Finally, to ensure that none of the principals involved later challenged his instructions or deviated in any way from the strictures imposed by this will, Robert the Wise included the following codicil: “The before mentioned duke and duchess and the duchess’ sister Maria, affirming themselves adult, and such from their appearance it is manifest they are, have promised and sworn by corporeal touch of the Holy Gospel, in the presence of ourself, the ruler and King [Robert], and of our judge, notary, and the undersigned witnesses, to keep firmly and inviolably [the terms of this will], and at no time whatsoever, by themselves or by means of others, to do or act contrary to any of the aforesaid bequests and conditions.”
And so was undone in a matter of hours the work of nearly a decade. Nor was there time to thoroughly digest the implications of this royal thunderbolt, nor to appeal to the elderly king’s better judgment, nor plead with him for restitution or reinstatement. For by January 20, 1343, four days after the disclosure of this remarkable document, Robert the Wise was dead.
CHAPTER V
The Foolish Legacy of Robert the Wise
For Joanna, confronting the loss of the only father figure she had ever known must have been devastating. Robert the Wise had been her earliest and most devoted champion, shielding her from the dark aims of those who would use her position for their own purposes. From her earliest days he had demonstrated faith in her ability to shoulder the demands of sovereignty. His presence had dominated the great arched hall of the Castel Nuovo for her as it had for the rest of his subjects.
Although with almost his last breath Robert the Wise had ensured that Andrew would have no influence over the government of the kingdom, the king must have nonetheless also left verbal instructions that Joanna’s husband be raised to knighthood and her marriage consummated immediately. On January 22, just two days after Robert’s death, while the king’s body, surrounded by candles, still lay in state at the church of Santa Chiara, Andrew was hastily knighted in a private ceremony at the Castel Nuovo. Only three people witnessed the duke of Calabria’s induction into manhood, all senior members of the ruling council. One was a notary, and one was the vice-seneschal Raymond of Catania, one of Philippa’s sons. Since the court was officially in mourning, Andrew was denied the feasts and lavish public celebration that ordinarily would have accompanied the dubbing, but evidently even this scaled-down rite of passage served its purpose. For “on the day of Wednesday, the 22nd of the month of January [1343], as the lately deceased King Robert had dictated… Andrew… appeared lawfully at [Joanna’s] door at the Castel Nuovo, despoiled her, and knew her carnally,” reported the Chronicle of Parthénope, one of the official records of the period. That the members of the ruling committee and Joanna in particular acquiesced to this obligation of office so soon after Robert’s death is a strong indication that all of those involved were in fact simply carrying out the old king’s last commands.
Joanna’s grief and affection for her grandfather may be measured in the size and splendor of the tomb she had built for him. At the young queen’s behest, two Florentine master sculptors were engaged to erect the massive marble sepulcher, which still survives today in the church of Santa Chiara. Three stories high, the monument was larger and grander than any other reliquary in the vast church. Carved in imitation of the crypt of an emperor or a pope, the tomb depicted Robert surrounded by his family, including Joanna, who is represented as seated on a throne in the second niche, the whole “devised to silence doubts that Robert had been a usurper.” Robert is himself presented to God on this statuary by two figures representing Saint Francis and Clare of Assisi, a reference not only to his lifelong commitment to the Franciscan order but also to his own preeminence on earth. In this way did Joanna successfully ensure that her grandfather’s renown survived his death: “The altarpiece’s significance to the Angevins never was forgotten in Naples.” The scale of the commission also served as an announcement of Joanna’s intention to build in the grand tradition of her ancestors, to leave her own imprint on the kingdom through the erection of important monuments. An attention to and pride in civic building and decoration, she knew, was part of the Angevin legacy of sovereignty.
