Joanna’s own sanctuary, the church of Santa Maria Incoronata, was completed in the early 1360s. Although not constructed on the same grand scale as the vast monastery of Santa Chiara, the Incoronata was nonetheless an important addition to the city’s architecture. The queen made every effort to ensure the beauty of the interior, hiring Roberto Oderisi, a disciple of Giotto and one of the most celebrated masters of his day, to create the frescoes on the walls and ceiling. Giotto, the most revered artist in Italy during the first half of the fourteenth century, had been Robert the Wise’s court painter from 1328 to 1332. During his tenure at court, Giotto had taken the highly unusual step of including women in his depiction of famous heroes on the walls of the sala grande (the great hall) of the Castel Nuovo; this was clearly in recognition of Joanna’s having being named heir to the throne after the death of her father. An amusing but apocryphal legend has the eminent king in conversation with the equally renowned artist. “Whilst Giotto was engaged upon his work King Robert would often come and chat with him, for he appreciated his shrewd speeches as much as his art. ‘If I were you, Giotto,’ he remarked one summer day, ‘I would stop painting now it is so hot.’ ‘And so would I, Sire,’ replied the painter, ‘if I were you.’”
For Joanna, Roberto Oderisi created brilliant images of the seven sacraments using contemporary figures, including a scene depicting the marriage and coronation of the queen and Louis of Taranto, and another, painted after 1362, of the death of the king. In addition to the Incoronata, Joanna completed construction of the monastery of San Martino, a project originally undertaken by her father in 1325 but left unfinished at his death in 1328. The queen herself, as well as all the surviving members of the royal family and many influential barons of the court, attended the consecration of this monastery in 1369. The grandeur accompanying this ceremony is telling: Joanna’s ability to finish the monastery both honored her father’s memory and placed her in an unbroken line of powerful Angevin rulers. During this period the queen also erected another church, dedicated to Saint Anthony, to which was attached a hospital.
The gift of a hospital, rather than a monastery or nunnery, as would have been the preferred manner of largesse during King Robert’s reign, reflects an obvious attempt to cope with the recurring horror of the plague. The queen’s approach to public health care, particularly as it concerned the poor, was strongly influenced by the doctrine of benevolence practiced by the Spiritual Franciscans, a tradition handed down to her by her grandmother Sancia. Under Joanna, all licenced doctors and medical practitioners were obliged to treat the poor free of charge. This enlightened approach to the general welfare was uncommon for Europe. In nearby Florence, for example, “only the rich could call in a physician.”
The practice of medicine in Naples under Joanna was unique in other ways as well, owing in large part to the presence within the kingdom of the University of Salerno, the oldest and most respected medical school in Europe. As early as the eleventh century, this port city was celebrated as a center of learning. “Salerno then flourished to such an extent in the art of medicine that no illness was able to settle there,” boasted its archbishop in 1075; a hundred years later, a Spanish Jew traveling through Italy described Salerno as the place “where the Christians have schools of medicine.” As a result, the medical profession flourished in Naples, and between the years 1273 and 1409 a remarkable 3,670 medical licenses were issued within the kingdom, dwarfing those in other parts of Italy. Even more novel was the number of these licenses issued to women.
Again, this anomaly can be traced to the medical school at Salerno, which in the twelfth century produced a famous text dedicated to women’s health, the Trotula. There are strong indications that at least parts of the Trotula were authored by a woman, and that a woman actually taught at the medical school during this period. But it was was highly unusual for women to be licensed. Only four women matriculated as doctors in Florence in the fourteenth century, and two of these were daughters of doctors who “could not claim to be physicians in the strict sense, lacking doctorates.” From 1100 to 1400, the kingdom of France recognized seventy-four women as some form of physician, but a large percentage of these were untrained and unlicensed. England listed only eight women in eight centuries as “healers”; the crown of Aragon recognized none.
