Unfortunately, Marseille was not the seat of regional government—that dignity belonged to the capital city of Aix-en-Provence. Joanna’s relationship with that municipality, or, more specifically, with the provincial nobility who lived there and governed in her name, was much more troubled than it was with her Marseille subjects. A number of grievances, dating from the time of Robert the Wise, had never been assuaged to parochial satisfaction, and the discontent had recently been amplified by the queen’s having put forward Neapolitan candidates for administrative positions that the local magnates, jealous of their income and authority, felt should have gone to one of their number. These resentments, always present in some form between official Aix-en-Provence and Naples, had been fanned by Hungarian agents, chief among them Andrew’s cousin the dauphin of Vienne, who frequently acted as an operative for the crown of Hungary in Provence. The extent of the native aristocracy’s unhappiness, and of Hungarian inroads into her territory, were made plain to Joanna when, on her way to Aix from Marseille on February 2, she was accosted by a military guard, who arrested her chamberlain and the other Italians traveling in her suite on the charge of conspiracy in the murder of Andrew and imprisoned them in a nearby dungeon.
Joanna recognized this act for the bargaining ploy it was and not as a substantive threat to her rule. After all, if the dauphin of Vienne had truly convinced the governing elite of Provence to switch their allegiance to the king of Hungary, it was the queen herself who would have been arrested rather than her servants. So she continued on to the capital and ensconced herself in the ancestral palace to begin negotiations with the provincial government to resolve the troublesome issues. The luster of the royal presence in Aix, coupled with the beautiful young queen’s sympathetic attention and evident willingness to accommodate their complaints, soothed the wounded feelings of her slighted administrators and led quickly to reconciliation. There was nothing the regional authorities could do about her entourage—because the church was responsible for investigating Andrew’s assassination, only the pope had the power to free those charged in the case—but a compromise was arranged. Joanna swore by solemn oath at a public ceremony on February 19 to appoint only persons native to Provence to the government, and this gesture was immediately reciprocated by an oath of fealty from the local authorities and regional aristocracy, both to herself and to her son, Charles Martel. From this point on, Hungarian encroachment in this all-important region was effectively arrested. Provence remained loyal to the queen.
Had she wished to serve out the rest of her reign in comfortable exile, this would have been enough, but Joanna had come to Provence to fight, not to hide. To renew the struggle, the queen needed men and arms to launch a counterattack, which meant an infusion of new funds and the recruitment of allies. Four months’ pregnant, she also required a papal dispensation to legitimize both her marriage and her unborn child in the eyes of the church. Mostly, though, she needed to publicly clear her name of the charge of conspiracy in the murder of her husband, as none of the former goals could be accomplished without the latter. Of all the rulers in Europe, only the pope was capable of granting these requests.
Yet she knew she could not take a chance of arriving uninvited in Avignon and perhaps enduring the humiliation of Clement’s refusing to see her, or worse, of ordering her arrest. If she came to the papal palace, it had to be on her own terms: as a queen consenting to appear, a meeting between two equals, with all the dignity and respect due to visiting royalty. She could not afford surprises; the details of their interview had to be arranged in advance. More than this, Joanna understood that in order to gain the maximum benefit from the rendezvous, there had to be as many witnesses present as possible. If they met secretly, Clement could then simply deny the audience had ever taken place. She had to force the pope to receive her publicly. And so, beginning in February, the queen of Naples began a letter-writing campaign from her castle in Aix, lobbying the Holy See for an interview.
