The dowager duchess of Durazzo, committed to the advancement of her family, had not ceased in her efforts to place all her children in as advantageous a position as possible. Her latest intrigue had been to try to marry her second son, Louis of Durazzo, to the empress of Constantinople’s daughter, Marguerite, and thereby cleave the united front heretofore displayed against her family by the house of Taranto. Catherine opposed the match, but Agnes, no doubt emboldened by her previous success at surreptitious matchmaking, and apparently following much the same strategy, did not back down in the face of the empress of Constantinople’s resistance. Instead, in late 1344 she had begun to pressure Clement into granting permission for the match, working as usual through her brother Cardinal Talleyrand.
But it was best to be at the peak of one’s abilities when taking on an enemy of Catherine’s caliber, and Agnes had the misfortune to fall ill in May and was still bedridden by August. Domenico da Gravina is the sole source for the chronology of events which transpired in the days immediately preceding her death. “Madame the duchess of Durazzo was… gravely ill,” the chronicler related,
when a very prominent medical doctor named master Giovanni da Penne… arrived in Naples. Hearing of his arrival, the duke of Durazzo asked him to come and examine his mother… The doctor took the duchess’ pulse and reassured her, as well as her son, as to her health. Also present in the room were madame Maria, her daughter-in-law, madame Margherita di Ceccano and her daughter, madame Sancia, and several other ladies and maids-in-waiting.
It just so happened that at that time, duchess Agnes was not on good terms with her son and his wife; good relations had returned between the duke and his brothers… but all disagreements had not been fully resolved between the women. The doctor required that the sick woman’s urine be collected at daybreak and given to him in the morning so that he could draw his diagnosis. Exhorted by the Empress and the Queen, malevolent women arranged to have madame Sancia [who was pregnant] sleep near the patient that night. They collected the duchess’ early morning urine, but then threw it out, replaced it with Sancia’s, and showed that to the doctor when he arrived.
As soon as he saw it, the doctor realized it was that of a pregnant woman. He blushed and was shaken to the point of stammering; then, taking the duke outside, he told him in secret that his mother’s urine revealed that she was expecting a child. The duke, equally angry and astounded, did not know what to say. He could not believe that his mother would be in that state. The doctor had the urine brought to him and explained the signs that allowed him to conclude that it was that of a pregnant woman. He was right, of course, but uncovering the betrayal of the duchess was beyond his science.
In ignorance of the trap set for his poor mother, and having carefully avoided this topic with his brothers, the duke was most troubled and lost interest in his mother’s welfare. Those women who were in charge of her poisoned her with a potion in which they had added a toxic substance. A few days later, she died in Christ, free of the sin she was blamed for.
There is no way to tell how much of this story is true. Agnes had indeed recently made herself unpopular with Joanna by frequently siding with Aimeric during the legate’s tenure in an attempt to curry favor with Avignon. Sancia of Cabannis, Joanna’s nearest friend and one of her ladies-in-waiting, was pregnant during Agnes’s illness, and the queen’s own pregnancy might have given Joanna the idea for this plot. Moreover, poison was unquestionably the instrument of choice among women for dispensing with an unwanted rival.
On the other hand, the credulity of the men involved, particularly Charles of Durazzo, is not quite believable. Even if the duke was weary of his mother’s interference, he would not have condoned this stain on the family honor. Nor was poison necessarily required to finish off Agnes, for although the doctor might have been able to detect pregnancy in urine, the state of medicine in the Middle Ages was not such that he could have acquired the means to cure a serious disease, which, from the length of the dowager duchess’s illness, it is evident she had. Poisoning was the suspected cause of death for many who died of illness in the Middle Ages, as it made for much more interesting gossip than death by an ordinary malady. The rumor had circulated sufficiently for a chronicler who was not a member of the royal court to be familiar with it, yet no member of Agnes’s family complained to either Talleyrand or the pope of these suspicions, or called for an investigation into the dowager duchess’s death. This last is especially telling, for if Charles of Durazzo could have proved Joanna’s complicity in his mother’s death, he could have had her deposed, and Maria would have then inherited the kingdom. This inevitably leads to the possibility that the dowager duchess, weakened by a long illness, simply succumbed to an opportunistic bacterium in the stifling heat of a southern Italian summer.
