Thus was the stage set for one of the great triumphs of Joanna’s long career. In December, the queen of Naples herself sailed to Sicily. On December 24, 1356, she and Louis of Taranto, together with their court, entered Messina, and the very next day the pair were officially installed as king and queen of Sicily. Afterward, the new sovereigns received the homage of the native aristocracy, the vast majority associated with their allies from within the Latin faction, although one of Frederick III’s own cousins changed parties and did obeisance to Joanna and Louis.
The planned incorporation of Sicily into the kingdom of Naples, painstakingly negotiated in the months preceding the coronation ceremony, demonstrated acute political sophistication by both sides. Despite having endured more than half a century of conflict, Joanna’s government had the good sense to treat its former enemy with respect and generosity. The Sicilians, as represented by the Latin faction, had asked that Joanna and Louis return to Sicily every three years in order to have a presence on the island, and also that leading members of the Latin party be brought in as counselors to the kingdom of Naples, so that the island would become integrated into the realm and not remain simply an appendage. The crown acceded to these stipulations, asking only, on Niccolò’s recommendation, that the court at Naples reserve the right to appoint officials to rule the island in their stead, as the royal seneschal did in Provence. The Latin party agreed to this condition provided that all administrators were chosen from within its ranks. This left the Catalan faction effectively disenfranchised, which ensured its perpetual opposition, but to expect otherwise was asking for a significantly more enlightened perspective than the governments of the Middle Ages were generally capable of exercising.
On Christmas Day of 1356, Joanna achieved the long-desired reclamation of the island of Sicily, the cherished goal that had eluded her father, her grandfather, and her great-grandfather before her. Only Charles of Anjou, the esteemed patriarch of the family, had stood where Joanna now stood, had received the homage of the native population as the queen did now, was acknowledged sovereign as she was so acknowledged. Despite enormous outlays of money and troops, no one else in her family had even come close. On a personal level, the magnitude of the triumph must have been overwhelming, for there was no better way to justify both her reign and her grandfather’s faith in her than by having brought Sicily back into the kingdom.
Moreover, this victory for the queen of Naples stood in sharp contrast to other, similarly momentous, events of that year. At almost exactly the same time that Joanna was recovering Sicily, her cousin, the Valois king of France, was undertaking his own military campaign against his habitual enemy, the king of England, with considerably less gratifying results.
Philip VI, Catherine of Valois’ brother, had died in 1350 and was succeeded by his son, John II, known, inexplicably, since neither his temper nor his administration justified the sobriquet, as “the Good.” King John was already thirty-one and married with five children when he ascended the throne, which ought to have introduced an element of stability to the royal transition; unfortunately, John’s feeble judgment belied his maturity. In the first months of his reign, the new king took a number of questionable initiatives, including rashly executing the constable of France in order to replace him with one of his own favorites, and devaluing the money supply in an attempt to restock the royal coffers—policies that did not endear him to his subjects.
Still, he might have muddled through were it not for his cousin, Charles, king of Navarre, whose nickname, “the Bad,” was, by contrast, perfectly apt. Charles was young, charming, talented, and ambitious, but he was also cunning, volatile, and treacherous. As a direct descendant of Philip IV, he had a claim to the French throne and considered the Valois to be usurpers. Not satisfied with his own relatively insignificant domain, Charles made no secret of his desire to replace his cousin as king of France, or, failing that, to increase his own possessions and prestige as much as possible at John’s expense. John tried to buy him off in 1351 by marrying his eight-year-old daughter Jeanne to the nineteen-year-old Charles, but the king of Navarre interpreted John’s policy of appeasement as weakness and moved to confront him more directly. In 1354, Charles the Bad openly rebelled by brazenly murdering John’s new constable of France, Charles of Spain. “Know that it was I who, with the help of God, had Charles of Spain killed,” he wrote coolly to an astonished Pope Innocent VI. When John retaliated by claiming the king of Navarre’s estates forfeit, Charles the Bad invited Edward III of England to raise an army and meet him in Normandy, promising to augment the English military effort with his own troops and to use his Norman castles as a base of operations in order to strike a blow against John “as he shall never recover from.”
