When Joanna saw the duke of Durazzo and Robert of Taranto and their attendant troops ride into Naples, she knew she had lost her kingdom and was in imminent danger of losing her life. If Louis of Hungary caught her, he would kill her, of that she had no doubt. Her only hope was to flee Naples for Provence, which remained under her jurisdiction. If she survived, she might yet organize a counteroffensive by calling on her Provençal subjects and the papacy and Louis of Taranto’s uncle, the French king, for aid. She called together the members of her household and, in the interests of an orderly transition of government, appointed a committee of noblemen to administer the realm in her absence. To protect her people as much as possible from the wrath of the invaders, the queen formally released those present, and through them all her subjects, from the oath of loyalty they had taken to her until such time as she returned to Naples, and she advised her partisans, for their own safety, not to resist Louis of Hungary’s entrance into the capital.
Then came the hardest part: leaving her son behind.
Joanna adored her child and must have wanted to take him with her. The queen had been given ample opportunity over the past year to deliver the boy to either Clement or the Hungarians and had steadfastly refused to do so, despite the ever-increasing pressure of her mother-in-law’s threats and demands. But she was about to take an uncertain voyage on rough seas in the middle of winter, which might be dangerous for the toddler. Even should she have decided to hazard this, there was no way to spirit Charles Martel, who was under the strict eye of his governor and Isabelle the Hungarian, away from the Castel dell’Ovo without alerting them to her intentions. Joanna knew that no harm would come to the boy from the Hungarians if he remained in Naples. Andrew’s child was precious to her in-laws. To take him away from his mother was one of the reasons King Louis had invaded in the first place, and so she could be confident that if Charles Martel remained behind, he would be cared for and protected, and the citizens of Naples spared, at least in some measure, the conqueror’s ill humor and reprisals. Charles of Durazzo no doubt intended to offer up the heir to the throne immediately to his victorious cousin as a means of furthering his own interests and might well surrender her to the Hungarians along with her son. She could not take this risk; it is not known if she was even able to say goodbye. Her only hope of being with her child at some time in the future was to leave him now.
Taking as much specie from the royal treasury as she could manage for her expenses and the inevitable bribes she would need to buy support—she was, after all, going to Avignon—and accompanied by a small group of retainers that included her chamberlain Enrico Caracciolo, Joanna slipped away during the night of January 15, 1348, and, having previously arranged for three galleys to be waiting in the harbor, set sail for Provence.
Whispers of the queen’s midnight flight reached Capua early the next morning causing Louis of Taranto, accompanied by Niccolò Acciaiuoli, to hurry back to the capital, leaving the garrison under the command of the count of Altavilla. When the two men discovered that the rumors Joanna had escaped the city were true, Niccolò convinced the prince of Taranto to do the same. Louis of Taranto could not kneel to the king of Hungary as his older brother and cousin intended to do; as Joanna’s husband, he would be executed if he fell into enemy hands. Like the queen, his only hope of success lay in securing outside reinforcements to replace those troops his older brother and Charles of Durazzo had so treacherously withdrawn from Capua at the last moment. Giovanni Villani reported that Louis and Niccolò tried to find an armed galley, in case they met resistance along the way, but there were none to be had. With the Hungarian army on the move and no time to spare, the pair hired the only vessel they could find, a narrow, flimsy fishing boat, and took off on the evening of January 16 in the middle of a driving winter storm in this small craft to try to convince the Florentines one last time to help.
After resting and reorganizing his army at Benevento for six days, during which time he received delegations from throughout the kingdom offering surrender and homage in the hopes of preventing additional pillage and slaughter, Louis of Hungary had indeed begun marching his troops west toward Naples on January 16. The king did not attempt to take the capital immediately. Naples, with its crowded population and maze of narrow streets, would be a difficult city to quell if its citizens decided to resist. Instead, the Hungarian army bypassed the capital and headed north, a route that took them directly past Capua. At the approach of the enemy, the German mercenaries under the command of the count of Altavilla, seeing a large number of their compatriots in the body of the opposing army, deserted to the Hungarians. At this final defection, the count was reduced to hanging a Hungarian banner over the wall of the city in surrender. Louis of Hungary, having thus conquered the kingdom without having to engage in a single battle, arrived the next day at Aversa and occupied the city. As Joanna had anticipated, her brother-in-law’s first act was to send an envoy to Naples to demand that Charles Martel be relinquished into Hungarian control, a transfer that was affected immediately. “In the same year, on the 19th day of the same month—it was Sir Amelio del Balzo who was taking care of the Lord Charles Martel—they assigned him [Charles Martel] to Count Ciccono of Hungary, who received him in the name of the king of Hungary, and they even assigned to him [Count Ciccono] the Castel dell’Ovo,” reported the Chronicon Siculum.
