But the king of France was not easily put off and sought to force the union on Joanna by putting pressure on her through the Holy See, which was in a state of flux due to the death of Innocent VI. The old man, weakened and depressed by a series of foreign policy failures, had expired on September 12, 1362. For all his virtuous commitment to reform, Innocent’s bellicose approach to his opponents had left the church far less wealthy and powerful than it had been under his corrupt predecessor, Clement VI, a state of affairs that did not go unnoticed by the cardinals. In their first ballot, taken on September 22, the Sacred College elected Clement’s brother, Hugues Roger, by a margin of fifteen to five.
Hugues, however, did not want to be pope, and emphatically declined the honor, forcing another vote. Again, the rivalry between cardinals Talleyrand of Périgord and Guy of Boulogne ensured that neither of the two could claim a majority, and the papal ambitions of both men died with this election. Instead, on September 28, the Sacred College, casting about for someone acceptable, chose another older, compromise candidate, fifty-one-year-old Guillaume of Grimoard, the abbot of Saint Victor of Marseilles.
Guillaume happened to be fulfilling the post of papal nuncio to the court of Naples at the time of his election. Informed by confidential envoys of the cardinals’ decision, he hurried back to Avignon. He was crowned on November 6, 1362, taking the name of Urban V.
The elevation of the abbot of Saint Victor to the papacy was fortuitous for Joanna. Her relationship with Innocent VI, whom the queen had never met personally, had been prejudiced from the first by Innocent’s evident dislike (fully reciprocated) of Louis of Taranto, which had resulted in her kingdom suffering through years of interdict and unnecessary papal intervention. The cornerstone of Angevin foreign policy had always been a partnership with the papacy, but while her husband was alive, Joanna had never been able to establish the strong, mutual, working alliance with Innocent that she had had with Clement. The queen had been forced to rely on a surrogate, her grand seneschal, whose efforts, while ultimately helpful, were also self-serving. When it came to the papal court, Niccolò was always more interested in promoting himself than he was in forging a genuine understanding between Naples and Avignon.
All this changed with the election of Urban. Between Joanna and her former nuncio existed a mutual respect and sympathy born of familiarity with each other’s personality and religious and cultural perspectives. Although personally austere like his predecessor—throughout his tenure, Urban held firmly to the discipline of his monastic order, including eschewing traditional papal garb in favor of a simple monk’s habit and sleeping on the bare floor—the new pope’s temperament was far more easygoing, attractive, and obliging than Innocent’s. When dealing with supplicants, Urban’s first choice was to accede as much as possible to everyone’s requests; in this his approach to his duties was reminiscent of Clement VI’s (although he did not have Clement’s predilection for graft). Urban was also exceedingly generous and a great patron of the arts. As pope, he improved his former abbey in Marseilles, personally supervising the work of the architects and decorating the church with fine tapestries and religious objects cast in gold and adorned with precious jewels. He built a cathedral and priory in southern France, among other projects. His commitment to letters and learning was no less passionate. Urban actively supported universities and students and even founded a school of music. Petrarch admired him and wrote him fawning letters later in his career.
That Urban was someone with whom the queen felt comfortable was evident from the very beginning of his pontificate. Before he was even enthroned, she asked for official permission to remarry and was rewarded with letters bearing his consent, issued on November 7, the day after his coronation. According to Matteo Villani, when King John of France subsequently arrived in Avignon on November 20 to pay his respects to the new pope, and immediately put forward his son Philip as a candidate for marriage with Joanna, Urban at first promised to pursue the matter “as long as the prince would reside in the kingdom, took the oath, and paid its dues to the church, and that the queen, whom he would exhort, would agree.” But the queen most vehemently did not agree. Responding to a November 29 papal letter, in which Urban observed that refusal of her French cousin’s suit might be harmful to herself and her kingdom, Joanna flashed back: “After all, the decision to marry is free, and I can’t see why this should no longer be the case at the expense of my freedom… I beg your Holiness as respectfully as I can to forgive my thoughtlessness for my excessive and possibly offensive words, but this is a topic which incites me to express my thoughts undiminished… I hope that I have taken such counsel in this that my posterity will be fully preserved in the blood of my royal house, far from (and I would rather die) passing it on to other nations,” she concluded passionately.
