 loaves of bread, 83⁄4 oxen, 551⁄4 sheep, 8 pigs, 4 boars, a large quantity of different kinds of fish, 200 capons, 690
chickens, 580 partridges, 270 rabbits, 40 plovers, 37 ducks, 50 pigeons, 4 cranes, 2 pheasants, 2 peacocks, 292 small birds, 3 cwt. 2lbs. of cheese, 3,000 eggs, a mere 2,000 apples, pears and other fruits; they drank 11 barrels of wine.”
Clearly, the Spirituals’ spartan lifestyle and insistence that Christ had meant for the apostles (and by implication the church) to live in poverty was unacceptable. To John, their movement was not only embarrassing but also dangerous. Others were beginning to look askance at the papal lifestyle and were joining their voices in the call for reform. To squelch this opposition, John XXII issued a number of bulls insisting that Christ and the apostles were not against the owning of property and proclaiming it heretical to believe otherwise. Then, to emphasize his position, John had four Spiritual Franciscans who refused to recant their beliefs burned at the stake in Marseille in May 1318.
The pope’s actions had the opposite effect: rather than suppressing the Spiritual movement, he hardened the will of its leaders and increased the calls for reform. Devout Franciscans flocked to Naples; the Castel Nuovo was filled with friars; Sancia’s own confessor was one of the heads of the movement. The queen’s eldest brother, James of Majorca, dressed in his ragged habit, could often be seen begging on the streets of the old city. There was even some talk within Sancia’s circle of deposing John XXII in favor of her brother James. Encouraged by her followers, Sancia aggressively inserted herself into the reform debate, writing letters to both the pope and the Franciscan general minister. Robert, strongly influenced by Friar Francis’s beliefs during his youthful captivity, with a revered brother who would be sainted for embodying Spiritual Franciscan values, supported his wife’s program.
Although certainly sincere in her beliefs, an undeniable whiff of ambition pervades Sancia’s frenetic activity on behalf of the Spirituals. Very likely, the queen aspired to sainthood. A hint of this is found in one of her letters to the Franciscan general minister, in which she urged the order to adopt the Spiritual interpretation of poverty. “I… consider it the greatest grace if God causes me to die and to be a martyr for this cause,” Sancia wrote. A few lines later she went even further and implied divine inspiration, which might, in a pinch, stand in for the miracle that the queen knew was a necessary requirement for sanctification. “On Thursday, the eighteenth of April, I entered the small chapel next to my chamber in the Castel Nuovo in Naples where well through three candles before daybreak, with the door closed, alone with the body of Christ, which was upon the altar, I commended myself to him and afterward began to write as the Lord directed me, without any counsel, human or earthly… written in my own hand on the aforesaid day in the Castel Nuovo… in the year 1331.”
The Lady Queen Page 3