What can be said with certainty is that even those outside the royal court perceived an alliance of interest between the queen, the family of Philippa the Catanian, and the house of Taranto against the advancement to power of the Durazzo branch of the royal family, which had consequently allied itself with the Hungarian party. The death of Agnes of Périgord exacerbated this competition and contributed greatly to the atmosphere of desperation and treachery that permeated the realm that fateful summer. The nuncio’s subsequent announcement that Andrew would be crowned with Joanna in a formal ceremony on September 20 did nothing to dispel the general recognition that events were spiraling out of control.
After Agnes’s death, the royal court moved once again, this time to the summer residence at Aversa, a twelfth-century castle favored at this time of year for its proximity to the extensive grounds and cool, pleasant gardens belonging to the adjacent Celestine monastery. Joanna and Andrew rode out to the palace together, arriving on September 7, intending to stay in Aversa until the morning of the 19th, at which point they and their households would make the short journey back to Naples for the coronation ceremony on the 20th. The queen was by this time in her sixth month of pregnancy and looked to prolong her respite from the late-summer heat of the capital city until the last possible moment.
Just as Joanna and Andrew were setting out for Aversa, Cardinal Aimeric, who had been held up in Rome trying unsuccessfully to settle differences between the Colonna family and their archrivals, the Orsinis, finally returned to Avignon. On September 5, the pope honored the legate for his service in Naples and the next day began a series of extended debriefings with the cardinal, at which Aimeric reported his impressions and eyewitness accounts of the powerful political forces at odds within the kingdom. During these conversations, the former legate of Naples learned of Clement’s June 10 dictate that Andrew be crowned and share power with Joanna, and of the subsequent decision to impose the double coronation over her protests.
Aimeric might have been incompetent, but he wasn’t stupid. His year in Naples had taught him the danger inherent in raising Andrew to the throne, and he apparently communicated this forcefully to Clement. The upshot of these discussions was that the pope reversed himself again. A new series of papal letters, dated September 20 and September 21, were dictated to Joanna and Andrew. The queen was once again recognized as the sole heir to the throne, according to the conventions that had existed since the original contract between the church and Charles of Anjou. Andrew was chastised for his immature behavior. His coronation was once again made conditional upon his recognizing Joanna’s sovereignty. He was expressly forbidden, upon pain of excommunication, to interfere with his wife’s authority and prerogative after the ceremony.
While Clement and Aimeric were thus in the process of revising, yet again, the official church position toward the sovereignty of Naples, Joanna and Andrew were ensconced at their castle in Aversa. Joanna continued to administer her government and saw delegations from the capital nearly every day. On September 15, she renewed the rights of the convent of Santa Chiara and forbade the prostitutes of Aversa from conducting business too close to the castle. On September 17, she drew up papers recommending special pri
vileges for merchants in the town of Gaeta, nominated a distinguished jurist to an official position in Provence, and received a deputation of apothecaries angling for commercial advancement within the kingdom.
For Andrew, the sojourn to Aversa was in the nature of a holiday, and he took advantage of the country surroundings to enjoy himself. On September 18, after the midday meal, the soon-to-be-crowned king spent the afternoon watching, and frequently joining, the dances that were being performed on the main road outside the castle, and evidently continued to participate in the general merriment until long after dark. As the couple were intending to leave the next morning for Naples, Joanna retired early that evening, without waiting for her husband to return to their rooms. She and Andrew slept in separate bedrooms but shared a common living room and a gallery overlooking the garden. By her own account, Joanna was already asleep when Andrew finally returned to their apartment.
