The Lady Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Pleased by Louis of Taranto’s new compliancy, Joanna actively and enthusiastically embraced the notion of a double coronation as a means of stabilizing her relationship with her husband and ensuring the safety and welfare of her kingdom. What she had wanted most was official recognition of her inherited right to rule, and once that issue was resolved, she volunteered to work together with Louis in the interests of reform and unity. There was both a sense of fairness and practicality in this gesture. She must have recognized that, more than anyone else, Louis of Taranto was responsible for Joanna’s regaining her birthright; he had led her armies and made the conquest of the realm sufficiently difficult that her Hungarian brother-in-law saw fit to accept a negotiated settlement. And the kingdom still needed him: there were yet castles in the hands of enemy soldiers, and these men had to be encouraged to leave their posts quietly. Criminal activity, such as looting and robbery, also had to be inhibited and boundaries secured against future aggressors.

  The result of this unaccustomed political accord was a number of forward-looking edicts issued in the names of both the queen and the prospective king and bearing both their seals. One of the most intelligent was the proclamation, on April 7, 1352, of a general amnesty toward those of their subjects who had cooperated with or supported the Hungarians during the invasion. This decree included not only a full pardon but also the restitution of all goods confiscated by the crown during the war, a generous decision that won Joanna and Louis much support from their former opponents in the kingdom. However, the queen’s newfound collaboration with her husband was not so trusting that she did not take measures to protect herself. Although she allowed the chancellor of the realm to retain possession of the grand seal, as was customary, she insisted on keeping her personal seal in her own chambers, so that it could not be used against her, an indication perhaps that Joanna had not forgotten, much less forgiven, Louis’ earlier treachery.

  The rest of April was taken up with preparations for the coronation. The event was conceived on a scale to rival the celebrations hosted by the court during the days of Robert the Wise, when spectacle was used deliberately as a means of establishing political legitimacy. Invitations were dispatched by courier to allies as far away as Provence, Siena, and Florence. Noble families from every corner of the kingdom were summoned. High-ranking syndics and churchmen were required to attend. The pope sent a special emissary to perform the ceremony in his name. Joanna and Louis had requested that a cardinal officiate, but Clement, fearful of provoking Hungarian ire again by a too-obvious favoritism toward Naples, sent the archbishop of Braga instead. Church approval was reflected in the speedy arrival of the ecclesiastic on the shores of Naples—for once the papal representative managed to arrive on time.

  Finances were a problem—the royal treasury had been almost completely depleted by the war—but this did not deter the queen in her expenditure. The populace would expect opulence, and after years of hardship, Joanna was determined to give it to them. She spent lavishly—over five thousand florins for jewels alone—and solved the difficulty by sending the bill abroad. On April 26, the queen signed an official order for payment to her seneschal in Provence: “In conjunction with our festive coronation to be celebrated on Pentecost [mid-May]… we owe to two Florentine noblemen, in return for an advance of 4,371 florins and a three part share of our other expenses listed below, namely: twenty-eight girdles adorned with silver in diverse designs; a tunic of pearls and silk; two silver swords, one a dagger; 115 strings of amber [rosary] beads for Paternoster;… two silver saddles for our horses; a goblet of crystal and silver… twelve barrels of beer with silver tankards; two staffs of silver; ten pearls fastened in golden rings; four diamonds fastened in golden rings; thirty-nine mother-of-pearl buttons adorned with gold and precious stones; twelve brooches suitable for wearing on the chest, from gold and silver; six red semi-precious gems… three rubies, six emeralds, seventeen sapphires and a pearl and sapphire ring.”

  The ceremony, which was preceded for days by festive public entertainments such as pageants, jousts, games, and other merrymaking, was held on May 27, 1352, the feast of Pentecost. As a gesture to Louis, the coronation service was conducted inside the ancestral palace of the house of Taranto. In front of the massed assembly of the court and invited guests, the archbishop of Braga, after an official benediction, placed crowns, first on the head of Louis, then Joanna, and anointed both with holy oil. The religious rite concluded, the king and queen seated themselves on their respective thrones and proceeded to receive the homage of their barons. Only Maria, who had come so close to ruling Naples herself and was reduced by this ceremony and her sister’s priority once again to the nebulous condition of stand-in, refused to do obeisance to her sister and brother-in-law. Since her return to Naples, she had remained destitute, and Louis of Taranto, perhaps not unreasonably given her attitude and past behavior, had worsened matters by ordering that she and her children be confined to the Castel dell’Ovo to prevent further treason with Hungary. Clement eventually negotiated an accord whereby Maria won her release by agreeing to do homage for her lands in a private ceremony conducted in October.