In fact, the queen, forced by the pressure from France to act quickly, had already made her choice. On December 14, without waiting for Urban’s response, Joanna officially committed herself through emissaries to wed James IV, king of Majorca, son of Sancia’s nephew James III, who had succeeded to the throne of Majorca when Sancia’s brother Sancho died in 1324. It was James III who, having lost his kingdom to the crown of Aragon, had come to seek papal aid in 1348 at exactly the same time that Joanna had stood trial before Clement VI; James III to whom Joanna had lent her fleet in 1348 in gratitude for his having championed her cause with the pope. The future James IV, twelve years old at the time, had been with his father in Avignon; presumably, Joanna met him there.
The queen of Naples might have kept her Provençal ships for all the good they had done her cousin. In 1349, having acquired an army to go with his borrowed fleet, James III, accompanied by his son, had launched an attack against his Aragonese enemies in Majorca. This invasion failed spectacularly. The king was killed and his son, James IV, was captured and imprisoned, remaining “shut up for the next fourteen years in an iron cage.” He finally managed to slip away in 1362, just in time to marry Joanna by proxy on December 14. The timing of his breakout is coincidental enough to suggest that the court of Naples may have had something to do with his escape.
For Joanna, at least on paper, James IV of Majorca had all the attributes she was looking for in a husband. She would not have to worry about his being envious of her title and have to placate him by raising him to the crown of Naples, as she had had to do with both Andrew and Louis of Taranto. James was already a king, and therefore of equal rank to his wife. Moreover, he brought his own kingdom (albeit one that for the moment was ruled by someone else) to the marriage, a kingdom he was absolutely committed to regaining, so he would not feel the need to rule hers. At twenty-seven, he was the perfect age to lead her armies, not so young that he would not be listened to and not too old to fight himself. He could keep both her brothers-in-law at bay and her boundaries secure. He was not a blood relation, yet an alliance with Majorca was completely in keeping with Angevin tradition, as established by her grandfather, and added the legitimacy of history to her reign. Should he recover his kingdom with her help, as she clearly expected him to do, he would be the perfect ally to defend her dominion over Sicily and buffer Naples from the acquisitive tendencies of the crown of Aragon. Niccolò Acciaiuoli, who was hardly a political neophyte and had a vested interest in maintaining Neapolitan authority in Sicily, also approved of this choice.
The king of Majorca had every reason to embrace this alliance as well. After spending so much of his youth in hopeless captivity, he suddenly found himself free and paired to a provocative woman who was desired throughout Europe for her large and strategically located realm and who could afford him the means to revenge himself on his enemies.
Joanna had her way. Urban bowed to her wishes and approved the marriage in a bull dated February 8, 1363. On May 16, the bridegroom and his retainers sailed into the harbor accompanied by a flotilla of seven ships. There was the usual period of rejoicing involving banquets, processions, and other public festivities and then, in a solemn ceremony at the
Castel Nuovo, Joanna took as her third husband James IV, the king of Majorca.
CHAPTER XV
The Quest for an Heir
Fourteen years in a dark, cramped prison cell does not always produce the healthiest or most well-adjusted marriage partners.
Naples was still struggling with the remnants of the plague when James of Majorca arrived in May. Weakened physically from his long confinement, the king now faced the oppressive heat of a southern Italian summer. James’s run-down constitution must have been well known within the realm, because almost before the bride and groom had a chance to become acquainted, Robert of Taranto challenged Joanna’s government. In the middle of June, the emperor of Constantinople, with the full support of his brother Philip, seized a castle in a display of strength against the queen, using as his excuse a dispute over property Maria claimed was still due her from her original dowry.
