The Lady Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Joanna’s efforts on the part of her preferred lover were not in vain. Louis’ actions in the wake of the initial defeat justified the queen’s belief in his martial abilities. He stayed in Capua just long enough to regroup and then fought his way to Benevento, which surrendered to him; from Benevento he moved on toward Naples, gaining territory, supplies, and soldiers as he went. By June he and a strong force were ensconced on a hill northwest of the capital, close enough to look down on the city and for those in the buildings below to be aware of his looming presence, and there he sat, building strength, and waiting for an opportunity to strike.

  And at almost exactly the same moment Louis took his position on the hill, word came that the Hungarians had assembled a prodigious army with the intention of invading Naples.

  CHAPTER IX

  The World at War

  Throughout this period, Clement VI had struggled, with conspicuously little success, to influence events in Naples. To be fair, this lack of progress was not entirely the pope’s fault. Clement certainly meant to investigate Andrew’s death and bring the real murderers to justice quickly but his administration was simply overwhelmed by the other pressing concerns demanding the Curia’s attention. What with England’s menacing France, and the territorial ambitions of the Holy Roman Emperor, legates were in short supply. The first two cardinals assigned to investigate Andrew’s murder were redeployed to other trouble spots en route to Italy and so never arrived in Naples. When the pope finally settled on a new legate, Bertrand de Deux, the cardinal of Saint-Marks, to act as his representative in Naples (Aimeric adamantly refused to go back), the cardinal fell ill and his departure had to be delayed indefinitely.

  Then, in early June 1346, the papacy received a disturbing letter from the queen mother of Hungary. In it, Elizabeth renewed all her previous demands regarding her daughter-in-law and the kingdom of Naples and now also insisted that Maria’s marriage to Charles of Durazzo be annulled (by this time the pair had three children, all daughters) and that Joanna be refused permission to remarry for the rest of her life. The queen mother scoffed at the notion that any person of rank would be punished for Andrew’s death if the matter were left to Neapolitan justice, and made clear Hungarian intentions to intervene as they saw fit. “This letter very closely resembled a declaration of war.”

  Elizabeth’s missive was sufficiently alarming to spur Clement into action. He immediately dispatched an envoy to Visegrád to reason with the queen mother. The pope followed this with a letter dated July 17 in which he reassured Elizabeth that, regardless of rank, her son’s executioners would be brought to severe justice. Nonetheless, he refused to yield to her demands and warned that if Hungary went through with an invasion, the kingdom would be denounced as an enemy of the church, a label that carried the threat of interdiction.

  The pope had already turned his attention to Naples. Forced to work through native surrogates, in a June 3 letter Clement authorized the chief justice of the kingdom, Bertrand del Balzo (cousin of Hugo), to act for the church in carrying out the maximum sentence possible on those suspects convicted of murdering Andrew. On June 8, he wrote to Joanna, the empress of Constantinople, Robert and Louis of Taranto, and Charles of Durazzo, exhorting each member of the royal family to do everything in his or her power to aid the chief justice’s efforts in meting out swift and sure punishment to the killers. The pope’s intention was clearly to appease the Hungarians by a very public show of law and vengeance—an obvious and extravagant bloodbath, undertaken and supported by the crown of Naples, being deemed the best way of eliminating the stated motive for invasion. However, mindful that the consequences of this sort of deliberate savagery were sometimes difficult to contain, particularly after the uncontrolled violence of March, Clement also communicated secretly to Bertrand del Balzo on June 4 to abstain from punishing any member of the royal family suspected of participating in the assassination. Instead, the chief justice was to refer the matter to Avignon. The pope reserved for himself the right to judge and inflict punishment on those of exalted rank.