  The rite of homage was followed by a triumphant procession through the streets of Naples, to allow the citizenry a view of the spectacle. According to Matteo Villani, an ominous incident occurred during the parade, which foreshadowed an even greater tragedy. The narrow streets of Naples were crowded with onlookers, which made the horses, whose jeweled bridles were held by grooms, jumpy. When a gentlewoman coquettishly threw a bouquet of flowers down to Louis of Taranto from the balcony where she was standing, the king’s horse suddenly shied, and Louis was forced to leap from his saddle to avoid injury. In the act of saving himself, his crown flew off his head and broke into three pieces on the cobblestones. This was naturally taken by those who witnessed the accident as an evil omen, but Louis simply laughed it off and, calling for another horse, fitted the crown together as best he could, replaced it on his head, and continued to ride with Joanna until they had finished their rounds. But superstition won out nonetheless; throughout her life, the queen of Naples was fated never to experience joy unalleviated by grief. Weary but elated, Joanna, accompanied by her husband, finally returned home to the Castel Nuovo at the end of the evening only to find the household in devastated mourning: during her absence, two-year-old Françoise, her only surviving child and the heir to the throne, had been stricken with a fatal illness and died.

  In the decade succeeding the death of her grandfather, Joanna had weathered murder, treason, civil unrest, the death by excruciating torture of her best friend and surrogate mother, exile, a trial for her life, plague, war, treachery, and finally, the anguishing loss of all three of her children. Her sacrifice was matched only by her determination to prevail. For all the sorrow, no monarch in Europe had fought harder for his kingdom than the queen of Naples, nor succeeded so convincingly in the face of such odds.

  CHAPTER XII

  Foreign and Domestic Relations

  Nothing in Joanna’s background could have prepared her for the devastation that greeted her on her return to power. Plague, followed closely by the brutal invasion and the prolonged destruction of an extended war, had decimated the realm. The statistics are so dire that they defy imagination. In one three-month period, half the inhabitants of the capital city succumbed. Additionally, one third of the kingdom’s towns and villages suddenly disappeared or were abandoned, particularly in the low-lying regions of Apulia and Abruzzi. Nor was Naples unique. The population of Florence dropped from eighty thousand to thirty thousand. Pisa, which began the century with fifty thousand citizens, recorded less than ten thousand still living in the town in 1428. The story was the same in every major city in Europe stricken by the Black Death. “Is it possible,” wrote Petrarch after experiencing the plague in Avignon, “that posterity will believe these things? For we who have seen them can hardly do so.”

  Those who had managed to survive the onslaught wrought by nature h
ad then to contend with the hardships inflicted by war. The Hungarian army had deliberately destroyed homes and fields both to punish loyalists and to deprive the opposition of food and supplies. “I found my Pouilles lands [in Apulia] in a pitiable state and poverty-stricken such that, far from being able to extract any harvest, I had to provide so that its inhabitants wouldn’t abandon them for a better life elsewhere,” Niccolò Acciaiuoli wrote in a letter to one of his Florentine relatives in 1352. “I must still have my castles watched carefully, so recent is the disease we just bore.” Niccolò was wise to be vigilant. The plague would strike Italy again in 1362, and once more in 1373, further frightening the inhabitants and depressing birth rates. The capital city of Naples would not regain its former population level for 150 years.

  Such poverty and desperation bred lawlessness on a scale that dwarfed former experience. With the advent of peace, the thousands of mercenaries who had been recruited by the Hungarians and the Neapolitans found themselves lacking employment. Accustomed to a life of pillage and threat in the cause of one monarch or another, they organized themselves into large groups and continued their former activities for their own benefit. The “free companies,” as these criminal gangs became known, preyed upon the citizenry, extorting protection money from towns and villages and waylaying merchants and innocent travelers.