But her grief at the loss of her grandfather did not blind Joanna to the risks to which his last will and testament exposed her and her kingdom. There was no way to judge the political and military ramifications of openly denying Andrew a say in the government of Naples. King Louis and his mother, Elizabeth, would undoubtedly protest the decision to the pope, and would perhaps even try to convince the papacy to substitute Louis’ claim to the kingdom, as the eldest child of Carobert, for Joanna’s. The specter of invasion, too, hung over the kingdom of Naples if Andrew’s family did not have their way. The Hungarians could raise an impressive army at any time, and Louis was able-bodied and trained for warfare.
Joanna, by contrast, was severely handicapped by her sex and the requirement that the committee established to rule during her minority be consulted on every issue. For even if the committee agreed to her request for troops, who then would lead them into battle? Joanna could not do it herself, and there was no king. Without Andrew, she had no champion, no general who could force the hostile and competing factions within her family to ally together to face the threat. Nor could she procure a warrior by marriage, as she was already married. By his last will and testament then, Robert the Wise undermined from its first days Joanna’s reign and made her vulnerable to attack.
That both Joanna and the ruling committee were aware of the tenuous position in which her grandfather had placed her is evidenced by the speed with which she named one of her most prestigious vassals, Hugo del Balzo, the count of Avellino, as her ambassador to the papal court. Protocol demanded that the new queen of Naples do formal obeisance to the pope for her kingdom, and Joanna invested the count with the authority to act as her surrogate at the ceremony. She also specifically instructed Hugo to petition the pontiff, Clement VI, to permit Andrew to be crowned king.
By asking for this coronation, Joanna did not mean to grant her husband rule of the kingdom or to share power with him, but merely to offer him the face-saving honor of a rank commensurate with her own. Moreover, the timing of this petition—Hugo del Balzo was dispatched to Avignon on January 25, only five days after Robert’s demise, with the full approval of Sancia and the ruling council—would indicate that this bargain had been hammered out in advance of the king’s death. It is difficult to believe that Andrew would have voluntarily sworn to abide by the conditions of the will had the prince and his counselors not been privy to secret assurances of some kind.
Unfortunately, Joanna’s rational attempt at diplomacy—designed to reinstate the former status quo and thereby preempt any possible protests on the part of Andrew’s family—was by no means the only scheme emanating out of Naples that found its way to the treacherous milieu of the papal court.
Throughout the long years of King Robert’s deterioration, Agnes of Périgord had never surrendered her ambition to see her eldest son, Charles, duke of Durazzo, invested with the sovereignty of Naples. For this reason, Agnes had maintained close ties to the crown, helpfully offering Charles’s services to Robert for one of his annual doomed attacks on Sicily and working to insinuate herself into the confidence of Sancia and the two young princesses. Although outwardly her efforts came to naught—the old king failed to reward her son or to legitimize his interest in the throne in any way—Agnes was nonetheless quick to recognize that by naming Maria as an alternate heir, Robert the Wise had left open the possibility of a new route to power. If Joanna should die childless, or be deposed by the pope or the Hungarians, Maria would inherit the kingdom. This made Joanna’s fourteen-year-old sister, who by the same will was now also extremely wealthy in her own right, a highly attractive candidate for marriage. Robert had decreed that his second granddaughter should wed the heir to the French throne, but Agnes was as desperate to prevent this match as she was to advance her eldest son’s career. Philip VI, the k
ing of France, was Catherine of Valois’ brother. Inevitably, then, a marriage between Maria and a scion of France would overwhelmingly favor the interests of the house of Taranto over those of the Durazzo.
Letters indicate that some initial negotiations with the French had taken place, but the details of so important an alliance would, Agnes knew, take time. While Maria’s fate remained in this unsettled state, it might still be possible to independently petition the papacy for the princess’s hand in marriage. This could only be accomplished by someone with close ties to the Sacred College, someone with the ability to call on a powerful advocate who was on such intimate relations with the new pope (Benedict XII had died the previous spring) that he could persuade the pontiff to act in the interested party’s favor. Happily, Agnes was connected to just such an advocate: her brother Cardinal Talleyrand of Périgord.
