The Lady Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  In the fall of 1342, the new leader of Florence, who had been elected “dictator for life,” sought protection for the firms by declaring a three-year moratorium on payments, hoping to buy the time necessary to collect the monies due the companies in England and so maintain their solvency. But rather than pay, Edward III instead launched a series of audits intended to minimize his obligations to his Florentine creditors, at which point it became clear that the super-companies would sustain major losses. This was the final blow. The government of the dictator for life fell on August 3, 1343, and a full-scale panic ensued.

  To protect the kingdom’s interests, Joanna and Sancia together signed a letter on August 25 to the government of Florence, reminding the commune of the close relationship that had always existed between the Angevin kingdom and their city, and demanding that Neapolitan claims be given preference in the distribution of assets. But in truth there was nothing to be done. The Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli families declared bankruptcy in October 1343; the Bardi limped on before finally shutting down in April 1346. Payouts to creditors were less than 50 percent of the asset base, and the small size of the settlement was not entirely the result of losses. The partners of these firms were evidently as adroit at hiding their money as they had once been at making it. “Most of the shareholders appear to have fled the city and arranged to shift property into safer hands. Such action seems to have been standard practice in Florence at the time.”

  Businesses had failed before in the Middle Ages, but not like this. Due to advances in transportation and education, the size and scope of the super-companies’ dealings were unprecedented. Giovanni Villani estimated that the super-companies’ demand for skilled labor was so great that 1,200 Florentines had been taught to read and write in the vernacular and to use an abacus. The Bardi family alone employed a workforce of between 120 and 150 people spread across Europe, an administrative network second only to the Curia. These firms represented the first truly modern multinational corporations, and when they failed, they touched off the first truly modern multinational recession. Wages fell, businesses closed, and unemployment rose all over Europe; people lost their life savings, and credit, which had been so easily obtained in the past, was no longer forthcoming. Governments as well as individuals were affected. Because nothing like this had ever happened before, royal treasuries were not equipped to handle the crisis, the ideas of coordinated central bank intervention and government bailouts being still six hundred years away from conception.

  Every economy in Western Europe was impaired, but nowhere was the damage inflicted as severe as it was in Naples, where for decades the super-companies had effectively functioned as the financing arm of the royal government. The entire wealth of the kingdom was based on these firms purchasing the enormous output of grain, which in a good year achieved a level of 45,000 tons. The revenues associated with the super-companies paid for all the finished goods that flooded the Neapolitan marketplace, including the luxury items—the silks, the jewels, the multicolored, gold-threaded cloth from the Far East, the exotic eatables, the spices, the perfumed soap. They financed the building of the impressive castles and churches commissioned by Charles the Lame and Robert the Wise and his queen and paid for their decoration by the finest artists in France and Italy. The great grain trade was the motor that allowed a succession of Angevin rulers to run up, year after year, the huge military expenses associated with the fruitless campaign to retake the island of Sicily and to deliver the seven thousand ounces of gold (and probably the white horse as well) for the annual tribute every Angevin monarch, male or female, was obligated to pay the papacy without fail.

  Of course, no one living in 1343 could have guessed how long and how deep the downturn would be, or its implications for Naples over time. The court must have expected that the super-companies would recapitalize at some future date and the kingdom return to its previous condition of affluence. But in fact, the prosperity associated with King Robert had been the product of luck and unsustainable economic realities, and not good government. “The Angevins remained dependent on the merchants as they embarked on a spending spree, rebuilding Naples and indulging themselves in prestige-enhancing conspicuous consumption. Thus, the lucrative grain trade… became transformed into a long-term quasi-monopoly for them [the super-companies], as a result of subsequent Angevin profligacy.” By rights a realignment of the grain trade ought to have taken place in the previous decade. Only the extreme competence of the managing directors of the Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuoli families had put off the bust until the beginning of Joanna’s reign. But no one understood that at the time, and the new queen was blamed for it.