The king was in the act of disrobing for bed when he was notified that a courier bearing important papers requiring his immediate attention, possibly having to do with his coronation, had just arrived from Naples. Andrew dressed hastily and followed one of his household out of the room and to the gallery, but instead of a messenger he found a group of armed men. Before he could move, he was seized and the door was shut and bolted behind him to prevent his escaping back into his quarters. There was a struggle, but Andrew, half-clothed and without a weapon, was easily subdued. The men had brought a rope, which they used to strangle the teenager; they dragged him to the end of the balcony and hung him over the side, while other assassins, stationed in the garden below, proceeded to pull on his legs to accelerate the process of asphyxiation. “Immediately he [Andrew] was summoned by them, he went into the gallery or promenade which is before the chamber. Certain ones placed their hands over his mouth, so that he could not cry out, and in this act they so pressed the iron gauntlets that their print and character were manifest after death. Others placed a rope around his neck, in order to strangle him, and this likewise left its mark,” read the official report of the crime filed later at Avignon. “Others tore out his hair, dragged him, and threw him into the garden. Some say that with the rope with which they had strangled him they swung him, as if hanging, over the garden. Some [also] got him under their knees and we heard that this likewise left external traces.”
The conspirators’ next move was to dispose of their victim’s body and so hide the evidence of their crime. Intending to bury Andrew in the garden, they cut the rope by which the young king was suspended over the balcony. But the thud of the corpse hitting the ground awakened Andrew’s nurse, Isabelle the Hungarian, who had been in charge of the king since he was a child. Hurrying to investigate, Isabelle surprised the assailants before they had time to conceal the body. At the sound of her screams, they scattered and disappeared into the darkness of the night. “It was further related to us that they intended to throw him [Andrew] into a deep well (even as St. Jeremy was thrown into a pit), and thereafter to give it out he had left the kingdom by counsel of some of those who were loyal to him, who had resolved to kidnap him and send him to the king of Hungary… and this they would have carried out had not his nurse quickly come upon the scene,” Clement himself concluded in a document addressed to one of his cardinals.
The rest of the castle, alerted to the crime by Isabelle, conducted a search of the grounds but only succeeded in recovering Andrew’s body. At this point the queen of Naples was awakened by her ladies-in-waiting and informed that her husband, Andrew of Hungary, was dead.
Two days later, the papal letters rescinding Andrew’s share in the government of the kingdom, which might have saved his life, were issued in Avignon.
CHAPTER VIII
Under Siege
The heinous nature of Andrew’s assassination, given substance by the underlying political context, instantly created an atmosphere of sensationalism around which misinformation, exaggeration, and rumor swirled. The number of ordinarily reliable chroniclers who on this occasion eschewed any pretension of objectivity is material. Some of this is attributable to a deliberate campaign by the Hungarians to paint the conspiracy as broadly as possible for political purposes. Giovanni Villani, for example, who was in Florence that fateful September, relied for his information upon the testimony of Isabelle’s son Nicholas the Hungarian, who was dispatched to Visegrád to inform the royal family of the circumstances of the crime and who stopped in the Italian city just long enough to regale the populace with his version of the atrocity. But the Hungarian offensive, which would not begin in earnest for several months, cannot be held wholly responsible for the numerous errors and propaganda that sprung up in the wake of Andrew’s demise. The murder was much more compelling if told from the perspective of a grand conspiracy, and was made even more shocking if the queen herself played a leading role, and this was not an insignificant inducement to embellishment. The chroniclers were, in the end, storytellers.
And so Domenico da Gravina asserted that, once informed of the murder by Isabelle the Hungarian and the other royal ladies-in-waiting, the queen was so struck by shame and guilt that she lay immobilized in bed, unable to meet the gaze of any of those around her until far into the next morning. She was accused by another chronicler of having neglected her husband’s corpse for three days before a canon of the cathedral of Naples finally took it upon himself to inter Andrew’s remains, while a third source, Giovanni da Bazzano, asserted that, on the contrary, Andrew’s body was laid out and posthumously crowned by a cardinal sent by Clement for this purpose. But undoubtedly it was Giovanni Villani’s account (as supplied by Nicholas the Hungarian) of the day immediately following the murder that captured the imagination of succeeding generations:
When morning came, the entire population of Aversa went to the queen’s residence to find out who had perpetrated such a crime, and to exact retribution. The queen suddenly blushed, and, as if transfixed, kept her head down and her tearless eyes averted. Leaving her dead husband behind, she went without delay to another residence and prolonged her stay there, as if in her guilt she feared that the people might kill her. Meanwhile, the news of the duke’s [Andrew’s] death had reached Naples at sunrise. The duke of Durazzo, his brothers, and the prince of Taranto, along with Bertrand del Balzo, several other counts and barons of the kingdom, and almost all of the knights, squires, and citizens of Naples immediately took to the road to Aversa in an uproar of cries of pain and sorrow and with great anger in their soul: each of these mighty lords was surrounded by a well-armed retinue.
