These measures naturally inspired opposition from the queen’s antagonists, of whom Charles, duke of Durazzo, now emerged as one of the most dangerous. The duke’s initial collaboration with Robert of Taranto had always been convenient, a way of damaging Joanna’s authority in the hope that she would be removed in favor of her sister. When this did not happen, and Charles began to realize that Joanna might actually marry one of his Taranto cousins and circumvent the Durazzo interests altogether, he turned traitor. Domenico da Gravina claims that the duke wrote to his Hungarian cousin King Louis as early as June, promising his support and that of the Neapolitan barons allied with him should the king decide to attack, but it seems likely that Charles did not actually invite the Hungarians to invade until after Charles Martel had been granted the duchy of Calabria, an honor the duke of Durazzo had himself demanded of the queen. In either case, it is reasonably certain that by September, Charles of Durazzo was in clandestine communication with the king of Hungary in an attempt to better his family’s prospects in the event of an invasion. The duke had already earned Joanna’s profound enmity for his role in the apprehension and torture of Philippa and Sancia; now she recognized him as jeopardizing not only her own welfare, but the kingdom’s as well.
But there was nothing to be done until she could evade Robert’s advances. Louis had been dissuaded from attacking his brother’s forces in the capital at the last moment by the pope’s holding out the promise of an approved marriage with Joanna. “If you attend to our admonitions, and obey them by refraining from creating these present disturbances, we will do as favorably for you as can be in those affairs concerning which Catherine, your august mother, has written to us,” Clement had written. Although Robert could see that his mother’s influence was working in his younger brother’s favor, he remained determined to wed the queen. Despite the entreaties of both Joanna and the pope, who warned that his continued presence at the Castel Nuovo incensed the Hungarians, the elder prince of Taranto stubbornly refused to vacate the palace, and while Robert was there, Joanna had little hope of unifying the kingdom.
Then, on October 4, after an illness of only a few days’ duration and within hours of being excommunicated for her refusal to surrender Charles and Bertrand of Artois to the authorities, the empress of Constantinople quite unexpectedly died. Although her conspiracy in the death of Andrew was never proven, her influence on the events succeeding the assassination was unmistakable. She and Niccolò Acciaiuoli together chose Andrew’s eventual successor, protected at least one of his killers, and secured the fortunes of the Taranto family over those of the Durazzo. Ruthless, driven, and with a keen eye for political gain, Catherine’s abilities dwarfed those of her sons. It was Acciaiuoli who assumed the mantle of family leadership after her death.
Her aunt’s demise provided Joanna with the opportunity she had been seeking. By command of the queen, Catherine’s funeral was to be celebrated at the church of San Domenico, in the heart of the old city of Naples, on October 8. When, as was expected, Robert of Taranto rode out of the Castel Nuovo to pay his last respects to his parent, Joanna was ready. According to both Domencio da Gravina and the Chronicon Siculum, she and her guard quickly evicted her cousin’s retainers and then shut and locked the doors of the castle against him. When he returned in the evening, he was refused reentry. The queen had rid herself of one unwanted suitor.
But she did not then immediately embrace Robert’s brother—to do so would only have further incited the Hungarians to hurry their attack, and Joanna needed time. Instead, she fell back on her grandmother’s practice and petitioned Clement to be allowed to surround herself with four sisters from the nearby Clarissan convent, a request granted by the pope on October 30. When Cardinal Bertrand de Deux, the papal legate, finally arrived after an extended tour of Italy on November 20, he too moved into the Castel Nuovo. Let her mother-in-law complain about that.
Although the cardinal’s first undertaking was supportive—on December 6 he reenacted the homage ceremony to Charles Martel, thereby providing official church sanction to the queen’s policy and legitimizing her son as heir to the throne—Joanna understood that the legate’s presence in Naples meant that she could no longer protect Philippa and Sancia from execution. The pair had been condemned, and Bertrand de Deux had his instructions. If the queen opposed his dictates, she risked alienating the Holy See at a time when the kingdom of Naples needed all the allies it could get. She had no choice but to sacrifice her adopted mother and one of her most intimate friends, despite the belief, well founded by the lack of evidence, that they were innocent of the crime of which they had been accused.