Also on January 19, Charles of Durazzo and Robert of Taranto made a grand entry into Aversa, at the head of a long procession of the capital’s highest-ranking aristocrats, to do formal obeisance to the victorious king of Hungary. Although the fact that King Louis chose the site of his brother’s assassination as the setting in which to receive the homage of his Neapolitan relatives should have been a tip-off, the duke of Durazzo, in particular, was confident that at least he and his family—he had brought the younger of his two brothers, Robert, along on this diplomatic mission—would receive a warm reception from his cousin. Charles had, after all, befriended Louis’ brother Andrew before his death; had led the relentlessly merciless offensive against the victim’s killers that had resulted in the public torture and extermination of those closest to the queen; had urged his Hungarian relatives to invade the kingdom, promising his support and those of his vassals and allies in the event the attack took place. His nominal participation in the war effort mounted by Louis of Taranto, if it was known to the king of Hungary at all, would not, the duke of Durazzo must have reasoned, be held against him as Charles had laid down his arms peacefully and had convinced others to do so as well. The groundwork for this moment had been laid carefully through months of clandestine communication with his royal cousin, and so Charles rode into Aversa full of praise, humble servitude, and sympathetic family feeling for the new ruler of Naples.
And it all went just as Charles had expected. Louis of Hungary met the overtures of the Neapolitan delegation with a satisfying graciousness. He took a special interest in his cousins, inquiring of the whereabouts of even the younger members of the houses of Taranto and Durazzo. When informed that two of the male representatives of the family, Philip of Taranto and Louis of Durazzo, had stayed behind in the capital in order to arrange a magnificent welcoming ceremony for the king, Louis of Hungary insisted that they, too, come to Aversa and be present at a festive banquet he planned to host on January 22. Charles of Durazzo and Robert of Taranto made haste to inform their two younger siblings of the king’s invitation, and so, on the evening of the appointed day, the male members of the entire family sat down together for a celebratory feast, the consummation of which was captured for posterity by Domenico da Gravina:
“The king greeted the princes graciously, conversed with them, left them in the great hall of the palace and went into his room with his advisors. After careful consideration, the counsel decided that the princes would be arrested at the end of the meal,” recorded the chronicler. “The king left his room and came back to the company of his cousins; he discussed a thousand diverse topics with them, as well as with the
lords and squires in attendance until dinner time. When dinner was ready, water for his hands was brought to the king, then to the duke and to the prince of Taranto [Robert], then to all the others, according to hierarchy.
“The duke, the prince and their brothers ate at a different table than that of the king’s. [A nobleman] took advantage of this to say to the duke, as he was serving: ‘Unfortunate Duke, you wouldn’t believe me, but you came to your misfortune. You can still escape. Believe me, leave!’ But the irritated duke glanced sharply at him and almost reported these words to the king; he contained himself however, and said nothing… When dinner was over and the tables cleared, the king summoned the duke and the other princes. His smile was replaced by the harshest expression as he unveiled with terrible words the true feelings he had for the princes and that he had kept hidden until then:
Duke of Durazzo, monster of iniquity, know that you are in our hands to suffer the consequences of your crimes and to pay for your treason with your life. But before you die, confess your betrayals against our Royal Majesty so that we do not have to call on other witnesses to inflict on you the punishment for your treason. Thus tell us, duke, why you ensured that your uncle, the duke of Périgord, delayed the crowning of our brother duke Andrew in the court of Rome, which enabled his ignominious death… Might you wish to refute that you are the author of this scheme? Here are the letters you wrote, under your seal. You know full well that the will of our great uncle king Robert gave us to marry his granddaughter Maria, whom you married fraudulently… After our brother’s death, you showed much zeal in pursuing his murderers and you exacted the harshest revenge. This might have earned our forgiveness. You wrote to invite us to this kingdom, and promised to bring us in with the help of the counts in your party and to deliver the regicides into our hands. How could you then dare, you traitor, on the order of Joanna your queen, to lead an army [against us] at L’Aquila… Our armed forces were to help you destroy Louis, Joanna and the other princes, your cousins, and to banish them from this kingdom; you would then have remained the sole power in this country and you would have then plotted our death… But all these fine plans have come to naught, as one cannot hope to play us this way.
After this outburst, so reminiscent of the charges Louis of Hungary and his mother had elaborated in their earlier letters to the pope, all five men were arrested. Robert and Philip of Taranto and Louis and Robert of Durazzo were deposited in the dungeon under guard. Charles of Durazzo was hauled in front of a Hungarian tribunal, which quickly condemned him for the murder of Andrew. At dawn the next morning, the prisoner was brought back to the castle, where Louis of Hungary and a party of soldiers awaited him. The king demanded to know the exact location of his brother’s assassination. The duke had no choice but to comply with this request, and brought the king of Hungary and his attendant guard to the terrace where Andrew had been hanged. Upon being informed that this was the site of his brother’s ambush, Louis of Hungary coldly gave the command for his cousin’s execution. Charles of Durazzo was beheaded on the spot, and the bloody trunk of his body thrown over the balcony railing and into the garden below, there to lie as Andrew’s corpse had lain on that fateful September night some two years before.
Hours later, after the king had left the castle, friars from the adjacent monastery crept out and removed the remains of the once-feared duke of Durazzo and brought his headless body to a tomb at the church of San Lorenzo Maggiore in Naples, where it was discreetly interred.