A venerated ancestor of the Talleyrand of Périgord, who four centuries later would be famously associated with both the French Revolution and Napoleon, Agnes’s brother was one of the most influential cardinals at the papal court at Avignon. Petrarch wrote of the cardinal, “He himself denies it, but everyone affirms that he has made two pontiffs in a row.” One of these was the new pope, Clement VI, whose election the previous year, expertly steered by Talleyrand, had taken only four days to secure. Cardinal Périgord owed his eminent position in life both to his mother, who had caught the eye of an earlier pope, Clement V (“for it was openly said that he had as mistress the countess of Périgord, a most beautiful lady,” the chronicler Giovanni Villani reported), and to his family’s determined allegiance to the French. The county of Périgord represented a front line in the theater of the Hundred Years’ War. It was located in that part of the kingdom over which both Edward III and Philip VI claimed sovereignty. The king of France knew that he could not afford to lose the loyalty of a vassal who fought so consistently against encroachment by his enemy, and so he made efforts to reward the family through grants of new property and other signs of royal favor, including the demonstrable promotion of the cardinal’s career. “It was probably this close association with the French crown which explains Talleyrand’s prominence in the College of Cardinals from the very outset, and his growing reputation as a leader of the French party in the College which was in such a majority.”
Confident of her brother’s leverage at the papal court, Agnes proceeded with her plot to circumvent King Robert’s instructions. In this, she seems to have gained a willing accomplice in the prospective bride herself. Maria was likely never enthusiastic about having to leave her childhood home in Naples in order to marry the faraway king of Hungary, nor, at fourteen, was she happy to wait indefinitely for an offer, which might never come, from the French royal family. Her cousin Charles had gone out of his way to make himself agreeable to the young princess, and his efforts seem to have met with success. From Maria’s point of view, it was certainly better to stay in Naples and marry someone she had known and grown up with than to trust her fate to a complete stranger.
Sancia’s support for the match—Agnes took King Robert’s widow into her confidence as well—is also understandable. The dowager queen disliked and distrusted the haughty Catherine, and much preferred the company of the duchess of Durazzo, with whom she was intimate. Later, Sancia would name Agnes and her sons among the executors of her will, an honor conspicuously withheld from the members of the house of Taranto. A marriage between Maria and Charles of Durazzo would demote the empress’s power within the kingdom, and Sancia was apparently willing to risk the ire of her Taranto relatives in order to accomplish this end.
With Sancia and Maria in favor of the match, it was not difficult for Agnes to convince Joanna as well of its worth. The young queen’s acceptance of this arrangement, attributed by the chronicler Domenico da Gravina to Sancia’s influence, is also a clear indication that, far from being forced into marriage, Maria actively expressed a desire to wed Charles. Joanna and Maria were very close. They were almost the same age and had been orphaned together. They had been each other’s playmate for as long as either could remember; they had been brought up in the same castle, eaten the same meals, listened to the same church services. During the first few months after Robert’s death, the accounts show that Joanna made an effort to please her sister, hosting a feast in her honor and gambling at hazards with her. Joanna was unlikely to have added her approval of a union with the house of Durazzo, knowing the likely reaction of the house of Taranto, if Maria had not wished for it.
Having secured the surreptitious assent of both queens (although not that of the ruling council), Agnes hurried to translate the promise of success into reality. The duchess of Durazzo proved herself an extremely adept conspirator. She understood that the empress of Constantinople, through her brother the king of France, was fully capable of preventing any alliance that ran counter to the interests of her sons, even one which boasted the approval of the pope. The dispensation for Maria’s marriage therefore had to be worded carefully so as to allow Agnes complete freedom of movement and the ability to act unilaterally if necessary. Such favors did not come without a price, so in her appeal to her brother, the duchess of Durazzo did not rely simply upon family feeling. Instead, she offered Talleyrand twenty-two thousand florins—the whole of the dowry still due her in connection with her marriage—if he would arrange matters to ensure her son’s wedding.