  Economic recovery was impossible under these conditions, so one of the first steps Joanna took after her coronation was to appoint a new chief justice and provide him with the means and authority to vanquish the outlaws. “Followed by 400 horsemen,” Matteo Villani reported, “he [the chief justice] rode across the kingdom, pursued criminals, brought barons and townships to compliance, insisted on collecting taxes and ensured that feudal services were carried out. Thanks to him, roads became free and safe.” Boccaccio, writing in 1362 about Joanna in his treatise Famous Women, agreed: “If we examine her domain closely, our amazement will equal its fame, for it is a mighty realm of the sort not usually ruled by women. Yet far more admirable is the fact that Joanna’s spirit is equal to its governance, so well has she preserved the luminous character of her ancestors. For example, after she was crowned with the royal diadem, Joanna bravely took action and cleansed not only the cities and inhabited areas but also the Alpine regions, remote valleys, forests and wild places from bands of outlaws… and the siege of these places was not lifted until their strongholds had been captured and the accursed men inside executed. No previous king had been willing or able to do this.”

  Within two years of her coronation, Naples was able to begin producing grain again—not at the same heady levels that had once encouraged the growth of the super-companies, for the labor force available to achieve that goal no longer existed—but harvests sufficient to meet the kingdom’s own needs and even a little for export.

  This strong beginning was soon challenged by malevolent forces outside the queen’s control, both at home and abroad. The first obstacle came upon the death, on December 6, 1352, of Clement VI.

  With Clement’s passing, from an internal rupture, Joanna and her kingdom lost an advocate whose power and influence rivaled that of her original sponsor, Robert the Wise. Just as important, because the queen had known the pontiff personally and was well acquainted with his manner and habits, she had been able to anticipate his response to any given situation. But suddenly, Clement was gone and in his place was an unfamiliar cardinal who had taken the name Innocent VI.

  Innocent was a lawyer by training and an ascetic by temperament. His election, orchestrated in a mere forty-eight hours by Cardinal Talleyrand of Périgord, was designed to deflect the charges of corruption and high living that had tainted Clement’s regime. Even so, Innocent was a compromise candidate. Originally, the cardinals had thought to elect the prior general of the Carthusian order, a man renowned for piety, but were apparently talked out of it by Talleyrand. “My Lords Cardinal, you don’t know what you’re doing,” Talleyrand retorted, according to an unnamed chronicler of the period. “Surely you must realize that the Carthusian prior will be moved by such justice, rigor, and righteousness, that if we elect him pope he will certainly set us back in our old condition. Why, within four months our mounts will be dragging horse-carts. He fears no one, and in his zeal for Mother Church he has all the confidence of a lion!” Whether this story is true is unclear; there were other objections, of a more practical political consideration, to the candidacy of a Carthusian prior. Innocent’s election, on the other hand, is readily explained. He was already in his sixties, in poor health, and was often swayed by the more powerful personalities surrounding him. “No doubt the Sacred College hoped to mould him easily to its wishes.”

  The new pope could not have been more different from his predecessor. Where Clement had been generous and expansive, spending lavishly and welcoming supplicants and their bribes to Avignon, Innocent’s first action was to require all beneficed priests to return to their benefices, with disobedience punishable by excommunication. “In this way he emptied the Papal Palace of a crowd of useless courtiers, whose only occupation was intrigue and money-making. Naturally frugal… he banished all splendor from his Court… he required the Cardinals, many of whom were given up to luxury and had amassed great wealth, to follow his example.” Already an old man when he assumed his post, Innocent was inclined to be short-tempered and querulous. He ate sparingly and was prone to many physical ailments, which did not improve his mood. Nor did his advanced age unduly affect or abbreviate his pontificate. He managed to hold on stubbornly for a full decade.

  Aware that he owed his office to Talleyrand, Innocent followed his benefactor’s advice in most matters, especially during the early years of his pontificate. And although the cardinal of Périgord had in the past allied himself with the queen of Naples when her interests coincided with his own, this had not been the case for some time. Talleyrand was keenly interested in the welfare and advancement of his nephews, the younger princes of Durazzo, who had been held captive by the king of Hungary since the beginning of the war. He had opposed the double coronation of Joanna and Louis of Taranto as according too much power to the Taranto family over that of the Durazzo, but he had been overruled by Clement. With Clement dead and the hostages, freed by the peace treaty, on their way home to Naples, Talleyrand was determined to protect his family’s birthright and ascendancy in the kingdom. Louis was equally resolved to maintain Taranto supremacy over that of his cousins, drawing the lines for confrontation.

