Seeing his advantage slipping away, Louis of Durazzo, in combination with a group of Neapolitan noblemen still loyal to his house, again tried to launch a rebellion from his base in Apulia during the spring of 1360. With Niccolò out of the kingdom, Louis of Taranto himself led a force against the revolt. The king of Naples besieged and destroyed the castles of many Durazzo partisans, forcing his antagonists to surrender and sign a truce. Additionally, Louis of Durazzo was compelled to relinquish his only child, Charles, to the crown of Naples, to be brought up at Joanna’s court, as hostage to his father’s good behavior in the future. The boy was only three years old when he arrived at the Castel Nuovo, and the queen took to him immediately. Perhaps he reminded Joanna of her own small son, Charles Martel, who had been very close to this age the last time she had seen him, before war with the Hungarians had forced her to flee Naples without him.
Joanna’s problems, however, were inconsequential in comparison with those of her Valois cousins during this period. The queen of Naples’s rule, though challenged, was stable, and her kingdom essentially secure. France, on the other hand, was in danger of imploding. In addition to the scourge of the free companies, King John’s eldest son, Charles, faced threats to his authority from all sides including a peasant uprising in 1358, known as the Jacquerie, and a rebellion by his brother-in-law, Charles the Bad, who, though imprisoned before the battle of Poitiers, “found means to escape during these disturbances, and having collected an army, declared war against France.”
The political disintegration of his adversary’s kingdom did not go unnoticed by Edward III. Seeking to press his advantage, the king of England demanded huge territorial and financial concessions as a condition for releasing his royal hostage and renouncing any future claim to the throne of France. When the French refused the exorbitant terms, he prepared once again for war. “Edward, on receiving their answer, resolved that he would enter France with a more powerful army than ever, and remain there until the war should be honorably and satisfactorily ended. He made accordingly such great preparations, that the like were never seen before; large numbers of Germans, Bohemians, Brabanters, Flemings, Hainaulters, rich as well as poor, flocked to Calais to assist him; and Edward, on landing at Calais, lost no time in arranging this immense army, and in marching through Picardy and Rheims.” The selection of Rheims was no accident; the kings of France were traditionally crowned by the archbishop at the cathedral there. Edward wanted his own coronation ceremony, and all that stood between him and the kingship of France were the gates of the city.
But in his hurry to strike while his enemy was vulnerable, he had not taken account of the weather. Instead of waiting for spring, as was customary, Edward III’s forces landed in December 1359, very late in the year for an offensive. “The weather was bad and rainy; and, on arriving before Rheims, the English found no very comfortable quarters,” Froissart reported. “The men were miserably housed, and their horses hardly treated and ill fed; the last two or three years’ war had so destroyed the country that the ground had remained untilled; and so great was the scarcity of corn of all sorts, that parties were sent to forage as much as ten or twelve miles off.” Moreover, Rheims closed its doors firmly against the invader and refused to surrender. After about forty days of mucking around disconsolately in the cold and the mud, the king of England decided the prize was not worth the contest. After a few more months of pillage to the south and then more inclement weather near Chartres, including one notable hailstorm in April, Edward was ready to reopen peace negotiations.
On May 8, 1360, England and France signed the Treaty of Brétigny. In exchange for Edward’s definitive renunciation of the French crown, this agreement, while not meeting all his former demands, nonetheless ceded him sovereignty over Calais and the duchy of Aquitaine, which had not been in English hands for almost two centuries. King John’s ransom was fixed at three million écus (about L500,000), and the prisoner was finally released from captivity—although John’s sojourn in England was so agreeable, and his relations with his jailor so congenial, that this hardly seems an appropriate description of his condition. “When everything relative to the peace was concluded, the King of France left England for Calais. Here he was met by King Edward, who entertained him at a most magnificent supper in the castle… after supper the two kings took a final leave of each other in a most gracious and affectionate manner.” Then Edward sailed back to England.