England was only too happy to answer Charles’s summons. In 1355, two expeditions sailed for the western coast of France. The first, led by the king’s son Edward, the Black Prince, landed at Bordeaux that summer with a thousand knights and two thousand longbowmen; the second, commanded by the duke of Lancaster, made for Normandy some months later with three thousand cavalry and two thousand archers. On and off for the better part of a year the Black Prince terrorized the civilian population, ravaging towns and villages and looting everything in sight. “My lord, as to news from these parts,” wrote Sir John Wingfield, who accompanied Edward on this campaign, in a December 23, 1355, letter to the bishop of Winchester, “you will be glad to know that my lord [the Black Prince] has raided the county of Armagnac and taken several walled towns there, burning and destroying them, except for certain towns which he garrisoned. Then he went into the viscounty of Rivière, and took a good town called Plaisance, the chief town of the area, and burnt it and laid waste the surrounding countryside. Then he went into the county of Astarac, and took several towns and had them burnt and destroyed, and the countryside likewise… Then he entered the county of Lisle and took some of the walled towns and had a good number of good towns through which he passed burnt and destroyed.”
Such extreme provocation could not be ignored. In April 1356, King John finally had Charles the Bad arrested and thrown in prison. John then readied himself for war. “He gathered all the forces of the kingdom of France; there was neither duke nor count nor baron of note whom he did not summon, and all assembled at Chartres. He brought together a noble army; according to the list he had more than ten thousand,” wrote Chandos Herald, a chronicler of the period. By now thoroughly alarmed, Innocent VI dispatched his two most experienced and powerful cardinals, Talleyrand of Périgord and Guy of Boulogne, to intercept the antagonists, negotiate a truce, and so prevent war. The French army marched south from Chartres; Edward and his men moved north from Bordeaux; the cardinals hurried west from Avignon. On September 18, 1356, these three groups met at Poitiers.
The papal emissaries did the best they could, particularly the cardinal of Périgord, who convinced the belligerents to postpone battle “out of reverence for holy Church and in order to save the shedding of Christian blood,” according to the English chronicler Geoffrey le Baker. Talleyrand then used the agreed-upon hiatus to engage in some last-minute diplomacy, riding back and forth between the French and English camps. “The battle that day was stopped by the Cardinal of Périgord,” wrote the chronicler Jean Froissart, “who earnestly endeavored to bring about a peace, but in vain, for neither party desired it.” Instead, both sides used the recess to prepare more thoroughly for conflict: the English army obtaining a much-needed rest, while “the French army increased by a thousand men at arms and many more common people.”
The next day, peace negotiations having failed, the battle was joined. Conditions were similar to those at Crécy in 1346. Again, the English forces were overwhelmingly outnumbered. “The whole army of the prince, including everyone, did not amount to 8,000; while the French, counting all sorts of persons, were upward of 60,000 combatants, among whom were more than 3,000 knights,” asserted Froissart (although in reality the overall number of French soldiers was probably closer t
o 16,000). Again, the English, in the instrument of the longbow, held the technological advantage, a superiority evidently recognized by Edward, who made a special point of addressing his archers separately from the main body of the army. “Occasion, time, and dangers maketh of fearefull men very strong and stoute, and doth many times of dull witted men make wittie: honour also, and love of the countrey, and the desire of the rich spoyle of the Frenchmen, doth stirre you up,” cried the Black Prince in an attempt to rouse this critical unit to the task at hand. Again, the English army fought with discipline and coherence while the French king deployed his troops chaotically, which allowed Edward’s men to ambush and pick off the enemy in a piecemeal fashion, thereby effectively negating the numerical superiority of King John’s forces.
Still, both sides battled valiantly, and no one showed more courage than the king of France, who, with his youngest son at his side, remained in the thick of the fighting throughout. Finally, after some seven hours of struggle, it became apparent that Edward’s arrows and strategy had prevailed. A young knight fighting on the side of the English, seeing the guard surrounding the king of France set upon by a last, decisive offensive by the Black Prince, called to John: “‘Surrender yourself, surrender yourself, or you are a dead man.’ The King, who found himself very disagreeably situated… then gave him his right-hand glove, and said, ‘I surrender myself to you.’”