  Bertrand del Balzo set to his task and immediately ran into a formidable obstacle: the empress of Constantinople. Announcing grandly that, if punishment were necessary, reprisals would be meted out as she saw fit, Catherine refused to surrender either Charles or Bertrand of Artois to the chief justice’s authority. Domenico da Gravina asserted that the empress was motivated by a desire to keep the Artois’ considerable wealth, which would be forfeit upon a conviction of guilt, for herself rather than handing it over to the church. But there may have been other incentives for her unwillingness to cooperate with the official investigation. It seems very likely that Bertrand of Artois was in fact one of the primary architects of the crime, and there was no controlling the testimony of a man under torture. In the hysteria of the prosecution, accusation might have spread inconveniently to Catherine’s own family and favorites, not to mention the matriarch herself, a situation she was keen to avoid. So for the time being, Charles and Bertrand of Artois remained sheltered behind the haughty disdain of the empress’s defiance and the sturdy walls of her castle, which, coincidentally, was located only about ten miles from Aversa.

  Those surrendered from the Castel Nuovo during the riots of March were not so fortunate. Through confessions obtained through torture or the threat of more torture, Bertrand del Balzo and the small committee of jurists assigned to aid him uncovered two additional plots against Andrew’s life, one to poison the prospective king and the other to kill him through witchcraft. This was helpful as it allowed the investigators to judge all the suspects, even those who had clearly not been involved in the actual assassination, guilty of conspiracy to murder Andrew in one form or another. By July, all the influential courtiers who had formerly made up Joanna’s circle of intimates had been condemned to death and stripped of their titles and fortunes. The chief justice himself appropriated one of Sancia of Cabannis’s estates in Provence. The first executions began in early August (although two minor aristocrats, whose relatives swore they were innocent, but who had nonetheless been swept up in the general frenzy, died of illness and complications from torture while still in detention). On August 2, Robert of Cabannis and the count of Terlizzi were transported from the Castel Capuano to a dais that had been specially erected on the beach just outside the Castel dell’Ovo. “The prisoners were sentenced to death amidst the mob’s insults,” wrote Domenico da Gravina.

  The Chief Justice armed his guard; carts were prepared; forges were lit and loaded, and the executioners climbed aboard. In one cart was the count of Terlizzi, bound in iron chains, and in the other cart was the seneschal… The prisoners were… paraded through every street in Naples, flagellated repeatedly, their flesh mercilessly seared by the torturers’ red hot irons; and the throng, from the most diminutive to the most sizable, shouted in unison: “Would all such traitors suffer the same fate and worse!” They were spit upon and stoned. When at length they arrived at the place where the pyre had been built (even though there was very little left of the prisoners to burn), Master Robert had already just passed away. The count of Terlizzi, however, was still alive. Both men were hauled off the carts, and placed upon the pyre. But at that point, the mob… ran to the pyre and removed the bodies which, dead or alive, were then cut into pieces and thrown back into the fire as so many logs. Some craftsman took bones with which to fashion dice and knife handles as keepsakes.

  The frenzy did not end there. In imitation of a particularly notorious execution which had occurred in Florence previously, Boccaccio continued: “The semi-burned corpses were pulled from the flames and… some people tore out the hearts and lungs to eat them. Then hooks were jabbed in the bodies and they were dragged in the mud and the sewers throughout the town; and bits of these bodies remained here and there, torn to shreds.” On August 7, this performance was repeated with Raymond of Catania and Nicolas of Melizzano. On the day of each courtier’s execution, the victim’s property was divided among his persecutors. Bertrand
del Balzo, in particular, received a large share of the spoils.

  After this first round of executions, the chief justice took a short hiatus. During the interval, on August 26, 1346, a seismic event took place, one whose political repercussions were felt in every court in Europe and which, though occurring far from Naples, would nonetheless powerfully influence the fate of its queen. The site of this upheaval was a little town on the northern coast of France, very near the county of Flanders, by the name of Crécy.

  In the five years leading up to the battle of Crécy, Edward III, king of England, had enjoyed some not inconsequential success in his campaign against the French. In 1342, Edward had taken sides against Philip VI of France in a succession dispute in Brittany, offering men and arms to the pro-English candidate. The king crossed the Channel and landed three battalions in support of his ally, one of which he led himself. In the subsequent fighting the English took the city of Vannes and much of the coastline before agreeing to a three-year truce with the French. Encouraged, King Edward and his sixteen-year-old son, Edward, Prince of Wales, landed an army in Normandy in the summer of 1346, sacked Caen, and marched north to Ponthieu, barely bypassing Paris. Philip VI hastened to counteract English momentum by raising an army several times the size of his opponent’s. He, too, led his own forces, marching to intercept his foe. On the afternoon of August 26, these two armies met at Crécy.