The king sailed back—but the majority of his huge army, frustrated, hungry, deprived of spoils, and hankering for warfare now that the rain had cleared up and the warm weather had arrived, remained. Having absorbed the example set in the aftermath of the battle of Poitiers, the disgruntled mercenaries formed once more into ad hoc brigades intent on pillage and destruction. The largest and most notorious of these, the White Company, was led by an Englishman, Sir John Hawkwood, with a businesslike efficiency that would have done credit to the managing partner of one of the Florentine super-companies. Hawkwood did not allow the concepts of loyalty or professional contracts to interfere with his pursuit of wealth; he was willing to fight for anyone who paid, which often resulted in his switching allegiance from one day to the next as opposing sides entered into a bidding war for his services. The White Company, consisting of 3,500 horsemen and 2,000 foot soldiers, was even more fearsome than the free company formerly commanded by the Archpriest Arnaud de Cervole. And, just like its predecessor, this terrifying force set its sights on the wealth of the papal court. On December 28, 1360, Hawkwood and his men thundered into Pont-Saint-Esprit, just across the Rhône from Avignon, and occupied the town.
Again, Innocent VI frantically called for help, even preaching a crusade against the ruffians; again, the citizens of Avignon barricaded the city and posted twenty-four-hour watches along the ramparts; again, the situation was resolved by the extortion of a large sum of money from the papal treasury. At the end of March, Innocent agreed to pay Hawkwood the impressive sum of 14,500 gold florins to leave Provence and sent him off to Italy to employ the special talents of the White Company against Bernabò Visconti of Milan.
And so in the spring of 1361, Hawkwood’s evil mob, a peripatetic man-made pestilence, filed out of Pont-Saint-Esprit under the ennobling auspices of the church and lurched inexorably toward Italy, leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake.
So alarming was the specter of the White Company’s descent on Milan that it caused a ripple effect throughout Italy even before the actual event took place. Anxious to establish a line of defense in advance of the expected assault, Bernabò Visconti and his army withdrew precipitously from their conflict with Cardinal Albornoz in Bologna. With the decampment of their Milanese foes, the members of the large Hungarian army recruited to protect the church’s interests in Bologna suddenly found themselves lacking gainful employment, an unhappy state of affairs that was soon rectified by the soldiers banding together into yet another mercenary company, which then struck out on its own in search of easy spoils to the south. News of the availability of this formidable fighting force, eager to sell its services to the highest bidder, soon reached Louis of Durazzo, still smarting from his earlier defeat at the hands of Louis of Taranto. He invited Hanneken von Baumgarten, one of the leaders of the Hungarian Company, to a secret meeting at a Durazzo castle in Foggia, and a deal was struck. By March 1361, 2,500 members of the Hungarian Company were in Abruzzi, prepared to aid in a revolt against the crown.
This was the third time Louis of Durazzo had provoked a rebellion in seven years. Niccolò Acciaiuoli would later write of this period that Joanna and Louis of Taranto “had always to eat their fruits green… They have been so harassed by troubled circumstances and by continually changing and costly events, overt or covert, from internal or external causes, that as soon as a storm erased another appeared in its place immediately.” The situation was sufficiently perilous for Louis of Taranto, under whose jurisdiction matters relating to the military fell, to issue a proclamation summoning his vassals
to fight on the side of the crown. Both the king and queen of Naples felt an urgency to engage the enemy as soon as possible in order to minimize loss to the citizenry, who would undoubtedly be the object of pillage and looting so long as the Hungarian Company remained within the realm. “So our intention might be known to all,” Louis of Taranto wrote in an edict published throughout Naples, “we have promised solemnly by our King’s faith and word as witnessed by the magnificent Niccolò Acciaiuoli, Grand Seneschal… to do all we can to bring this battle about as will be shown by the event itself; as we prefer to give our life for our sheep, rather than wait about for the enemy’s ruin, which would then be harder to achieve because of the country’s ruin.”