By contrast, in the fourteenth century alone, Naples conferred thirty-four medical licenses on twenty-four women. Since a test or inquiry of some sort was involved for each medical condition, this meant that some of the women obtained expertise in multiple specialties. The license issued to a woman named Raimonda da Taverna in 1345, for example, read: “The aforesaid Raimonda… has been examined by our surgeons… and has been found competent to cure the aforesaid illnesses [‘cancers,’ wounds and fistulas]. Although it is unsuitable for women to associate with men, lest they compromise their feminine modesty and fear the blame of forbidden transgression, [nonetheless] they have a legal right to practice medicine.” Thirteen of the twenty-four women licensed as practitioners were specifically authorized to treat other women, although they were apparently not limited to standard female ailments. Some of those who matriculated were trained to perform surgery.
Historians, confronted with the anomaly of so many licensed female physicians in fourteenth-century Naples have struggled to explain the data. “Indeed, the relative independence of southern Italian women practitioners… may have been fostered in part by heightened southern Italian concerns about the modesty of female patients at the hands of male doctors.” The hypothesis of an excessively demure female population would seem to be challenged by Boccaccio’s eyewitness descriptions of the licentious behavior of the upper classes, and certainly Charles of Durazzo had no such qualms about having a male physician examine his mother when she fell ill in the summer of 1345. Another, more plausible explanation for the large number of female doctors in southern Italy might just be that, during the period in question, the kingdom of Naples was ruled by a queen.
Joanna had also made an effort to reestablish the ambience of high culture for which Naples had been known during her grandfather’s reign. To achieve this meant luring to court at least one of the handful of celebrated scholars or writers who constituted intellectual society in Italy during this period. Petrarch, the reigning luminary, was the obvious choice, more particularly as, to the great scandal of his friends, the poet laureate had been living off the hospitality of the ruthless Visconti family of Milan since 1353. “I would wish to be silent,” wrote an aghast Boccaccio when he first learned of his friend’s new patrons, “but I cannot hold my peace… My indignation obliges me to speak out. How has Silvanus [Petrarch] acted? He has forgotten his dignity; he has forgotten all the language he used to hold respecting the state of Italy… and his love of liberty; and he would imprison the Muses in that court. To whom can we now give our faith, when Silvanus, who formerly pronounced the Visconti a cruel tyrant, has now bowed himself to the yoke which he once so boldly condemned! How has the Visconti obtained this truckling, which neither King Robert, nor the pope, nor the emperor, could ever obtain?” As early as 1360, both Joanna and Niccolò, an accepted member of Petrarch’s highly selective circle of correspondents, tried to coax the scholar to Naples, offering him the prestigious position of royal secretary, but the poet, fleeing the return of the plague, chose instead to settle at Venice. Casting around for another distinguished candidate to fill the post, the court instead settled on Niccolò’s old acquaintance Boccaccio.
Lacking a rich and powerful benefactor like his friend Petrarch, Boccaccio was living in poverty in Certaldo, about twenty miles southwest of Florence. The Decameron, his masterwork, a collection of one hundred stories told by a fictitious group of aristocrats fleeing the plague, had been finished in 1351 to popular acclaim and had made its author’s name if not his fortune. The book was held in such high esteem in Naples that Niccolò’s own nephew begged for a copy from his cousin the archbishop-elect of Patras in a July 1360 letter: “Reverend Domine,
here is Monte Bellandi writing to his wife that she is to give you the book of the tales of messer Giovanni Boccaccio, belonging to me; wherefore I beseech you that you have it delivered to you; and if the Archbishop of Naples has not left I beg that you send it by him—by his servitors, that is—and he is not to give it to Messere Niccolò Acciaiuoli nor to any other person than myself. And if the Archbishop has departed, have it given on my behalf to Cenni Bardella… otherwise, do you send it to me yourself by one who you believe will deliver it to my hand; and do be most careful that messer Neri shall not get hold of it, for then never would I have it… and do be careful not to lend it to anyone because there are many who would be dishonest.” Despite The Decameron’s many admirers, however, Boccaccio’s standing as an intellectual and a man of letters was no match for that of Petrarch, nor even of the previous Neapolitan royal secretary Zanobi, who had succeeded Petrarch as poet laureate and subsequently advanced to apostolic secretary under Innocent VI. Boccaccio was even more inferior in reputation to Acciaiuoli, whose many diplomatic, political, and military achievements had put him on a familiar footing with popes and heads of state, causing even Petrarch to address him with fawning servitude. “With my entire soul I reverently embrace you, O man most rare in every age and unique in ours, and legally lay claim to you as to a discovered treasure… When you offer your greatness to a man of my insignificance… you honor not me but yourself, thereby seeming perfect in every respect,” Petrarch wrote to Niccolò by way of congratulations for the grand seneschal’s victory over Sicily. Still, the kingdom—or rather, Niccolò, to whose household this position was assigned—needed a secretary, and in the summer of 1362, on the recommendation of Francesco Nelli, a mutual friend, an invitation to accept this posting was extended to Boccaccio. The author of the Decameron confirmed this appointment by writing to Nelli that he had received an “epistle written by the hand of Maecenas [Acciaiuoli],” asking him “to share with him his joys.”