  Philip boasted overwhelming superiority of numbers—approximately fifty thousand men to England’s thirteen thousand—but Edward had military discipline and, in the English longbow, a weapon that had previously been used only against Scotland, a crushing technological advantage. The French troops were tired, particularly their Genoese crossbow men, who had “marched on foot that day six leagues [approximately fifteen miles], completely armed and carrying their crossbows,” as the famous fourteenth-century French chronicler Jean Froissart observed. The English, who had arrived the night before, were rested. Under Edward’s leadership they were formed into three battalions, placed strategically for tactical advantage, and then sat placidly awaiting the arrival of the enemy. “There is no man, unless he had been present, that can imagine or describe truly the confusion of that day,” Froissart wrote:

  Especially the bad management and disorder of the French, whose troops were out of number… The English, who, as I have said, were drawn up in three divisions, and seated on the ground, on seeing their enemies advance, rose up undauntedly and fell into their ranks… You must know that the French troops did not advance in any regular order, and that as soon as their King came in sight of the English his blood began to boil, and he cried out to his marshals, “Order the Genoese forward and begin the battle in the name of God and St. Denis”… The sun shone very bright; but the French had it in their faces, and the English on their backs. When the Genoese were somewhat in order they approached the English and set up a loud shout in order to frighten them; but the English remained quite quiet and did not seem to attend to it. They then set up a second shout, and advanced a little forward; the English never moved. Still they hooted a third time, advancing with their cross-bows presented, and began to shoot. The English archers then advanced one step forward, and shot their arrows with such force and quickness that it seemed as if it snowed. When the Genoese felt these arrows, which pierced their armor, some of them cut the strings of their cross-bows, others flung them to the ground, and all turned about and retreated quite discomfited.

  Disorganization turned into rout. Furious at the retreat of the crossbow men, Philip VI ordered his cavalry forward with instructions to kill the Genoese if they got in the way; this did not improve morale. The ranks of the French cavalry were cut down by the arrows of the longbow men before the knights had a chance to engage their English counterparts. Still, the French fought bravely, surrounding the soldiers mobilized under the leadership of the Prince of Wales. When the son sent an emissary to his father to bring aid, Edward III refused saying, “return to those that sent you, and tell them from me not to send again for me this day, nor expect that I shall come, let what will happen, as long as my son has life; and say that I command them to let the boy win his spurs, for I am determined, if it please God, that all the glory of this day shall be given to him, and to those into whose care I have entrusted him.” Fortunately for Edward, his son prevailed, and from this battle on was known as the Black Prince, so named both for the reputed color of his armor and the fear his ferocious warfare inspired in the French.

  When, by the end of the day, the king of France was forced to flee the field with a mere handful of his barons, the English victory reverberated throughout Europe. Edward had lost only fifty knights, where Philip counted among his dead “11 princes, 1,200 knights, and about 30,000 common men,” according to Froissart. “It was not merely a victory but one of the few classic fights of history. The overweening power of France, leader of the West, had been humiliated by an army… not more than a third the size.” Worse, Edward moved immediately to capitalize on his success, marching his army north to Flanders in order to besiege the important coastal town of Calais. Suddenly, the English seemed unstoppable.

  The outcome of the battle of Crécy caused considerable anxiety in Avignon. The Sacred College, dominated by French cardinals, did not even pretend to neutrality, and the pope himself lent Philip VI 592,000 gold florins in the wake of the disaster. An English chronicler of the period, John Erghome, wrote that Clement “always, inasmuch as he was able, was with the French against the English.” The papacy understood that the balance of power, which had favored France and served Avignon so well in the past, was shifting ominously. Momentum now favored the English and their allies, among whom the Hungarians were predominant. “At this time, Pope Clement and the king of France… were leagued together; on the other side were the king of England, Louis of Bavaria [the Holy Roman Emperor], and the king of Hungary,” reported an Italian chronicler. As early as March, Edward III had sent a letter by emissary to Louis of Hungary, encouraging the king to invade Naples, writing: “We will freely give both counsel and assistance towards avenging such a crime,” referring to the murder of Andrew. France had already relinquished much of its western coast and was suddenly in danger of losing Calais and possibly Flanders; it could not afford to lose its close ally Naples. And yet the internecine warfare between Robert and Louis of Taranto had fractured the kingdom, which meant that the Hungarians were almost guaranteed a victory should King Louis decided to attack.