Having revenged his brother’s death in this convincing manner, Louis of Hungary left Aversa and marched his army to the capital city of Naples. The shocking news of the summary execution of the duke of Durazzo and the imprisonment of the other male members of the houses of Durazzo and Taranto had preceded the king, as had many of his soldiers, bent on looting. “A night of violence followed this tragic evening,” Domenico da Gravina wrote. “Servants from [the princes’] escorts were hunted down and slaughtered in the streets of Aversa, and their homes in that town as well as in Naples were plundered.” The Hungarian marauders converged on Charles’s Neapolitan palace. “His wife [Maria] barely escaped this peasant revolt,” the chronicler asserted. “She ran away in the middle of the night, half naked, her two young children in her arms, and took refuge in the nearby convent of Santa Croce.” The duchess of Durazzo (who was pregnant again) and her children were soon joined at the convent by Robert of Taranto’s new wife, Marie of Bourbon, in a similar state of privation. Joanna’s sister was eventually smuggled out of Naples disguised as a friar; she and her children escaped to Tuscany and from there took a galley to Provence. Marie of Bourbon was similarly spirited away safely by sympathetic partisans to Florence.
Louis of Hungary arrived just as evening was falling. The city had been on the lookout for him all day. As soon as his army came into view, a mixed throng of commoners and aristocrats sallied out to meet him. As part of the grandiose welcoming ceremony (ironically arranged by Philip of Taranto and Louis of Durazzo, who were currently languishing in Hungarian captivity), the king was offered his choice of three magnificently ornamented canopies, specially designed for the occasion, to ride under as he entered the capital. The king refused them all, hardly an encouraging sign. Nor did his attitude toward his conquered subjects improve on further acquaintance. The Hungarian’s first act, after taking over the Castel Nuovo, was to divide up the palaces, property, and possessions of the houses of Taranto and Durazzo and dispense these riches to himself and his generals. His second was to threaten the populace with a general sack if the citizenry did not raise an exorbitant sum in taxes to their new sovereign.
The rank and file of the capital, used to the more benevolent ways of a queen who fed the poor and dispensed alms with generous regularity, resisted their new sovereign’s severe approach to administration, secretly electing eight leading citizens to act as an unofficial government and organizing themselves under these representatives into a voluntary militia. On the night of January 28, having put up with looting by mercenaries billeted in private homes all over the city for five days, and convinced a general sack was imminent, the city fought back. Digging up the streets, the townspeople erected makeshift barriers by heaping the cobblestones into piles. These bulwarks, in addition to blockading the entrance to roadways and private homes, provided the disgruntled citizenry with ammunition against the enemy. Under the command of their eight generals, the population kept watch in shifts all night. When a mercenary showed himself, his way was blocked, and he was immediately pelted with rocks from doorways and rooftops. Finding themselves under attack from all sides, Louis’ soldiers retreated; many died and a large number surrendered. The king was forced to negotiate with the leaders of the ad hoc government and agreed to pay the mercenaries from his own cache of silver in order to reduce the risk of looting. If the male members of the Neapolitan royal family had shown one tenth the resilience and courage of the common inhabitants of the capital, they might have saved themselves the unpleasantness of death, despoliation, and a prolonged imprisonment, not to mention retaining the kingdom.
As it was, though, after the king of Hungary came to this new understanding with his metropolitan subjects, the incidents of armed resistance decreased. Louis, who now styled himself king of Jerusalem and Sicily, prince of Capua and Salerno, and king of Hungary, Dalmatia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, among other titles, was soon able to fulfill the last and most coveted of his objectives. On February 2, under the guise of protecting the heir to the throne from phantom Neapolitan intrigues against his life, he dispatched two-year-old Charles Martel, along with his four captive royal cousins, home to Hungary as spoils of the campaign. The toddler, who had been raised in the warmth of southern Italy and had never known ice or snow, was surrounded by an entourage of Hungarian noblemen and nurses who transported him by litter to the eastern shore of Naples. From there, the procession crossed the Adriatic for the Dalmatian coast on February 12 as a prelude to the long, dangerous trip north, through the frigid
mountains and furious gales of winter, to Visegrád.
This was the last anyone in Naples saw of Joanna’s child. Charles Martel, weakened by the arduous journey, died soon after arriving in Hungary.
The queen’s galleys made the voyage across the Mediterranean quickly. Joanna was able to land in Provence on January 20, just five days after fleeing Naples. She and her entourage traveled immediately to Marseille, where the queen knew she would be assured of a warm welcome. Years of preferential treatment had inspired in the inhabitants of the city a keen loyalty to the “Mistress of Marseille,” as Joanna was called, for the Angevin rulers of Naples had recognized early the importance of this port as a conduit for trade, men, and arms between the various far-flung regions of the domain. On January 29, the queen was treated to a festive ceremony, accompanied by as much pomp and splendor as the town could arrange on short notice, at which she publicly pledged herself to maintain the welfare and interests of the city. In turn, her vassals promised to defend and support her in her time of need. Nearly the whole of the population crammed itself into the streets for this rare look at their sovereign.
The Lady Queen Page 19