  Blame was the least of Joanna’s problems. Although Robert the Wise had left a substantial surplus in the royal treasury at his death, he had also encumbered his estate with a number of bequests and conditions, which Joanna, as his heir, was legally required to honor. Mostly these had to do with earmarking funds for another attempt on Sicily as well as ensuring that many of the old king’s favorites—including his illegitimate son, Charles of Artois, and certain members of Philippa the Catanian’s family—were protected and promoted. Unfortunately, however, payment of these stipends had the effect of draining the kingdom’s resources at an accelerated pace. Nor could Joanna apply, as had her grandfather, for easy credit when this money ran out; her bankers, even those who had managed to escape town or jail, were no longer in business. The days of unlimited Angevin spending were over.

  Even the weather turned against the kingdom. For the next two years the average rainfall rose precipitously, drowning the grain fields, reducing crop yields, and adding greatly to the general atmosphere of anxiety and foreboding.

  While Joanna and her counselors struggled to limit the kingdom’s losses in the face of this financial crisis, the court was distracted by the arrival of yet another visiting dignitary. On October 11, 1343, Francesco Petrarch, the poet laureate, rode into Naples. His was not a social visit. The great scholar was acting in an official capacity as a personal emissary on behalf of his good friend Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, a member of Rome’s powerful Colonna family. The cardinal was a rising force at the papal court in Avignon (and, as such, a rival of Cardinal Talleyrand of Périgord). Petrarch had been charged by his friend with obtaining the freedom of the imprisoned brothers of the Pipini family.

  The three Pipini brothers, led by the eldest brother, Giovanni, count of Minerbino, had been jailed by Robert the Wise for their criminal participation in the civil unrest of 1338. So little concern for the rule of law or the general populace had the brothers displayed while pursuing a vendetta against their enemies that they had been nicknamed “the scourge of Apulia.” A small army had been required to force them to capitulate, but they were eventually brought to trial in 1341 and subsequently convicted in a court of law of murder, rape, pillage, arson, treason, “kindling civil war,” and other assorted capital crimes. They had originally been slated for execution, but their mother had pleaded successfully with Sancia to have the sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and so the three young men were currently spending their days in fetters in the dungeon of one of the royal castles. After Robert’s death, their mother had had the sudden inspiration to send a heartfelt appeal, supplemented by a substantial bribe, to Cardinal Colonna, a distant family relation, to secure their release. After all, it had worked for Agnes.

  The cardinal had obliged by sending Petrarch, who was assumed to have influence at the royal court because of his earlier visit to Naples. Petrarch was a famous poet and a revered scholar, but he was an inexperienced diplomat, and his attitudes toward politics were at once naive and self-serving. His errand was viewed with marked disfavor by Joanna and her court, and his entreaties for clemency on behalf of his clients were met with resistance. The prisoners’ property, appropriated at the time of their conviction by Robert and subsequently reassigned to political favorites, including Raymond del Balzo, a relative of Hugo, would have to be returned if they were pardoned. Raymond
, a member of the ruling council, was naturally reluctant to do this. But dwarfing this objection was the royal court’s fear of the known characters of the men involved. They were arrogant, unrepentant killers, and their release was sure to visit fresh calamity upon the kingdom.

  Not wishing to offend so distinguished and respected an emissary, or his patron, however, rather than simply denying Petrarch’s request, Joanna, Sancia, and the ruling council stalled and equivocated. Joanna granted the poet several private interviews at which she apparently discussed, not the liberation of the Pipini brothers, but literature. On November 25 she signed letters patent appointing him her domestic chaplain, the same esteemed scholarly position he had occupied under her grandfather’s regime. Sancia (herself a beneficiary of Pipini property, some of the brothers’ most valuable horses having found their way into her stable) also granted an audience to Petrarch at which she commiserated with him over his and his clients’ plight. “The elder queen, formerly the royal spouse, now the most wretched of widows, has compassion, as she says, affirming that she can do nothing more,” Petrarch observed to Cardinal Colonna in a letter written from Naples soon after his arrival. “Cleopatra [by which he means Joanna] with her Ptolemy [Andrew] could also show compassion if Photinus [Friar Robert] and Achilles [Raymond del Balzo] would allow it.” The two queens’ sympathy was, in this case, feigned. Joanna later explained her position in a letter to the pope, which she asked Petrarch to deliver. “Letting the Pipini go free would be incentive to emulate them,” she wrote to Clement VI. “These prisoners could not presume to speak of innocence when no one is unaware of the extraordinary abuse they perpetrated in the time of King Robert; devastation, plunder, arson, murders and abuse of all kinds; when no one is unaware, too, of their open rebellion and insane stubbornness, and how, despite the King’s summons and threats, they continued to disturb the peace and quiet of the realm, and were so bold as to hold out against the royal troops and fight them with their gang of outlaws, knaves and other such criminals… By the letter of the law they deserved to be sentenced to death.”

