Sancia assumed responsibility for the education of Joanna and her younger sister upon the death of their parents. Between having to sit through three hundred of her grandfather’s sermons and the extreme spiritual indoctrination promoted by her grandmother, it is not surprising that Joanna developed a familiarity with the Lati0n tongue. The wonder would have been if she had not learned it.
Despite her grandmother’s best efforts, however, Joanna’s formative years were anything but sheltered. Other potent influences were at work at the court of Naples, which, even as a child, Joanna would not have been able to ignore. For competing with the climate of rigid asceticism fostered by Sancia was the all-too-material and decidedly less virtuous world of the royal entourage. Princely courts were extended-family affairs in the fourteenth century, and Naples was no exception. Of the many relatives who chose to avail themselves of the glittering social whirl of the capital, one stood out: Joanna’s aunt, Catherine of Valois, widow of Robert the Wise’s younger brother Philip, prince of Taranto.
Catherine was Joanna’s mother’s older half-sister (both were fathered by Charles of Valois). Catherine had married Philip in 1313, when Philip was thirty-five and she just ten. Catherine was Philip’s second wife. He had divorced his first on a trumped-up charge of adultery after fifteen years of marriage and six children in order to wed Catherine, who had something he wanted. She was the sole heir to the title of empress of Constantinople.
How a ten-year-old French girl came to inherit the legal claim to this city in Greek Byzantium, possibly the most desired metropolis in history, manifests a peculiarly medieval contrivance. A century before, in 1204, the army of the Fourth Crusade, en route to the Holy Land to liberate Jerusalem for Rome, instead sacked Constantinople, even though it was a Christian city and the Greeks were in fact staunch allies of the pope in the struggle against the Muslims. Within three days the crusading defenders of Christianity had managed to destroy centuries’ worth of the most precious art the civilized world had to offer. An eyewitness to the carnage, Nicetas Choniates, described the crusaders’ rampage: “They smashed the holy images and hurled the sacred relics of the Martyrs into places I am ashamed to mention, scattering everywhere the body and blood of the Saviour. These heralds of Anti-Christ seized the chalices and the patens, tore out the jewels and used them as drinking cups… And they brought horses and mules into the Church, the better to carry off the holy vessels and the engraved silver and gold that they had torn from the throne, and the pulpit, and the doors, and the furniture wherever it was to be found; and when some of these beasts slipped and fell, they ran them through with their swords, fouling the Church with their blood and ordure.” When they had finished vandalizing the city, the crusading knights, many of them younger sons of noble families from France, decided to stay and rule. They elected one of their company as emperor and then parceled out the territory west and south of the capital to themselves in order of rank. That was how the Latin Empire of Byzantium, so called for the official language of the western church, was founded.
The Greeks took nearly sixty years to recapture Constantinople, but they finally succeeded in 1261, forcing the last Latin emperor, Baldwin II, to flee the city in such a hurry that he left behind his luggage. Making his way to Italy, Baldwin II struck a bargain with Joanna’s great-great-grandfather Charles of Anjou, in which the ousted crusader ceded the principality of Achaia, on the western coast of Byzantium, to Charles in exchange for Charles’s help in regaining his empire. Although the planned invasion never came off—Charles’s fleet was destroyed by a particularly violent storm on the eve of the attack—Achaia nonetheless remained in Angevin hands. In 1294, Charles the Lame awarded the territory to his son Philip, prince of Taranto. The Achaia legacy carried with it the unspoken expectation that Philip would expand the family’s holdings to the east; this he had done by raising an army and conquering the important city of Durazzo, on the western coast of Albania. A bustling fortified port, Durazzo was the starting point for the Via Egnatia, the principal east-west route in Byzantium, which led directly to Constantinople. “Now we come to speak of Albania, which, on its southern side, is right next to Greece,” wrote a European chronicler, probably a member of the Dominican order, in 1308 in a journal titled An Anonymous Description of Eastern Europe:
They do have one city called Duracium [Durazzo] which belongs to the Latins and from which they get textiles and other necessities. The Prince of Taranto, son of the King of Sicily [Charles II], now holds sway over part of this kingdom… From Apulia and the city of Brindisi one may cross over to Durazzo in one night, and from Durazzo one may travel on through Albania to Greece and to Constantinople much more easily and without all the road difficulties and perils of the sea. The Roman emperors of ancient times used this route for it is excessively tedious to transport a large army in such a period of time by sea and by such long roads.
By singling out Durazzo, Philip made plain his ambition to retake the capital of the Latin empire.
But Philip of Taranto had a rival. Charles of Valois, the powerful younger brother of Philip IV, king of France, had no kingdom of his own and wanted one desperately. Charles had muscled several other suitors out of the way in 1301 in order to marry Baldwin II’s granddaughter, who had inherited the old emperor’s claim to Constantinople. Unfortunately, in 1308, just as Charles was in the process of preparing for an invasion of Greece, his wife died, and the title of empress passed to their eldest daughter, Catherine. Even so prominent and influential a member of the French royal family as Charles could not hope to obtain a papal dispensation to marry his own daughter, and so he had reluctantly surrendered his dream of empire to Philip of Taranto, upon whom he had bestowed Catherine’s ten-year-old hand in 1313.
