The Lady Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  By June 1, Urban had landed at Pisa and on June 9 entered Viterbo, where he found Joanna’s new grand seneschal, Niccolò Spinelli, awaiting him, along with other high-ranking members of her court and an armed force sent by the queen to protect him. Here the papal court settled for the hot summer months, and Spinelli and the Neapolitan soldiers distinguished themselves by quelling a rebellion against the papacy on September 5. Finally, on October 16, 1367, Urban fulfilled his promise by making a triumphant entrance into Rome, albeit one accompanied by a significant military escort. The Neapolitan delegation held a prominent place of honor in the procession.

  In March of the following year, Joanna, regally surrounded by an entourage consisting of senior members of her baronage, and accompanied by a procession of sumptuously clad retainers, paid a state visit to Rome. The pope met the queen on the outskirts of the city and they rode together into the center of town, where she was formally greeted by the cardinals on the steps of a somewhat restored Saint Peter’s and then taken to hear Mass. On March 17, the fourth Sunday of Lent, as a mark of special favor, Urban presented Joanna with the Golden Rose, a highly unusual gesture that caused comment. “Some of the Cardinals afterwards protested that this coveted honor had never before been granted to a woman. The ready Pontiff replied, ‘Neither has any of you ever seen an Abbot of St. Victor [Urban’s former position] in the chair of St. Peter.’” The presentation of this ornament must have been deeply satisfying for the queen. Robert the Wise never got a Golden Rose.

  Joanna’s triumphs were never completely unblemished, however. Just before the queen knelt at the pope’s feet to receive her honor, word arrived that her husband, James of Majorca, had been captured in battle and was being held for ransom.

  In the two years he had been away, James’s odyssey had taken him first to Avignon, and then westward to Gascony in search of an ally willing to assist him in a campaign against the king of Aragon for control of Majorca. Finding none, James had instead found himself drawn into a completely unrelated conflict that happened to occupy a position of prominence at the time: the hereditary struggle for the crown of Castile.

  The war for Castile had its origins in the amours of its former sovereign Alphonso XI. Alphonso had been married to Maria of Portugal, by whom he had a son, Pedro. Having fulfilled his duty as a husband by providing an heir, Alphonso, who seems to have been less than enchanted with his wife, had remedied the situation by taking another woman, Leonora de Guzmán, as his lover. Leonora also provided Alphonso with a son, Enrique, sensibly known as “the Bastard.” There was nothing unusual about this arrangement except that Alphonso so made a point of favoring his illegitimate family that Maria felt humiliated. To appease his mother’s wounded sensibilities, Pedro’s first act upon assuming the throne after his father’s death was to murder Leonora and banish Enrique, a maneuver that earned the new king the sobriquet “Pedro the Cruel.”

  Enrique fled to France, where he found a powerful ally in Charles V. Pedro the Cruel was a partisan of Edward III; if Charles put Enrique the Bastard on the throne of Castile instead, England would lose (and France would gain) a valuable ally. Although France had ostensibly been at peace with England since the Treaty of Bretígny in 1360, Charles was only too willing to harass the English through surrogates. The king of France introduced Enrique to his best general, Bertrand du Guesclin, who secured an army of several thousand men by redirecting the energies of those free companies that had not already left France for Italy. Together with Enrique, Bertrand invaded Castile and successfully removed Pedro from the throne in 1366. “It seems all but certain that the campaign of the companies under Du Guesclin… was part of a brilliant French strategy designed by Charles V to take the English in the rear.”

  Finding himself on the run, Pedro remembered his English ally and turned up in Bordeaux, where Edward III’s son the Black Prince, now styled prince of Aquitaine, kept a magnificent court. The ousted king of Castile asked for help, offering to pay all expenses and to reward his collaborators handsomely. Pedro had brought what treasure he could with him and made a point of mentioning that there was quite a bit more back in Castile but that he hadn’t had room on his ships to carry it all. “My dear cousin [Edward], as long as my gold, my silver, and my treasure will last, which I have brought with me from Spain, but which is not so great by thirty times as what I have left behind, I am willing they should be divided among your people,” said Pedro. The Black Prince, his interest piqued, called a war council, which was attended by Charles the Bad, king of Navarre. Charles’s participation was necessary as Navarre held the only reliable pass through the Pyrenees between Spain and France. “They all, and the king of Navarre as well, agreed to help king Pedro to win back Spain; since he had so humbly asked them he deserved to be helped; on this they were unanimous,” reported the chronicler Chandos Herald.