The capture of the king caused great consternation among what remained of his forces and resulted in a general exodus of the French from the field. Among those who fled (ignominiously, in the populace’s eyes) was John’s eldest son, Charles; his youngest, Philip, only fourteen at the time of the battle, was apprehended with his father. Edward treated his royal prisoners with exquisite courtesy, escorting them to England with great fanfare. The king of France was soon installed at Windsor Castle, where, Froissart observed, “he was treated with the greatest possible attention, and hunting, hawking, and other amusements were provided for him,” while he awaited payment of the crippling ransom demanded of his subjects as the condition of his release.
Thousands who had fought on the side of the French were not as lucky as the king; the countryside surrounding Poitiers was littered with the banners and bodies of those killed, among whom were some 2,426 knights and noblemen. This annihilation of the French aristocracy and their allies produced a strange footnote to Neapolitan history. The ill-luck of Robert of Durazzo, which had previously caused him to spend so much of his life in one dungeon or another, had persisted, and the young man, evicted from Avignon the year before, had arrived in France just in time to be recruited into the service of King John and marched to Poitiers. He was slain in the heat of battle during a particularly fearsome skirmish with Edward’s forces. The Black Prince himself recognized the body and had Robert’s corpse placed upon a shield. “Present it… to the cardinal of Périgord, saying, ‘I salute him by that token,’” ordered Edward, who had noticed that members of Talleyrand’s suite, although supposedly neutral, had fought that day on the side of the French, by way of a grim jibe.
Fate having dispensed with yet another of Joanna’s most dangerous opponents, the male members of the Durazzo family dwindled to one last survivor, Louis.
To cement her rule in Sicily, Joanna continued to reside in Messina with her court for a further eight months. A local government loyal to the new king and queen was established and efforts made to rout the Catalan faction from its remaining strongholds on the island, but the opposition party, long entrenched, remained exceedingly difficult to eradicate. The Neapolitan fleet attempted a raid on Catania at the end of May 1357 but had to turn back before reaching its target due to hostility along the shore, which threatened supply lines. Then, on June 29, Niccolò’s galleys were ambushed near the coast by a Catalan force that drew heavily on the population from just outside Messina. Although the fleet managed to escape to the safety of the harbor, Joanna recognized the need for a diplomatic initiative to supplement the military effort. She began a series of negotiations with Frederick III, which led directly to the offer of a marriage alliance—the Angevins’ preferred method of integrating rivals into the realm—with Margherita of Durazzo, Maria’s youngest daughter. This transaction highlights the political importance of the crown’s continuing to act as guardian for Maria’s daughters—with no children of her own, Joanna’s nieces, as the only direct descendants of Robert the Wise, were irreplaceable as diplomatic bargaining chips.
Holding on to the girls and their assets, however, only served to further alienate and incense Louis of Durazzo, who continued to petition Innocent VI for redress. But the outcome of the battle of Poitiers had significantly altered the political landscape. The king of France was a prisoner of the English and in his place was his eighteen-year-old son, Charles, weak and inexperienced, and at the mercy of conflicting forces unleashed by the military disaster. The combination caused by the absence of strong political leadership and the presence of large numbers of mercenaries left over from the battle with no discernable employment, resulted in, among other social evils, the formation of yet more bands of roving criminals. The most notorious of these was a free company of some four thousand ruffians led by Arnaud de Cervole, nicknamed “the Archpriest,” a soldier of fortune and native of the county of Périgord. By May 1357, the Archpriest’s forces had pillaged and rampaged their way across France and were preparing to invade Provence.
Innocent was frantic. Matteo Villani claimed that Talleyrand, seeking to strike out against Louis of Taranto for the injustice done to his nephews, was behind the attack, but this seems unlikely, as the cardinal of Périgord was in England trying to arrange for the ransom of King John at this time. The pope himself believed the Archpriest to be working for King John’s son Charles and wrote numerous letters to the prince as well as to his father to try to halt the invasion, but these were in vain. Arnaud’s forces attacked in July, murdering, burning, and looting much of the county. Concerned, Joanna and her court returned to Naples from Sicily, and the pope had the gates of Avignon reinforced and hired his own mercenaries to guard the papal court. Additionally, that autumn, Philip of Taranto’s marriage to Maria was hastily sanctioned by Innocent. This was no time to quibble over niceties with Louis of Taranto, the titular overlord of Provence—the pope needed all the allies he could get.