Catherine was twenty-eight years old, recently widowed, and a force to be reckoned with when the newly orphaned Joanna and her sister, Maria, first knew her at the Castel Nuovo in 1331. Shrewd, highly intelligent, and vital, Catherine was supremely conscious of her exalted ancestry and wore her title of empress of Constantinople as though it were a rare gem of mythic origin. Even the death of her husband, Philip, in 1331 had not dissuaded her from persisting in her efforts to reclaim the Latin Empire for herself and her three young sons: Robert, Louis, and Philip. A series of shockingly inept leaders had left the Byzantine Empire vulnerable to attack from the west, and this state of affairs was well known in Italy. Moreover, Catherine was used to getting her way. Her splendid household, near the Castel Nuovo, constituted a court-within-a-court, a rival hub radiating energy of a distinctly worldly nature. Not for Catherine was the spiritual life of denial and chastity embraced by Queen Sancia. The empress of Constantinople was a devotee of earthly pleasures. She dressed royally, as befit her position, and even her objects of devotion were brilliant in their ornamentation. A penchant for luxury was not her only vice. Catherine enjoyed the company of men and made no secret of her dalliances. Less than a year after her husband died, she was already carrying on quite publicly with a twenty-three-year-old phenomenon by the name of Niccolò Acciaiuoli.
Niccolò, a Florentine, had arrived in Naples with his father to help represent his family’s financial interests. The Acciaiuolis owned the third-largest commercial enterprise in Italy—one of the super-companies, as they would eventually become known—which made it the third-largest business concern in the world. The family’s interests were highly diversified: commodity dealing, shipping (the Acciaiuolis were one of three select firms contracted to manage the kingdom of Naples’s virtual monopoly on grain and grain exports), banking and corporate finance, manufacturing, merchandising, the operation of retail outlets, multinational trading, including the wholesaling of fine art and rare spices from the Far East—the list went on and on. The Acciaiuolis maintained branch offices in nearly every kingdom in Europe, including the papal court at Avignon, and the company’s senior executives whispered advice on tax collection and account balancing into the ears of every medieval monarch. The royal court of Naples
was an especially choice assignment for a younger member of the Acciaiuoli clan like Niccolò, seeking to establish himself in the world. Robert the Wise, who needed ever-increasing loans to cover the skyrocketing expenses brought about by his repeated attempts to recover Sicily, was the family’s most valued client.
In those days, representatives of the super-companies, particularly those dealing with royalty, were called on to provide a full range of services, including but not limited to making loans, tracking down exotic luxuries that had caught the fancy of a favored mistress, ferreting out confidential information, and playing the dangerous game of informant. Even by these standards, Niccolò was exceptional. Filippo Villani, who knew him, called Niccolò “very handsome… a marvelously fluent man.” When Niccolò first arrived in Naples, Villani continued, he “kept a shop, not full of trash but of valuable merchandise brought from many places, and he was planning to do much business.” Catherine of Valois, whom he met through his contacts at court, was one of his most prized clients. Intent upon her plans for empire, Catherine was involved in a particularly complex transaction with her brother-in-law John (another younger brother of Robert the Wise). John had agreed to cede his right to the principality of Achaia, which he had bought earlier for ten thousand ounces of gold from her late husband, Philip, to Catherine’s eldest son, Robert, in return for a cash settlement. Acting as Catherine’s agent, Niccolò managed the negotiation brilliantly. He bargained John down to five thousand ounces of gold from ten by sweetening the pot with the offer of the duchy of Durazzo in lieu of cash, and then secured the empress’s further admiration by loaning her the entire five thousand from the Acciaiuoli banking concern. His handling of this affair so impressed Catherine that she made him her principal counselor, and even appointed him tutor to her young sons.
He [Niccolò] began to frequent the court of the Empress of Constantinople. And since his affable wisdom greatly pleased that most prudent lady, he came to enjoy such high and honorable favor with her that she entrusted to him her entire family and freely committed to him the charge of her household. On his part, recognizing the importance of the duties imposed upon him he took it upon himself to instruct the children, previously neglected, as is the custom in Naples, with regard to the manners, habits and discretion suitable to their royal station.
Apparently, Catherine did not limit Niccolò’s domestic responsibilities to the needs of her sons. “It was said openly that [Catherine] included Niccolò Acciaiuoli among her other lovers… and made him rich and powerful,” Villani asserted bluntly.
Catherine’s freewheeling lifestyle and generally conceited demeanor excited the jealousy and resentment of another cadet branch of the family—that of John, now styled duke of Durazzo as a result of the recent transaction with his sister-in-law. John had also taken a French girl, Agnes of Périgord, as a second wife after his first, a princess of Achaia, had refused to consummate the marriage and been imprisoned for her temerity. Agnes came from very good stock—not quite as grand as Catherine’s, but still very distinguished and aristocratic—and she resented her sister-in-law’s unquestioned air of superiority. The rivalry between the two women only deepened when John died in 1336 and his lands and titles devolved upon Agnes’s eldest son, Charles of Durazzo, who was thirteen at the time of his father’s death. Agnes was devoted to Charles and very ambitious for his advancement. She knew that Catherine’s sons held a slight advantage in rank over hers, owing to their father’s having been older and therefore closer to the throne. But Agnes, while less flamboyant than Catherine, was every bit a match for the empress of Constantinople in terms of enterprise and calculation.