  The scholar attributed the thwarting of his mission, not to a genuine concern for the safety of the kingdom and its inhabitants, but rather to the “seductive band of courtiers” surrounding the two queens, particularly the odious Friar Robert, whom he claimed exerted undue influence over the rest of the council. “Relying not as much on eloquence as on silence and on arrogance, he [Friar Robert] wanders through the courtyards of the queens, and, supported by a staff, he pushes aside the more humble, he tramples upon justice, and he defiles whatever remains of divine or human rights,” he wrote, which is to say that the friar, too, opposed the release of the Pipini. “I have no hopes, except from the intervention of some superior power, as my dependence on the clemency of the council is out of the question,” Petrarch reported gloomily to Cardinal Colonna.

  Frustrated and disappointed, the unhappy ambassador sent a number of letters to Avignon complaining of the corrupt and dissolute state of the kingdom. He seems to have been prejudiced against Naples even before his arrival, for he had written to his friend Barbato da Sulmona at the time of Robert the Wise’s death some nine months before, “I am really alarmed about the youthfulness of the young queen, and of the new king, about the age and intent of the other queen, about the talents and ways of the courtiers. I wish that I could be a lying prophet about these things, but I see two lambs entrusted to the care of a multitude of wolves, and I see a kingdom without a king. How can I call someone a king who is ruled by another and who is exposed to the greed of so many and (I sadly add) to the cruelty of so many?” Nor was Petrarch likely to view Joanna’s rule with enthusiasm. “I consider what Plautus says in his Aulularia much closer to the truth: ‘There is no excellent woman; one is really worse than another,’” he once wrote, and, “A single law governs all females: they desire silly things, and they dread things of small account.”

  Through the letters with which Petrarch peppered Cardinal Colonna, the papal court at Avignon was treated to a litany of grievances and the discouraging image of a realm in utter chaos. “Perhaps last night I might have obtained the courtesy even of rejection had the Council not adjourned because of the approaching darkness, and had not the incurable disease of the city compelled everyone to return home early. Though very famous for many reasons, the city possesses one particularly dark, repulsive, and inveterate evil: to travel in it by night, as in a jungle, is dangerous and full of hazards because the streets are beset by armed young nobles whose dissoluteness cannot be controlled by the discipline of their parents, the authority of their teachers, or by the majesty and command of kings,” he wrote bitterly to the cardinal, seemingly oblivious to that fact that his purpose in Naples was to apply pressure for Joanna and her court to put three of the worst of these offenders back on the streets.

  Lawlessness was by no means specific to Joanna’s reign. During this very same period, the English town of Ipswich, for example, was so beset by criminal bands who roamed the countryside, and so helpless against feloniousness, that the ruffians felt comfortable enough to amuse themselves by taking over the regional courthouses. They pretended to hold trials at which they fined their hapless victims and deposed the local authorities “in mockery of the King’s justices and ministers in his service,” as a legal complaint in the year 1344 read. Ironically, the same conditions Petrarch now deplored had existed during the emissary’s previous visit in 1341, when the Pipini brothers were still at large and wreaking havoc on the populace—but at that time the poet had evidently been so gratified by the honor conferred on him that he hadn’t noticed. Instead, Petrarch attributed the city’s criminality to the barbarity of the gladiatorial tournaments with which aristocratic Naples entertained itself. “Here human blood flows like the blood of cattle, and often amidst the applause of the insane spectators, unfortunate sons are killed under the very eyes of their wretched parents,” he wrote indignantly to the cardinal. “I have already wasted many words speaking of it with the obstinate citizens. Indeed we should hardly be astonished that your friends [the Pipini brothers], offering as they do such a prize for greed, should be prisoners in that city where killing men is considered a game, a city which Virgil indeed does call the most delightful of all, but as it stands now would not be considered unequal to Thrace in infamy.” Petrarch was well aware of the influence his words would wield in Avignon, and so he made a point of ensuring that his opinions would be broadcast at the Curia. “And you will have to share some of the blame if from the information that I sent at some length in other more confidential letters you do not keep the Roman Pontiff better informed,” he warned his correspondent grimly.