Boccaccio had every reason to be suspicious of the grand seneschal’s invitation. Two decades earlier, the writer had been forced by financial necessity to leave an idyllic existence in aristocratic Naples and withdraw to bourgeois Florence. In his desperation to find a way back to the kingdom, Boccaccio had turned to his good friend Niccolò, who was then, like himself, a young Florentine of modest origins. “Niccolò… I am writing you nothing about my being in Florence unwillingly, for that would have to be written with tears rather than ink: only this can I tell you, that, just as Alexander changed the ill fortune of the pirate Antigonus to good, so am I hoping that mine will be changed by you,” he pleaded in a letter of August 28, 1341, the first of a long series of entreaties to Acciaiuoli to use his influence to obtain a position at court for Boccaccio, all of which were ignored. Now, however, it seemed that his hopes would finally be realized. Nelli too had written, urging Boccaccio to accept, to which the writer replied: “Finally thy epistle removed every doubt from me, till then untrusting, and, by thy Maecenas’ leave be it said, in thee I believed.”
At the end of October 1362, Boccaccio packed up his meager belongings—the greater part of which was represented by his library, among which were two new books that the grateful secretary had written specially to dedicate to Niccolò and his sister as gifts—and left Certaldo for Naples. His reception by Acciaiuoli provides a glimpse of the grand seneschal’s behavior and the workings of his household uncorrupted by the filter of self-aggrandizement so carefully cultivated by Niccolò in his official memoirs. Boccaccio’s new employer was then at one of his grand estates in Campania, where the secretary now journeyed at his own expense. He found the grand seneschal at home, but when Boccaccio attempted to greet him, “no differently was I received by your Maecenas [Acciaiuoli] than if I were returning from a jaunt to the towns or countryside near Naples: not with smiling face nor friendly embrace and gracious words; on the contrary he barely extended his right hand as I entered his house. Surely no happy augury this!” Boccaccio wrote soon after to Nelli. The situation went immediately from bad to worse, for, although the villa was grand and filled with “glittering things,” the royal secretary found himself quartered in the “bilge,” a tiny, filthy room with holes in the walls and a cot “just then brought up from the nether regions by a mule driver, and half-covered by a stinking bit of rug. In this self-same bilge with its disreputable cot is kept the domestic ware, the splendid service for dining.” As for Niccolò himself, Boccaccio asserted that he
frequently goes into closed assembly and there, so that it may appear that he has much to do with the serious affairs of the Kingdom, he places doorkeepers, according to the royal customs, at the exits of the room, and no one who asks for him is allowed to enter… and in the closet, by his command a seat was placed, for there, no differently than on his majesty’s throne, he sits… amid very discordant sounds of the belly and the expelling of the stinking burden of the guts, high Councils are held and the proper business of the Kingdom is disposed of… The simpletons who wait in the courtyard, think that he, admitted to the Consistory of the Gods, in company with them holds solemn Parliament upon the universal state of the republic.