Again the grand seneschal, recalled hurriedly from Bologna, took charge of the kingdom’s defense. On May 25, 1361, he managed, by a substantial payment in silver, to coax the Hungarian Company away from Louis of Durazzo’s service and into that of Joanna and Louis of Taranto’s. Although the bandits made for comically unreliable allies—much to their employers’ consternation, they changed allegiance back and forth between Louis of Durazzo and Louis of Taranto several times over the course of the next few months—Niccolò, working through diplomatic channels with the court of Hungary, eventually succeeded in having the mercenaries’ energies redeployed once more against Milan. In December 1361, the company permanently departed the kingdom and made its way north. Louis of Durazzo, deprived of the majority of his military support and pursued by a band of knights led by Niccolò’s son, the count of Melfi, sought refuge at the Sanctuary of Monte Sant’Angelo sul Gargano, a revered holy shrine, but the local population turned against him. Compelled to escape by night, he was captured and delivered to the royal court of Naples. On February 6, 1362, conceding defeat, he humbled himself before the king and queen and did obeisance to the crown. Then the last surviving brother of the once-powerful house of Durazzo was escorted to the royal prison at the Castel dell’Ovo, where he remained indefinitely at the crown’s pleasure.
The incarceration of Louis of Durazzo marked the end of the pitched struggle for ascendancy between the competing factions within Joanna’s family. Catherine of Valois’ ruthless scheme to place one of her sons on the throne of Naples, set in motion during her lifetime and then engineered after her death by her protégé Niccolò Acciaiuoli, seemed at long last to have definitively triumphed over the ambitions of her rival, Agnes of Périgord. With Louis of Taranto married to the queen, and his brother married to her younger sister, a succession favoring the house of Taranto over that of the Durazzo seemed assured.
But fate has a way of upsetting even the most obvious outcomes. Within two months of Louis of Durazzo’s imprisonment, to the terror of the general population, the plague suddenly returned to Naples, and this time claimed a royal victim. On May 24, 1362, at the age of thirty-five, Louis of Taranto, having contracted the fatal disease, received the final sacrament at the hands of a priest and died.
CHAPTER XIV
The Queen and Her Court
Although Louis of Taranto’s brutal behavior toward and infringement on his wife’s prerogative ensured that she did not mourn his passing—the queen would write to Innocent VI in June, officially informing him of the death of “such a husband”—Joanna was experienced enough by this time to anticipate that there would be challenges to her government once news of the king’s demise was made public. “Our position… [is] perhaps imperfectly protected by perverse intentions,” she observed to the pope in the same letter. Louis’ two brothers, Robert and Philip, would no doubt wish to influence the direction of the realm and to maintain the position and power they had achieved while their brother was alive; there was even a possibility that Philip, now legitimately married to Maria, would attempt a coup to replace Joanna with her sister and, citing precedence, have himself crowned king. To buy herself some time to prepare for any possible resistance, the queen kept her husband’s death a secret while she made arrangements to take full control of the court. Because plague was highly contagious, she gave orders for Louis’ corpse to be smuggled out of the Castel Nuovo under cover of night and deposited temporarily in the nearby church of San Pietro, so she could remain in the Castel Nuovo without fear of contracting the disease herself. Later, the king of Naples would be given a state funeral at the important church of San Domenico Maggiore before his body was finally buried beside that of his mother at a monastery near Avellino.
The swiftness of her husband’s illness and demise aided her conspiracy. Louis succumbed so quickly that no one outside the palace had any reason to suspect that anything was amiss. For ten days Joanna was able to shut herself up in the Castel Nuovo without detection while she considered her options. Louis of Taranto had left no will, saying, according to Matteo Villani, “that he owned nothing that he could personally bequeath, and that all belonged to Queen Joanna,” an indication that, in the end, the king recognized his wife’s superior rank and legitimacy. Perhaps regretting his harsh treatment of his cousin, however, with his dying breath he had issued an order freeing Louis of Durazzo from captivity. Joanna honored this request and liberated Louis of Durazzo from his cell, thereby securing her cousin’s gratitude. Having gained an ally against her husband’s formidable brothers, she then called a meeting of the Grand Council, and on June 5, in the presence of the archbishop of Naples and the most important barons and prelates in the realm, Joanna announced the king’s death and publicly assumed her throne as sole ruler of the kingdom, a state of affairs she evidently intended to perpetuate.