They reached Aversa and came upon a throng in tears, then went to the body of the unfortunate duke, lowered their heads, and cried. They then attempted to inquire as to the circumstances of the murder, but no one knew either its cause or its perpetrators.
In fact, the queen did not flee Aversa on September 19, eyes averted and fearing for her life, as Villani reported, but stayed at the castle for at least four days, as letters written under her seal attest. Nor did she leave her husband’s body neglected and exposed to the elements. On the contrary, both the official journals of the period, the Chronique of Parthénope and the Chronicon Siculum, record that Andrew was “honorably interred” (but not crowned) on September 20, the day after the murder, in the cathedral of Naples, an important Gothic church built by Charles the Lame to house the relics of the royal family. Andrew’s battered corpse was buried in the chapel of Saint Louis, next to the remains of his paternal grandfather, Charles Martel (Robert the Wise’s eldest brother), and grandmother, Clemencia of Habsburg, just as it should have been. Joanna further ordered a mass to be celebrated daily in the chapel in her husband’s memory, and she appointed and paid a specific clergyman for the rite. Lastly, the murder investigation could not have been quite as fruitless or inexplicable as Villani claimed, since within forty-eight hours of the slaying, on the same day Andrew was buried in Naples, one of his assailants was apprehended in Aversa. The culprit’s name was Tommaso Mambriccio, and he had been Andrew’s chamb
erlain, which meant he served in the bedroom.
Tommaso was the son of a nobleman who had been bankrupted by the collapse of the super-companies. The chamberlain apparently was one of those whom Andrew had threatened to execute after his coronation, and in his desperation to avoid this fate had undertaken to preemptively rid himself of his persecutor. Tommaso seems also to have been paid to participate, which obviously implied additional, wealthier and more high-ranking conspirators. He was captured (or more likely given up) on September 20 and, in typical medieval fashion, promptly tortured. To demonstrate the crown’s commitment to catching and punishing Andrew’s murderers, his interrogators, Charles of Artois and his close friend and ally the count of Terlizzi, both associated with the anti-Pipini faction at court, put Tommaso in a cart and rolled him through the streets of Aversa, all the while tormenting him with red-hot pincers in an effort to extract information from him regarding the details of the plot. While Tommaso’s well-documented agony, which ended in his death, no doubt satisfied the public lust for retribution, it was unfortunately of limited practical utility, as his overseers had taken the prior precaution of cutting out their victim’s tongue. “Tommaso was prevented from divulging his accomplices and abettors,” the Chronicon Siculum reported, among whom Charles of Artois and the count of Terlizzi were generally assumed to number.
This was Joanna’s dilemma. Tommaso was undeniably guilty of taking part in Andrew’s assassination, but it was equally clear that he had neither instigated the homicide nor acted alone. To the end of her life, the queen steadfastly and vehemently maintained her innocence of the crime of murdering, or of conspiring to murder, her husband. The best efforts of her many enemies to associate her with the plot, which included the use of forged letters, propaganda, torture, bribery and intimidation, all failed to yield the slightest proof of her guilt. More than this, Joanna’s one goal in the almost three years since her grandfather’s death had been to hold on to her kingdom against Hungarian encroachment. The scandalously crude and violent manner of Andrew’s demise could only further degrade her family name and was almost guaranteed to provoke a military response on the part of her in-laws. Joanna had been sufficiently astute the previous February to recognize that Elizabeth’s desire to take Andrew back to Hungary was part of a larger scheme to wrest Naples away from her by force, and to frustrate that attempt by prevailing upon the older woman to leave her son and by implication accept a political solution. It defies reason that the queen of Naples would suddenly decide, in a fit of naïveté, to all but invite the Hungarians to invade by deliberately planning or condoning Andrew’s murder.
The Lady Queen Page 14