But by September 1358, Arnaud had been bribed with a thousand florins from the papal coffers to withdraw his forces permanently from Provence, and in April of the following year the cardinal of Périgord had returned to Avignon from his diplomatic mission abroad and renewed his appeals on behalf of his sole remaining nephew. Once again under the cardinal’s influence, Innocent VI was reminded that Louis of Taranto had in fact not returned control of Maria’s daughters’ assets to Louis of Durazzo, as he had been instructed by the papacy, and that the crown of Naples was still in arrears on the annual tribute. The pendulum abruptly swung back in Louis of Durazzo’s favor. The pope renewed the sentence of interdict over Naples and, by letters of April 21, 1359, went so far as to name a legate, Cardinal Gil Albornoz, to take control of the kingdom.
Albornoz was a polarizing and feared figure in Italy. Where Clement had been content to cede effective control over the Papal States to the local baronage so long as a steady stream of bribes made its way to Avignon, Innocent VI was far more aggressive in his approach toward church overlordship of the patrimony. As early as 1353, the Holy See had ordered Albornoz to Italy and instructed him to wrest authority from the various indigenous lords who had seized power during Clement’s somewhat lax regime to ensure that official church government and income were once again enforced in the towns surrounding Rome. In the ensuing six years, Albornoz, who had been supplied by the pope with a small militia supplemented by local troops, had achieved no small measure of success. Within three years he had recaptured Orvieto, Viterbo, Romagna, the March of Ancona, and Rimini, and his reputation as a military commander and force to be reckoned with soared. By 1359, control had been reestab
lished sufficiently in the Papal States that the cardinal was able to turn his attention to the growing territorial threat from Milan, which, under the aggressive leadership of Bernabò Visconti, had expanded its military campaign as far south as Bologna.
Taking on Bernabò, a brutal warmonger prone to both violent rages and deviant sexual activity, required significantly more reinforcements than Albornoz had at his disposal, but the cardinal was willing to employ villains from within the free company who were still in Tuscany terrorizing the local population. Albornoz’s policy, however, ran contrary to that of Florence, which, sick of the scourge of criminality, had appealed to Naples to help rid Italy of the free companies. When Joanna and Louis of Taranto sided with Florence instead of Albornoz on this question, Innocent punished them by appointing the cardinal legate of Naples.
The resentment and wrath of the royal court at this demeaning tactic was as pronounced as it had been when Clement VI had appointed Aimeric, but Joanna was no longer a political neophyte; also, Innocent had been in power long enough that by this time she understood him. With Clement, she would have sent warm regards and a sumptuous bribe, but Innocent preferred taxes and deference, so Niccolò Acciaiuoli was hastily recalled from Achaia, where he had gone to look after his and Robert of Taranto’s interests after his triumph in Sicily. Dispatched to Avignon, he brought as much of the derelict tribute as she and Louis of Taranto could muster. Acciaiuoli, by this time an experienced diplomat, arrived in March 1360 and succeeded in having the legate revoked and the interdict lifted by May. The pope was so impressed with the Neapolitan envoy that he even presented Niccolò with the Golden Rose and sent him off to Milan as a papal ambassador, to see if war with Albornoz could be averted. Niccolò tried his usual tactics, offering Bernabò Visconti one hundred thousand florins to surrender Bologna to church authority, but Bernabò refused. Despite his failure, Innocent’s evident regard for Niccolò greatly increased the grand seneschal’s reputation as a statesman throughout Italy, a perception he quickly turned into tangible gain. When, on October 15, 1360, Albornoz succeeded in taking Bologna with the help of a free company and a seven-thousand-man army recruited by Innocent from Louis of Hungary at the last minute, Niccolò was named rector of the city in recognition of his service.
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