Robert and Philip of Taranto reacted to the news of Joanna’s widowhood with predictable antipathy. Although the queen had made clear her resolve to manage her government without interference, at thirty-six, she was still capable of childbirth and so would undoubtedly remarry. Since, as married men, neither Robert nor Philip was able to capitalize on this unique opportunity, it meant a new and powerful player would once more be introduced into Neapolitan politics. Above all, the brothers were adamant that Louis of Durazzo not be chosen to fill the vacancy left by the recently deceased king. According to a chronicler, “They obtained letters from her [Joanna] with the assurance that she would not” marry Louis, but even this attestation proved insufficient to allay their fears. “Still not content, they imposed a guard who then poisoned him with some concoction.”
Whether Louis of Durazzo, who died on either June 25 or July 22, 1362 (both dates are cited by chronicles), was actually poisoned or, weakened from his imprisonment, had succumbed to disease is unclear, but what is transparent is Joanna’s loathing of her deceased husband’s family and her desire to temper their influence within the realm. Upon Louis of Durazzo’s death, she made a point of singling out his five-year-old son, Charles of Durazzo, for special favor. Appointing an important nobleman as the boy’s seneschal, the queen also ordered that in the future little Charles was to be treated with “all honors due to the royal household and to maintain him in a royal state,” a signal of her intention to elevate the house of Durazzo at the expense of that of Taranto. Then, having thrown down the gauntlet, and recognizing that she was going to need all the help she could get (which adds credence to the poisoning story), she sent an urgent courier to Niccolò Acciaiuoli, notifying him of the late king’s death and requesting that he return at once to Naples.
Niccolò, who was at this time in Messina trying once again to subdue the Catalan opposition in Sicily, answered her summons immediately. “Hearing with great sadness (while in Messina) that conspiracies and leagues of neither small nor unimportant nobles had arisen in Naples at the expense of the Lady Queen, my mistress, I left the affairs of Sicily in good order in the hands of my son… and returned to Naples with four armed galleys, to give my most loyal support to my mistress and her needs, with no other limit than my life,” he later wrote rather melodramatically in his autobiography. “And in truth my return was much more profitable to the Lady Queen my mistress than to me, because my actions were so obvious and consistent, supported the just c
ause of my queen, and, with her other loyal followers, undertook whatever was necessary against her enemies’ actions, that violent hatreds, dangerous enmities and infinite jealousies befell me.”
The arrival of the grand seneschal, not to mention his four warships, in Naples that fall proved sufficient to forestall further mutinies on the part of the Taranto brothers. For the first time, Joanna was able to rule her kingdom without having to ward off a husband’s or her family’s attempts to interfere with her government. Alone in Europe, she represented a woman exercising absolute power. The archbishop of Naples, who was present at court and had ample opportunity to observe Joanna during the period immediately following the death of her husband, captured her mood at this time for posterity. “The queen delights in governing,” the archbishop wrote in a letter to the pope. “She wants to do everything because she has waited so long for this moment.”
The archbishop’s remark notwithstanding, Joanna had not been idle during the years preceding her husband’s death. As early as 1352, when she was just crowned, the queen had resumed the policy of perpetuating and legitimizing her own and her family’s image through public building and decoration in the Angevin tradition. She had begun by erecting a new church, intended as a reliquary to house some shards from the crown of thorns, in thanksgiving for her throne, just as her grandmother Sancia had ordered the construction of Santa Chiara after her own coronation. Also at this time, in June of 1352, the queen organized and attended a ceremony in which Sancia’s remains were removed to an elaborate tomb at the convent of Santa Croce before an august body of bishops and other church officials. Joanna, in describing this event in a letter to the pope, made an (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to obtain sanctity for her grandmother, citing the miracle that, upon the transfer, Sancia’s seven-year-old corpse was discovered “whole and not decaying, immune from rottenness and stench.”
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