  In this atmosphere of disquiet, the captive princes, both Durazzo and Taranto, straggled home. If the king of Hungary had had any idea how much trouble they would cause, he would have let them out much earlier.

  Robert of Taranto was the first to return to Naples, arriving in the spring of 1353, followed closely by his younger brother Philip. The new king of Naples restored enough of his family’s former estate to his older brother to merit, if not his loyalty, at least his outward compliance. Philip’s settlement was smaller, but Louis of Taranto made known his intention to safeguard his younger brother’s interests by marrying him to Joanna’s sister, Maria, who, having rid herself of her second husband, Robert del Balzo, in so convincing a manner, was once again unattached. Maria’s opinion of this prospective arrangement was of no concern to Louis of Taranto. Despite having taking the oath of homage to Joanna and Louis, Maria was still viewed with suspicion. To ensure her good behavior, all four of her daughters, any one of whom might one day inherit the throne, had been placed under Joanna’s guardianship, while the king of Naples kept control of their considerable assets himself. Still, as long as the duchess of Durazzo remained single, she posed a threat to the monarchy, as any potential husband could rally support from among the disaffected and make a claim to the throne of Naples through his wife. For this reason Louis of Taranto was determined to marry her safely to his brother Philip.

  This arrangement provoked vociferous opposition from the two remaining Durazzo brothers, Louis and Robert. Upon his return to the kingdom in
the summer of 1353, Louis of Durazzo, the oldest surviving member of Agnes of Périgord’s brood, tried to recover both his ancestral estate and his nieces’ property but was rebuffed. The youngest Durazzo brother, Robert, did not bother to return to the realm at all but went straight to the court of his powerful uncle in Avignon to see what could be done to improve his prospects. Robert of Durazzo was particularly hotheaded and pugnacious. Upon his release from captivity, not content with slipping away quietly like his brother, Robert had instead brazenly challenged Louis of Hungary to a duel, an unhelpful maneuver that exasperated the rest of the family and very nearly provoked renewed hostilities with that kingdom.

  The cardinal of Périgord immediately took up his Durazzo nephews’ cause, advising Innocent VI to prevent the marriage of Maria to Philip of Taranto and demanding that the pope try to force Joanna’s husband to relinquish Maria’s daughters’ assets to the care of their uncle Louis of Durazzo. Talleyrand also took steps to secure Robert of Durazzo’s fortune by engaging his young kinsman to a niece of the wealthy Giovanni Visconti of Milan, in the hopes that Robert could then use his wife’s money and her family’s military prowess to recover Naples for the Durazzos.

  Joanna’s official stance toward the Durazzos and her attitude in connection to the proposed marriage of her sister to Philip of Taranto is difficult to pinpoint, chiefly because her relationship with her own husband during this period was so pernicious. The death of their one remaining child, Françoise, had apparently shattered whatever fragile equilibrium existed between the couple in the months preceding their coronation. Although Louis of Taranto had promised in writing not to impinge on Joanna’s sovereignty, he experienced no such qualms when it came to imposing his authority over her in their private lives. Matteo Villani put it bluntly: “He honored the Queen little; whether this was his fault (and his responsibility was great) or that of the Queen, he often beat her as one would a lowly woman, to the great shame of the Crown.” Joanna herself complained in a letter to Innocent VI in December 1353 that she was “humiliated” and “anguished” in her relations with her husband. He cheated on her regularly and fathered at least three children by other women. Joanna, on the other hand, had no more pregnancies with Louis after Françoise. Although she clearly loathed him, this did not necessarily imply a severing of cohabitation. After he died, she refused to wed the king of France’s son, another Valois, on the grounds that marrying too closely within the family led to “sterility in her times of fertility” and the early death of children, an indication that she had continued trying to conceive an heir with Louis but had been unsuccessful.