As it happened, Talleyrand of Périgord nourished his own aspirations as regards the Curia. Agnes’s bribe aside, the cardinal no doubt reflected that having one of his nephews placed as a possible successor to the powerful throne of Naples might prove extremely useful the next time the Sacred College was called upon to elect a pope, and he promptly spoke to Clement VI about accommodating his sister’s request.
Clement had a well-deserved reputation for high living, aristocratic taste, and easy generosity (which had no doubt served him well among his fellows in the recent papal election). The new pope’s two favorite sayings were “No one should go out from the prince’s presence discontented” and “A pontiff should make his subjects happy.” Clement was acutely aware of his obligation to the cardinal and saw no reason not to accede to his wishes. On February 26, 1343, he signed a bull that allowed Agnes’s son Charles to wed any woman he liked, as long as her relationship to the duke did not fall within the normally proscribed bounds of consanguinity. In this way was the marriage to Maria sanctioned by the church without the pope’s actually having to reveal the name of the intended bride, a detail that might have proved awkward in later conversations with the kings of France and Hungary, who were bound to be somewhat put out by this appropriation of a valuable asset. This bull was made public in Naples.
Not made public were two additional dispensations addressed to the house of Durazzo, which were also signed by the pope on February 26. The first of these invested Agnes and her progeny with the power to consult their own desires when choosing a priest and declared that these priests would be allowed to administer any or all of the sacraments at the location of the Durazzos’ choice, “even in prohibited places of worship.” The second secret bull, which was directed to Agnes alone, contained a blanket permission for the duchess of Durazzo to retreat at any time to any convent she liked.
Once again, the rapid manner in which these papal documents were obtained—they were issued less than six weeks after Robert’s death—is a strong indication that the conspiracy predated the king’s passing. And clearly Agnes, at least, was well aware of the provocation this marriage would represent to her adversary, the empress of Constantinople, and the likely violence of Catherine’s response. The business about retiring into a convent was in the nature of an escape clause.
In due course, Charles’s vague but nonetheless official papal dispensation for the marriage to his cousin arrived in Naples, and Joanna and Sancia hosted the formal celebration of Maria’s engagement on March 26, 1343, at the Castel Nuovo. The speed with which the pope had sanctioned this union would naturally have been interpr
eted as a sign of papal favor and must have encouraged Joanna and Sancia to believe this was an appropriate step to take to both resolve Maria’s future and stabilize the order of succession. In yet another stab at legitimacy, all the members of the ruling council, having previously been informed of the bull’s contents, were present to witness the ceremony. But even the authority of this delegation could not disguise the atmosphere of menace created by the pointed absence of the empress of Constantinople and her brood. In fact, Catherine was livid at having been outmaneuvered in this fashion and protested the betrothal in the strongest possible terms to both her niece Joanna and the pope; and just as the duchess of Durazzo had predicted, she called upon the king of France to intervene on her behalf in Avignon to have the dispensation rescinded.
But Agnes, having anticipated this response, was ready for it. Two days later, on March 28, the house of Durazzo launched the second, covert half of its plan. One of Maria’s ladies-in-waiting, a young woman by the name of Margherita di Ceccano, herself the niece of a cardinal, was an accomplice to the plot. With Margherita’s help, Charles of Durazzo quietly lured his young fiancée into the west garden of the Castel Nuovo, which abutted the grounds of his family’s estate. According to Domenico da Gravina, from there he “abducted” her to his castle, where a sympathetic priest was waiting. This priest, by the power invested in him in accordance with one of the secret bulls signed by the pope, then hurriedly and secretly married the couple. But the performance of so unorthodox a nuptial sacrament was not enough to assure Charles of his bride. So just to make certain that there was no going back, as soon as the priest was finished, the duke of Durazzo took the precaution of consummating the marriage. Or, as Domenico da Gravina, relaying information that was obviously common knowledge at the time, reported, “having intercourse, it is said, and keeping her in his own palace.”
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