Ordinarily, the task of subduing Robert and Philip would have fallen to Joanna’s new husband, but James was too ill to fight. “The Sire the King suffers from tertian fever,” the archbishop of Naples observed to Urban in a letter dated July 1, 1363. “The doctors increased the prescriptions in view of the malicious nature of the times and the epidemic, which has already caused the death of many people.” By July 5, James’s health showed signs of improvement but “I doubt that he will get better because his hygiene is very poor,” the archbishop informed the pope in a further update. “He slept with the queen even though he had been drinking water and despite the contagion, such that this third fit of fever redoubled and exhausted him, causing him to suffer a fourth fit on July 2.”
Fortunately, Robert also fell seriously ill around this time, and Joanna was able to resolve the crisis by settling three cities and a castle on Maria, thereby dividing Philip’s monetary interests and subsequently his political allegiance from those of his ailing brother. Although the threat of violence was removed, the emperor of Constantinople continued to interfere with the queen’s administration. “He has already become very grand with me four times in the presence of the entire Council,” wrote the archbishop of Naples to the bishop of Avignon on September 3, “especially when the question came up of revoking grants unwisely made by the Queen, for she is very poor and does not have the resources wherewith to pay the census [to the Church]. [Robert] has done this so much that the business remains just about desperate, and yet all men are of the opinion that if the advice of the Count of Nola [another of Joanna’s counselors] had been followed in collecting and saving funds and in certain other respects, the Queen would have plenty of money.”
James of Majorca’s ill health was but one component of a far larger problem confronting Joanna. Early in the marriage, the queen discovered that her new husband was mentally unbalanced and given to violent episodes. Although James had signed a marriage contract specifically waiving any right to encroach upon his wife’s authority, or to meddle in any way with the government of her realm, within days of arriving in Naples he began demanding that he be ceded control of the kingdom. When Joanna refused, he flew into feverish rages, ranting irrationally and threatening both his wife and the kingdom. “The Queen, even though like the dead from his conduct towards her, has not had the courage to reveal it to others and told me only with great effort,” the archbishop later apprised the pope. “She fears the king as her husband and dreads him as the devil, as not only did his lengthy incarceration affect the soundness of his mind but also because he is, according to the doctors, eccentric by nature and like mad, which his words and deeds show, alas! only too much, and it would be much worse if he came to drink any wine… In particular we have not been able to convince him to sleep in a separate bed from the Queen’s, considering his impairment and despite his serious fits of fever, his heavy sweating, his enemas and other inconveniences.”
Joanna covered up these incidents of aggression and tried to be patient, but James persisted, going so far as to conspire with his brother-in-law, the marquis of Montferrat, to bring John Hawkwood’s White Company to Naples in support of a revolt against the queen. The White Company had arrived in Tuscany in July and had been hired for six months by the Pisans at a rate of 150,000 florins to strike against Florence, Pisa’s perennial adversary. By September, Hawkwood had scored a significant victory for his employer, capturing many Florentine noblemen in a single battle at Incisa. The specter of an invasion by this criminal band, reported by Matteo Villani to consist of some 3,500 heavily armed horsemen and 2,000 infantrymen, hung heavily over the kingdom of Naples, especially when members of the free company were discovered to have infiltrated to the north in December and had only been dissuaded from attacking by the presence of heavy snows. “The Lady Queen has suspected for some time that her husband has been responsible for the coming of the free companies, and for this reason there is today a scandalous dissension between them,” the archbishop of Naples wrote to the bishop of Avignon on January 18, 1364.
Joanna concealed her husband’s dementia from all but her most intimate counselors for as long as possible, but privacy became impossible on January 4, 1364, when James engaged in a very public display of domestic violence, which caused a great scandal at court and throughout the capital. Forced to concede that her third marriage was a disaster, the queen unburdened herself in a long letter to the pope, which reveals the depth of her despair. “Most Holy Father, the importance of this matter compels me to reveal to your conscience, with most displeasure, what I wish Heaven had allowed me to keep to myself in complete silence,” Joanna began. “Eight days after I had joined my spouse in matrimony by God’s permission, Your Holiness’s consent, and the necessary exemption, he began to engage in insane behaviors, about which I did not excessively worry, thinking that they were caused by his youth and the filth of a long imprisonment which might have dulled his sensuality. But after several days, afflicted with a fit of fever, he carried out even more outrageous deeds such that, on the doctors’ advice, I removed from his room the weapons, stones, wooden clubs and all such objects he could lay his hands on. But this too I kept silent, presuming that the infection from his disease was the cause of this. Later and as a result of the familiarity caused by a more intimate association I began to notice that every month, sometimes at the change of the moon and sometimes just after the full moon he would have an outbreak of madness, with some clear-sighted moments at intervals.”