On December 29, Philippa the Catanian and Sancia of Cabannis were tortured and burned. Boccaccio reported that their naked bodies “bound to poles [were] in wagons led through the city,” but Giovanni da Bazzano, another chronicler of the period, was more explicit. “Sancia, who had endured torture… yet had calmly and repeatedly denied the accusations, was brought to sea near Castel Nuovo. There, she was dangled from the crown of a galley’s mast, sprayed with brimstone and boiling pitch, and then was dropped into the sea near the hull… Unable to resist such torture, she confessed.” Philippa, mercifully, seems to have died from her wounds long before reaching the pyre, but Sancia, younger and more resilient, lived through the entire, excruciating process: “After that, she [Sancia] was paraded here and there, stretched out on red hot coals and tortured with pliers until her internal organs burned and she breathed her last,” the chronicler concluded.
There is no record of Joanna’s personal response to the agony endured on this day by those for whom she cared most in the world.
Despite repeated torment, neither woman ever named the queen as a conspirator in the death of her husband.
Events moved quickly after the arrival of the legate. As might have been expected, the execution of this latest round of condemned assassins in no way halted Hungarian aggression. In the weeks immediately following the futile deaths of Philippa and Sancia, Louis of Hungary and his younger brother Stephen arranged a war council with the Holy Roman Emperor, the king of Russia, the son of the king of Bohemia, and numerous other lords, counts, and barons. (The English were busy besieging the city of Calais.) At a meeting on January 24 and another later in February, those present formed an alliance for the purpose of avenging the death of Andrew. Each promised to return on April 22, the feast day of Saint George, accompanied by armed troops and supplies in anticipation of invading Naples. On March 27, Louis of Hungary sent a formal declaration of war against Joanna’s kingdom to Avignon.
Clement reacted by putting more pressure on his legate to fulfill the twin tasks of taking Charles Martel away from his mother and of convicting and executing a member of the royal family, preferably Joanna, which the pope believed might yet dissuade the king of Hungary from his planned attack. Bertrand de Deux, whether through cowardice, weakness, incompetence, or a sincere unwillingness to persecute those whom he believed to be innocent, was unable to achieve these goals. Almost as soon as he arrived, the legate reported to Clement that “the Princes are innocent,” but this failed to satisfy the pontiff, who suspected that the cardinal shrank from prosecuting the royal family in Naples for fear of reprisals. “It is most important that you lead an active and reliable investigation of the Queen and the Princes, in accordance with the letters we have sent you,” Clement responded to his representative in a letter dated February 17, 1347. “Our intention certainly is not to endanger your life in any way. But if this business cannot be conducted safely or practically in the Palace, or in Naples, or at one of the Queen’s estates, then it is absolutely necessary that you do this… where we trust your prudence will guide you.” As to the legate’s initial impression of the innocence of the queen and her family, Clement continued: “We are quite happy to hear this, but you should nevertheless not cease to investigate.”
The cardinal was equally unsuccessful at convincing Joanna to surrender her child to the care of the church. The
pope, evidently responding to information received earlier from the legate, who had sufficient time to observe Joanna with her son, tried to coax Bertrand de Deux into action, writing that if Charles Martel were removed from the kingdom, “nothing would lead to a suspicion of the Queen, who loves, cares for and raises her child with unusual maternal love.”