Clement was not pleased to hear from her. Joanna’s sudden appearance in Provence had put the pope in an awkward position. Despite the king of Hungary’s undeniable military success, the papacy still hoped to persuade him to withdraw voluntarily from Naples, and agreeing to meet with its fugitive queen would certainly antagonize Louis. At the very moment Joanna was pelting Clement with letters entreating his support, the pope was also contending with a party of ambassadors sent by King Louis, advising the Holy See of the Hungarian victory in Italy and aggressively forwarding their sovereign’s demand that the queen (whom Louis knew to have escaped to Provence) be deposed and executed and he, the king of Hungary, be crowned in her place. Clement, who knew that he would have eventually to choose between the two rulers but who did not wish to choose just yet, resorted to his customary maneuver of vacillation and delay. Ominously, in a February 16 letter, he refused Joanna’s request for an audience, using as his excuse the hostile presence of the Hungarian delegation at the papal court, and recommended instead that the queen travel west to Châteaurenard, to be closer to Avignon, and there wait for his emissaries to contact her. Hoping to acquire through obedience that which had so far been denied her by diplomacy, Joanna took the pope’s suggestion and removed to Châteaurenard on February 27 in the company of eighteen knights sent by the cardinals in recognition of her rank and position.
There is no way to tell how long she might have sat there waiting for Clement’s agents—or worse, his inquisitors—if the queen’s side in this political tug-of-war had not gotten an unexpected boost with the sudden arrival of Louis of Taranto and Niccolò Acciaiuoli in Provence.
They were lucky to be alive. Buffeted by high winds in the rain and cold, Joanna’s husband and his chief adviser had somehow brought their small boat into the port of Sienna. From there they had journeyed inland to one of the Acciaiuoli family estates just outside the walls of Florence. News of their arrival caused unease in the Guelphic city. Some of the inhabitants, remembering the aid Joanna’s family had rendered to the commune so often in the past, spoke out in favor of assisting Louis of Taranto in his struggle against the Eastern European invaders, but the Florentine elders, fearful of the king of Hungary’s proximity, overruled these partisans and locked the gates of the city against the Neapolitan prince. Only Niccolò’s cousin, the bishop of Florence, was brave enough to defy the signory and leave the city in order to meet with Louis and Niccolò. Together, the three decided that the best course of action would be to apply to the pope for aid. Chartering a much sturdier boat, they embarked from Pisa, arriving in Aigues-Mortes, near Marseille, the second week in February. Hearing that the queen had landed safely, but that her entourage had been imprisoned by Hungarian supporters, the Acciaiuolis rode immediately to Avignon to begin a dialogue with the Holy See, while Louis of Taranto moved into a castle in Villeneuve-d’Avignon, the area of town where all the cardinals lived, just across the Rhône from the papal palace.
Faced with the oratory of two such forceful advocates as the Neapolitan banker and his cousin the bishop, not to mention the presence of the king of France’s nephew just across the river, Clement agreed to receive Joanna. Niccolò Acciaiuoli, who clearly had a very high opinion of himself and a strong inclination toward self-promotion—he alone among the dignitaries of the period would think to ensure his place in history by penning an autobiography—would later take full credit for the success of these papal negotiations, and subsequent historians have uniformly taken him at his word. “When first the King of Hungary invaded this realm (Naples),” he wrote:
It became expedient for the Queen and my Lord the King [Louis of Taranto], whose welfare I had clung to so steadfastly and hopefully, to quit the kingdom, both by reason (to speak politely) of the shiftiness of her own subjects, and because the princes, magnates, and almost all the people, were willing to obey the King of Hungary. I alone, relinquishing everything I possessed in the realm, which amounted to no small reckoning, followed their fortune… In those times the ground would seem to quake at the m
ere mention of that King’s name [Louis of Hungary’s], as the Clementine and other Cardinals and courtiers well knew. The Queen was pregnant and still lacking Apostolic dispensation, while my master was young and inexperienced. It fell, then, to my lot, in default of any one better, to endeavor by every possible means to end the cruel disorder and destructive embroilment of their affairs.
However, while Niccolò no doubt played a role in bringing Joanna and the pope together and certainly handled the subsequent financial transactions resulting from their meeting, there were several other influences at work that led to Clement’s decision to grant Joanna an audience. The king of France, who had by this time lost Calais as well as Crécy to the English, wanted Joanna’s marriage to Louis of Taranto sanctioned and the young couple supported in their efforts to repel the Hungarians, and had sent ambassadors to Avignon with instructions to achieve these results. Joanna’s cousin James III, king of Majorca (Sancia’s nephew), who had lost his kingdom to the crown of Aragon and was looking for papal assistance in securing his birthright, also happened to be in Avignon at this time, adding another champion to the queen’s cause. With all due respect to Niccolò’s diplomatic talents, it is likely that this pair of royal advocates had as much to do with Clement’s capitulation as did the Acciaiuolis. Nor was the banker completely ingenuous about the selflessness of his motives in defending his sovereigns. Niccolò sacrificed nothing by fleeing with Joanna and Louis of Taranto. He well understood that his association as adviser to the queen and her second husband was public knowledge. If he had stayed behind, he would have been arrested and executed, and his lands and goods would have been confiscated by the Hungarians.