The queen observed that many famous physicians were consulted in an effort to cure James. She herself watched his diet carefully, which evidently meant inhibiting his consumption of fruit, as the archbishop of Naples also observed to the pope that James frequently overindulged, which resulted in “the flux and vomiting.” Nonetheless, despite her husband’s obvious lack of improvement and her understanding of the danger she faced, Joanna continued, with misgivings, to share James’s bed, she reported to Urban.
“But most recently, at the last change of the moon, one morning, suddenly, like a lunatic grinding his teeth, he began to say that he intended to be the master and general reformer of the justice of the kingdom, as I remember I had written to you previously, and that he would implement all the measures he intended in spite of me, and that I should immediately present to him a report on all pensions and privileges, as he wanted to know all,” Joanna continued in her letter. “I agreed so as to contain his madness and, to please him and against the advice that I had been given, gave the order to provide him with this report. Abusing my good intentions and my kindness, he took an arrogant tone and said that all beneficiaries of whatever privileges had been granted from as far back as one could remember until today would be deprived of these without delay.” When Joanna pointed out that there were several clauses within their marriage contract specifically prohibiting James from interfering in the realm, and that by signing this document, which had been further legitimized by a pontifical decree, he had agreed to these conditions, James flew into a rage.
“Bearing my answer with great impatience, he answered as he had often done publ
icly, with many gestures of contempt, that if he could be the master and lord, he would never relinquish this power either for the pope or for the Church, as he didn’t care to obey them. I counseled him not to speak this way in public. He turned to me and said he would do what he had to do. I asked him what he would dare do; he answered that he would even strike the body of Christ with a knife. The fact is, dear Father and Master, that he has already easily drawn fifty letters of donation to his acquaintances, of three thousand, two thousand, one thousand florins or more, to be collected each year on the royal treasury.”
Then Joanna described the incident that had caused such scandal in the realm. “Throwing himself impetuously at me, he seized me by the arm in the presence of several witnesses who thought I might fall to the ground. Even though these witnesses were many, I bore with extreme patience the insult that was made to me, and so nothing worse could ensue I expressly ordered that no one move, feigning to give the impression that he hadn’t done this with evil purpose but rather for amusement, and that he hadn’t intended to pull me so violently. He turned to me and indulged in insults slanderous to my reputation, saying out loud that I had killed my husband, that I was a worthless courtesan, that I kept near me go-betweens who brought men to me at night, and that his revenge would be exemplary… I realized that such things could not be kept secret and that they were the topic of conversation in the entire town. Very quickly, the illustrious emperor of Constantinople, prince of Achaia and Taranto, learning of this, sent me this night the empress his wife with the duchess of Andria his sister to keep me company. They slept with me in my room, showing me much concern and with the thought that my husband’s fit of madness would pass, but in the morning we found him in a worse state. Thus, in the evening of the second day, this same emperor came to me in person, along with my sister, wife of lord Philip of Taranto, accompanied by a goodly number of armed men, not to engage in any inappropriate action but rather to refrain the impudence of the king’s acquaintances [retainers]… had they the temerity to indulge themselves in insolent behavior… Finally, we decided that my lord and husband and I would never meet alone in a bed or in a room… until we could fully determine what needed to be done to ensure my safety… As for me, I openly go during the day, at appropriate hours and with the appropriate escort, from my room to the room where he lives to comfort him, giving him all honors due and bringing familial gifts,” she concluded sadly.
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