  Into this mix stumbled Joanna’s husband. “At this period Lord James, King of Majorca, came to visit the prince [Edward] in the city of Bordeaux, and to request his assistance in order that he might recover his possessions from the King of Aragon, who had driven him from them, and put his father to death,” wrote the chronicler Jean Froissart. The Black Prince instead enlisted James in the Castile campaign, saying, “Sir King… I promise you, most loyally, that upon our return from Spain, we will undertake to replace you on your throne of Majorca, either by treaty or by force of arms.” Thrilled to have found so forceful an advocate, James agreed to join the expedition and fight with the Black Prince on the side of King Pedro. As a special sign of favor, just before they left, James was selected to stand as godfather to Edward’s second son, Richard, born on January 6, 1367, the feast of the Epiphany, “the day of the three kings.” Much was made of the miraculous occurrence that, by coincidence, three kings were in Bordeaux on the day of the birth—Pedro, king of Castile; Charles the Bad, king of Navarre; and James IV, king of Majorca—a biblical allusion only slightly tarnished by the fact that only one of the three sovereigns could be said to be in actual possession of his kingdom at the time.

  The Black Prince and his allies put together a massive army of thirty thousand men and departed for Spain on Valentine’s Day 1367. The cost of maintaining so many men and supplies exceeded the value of the treasure Pedro had brought with him, so Edward fronted the money for the expedition, which eventually amounted to approximately 2.7 million florins. Enrique had been warned that they were coming, and although his generals advised avoiding a direct confrontation with so large an aggressor and instead suggested that the Bastard simply cut off Edward’s supplies “to famish them without striking a blow,” Enrique, goaded by the chivalric notion of warfare, which prized honor above all, stubbornly insisted on fighting. The result was the battle of Najera, which took place on April 3, 1367. James of Majorca led the rear guard, which was stationed “on a little hill to the left,” for the Black Prince. Enrique’s forces were outnumbered, and Edward and his longbows won easily. The Bastard was forced to flee, and Pedro was restored to the throne. “My dear cousin, I must thank you, for today you have done so much for me that I can never repay it in my lifetime,” said Pedro to Edward when it was all over. This turned out to be a highly accurate assessment of the situation, as the restored king of Castile subsequently reneged on the vast sum of money he owed to the prince.

  But although the battle had been won, the war was soon lost. Edward, who had his own notions of chivalry, insisted that Pedro pardon most of those taken prisoner and ransom the rest, a gesture to which the new king of Castile grudgingly acquiesced. Du Guesclin, who had escaped the battle but was subsequently apprehended, won his freedom through wiliness. “They say in France,” said Du Guesclin to the prince [Edward], “that you are so much afraid of me, that you dare not set me free.” “What! Sir Bertrand,” said the prince, “do you imagine that we keep you a prisoner for fear of your prowess? By St. George it is not so; for, my good sir, if you will pay one hundred thousand francs you shall be free at once.” Charles V immediately forwarded
the ransom, and Bertrand du Guesclin, an extremely able opponent, was free in a month.