  The Hungarian party recognized its opportunity. Elizabeth’s ambassadors in Avignon reported on Cardinal Colonna’s interest in the Pipini brothers and Petrarch’s description of the intractability of the Neapolitan court to the queen mother, who was not only still in Italy but was actually staying as a guest of the Colonna family in Rome. The result of this exchange was that Andrew suddenly took up the Pipini cause in Naples. The prince promised to do what he could to free the brothers, an advocacy position for which both Petrarch and his sponsor Cardinal Colonna were extremely grateful.

  This action on the part of the Hungarians, in combination with their considerable financial resources and a letter-writing campaign initiated by Elizabeth, by which every prince, priest and prelate over whom the queen mother exercised influence inundated the Sacred College with correspondence demanding that Andrew be crowned and Naples assigned a legate, finally succeeded in shifting the balance of power at Avignon away from Joanna and toward her husband. Petrarch’s damaging reports, as presented by Cardinal Colonna, provided Clement VI with the justification he needed to subvert Robert the Wise’s will. On November 28, 1343, the pope announced in the preamble to an official bull that “the age of the queen [Joanna] rendering her still incapable of governing, since the temperament of children is inconstant and easily influenced”—that must
have gone over well at the Castel Nuovo—he was dissolving the ruling council and prohibiting Joanna from exercising her sovereign right as queen. The pope then named Cardinal Aimeric de Châtelus to act as legate, investing him, as the papal surrogate, with full powers to rule the kingdom of Naples.

  The publication of this decree in Naples marked the commencement of a new, highly charged, dangerously desperate period at the royal court. From this point on, no policy, action, initiative, program, or plot was undertaken by any of the various interested parties in Naples without an eye to, or a reciprocal maneuver planned by, the interested parties at the Holy See in Avignon, and vice versa. It was as if the two courts, separated though they were by three hundred miles and the Mediterranean, nonetheless operated as parallel, mirror universes, two partners in a long-distance dance so attuned to each other’s rhythm that the slightest motion by one set off a reaction in the other. Outwardly, the struggle between the Neapolitans and the Hungarians had all the earmarks of the usual medieval diplomatic wrangling, but this was a sham: both sides understood that no mediating solution could be imposed by an external authority. It was a winner-take-all situation, and was fought as such.

  Joanna lost no time in responding to this dismaying turn of events through both official and unofficial channels. She dashed off a letter to Clement, which was presented at the papal court on December 19 by Hugo del Balzo, in which the queen of Naples indignantly protested the abrogation of her rightfully held powers and warned the pontiff against interference, “praying him to treat no further with the Hungarian envoys concerning the coronation of Andrew and the administration of her kingdom.” Nor did Joanna allow past grievances to prevent her from making use of every political advantage. Two days later, she dispatched a second, private letter to Avignon, this one addressed to her former nemesis, Cardinal Talleyrand, rival of her present adversary, Cardinal Colonna, in which she implored Talleyrand’s help in reversing Clement’s decision. “Pleading with confidence for your protection in our difficult situation,” she wrote, “we beg affectionately of you to prevent the dispatch of the legate by whatever means you deem necessary.” By now quite familiar with the cardinal’s preferred methods of operation, she included in her correspondence the intelligence that she was sending by separate courier “certain things, which they would not find displeasing.”