  Desperate to prevent this eventuality, Clement redoubled his efforts to forestall a Hungarian invasion by implementing a policy of appeasement. The executions of the first round of supposed conspirators, savage and grisly as these were, had failed to satisfy Andrew’s relatives, and so new, more stringent measures were called for. The pope demanded the enforcement of the death sentence for the remaining courtiers charged by the chief justice and threatened the empress of Constantinople with excommunication if she did not surrender Charles and Bertrand of Artois. At this time, too, Clement began to put forward the idea that the child Charles Martel should be taken from Joanna and brought, not to Hungary as Elizabeth had demanded, but to Avignon for safekeeping. If this represented a compromise measure, the pope acceded wholly to the dowager queen’s will in a far more threatening way. On August 28 and then again on the 31st, Clement directly addressed Elizabeth’s skepticism of the papacy’s willingness to convict members of the Neapolitan royal family for the murder of her son, by conferring on his legate Cardinal Bertrand de Deux, who had finally recovered sufficiently from his illness to leave Avignon for Naples, the power to prosecute, pass sentence, and finally, to execute Joanna or any member of the royal family found guilty of conspiracy to murder Andrew.

  Sovereigns did not keep diaries in the fourteenth century, nor publish their memoirs, nor confide their innermost worries and schemes to a favorite chronicler for posterity’s sake. Motive must be deduced from action, an imprecise process. Yet even by this clumsy standard, Joanna seems to have experienced
a turning point in the autumn of 1346.

  She was twenty years old, a mother and widow, hunted by powerful adversaries, confronted with bitter divisions within her realm. She had been stripped of her closest counselors and forced to stand by helplessly while her former confidantes suffered torments. The woman she called mother languished, bloodied and wretched, in the dank chill of a dungeon along with her granddaughter, Joanna’s intimate friend Sancia of Cabannis. Although the queen had managed thus far to shield the pair from the ultimate anguish, this was, she must have known, a matter of mere delay rather than commutation. The path of Joanna’s own future was also equally, brutally clear: without intervention she would lose first her child, then her kingdom (for she understood, if the pope did not, that nothing, save her deposition in their favor, would prevent her Hungarian in-laws from invading), and eventually, her life. Under the circumstances, paralyzing despair would not have been an unnatural reaction to the challenges that lay ahead.

  But Joanna was sovereign during a period in history when that concept still meant something, and she took strength from it. A queen embodied courage—and this may well have been Joanna’s defining trait—persistence, and above all, an unshakable belief in her own rights and abilities and office. As ruler, legal tools were yet available to her, and she used them. She seems finally to have recognized that she could not afford to let the papacy, or the Hungarians, or Robert of Taranto or Charles of Durazzo or even Louis of Taranto, dictate or impose policy on her. To safeguard her prerogative she had to take the initiative.

  As there was no one she trusted left to guide her, she fell back on her original training in order to devise a plan. The security of both her child and the realm demanded that the kingdom, now fractured, be unified, and the Hungarians made to look like interlopers. In September she took the first step toward this goal by establishing the official line of succession at a ceremony in which the heir to the throne, Charles Martel, received the homage of the baronage and was formally invested duke of Calabria, just as Robert the Wise had legitimized her claim to the kingdom while she was still a child. To further her agenda, she proposed in a letter of September 18 to Clement that a marriage for her son be arranged with the crown of France to ensure the interest of that kingdom in Naples, and thereby gain a more active ally against Hungarian encroachment, promising to send by special messenger “certain quantities of silver, in compensation for these numerous dispensations.”