  The real problem was Pedro, however. The restored king left for Seville soon after the battle, promising to return with sufficient treasure to repay the Black Prince and his army for their service. He never returned. Edward waited six months “and his army suffered great hardship, hunger and thirst, for lack of wine and bread,” reported Chandos Herald. With famine came illness. Of course, James of Majorca, with his delicate constitution, was one of the first to sicken. When it became clear that Pedro had defaulted on his obligations, Edward ordered the army to withdraw “and all prepared for departure except the King of Majorca, who was so ill that he could not be moved,” said Froissart. As a result, when Enrique and Du Guesclin regrouped, as it was inevitable they would, and invaded Spain with a second army in autumn 1367, the hapless James, having been left behind in the city of Valladolid, was captured easily and held for ransom. “As soon as the King [Enrique] was entered into the town, he demanded where the King of Majorca was? The which was showed to him. Then the King entered into the chamber where he lay, not fully whole of his disease. Then the King went to him and said, ‘Sir King of Majorca, you have been our enemy and have invaded this our realm of Castile with a great army; wherefore, we set our hands on you; therefore yield yourself as our prisoner, or else you are but dead.’ And when the King of Majorca saw himself in that case, and that no defense would help him, he said, ‘Sir King, truly am I but dead, if that it please you; and, sir, gladly I yield me unto you, but to none other. Therefore, sir, if your mind be to put me into any other man’s hands, show it me; for I had rather die than to be put into the hands of my bitter enemy, the King of Aragon.’ ‘Sir,’ said the King, ‘fear you not; I will do you but right; if I did otherwise, I were to blame. You shall be my prisoner, either to acquit you, or to ransom you at my pleasure.’ Thus was the King of Majorca taken by King Henry [Enrique], and caused him to be well kept there.”

  Pedro tried to rally, but deprived of Edward’s support, his forces were defeated. He was ultimately cornered by Du Guesclin and transferred to the care of his half-brother. The gracious consideration displayed by the new king of Castile to James of Majorca did not extend to his own family. On the evening of March 22, 1369, an unarmed Pedro was viciously stabbed to death by a group of men led by Enrique the Bastard, whose notion of chivalry had obviously evolved in the wake of his previous defeat.

  Nor did the Black Prince emerge unscathed from this adventure. Heavily in debt, he was forced to raise taxes on his subjects in Gascony, and his rule became even more unpopular among the conquered French nobility. Worse, while in Spain he had evidently fallen prey to the same disease that had afflicted James of Majorca, and the sickness grew worse after he returned to Bordeaux. By the following year, the Black Prince was so ill that he could no longer mount his horse.

  Joanna was thus forced to scrape together a large sum of money from within her already overtaxed resources to liberate a husband from whom she had only just succeeded in honorably separating herself. Urban, who was well acquainted with the most intimate details of Joanna’s third marriage, was sufficiently concerned she might refuse to aid James altogether that he felt the need to write to her, urging her to produce the funds with alacrity. “Even though we trust, without our ever doubting it, that you bring all of your care and concern to his release,” the pope wrote on January 30, 1368, as soon as the news of the king of Majorca’s imprisonment was known, “we urge your sublimity to apply yourself with persistence, and bring all the attention you can to the… ransom, or to any other means of freeing your husband.” Still, Joanna recognized her responsibility to her spouse and, working with James’s sister, the marchioness of Montferrat, eventually came to terms with Enrique. The ransom demanded—sixty thousand golden doubloons, the Spanish coinage—was so considerable that the only means of raising it was for the queen to discontinue salary payments to her government in Provence for a year, a solution that, not unreasonably, caused considerable discontent among the local officials. “The which ransom these two ladies [Joanna and James’s sister] paid so courteously, that King Henry [Enrique] was well content,” Froissart concluded. James was released into the care of his ally Charles the Bad to ensure that the king of Aragon did not take advantage of the king of Majorca’s weakness during the transition. He was back in Naples by 1369 in time for the solemn consecration ceremony of the church of San Martino, the monastery Joanna completed for her father.

  The issue of her husband’s ransom was not the only exigency Joanna wrestled with during this period. Of equal concern to the queen was the heirless condition of the realm. Uncertainty over the succession of the crown of Naples was too tempting not to invite interference. By 1368 the most insistent meddling issued from a voice from the past, and hailed from a part of the world that she most wished to forget: Hungary.

  Eighteen years had passed since the king of Hungary, stymied in his original conquest of Naples, had abandoned his hereditary interests and departed the kingdom, seemingly for good. In the interim, King Louis’ stature had swelled. His own people dubbed him “the Great” for having built Hungary into a regional power through aggressive military policies. Louis found the business of governing too tame for his tastes and much preferred warfare “since it is not the kingship itself that is desirable but the fame that goes with it,” as one of the king’s clerics, who knew him well, reported. But despite the renown he achieved, nature (or, more likely, the Angevin genetic structure) had contrived against him, so that, ironically, he faced exactly the problem Joanna did: at forty-two years old, the same age as the queen, the king of Hungary was still childless. The succession crisis in Hungary mirrored that of Naples still further: Like Joanna, Louis the Great’s nearest blood relation was a girl, his niece, Elizabeth, the daughter of his younger brother Stephen, Stephen himself having died in 1354.