Boccaccio spurned the bilge and stayed instead with a kind friend, but soon after his arrival, his benefactor decided to move again, this time to his elegant estate near Baia, and his secretary and all his household were obliged to move with him. Again, Boccaccio was placed in quarters humiliating to his position—a young Neapolitan nobleman of his acquaintance was so appalled by The Decameron author’s sleeping arrangements that he had his servants transport one of his own beds to Niccolò’s house for Boccaccio’s use. Worse, no sooner had the disillusioned writer dragged his library and luggage to this new location than the grand seneschal and all his retainers, forgetting all about the new secretary, relocated again, this time journeying to the royal court of Naples. Boccaccio was left “alone, with the load of books… on the shore together with the manservant… without the necessities of life and without any counsel.” He waited more than a month, living at the house of a poor friend, while “he [Acciaiuoli] pretended not to notice” before finally quitting the kingdom and his position in March 1363, “to be no longer tormented by that Maecenas… having taken leave of the Great Man with what moderation he was capable of.”
Joanna was no doubt kept in ignorance of the reasons for Boccaccio’s disgruntlement; the queen was extremely busy with diplomatic matters during this period, and this was not the sort of information Niccolò would have been apt to impart. Most likely, she was simply told that the writer was a “man of glass,” as his friend Nelli chided him in a letter dated April 22, 1363, and had decided to leave. Certainly the queen did not share her grand seneschal’s disdain for his former friend, as she tried to coax Boccaccio to her court again in 1370 when he came to visit his friend Hugo of San Severino. At that time, Joanna went so far as to offer to subsidize his stay in Naples so he would be free to devote himself to his work. “The wonderful man [Hugo] was caring [for me]… with all his powers, so that when help arrived from the most serene majesty Joanna, queen of Jerusalem and Sicily, he placed me in leisure among the peaceful Parthenopeii [Neapolitans],” Boccaccio remembered later in gratitude. When the writer graciously declined Joanna’s offer, “once again the queen made a great effort to hold him,” although again he refused.
History has a way of settling old scores, however. Despite his many undeniable diplomatic and military achievements and his attempt to perpetuate his fame beyond his death, which included the construction of a vast monastery in Florence where he was buried, Niccolò Acciaiuoli never achieved the lasting fame he desired. Instead, the immortality of universal recognition would be reserved for the impoverished, slighted author of The Decameron, whose haunting imagery and brilliant evocation of an era produced a masterpiece that would remain in print for nearly seven centuries.
In the months succeeding Louis of Taranto’s death, Joanna’s principal concern was not with art and culture but with matrimony. Remaining
single was not an option for the queen of so desirable a kingdom as Naples, and Joanna needed an heir. The animosity and ambition of her late husband’s brothers threatened her rule internally. External forces, like maintaining her hard-won sovereignty over Sicily and the necessity of keeping the kingdom’s boundaries secure from the brutality of the free companies, demanded that she move quickly to take a husband who could command an army. Joanna was at no loss for suitors; on the contrary, she was so beset by offers that her main difficulty was in fending off potential candidates as diplomatically as possible. King John of France, seeing such a prize as the throne of Naples suddenly become available, sent a series of ambassadors to Naples in August, including the bishop of Nevers and the French royal secretary, to coax Joanna into marrying his youngest son, Philip, just twenty years old. The Visconti family of Milan was no less eager to add southern Italy to the roster of their possessions.
The queen’s refusal of Ghibelline Milan was supported by the papacy, but the French proposal had church backing and had to be treated with delicacy. Joanna did not want such a young husband, and she worried that France might try to absorb Naples, which above all she wished to remain an independent monarchy. In a letter to the pope she emphasized the kingdom’s need of obtaining someone capable of “governing wisely and of defending the kingdom in a manly fashion.” To put John off, she wrote thanking him for the great honor he thought of bestowing on her, but regretfully declined Philip’s proposal on the grounds that matrimony between blood relations inhibited conception. Her union with the son of Catherine of Valois had already left her kingdom devoid of heirs, a vacuum the queen blamed for the realm’s many misfortunes, including “the conflicting wishes of the nobles and of the people, seditions, invasions, pathetic mutilations imposed to certain people, innumerable ransoms and countless tragedies and other evils too great to recount.” Just to make sure there was no confusion about her position on this matter, Joanna also informed John’s ambassadors that she had taken an oath to retire to a nunnery rather than perpetuate the misery of her infertility by wedding another member of the house of Valois.
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