But perhaps the most significant factor in formulating papal policy with respect to Naples was the behavior of the king of Hungary himself. By this time, Joanna’s sister, Maria, penniless and distraught, had also arrived in Provence with her children and made straight for the palace of her dead husband’s powerful uncle, Cardinal Talleyrand of Périgord. With Maria came the dreadful news of Charles of Durazzo’s execution at the hands of his Hungarian cousin, the imprisonment of the remaining Neapolitan princes, and the pillaging of the royal property.
This was too much for Clement, particularly as Louis of Hungary, through his ambassadors, persisted in accusing Cardinal Périgord of having masterminded his brother’s assassination even after the pope had stoutly denied the allegation. Under Talleyrand’s leadership, all the French cardinals, who made up the majority of the Sacred College, lobbied in favor of Joanna, and Clement, appalled by the indefensible mode of Hungarian vengeance (and worried that, in his eagerness to despoil his Neapolitan cousins, King Louis was absconding with property that belonged to the church), allowed himself to be persuaded to receive the queen. Word of his decision was dispatched to Joanna, who was waiting patiently at Châteaurenard. It must have taken no small amount of courage, with the plague at the height of its relentless force, to make the pilgrimage to Avignon at just this time, but Joanna did it without a murmur, arriving at the head of a grand procession escorted by a guard of thirty armed horsemen on March 15, 1348.
There is some confusion as to whether she proceeded directly to the papal palace on that date, or whether the pope received her a few days later. Giovanni Villani stated that Joanna stood before the consistory on March 27, but as Clement referred to his audience with the queen in a March 23 letter to the legate Bertrand de Deux, the Florentine chronicler seems to have been mistaken. Some historians believe the event took place on March 19 rather than the 15th, as the pope also penned a letter to the dauphin of Vienne on March 20 in which he wrote sympathetically of Joanna’s plight in a manner indicating that a personal appeal by the queen had just taken place. That Joanna succeeded in her first goal of being greeted by the Holy See, not as a suspect or a refugee but as a visiting queen, with all the pomp and respect required on such an occasion, is without question. In a letter to a later legate, Guy of Boulogne, Clement observed that the interview had been conducted “according to the ceremonial protocol observed by the Church for the reception of Royalty.”
But once inside the papal palace and having traversed the gauntlet of the great hall, Joanna still had to weather the hazards of an inquest. The queen could not ignore the fact of Andrew’s murder or the charges of complicity that had clung to her in its wake any more than the pope, who had publicly undertaken to investigate the crime, could receive her without definitively addressing the question of her guilt or innocence. Nor was this audience, so eagerly sought on the one side and so reluctantly brooked on the other, a mere formality, hastily organized to disguise a foreordained conclusion. Joanna was well aware that she stood before a man who, stung by the dowager queen of Hungary’s taunts that the church was incapable of confronting the royal family and administering justice in Naples, had sent a legate to her kingdom with specific instructions to convict her of the murder of her husband. “Consistory was… the supreme court of Christendom, and pope and cardinals together would sit in judgment, as they did on Joanna for Andrew of Hungary’s murder.”