  The king of Hungary did not want to leave the realm to his niece, but nor did he wish to forgo his Angevin bloodline. Searching for a candidate who embodied both these requirements, he discovered only one: Charles of Durazzo, son of Louis of Durazzo, the little boy who had first come to Joanna’s court as a hostage to his father’s good behavior and who was subsequently raised to a high position by the queen after Louis of Durazzo was murdered by Robert and Philip of Taranto in 1362.

  Intent on establishing a viable succession while he was still at the peak of his power, Louis the Great invited Charles of Durazzo to Hungary so that he and his young kinsman could become acquainted, and Charles introduced to the customs of the kingdom. This invitation was accepted, and Charles was brought to the Hungarian court, possibly as early as 1364, when he was still only seven years old. From this point on, Charles was more or less adopted by the man who had imprisoned his father and murdered his uncle. Although there seems to have been no official ceremony or announcement, it was implied that the boy would someday inherit the throne. Certainly, judging by later events, much of the Hungarian nobility and Charles himself believed this to be the case. Furthering this speculation, the king showed every consideration for Charles, had him brought up in splendor and luxury, and arranged a prestigious marriage for the boy with the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor. The engagement was broken off, however, when Hungary abruptly severed relations with this former ally; among the other political and strategic reasons for the break, the emperor was accused of having insulted Louis’ mother, Elizabeth, the dowager queen, “with impudent words.” Seeking another suitably illustrious partner for Charles, Louis and Elizabeth remembered Naples. In an instant was revived the old idea of combining the two kingdoms through the marriage of the next generation, prompting Louis to propose an engagement between Charles of Durazzo and Charles’s first cousin, Margherita, the youngest of Maria’s daughters and the only surviving niece of Joanna’s who was still unattached.

  Despite her fondness for Charles, this was definitely not the marriage the queen of Naples had envisioned for Margherita, or for the kin
gdom. Joanna was particularly concerned about her young cousin’s new affinity for the king of Hungary and the influence Louis would have over Charles. The queen balked, demanding that Louis the Great give assurances he would not use the marriage as a pretext to interfere in her government. The king of Hungary agreed to this stipulation, but still Joanna stalled, so he appealed once again to the papacy. Urban V was in favor of the match. The free companies, employed by Milan, were once again threatening the Papal States, and the pope hoped to encourage the king of Hungary, who had offered to send troops to fight on the side of the church, to make good on his promise. On June 15, 1369, Urban issued a bull approving the marriage and making the necessary allowance for consanguinity, since the principals were within the ordinarily proscribed degree of kinship.

  Despite Joanna’s many misgivings, Urban’s approval carried great weight with her, and she reluctantly agreed to the marriage—it is unlikely that, saving perhaps Clement VI, she would have done so for any other pope. On January 24, 1370, in a bizzare imitation of the past, Charles of Durazzo, just thirteen years old, returned to Naples accompanied by an elaborate Hungarian escort and was wed to twenty-two-year-old Margherita of Durazzo in a grand ceremony hosted by Joanna at the Castel Capuano, another of the royal palaces. Charles does not seem to have been inhibited by the age difference between himself and his bride. When he left Naples a short time later to return to Hungary (King Louis and the dowager queen Elizabeth having learned their lesson, there was no chance of the bridegroom’s residing in Italy and risking another assassination attempt), Margherita was already pregnant. She remained behind alone to have the baby, a girl, Marie. Sadly, the child died soon after birth and was buried in the church of Santa Chiara. Having suffered this wrenching loss, Margherita was then obliged to leave her lifelong friends and family in Naples to take her place beside her boy husband at the royal court at Visegrád, under the patronage and benevolent care of the man who had murdered the father she had never known.