The legate’s failure to act decisively on his instructions kept Joanna in power and allowed her to prepare for the coming war. Knowing how violently her in-laws were against her marrying a second time and to give the appearance of complying with Hungarian demands, she asked Clement, through a private channel, not to sanction her union with Louis of Taranto just yet. She also supported the legate in his efforts to make the prince of Taranto, who had taken over his mother’s position as jailer to Charles and Bertrand of Artois on her death, surrender Bertrand to the chief justice after Charles of Artois died of a long-standing case of gout on March 1. Bertrand, one of the foes whom Andrew with his banner had threatened with death as soon as he was made king, was turned over to the authorities later that month, and the man who actually seems to have both planned and participated in the assassination was himself finally executed for the crime. (The straightforward and excessively violent mode of the attack on Andrew was far more consistent with a hotheaded young man’s temperament and abilities. A woman or elder statesman would have given more consideration to appearances and opted for the far subtler approach of poisoning.) Because Bertrand was of high birth, being a direct descendant (albeit illegitimate) of Robert the Wise, he was spared the agony and humiliation of a public execution and was instead put to death privately, for which reason some chroniclers believed that he evaded punishment altogether by escaping to Achaia with Niccolò Acciaiuoli’s help. His death of course in no way satisfied the Hungarians.
The next phase of Joanna’s policy was to sufficiently unite her realm to be able to at least make the effort of repelling an attack. To do this, it was vital that Charles of Durazzo be persuaded to fight on the side of the kingdom, and so she bribed him with her most valuable asset: her son. On June 18, Charles Martel was affianced to his cousin Jeanne, daughter of Charles of Durazzo and Joanna’s sister, Maria. It was understood that Joanna would eventually marry Louis of Taranto and that the house of Taranto would rule in the present generation, but by this act a member of the Durazzo family would rule in the next, and this was sufficient to buy Charles’s loyalty. On June 20, Louis of Taranto was named vicar-general of the realm; on June 23, Charles of Durazzo accepted the position of captain-general of the army. Niccolò Acciaiuoli was immediately dispatched to Florence with a letter from Joanna for the purpose of recruiting troops from this ally for the coming battle. This left only Robert of Taranto, who was soothed by a dispensation from the pope on July 4, 1347, to marry the wealthy Marie of Bourbon, widow of the king of Cyprus and daughter of one of the most influential families in France. Marie owned a great deal of property in Achaia and helped Robert, who had inherited the title of emperor of Constantinople upon his mother’s death, to focus his attention on his eastern holdings.
No sooner had these painstaking negotiations with her family achieved the desired result than the queen was faced with the reality of conflict. In late June, word came to the capital that an advance guard of the Hungarian army had already arrived and was threatening the northeast corner of the kingdom. A battalion under the leadership of Charles of Durazzo was immediately dispatched to Abruzzi under orders to reconnoiter and hold back enemy advances until a more potent army could be raised.
The appearance of Hungarian troops on Neapolitan soil freed Joanna at last from having to pretend to accede to her in-laws’ demands. On August 15, the legate moved out of the Castel Nuovo and Louis of Taranto moved in. A week later, Joanna married her cousin at the hour of vespers. There was no time to obtain official papal approval or the necessary dispensations for the wedding. The queen knew that Clement, still hoping to avoid war, would have sided with the Hungarians anyway and delayed or denied her permission to remarry as a gesture to Andrew’s family, and this Joanna could not afford. The kingdom needed a committed general, and now she had one, the best available to her.
In September, Charles of Durazzo and his men returned to the capital to report on activity at the front. The news was grim. The advance guard of the Hungarian army had combined with some rebellious barons in the kingdom’s northeast corner. Charles had made a stand at L’Aquila but had been forced to retreat in the face of superior numbers. The crisis was at hand.
Together, Louis and Robert of Taranto and Charles of Durazzo went about the business of raising an army by mustering their various vassals and subjects and distributing arms. Joanna directed a diplomatic offensive and succeeded in obtaining an agreement from the Sicilians to abstain from launching their own invasion of Naples while the kingdom was under threat from the Hungarians—a significant achievement, as the prospect of a coordinated action between these two adversaries would certainly have doomed the realm. But the news from Florence was disappointing. Despite the queen’s entreaties and Niccolò Acciaiuoli’s family’s influence, the commune declined to send troops to fight beside those of its longtime ally. The Florentine elders, ever the practical businessmen, had already judged the likely outcome of the conflict and preferred to keep on friendly terms with King Louis of Hungary, who displayed no signs of extending the war beyond Neapolitan borders so long as no one stood in his way. Since Florentine territory was not at risk in this contest, the government concluded that there was no need to respond to the queen’s summons.
