But succession schemes and rights of inheritance are as subject to the vagaries of fate as any other political agenda. No sooner had the marriage of Charles and Margherita been consummated than the king of Hungary’s wife, who in seventeen years of marriage had failed to conceive a child, suddenly produced three daughters in quick succession: Catherine, born in 1370, Mary, in 1371; and Hedwig, in 1374.
Joanna’s prestige, and correspondingly that of her kingdom, continued to swell. In 1369, the queen entertained the Byzantine emperor, John V Palaeologus, who had come to Rome to mend the rift within Christianity between East and West in exchange for Urban’s promise of money and troops to fight the growing threat to Constantinople from the Turks. John Palaeologus so enjoyed his stay at the Castel Nuovo that he made a repeat visit and, prior to Charles of Durazzo’s wedding, offered to promote an alliance between the Byzantine Empire and the kingdom of Naples by marrying his son to Margherita instead, a proposal Joanna diplomatically declined. Additionally, in May 1370, following the wedding of Charles and Margherita, the kingdom of Naples hosted a meeting of the Chapter General of the Friars Minors at the feast of Pentecost. Some eight hundred Franciscan friars descended on the capital to discuss the issues of their order at the church of San Lorenzo and partake of Joanna’s generous hospitality. “The Lady Queen gave in their honor the most splendid banquet at the Castel Nuovo, to which all the friars went in procession,” reported a chronicler. Spectacles like these, so reminiscent of the celebrated reign of Robert the Wise, indicate just how far the kingdom of Naples had recovered its former brilliance under Joanna.
But in Rome the situation was much more precarious. For all their initial joy over the return of the papacy, the native population soon became disenchanted with Urban V, suspecting that the pope harbored a distinct preference for Frenchmen over Italians. This suspicion was confirmed in September 1368, when the pope raised six Frenchmen to the cardinalate and only one Roman. The Italians loathed the French, whom they regarded as haughty and mendacious, while the French despised the Italians, whom they considered coarse and barbaric. Urban’s policy of placing French cardinals and members of their retinues in positions of power was particularly galling. In 1369, this tactic provoked a crisis. The citizens of Perugia rebelled against church authority and drove away the Frenchman recently appointed as papal legate. When Urban raised an army to meet the challenge, Bernabò Visconti, alive to any opportunity to whittle away at church authority in Italy, magnified the conflict by sending John Hawkwood and a free company of two thousand horsemen to fight on the side of the Perugians. The two militias met outside the city in June 1369. The papal forces gained an initial success, even capturing Hawkwood himself, but the victory was short-lived. Two months later, Hawkwood was released. Reunited with his former company and bent on revenge, the English mercenary targeted the papal residences at Montefiascone and Viterbo, where Urban had retreated for safety during the hot summer months. The criminal band thundered through the countryside, robbing and murdering at will, setting fire to the fields and vineyards, and volleying arrows at the pope’s front doorstep. Even more disturbing from Urban’s point of view was that the majority of the citizens of Rome actively took the side of the Perugians against him.
Frightened, exhausted, and desperately homesick for the peace and civility of Avignon, an ailing Urban capitulated. Citing as a pretext a new outbreak of hostilities between England and France that required his presence, the pope made plans to return home. Too late, the Romans saw their error and sent an embassy to Viterbo to beg him to stay, but, much to the relief of the French cardinals, he refused. In a document written on June 26, 1370, Urban, under the guise of praising his Roman hosts, obliquely referred to the hostility of the populace to the Holy See and hinted at the need to maintain a cooperative spirit, “so that, if we or our successors decide for adequate reasons to return to Rome, we be not deterred by any troubles that may exist there.”
Joanna, who had answered the pope’s call and contributed troops to the army Urban had sent out against Hawkwood and Perugia in 1369, remained loyal to Urban, although she was regretful of the decision to leave Rome. Together with the kings of France and Aragon, she provided the thirty-four galleys required to ferry the papal court out of Italy on September 5, 1370. To ensure that her relationship with the pope retained its intimacy, Joanna promoted Niccolò Spinelli, who was also on familiar terms with the papal court, to seneschal of Provence, and accorded him powers superior to those of his predecessor, so that he might act as her surrogate in Avignon. Three weeks later, on September 27, to the delight of the citizenry, who envisioned a renewal of wealth and prestige in the pope’s return, the papal court entered Avignon in solemn procession and once again took up residency in the grand châteaus that had stood empty for the past three years.
Urban unfortunately did not have much time to enjoy the soothing atmosphere of peace he craved. The Roman experiment had visibly taken its toll on the pope’s health. Bridget of Sweden had prophesized, just before he sailed, that Urban would die if he left Italy. The pope obligingly added to her mystique by passing away on December 19.