One other person occupied a position of importance in Joanna’s life during her childhood years—her nurse, Philippa the Catanian.
Philippa had served Joanna’s family for nearly three decades. She had originally been hired by Joanna’s grandmother Violante, when, accompanying Robert the Wise in 1298 on one of his futile attempts to retake Sicily, Violante had discovered she was pregnant. An armed military camp not being the most convenient place to give birth, Violante recruited additional female household staff from the indigenous population. Catania, a port city on the eastern coast of Sicily, was nearby, and Philippa, “the daughter of a poor fisherman,” who was nonetheless “attractive in manner and appearance” (according to Boccaccio, who knew her later in life), was employed as a wet nurse even though “only a few days before she had been washing the clothes of the foreigners.”
Thrilled to have escaped the laundry room for the boudoir, Philippa applied herself to her new duties with diligence and competence. By turns charming, ingratiating, and soothing, Philippa soon made herself indispensable, so much so that when the military campaign ended, and Robert was forced (as usual) to retreat, Violante brought her new wet nurse back with her to Naples where Philippa “remained among the other servants.”
Once ensconced in Naples, Philippa’s life was to take the sort of preposterous turn more commonly associated with Shakespearean drama than with reality. At the same time Philippa was impressing Violante with her capabilities, an Ethiopian kitchen slave christened Raymond of Campagno (after the chief cook at the palace, who had purchased the African from some pirates) was similarly catching the eye of his employer, Violante’s father-in-law, Charles the Lame. Raymond did such a good job at the royal banquets (“to him almost all the duties of the kitchen were assigned”) that he ended up earning his freedom and replacing his namesake as head chef. From there, Raymond somehow made the leap from the kitchen to the royal household and was appointed guard of the king’s wardrobe, at which time “he began to attract the favor of the King and the nobles and to amass wealth.” Raymond turned from administrator to soldier, from soldier to commander. Cognizant of Raymond’s obvious abilities, and seeking to further reward this exemplary manservant, King Charles thought to provide him with a wife, just as Violante, also seeking to reward a favored domestic (or perhaps apprehensive of Philippa’s physical charms), was looking to provide Philippa with a husband. Such a happy convergence of royal interests was not to be ignored and so, without bothering to consult the principals, the marriage was arranged with admirable efficiency. Very soon, as Boccaccio observed, “the African soldier joined the bed of the Sicilian washerwoman.”
Although brought together in this unconventional manner at the impulse of their sovereigns, Philippa and Raymond each nonetheless recognized and appreciated the resourcefulness of the other, and the opportunities afforded them by their union. In Raymond, Philippa obtained a spouse as industrious in his husbandry as he was ferocious on the battlefield. As victory after victory came his way, and he was raised to ever-higher commands, Raymond never failed to demand and collect his reward. Ever mindful of the poverty and concurrent helplessness of his youth, the Ethiopian kept a sharp eye on his assets and invested wisely. Philippa soon found herself mistress of a vast holding, which included “towns, estates, villas, horses, numerous servants, rich clothes, and all goods in abundance,” noted Boccaccio.
For his part, Raymond acquired in Philippa an intelligent, attractive wife who gave him three sons and a daughter, and whose political acumen and connections helped him to advance his career. After Violante died, Philippa returned to the Castel Nuovo (thus lending credence to the notion that her marriage had been arranged because Violante feared a rival) to offer her services to Robert the Wise’s new queen, Sancia, and to Joanna’s mother, Marie of Valois. Again, Philippa proved herself invaluable to her royal mistresses. “She [Philippa] helped them, served them, and showed herself ever ready for their commands. She prepared and took care of their ornaments and various lotions and demonstrated that she was a perfect mistress… She exceeded in age the other women in the court… and it seemed by long habit she had learned the customs of the court.” With Philippa’s influence, Raymond was made royal seneschal, a chief adviser to the king himself. “What a ridiculous thing to see an African from a slave prison, from the vapor of the kitchen, standing before
Robert, the King, performing royal service for the young nobleman, governing the court and making laws for those in power!” Boccaccio wrote.
When her husband became seneschal, Philippa too was rewarded with a promotion and appointed by Marie of Valois to be guardian to her daughter Joanna, the heir to the throne. In 1331, after Marie died, “Philippa was honored as Joanna’s mother.” While again unorthodox, the choice of Philippa as surrogate parent was perhaps, given the circumstances, the most compassionate. To five-year-old Joanna, bewildered by the loss of both parents and the concept of death, Philippa represented continuity and comfort. The older woman was someone Joanna had known from birth. She was familiar with her childish routine and could coax her, when necessary, through her duties. Emotionally, Philippa provided the warmth and love of which Joanna’s step-grandmother, Sancia, was incapable, and Joanna clung to her accordingly.
The Lady Queen Page 4