With so much at stake, Joanna had asked for and obtained permission in advance to speak on her own behalf in order to refute the Hungarian accusations, a highly unusual occurrence. There is no record of what she said for the very good reason that Clement, hedging his bets as usual, did not wish to advertise this meeting to the king of Hungary, and so her inquest was not inscribed in the official church annals. This allowed the pope to write a year later to Louis of Hungary denying the rumors that he had granted an audience with the queen at this time with a clear conscience. Instead, to mollify the king, the pope reported that Joanna had been received by only a few cardinals and that, when told she must submit to an inquiry, she had quitted Avignon altogether without answering the charges against her. This letter was, of course, refuted by the much earlier missives Clement dispatched to both the dauphin and Bertrand de Deux, in which the pontifical inquest of the queen was expressly referred to, but then Clement was in no way the first of his profession to feel the need to sacrifice a little truth on the altar of diplomacy.
The report, then, of what did occur between the queen of Naples and the Holy See in the great hall of the papal palace on that March day in 1348 comes from the sixteenth-century Neapolitan annalist Angelo da Costanzo and the seventeenth-century Provençal historian Honorè Bouche, both working off sources contemporary to the period that are no longer extant. There is also a description of this event by the seventeenth-century church scholar Louis Maimbourg. All three of these accounts are in agreement. “Joanna arrived in Provence; since she had come not so much to protect herself against retaliation by the king of Hungary but rather to defend herself to the Holy Father Clement VI, she immediately went to see him in Avignon; she was welcomed with all the honor and pomp that a great Queen deserved in her own city and was received publicly by His Holiness with all the cardinals and ambassadors and agents of all the princes of Christendom in attendance,” wrote Bouche.
And so Joanna faced her inquisitors and answered the charges brought against her. It seems clear that she beguiled her audience. The pope was something of a connoisseur of beautiful women—during his tenure, the papal palace served as the site of an array of glittering banquets attended by many glamorous noblewomen, including, according to Matteo Villani, the pope’s special friend Cécile, the countess of Turenne. In the immediate aftermath of Joanna’s rebuttal, Clement evinced great sympathy for the queen of Naples’s plight. In a March 20 letter addressed to the dauphin of Vienne, the pope wrote, “You know of the wretched situation… our very dear daughter in Christ, the Queen of Sicily, finds herself in, and we believe you will be moved with a pious compassion for her, your cousin.”
But charm alone would not have sufficed to win the queen her suit. Joanna needed not sympathy but support; not a judgment but an ally such as could only be obtained by a sweeping dismissal of the charges. She had to make her interrogators believe not only in her innocence but also in her fund
amental right to rule, and most important, her ability to win back her kingdom. The image of majesty and lineage Joanna projected clearly influenced those judging her—she stood before them the granddaughter of Robert the Wise, the niece of the Valois king of France, the embodiment of a legacy long recognized in its legitimacy by the power of the church, an irresistible indictment against the Hungarian usurper. By her side were the twin pillars of her administration, evidence of the strength at her command by which she intended to recover her kingdom: her new husband, Louis, prince of Taranto, a warrior of unimpeachable credentials in the full flower of manhood, with an exalted ancestry to match her own; and Niccolò Acciaiuoli, a wily finance minister and statesman, with strong ties to Guelphic Florence.
The queen finished her recitation; the pope conferred with his cardinals; the judgment was handed down. “Not only innocent, but above the suspicion of guilt,” reported Costanzo. “She spoke at length with such grace and eloquence, brought forth so many good reasons for her defense, that… His Holiness was compelled to declare her innocent of the crime and of the suspicion of the crime that she stood accused of,” observed Bouche. “As far as the murder of her first husband Andrew of Hungary that many accused her of, she justified herself fully… both in that none of them [those already convicted and executed for the crime] ever implicated her in the horrific torture they endured, and by the eloquent defense she delivered herself in open consistory to the Pope Clement and the ambassadors of the Princes of Christendom with such strength and clarity that this Pontiff declared in an official act that not only was she innocent of this crime, she also could not be suspected of ever taking part in it,” agreed Maimbourg. So taken was Clement with the queen of Naples and her new husband that on March 30, the pope presented the golden rose (a highly valuable ornament encrusted with pearls and garnets, with a sapphire at the center of its golden petals, traditionally bestowed on the fourth Sunday of Lent as a mark of special papal favor) not, as he had originally intended, to the king of Majorca, but to Joanna’s champion, Louis of Taranto.
The Lady Queen Page 20