The lack of Florentine support, while disheartening, was not crippling. According to Giovanni Villani, by working together, probably for the first time in their lives, Louis and Robert of Taranto, along with Charles of Durazzo, managed to raise an army of more than 2,500 knights, some from as far away as Provence, as well as the customary German mercenaries. In consultation with Niccolò Acciaiuoli, Louis determined that the best place to make a stand was at Capua. About twenty miles north of Naples, Capua was of vital strategic importance. Much of the kingdom of Naples was composed of marshes and wetlands; only the Via Appia, an ancient road leading from Rome to Taranto, was reliably firm enough to allow a large army, with all its attendant baggage, machinery, and supply wagons, to pass quickly without fear of becoming stuck in the mud, and Capua was on the Via Appia. The city had the additional advantage of being bordered on three sides by a cove in the Volturno River, which more or less gave it its own moat and made it much easier to defend. Capua had long ago been recognized as a crucial component of the kingdom’s deterrent capabilities and as such had been well barricaded by successive rulers, so that the city resembled a fortress.
In December, Louis of Taranto, accompanied by his brother Robert and his cousin Charles of Durazzo, gathered his army together and marched to Capua, leaving Joanna, pregnant with his child, alone in Naples to await the coming storm.
CHAPTER X
The Scales of Justice
Louis of Hungary left Visegrád to invade Naples on November 11, 1347. Despite the promises of his earlier war councils, the king did not ride out accompanied by a massive army. Marching too many soldiers the long distance south would have been slow and unwieldy. Louis would have had to provide supplies, which meant lumbering carts over uncertain roads. Instead the king of Hungary, opting for speed, handpicked one thousand of his most ferocious and experienced knights and set off for northern Italy with only these elite troops, supplemented by an ample quantity of silver, expecting to hire mercenaries along the way.
Through strict discipline—he and his men rode methodically for six hours every day—the king of Hungary was in Cittadella, between Verona and Venice, by December 3; from there he went west to Vicenza and reached Verona by the 8th. These cities, predominantly Ghibelline, opened their gates immediately and enthusiastically to welcome a sovereign who was allied with the Holy Roman Emperor and who planned to invade Guelphic Naples. Louis’ army swelled with recruits, including man
y German mercenaries eager for spoils. Edward Acciaiuoli reported that by the time he reached the outskirts of Joanna’s kingdom, the king of Hungary was leading a battalion of five thousand knights and four thousand foot soldiers. Another chronicler set the figure as high as fifteen thousand cavalry. Louis met no resistance on his way south. Even Guelphic Florence, which had asked for and received military aid from Naples so often in the past, chose simply to get out of the invader’s way, sending a fawning delegation to inform the king of the city’s neutrality and even cravenly settling on him the honorary title of signore. By Christmas Eve, King Louis, accompanied by a now-formidable combat force, had met up with his advance guard at the town of L’Aquila in Abruzzi. But instead of immediately engaging Louis of Taranto, whom he knew to be at Capua, the king of Hungary, taking a roundabout route through the mountains, descended on Benevento, a minimally guarded city that he captured easily on January 11, 1348.
News of King Louis’ victory over Benevento, and the size and strength of the Hungarian army, spread rapidly throughout the kingdom. There was great fear in Naples; Benevento was only a three-day march from the capital. In Capua, the Neapolitan princes held a war council, at which, according to Domenico da Gravina, Charles of Durazzo and Robert of Taranto decided to capitulate to their Hungarian cousin and do homage to him without a struggle in order to get into his good graces. Despite the repeated pleas of Louis of Taranto to stay and fight, these two princes returned to the capital to prepare for the king of Hungary’s arrival. They took many barons and knights with them, a betrayal that left Joanna’s husband, along with Niccolò Acciaiuoli and Louis of Taranto’s first lieutenant, the loyal count of Altavilla, alone with a much reduced force to try to repel the invaders.
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