The reaction to the pontiff’s death in Guelphic Italy, where most people felt betrayed by the return to Avignon, was harsh. Petrarch was among the most lacerating. “Pope Urban would have been numbered among the most honored men if, when dying, his litter had been carried before the altar of St. Peter, and if with tranquil conscience he had there fallen asleep in death, invoking God and the world as witnesses that if ever any Pope forsook this place the fault was not his, but that of the author of his disgraceful flight,” the scholar wrote acridly. The news, however, was a blow to Joanna, who genuinely mourned Urban’s passing. That her affection had been reciprocated was made plain in the official letter sent by the Sacred College to the queen announcing the death. “The pontiff cherished a sincere love for your Serenity,” the cardinals made a point of noting.
The Holy See, determined to extinguish any possibility of repeating the misguided Roman adventure, made sure to elect a relatively youthful Frenchman, Gregory XI, to succeed Urban. But having been rekindled however briefly by Urban V, the desire for a Roman pontificate among the Italians stubbornly refused to go away. A bitter struggle for control over the papacy between France and Italy had been provoked and would end in a conflict that would prove every bit as destructive to Europe as the devastation of the Hundred Years’ War. As this violent political storm gathered strength and careened ominously forward, Joanna and her kingdom stood directly in its path.
CHAPTER XVII
Six Funerals and a Wedding
“The papal chair was governed by Gregory XI,” Machiavelli would later write of the new pope. “He, like his predecessors, residing in Avignon, governed Italy by legates, who, proud and avaricious, oppressed many of the cities.”
This state of affairs was exactly what members of the Sacred College had in mind when they chose Urban V’s successor. Crowned on January 5, 1371, by Guy of Boulogne, who had also orchestrated his unanimous election, Gregory XI had been singled out for his nationality, his youth, and his family connections. Although he had spent much of his career in Italy studying law under the tutelage of a master jurist, Gregory was Clement VI’s nephew, which made him a Frenchman both by birth and inclination. His election reflected the nostalgia the cardinals harbored for the heady days of Clement’s reign, when the pope had ruled as a great lord and the grandeur of the Holy See rivaled even the French royal court in prestige and glamour. Only forty-two years old, Gregory was the youngest of all the Avignon popes. Although he suffered from an unidentified ailment, it was not life-threatening, and he could therefore reasonably be assumed to rule for many years, by which time the cardinals, still shaken by the perils and inconvenience of their recent Roman adventure, devoutly hoped to extinguish forever the notion of an Italian papacy.
The new pontiff, schooled in law, was a firm believer in strong, autocratic rule and sought to extend church authority in Italy to
the fullest extent possible. Joanna’s government was an early victim of the papacy’s new expansionist policies. It was Gregory who, on October 31, 1372, rewrote the original Neapolitan treaty with Sicily, subverting the queen’s position and demanding instead that the island become a fief of the church; Gregory who later crowned Frederick the Simple and allowed his new vassal to style himself “King of Sicily.” Although these events did nothing to recommend the new pope to the queen, Joanna overlooked these grievances and tried to maintain a supportive attitude in an effort to establish a cooperative alliance with the Holy See. When, in April 1371, Gregory reconfirmed the Guelphic league established in 1366 to fight the free companies, the queen of Naples endorsed his decision by once again agreeing to participate, and she later sent a troop of three hundred lance men at the pope’s request to aid the coalition.
Gregory’s territorial and political objectives soon put Joanna to the test, however. Determined to control the Papal States and other traditional Guelph cities, many of which, in the wake of Urban’s departure, had rebelled against church officials, the pope went to new lengths to establish his authority. Correctly identifying the powerful Visconti family of Milan as the church’s primary antagonist for control of Italy after Bernabò brazenly took possession of the former church territory of Reggio in the spring of 1371, Gregory excommunicated Bernabò and declared a crusade against Milan. The war with the Visconti family was intensely personal to Gregory; a Sienese ambassador who knew him reported that the pope was “completely disposed to the destruction of the lords of Milan.” Gregory made no secret of his hatred. “Either I will destroy the Visconti such that there will not be a single one left, or they will destroy the Church of God,” he declared. For their part, the Visconti were no less implacable; when Bernabò was duly served by one of Gregory’s legates with the papal bull of excommunication, the dictator forced the man to eat the document right down to its “silken cord and seals of lead.”
The papal war against Milan, orchestrated from Avignon, was aggressively comprehensive in a manner that dwarfed Cardinal Albornoz’s previous military efforts. Gregory dispatched four separate armies from different locales—Savoy, Bologna, Naples, and Provence—to try to encircle and capture the Milanese city of Pavia. Joanna, the pope’s principal ally in Italy, signed a treaty with other members of the coalition against Milan pledging support. In 1372 she acted on this promise by sending James of Majorca to Avignon to participate in the war effort and authorizing Niccolò Spinelli to raise and captain the papal force emanating from Provence. Neapolitan troops were also assigned to a combat unit headed by the papal legate from Bologna.
At this point, the outcome of the conflict was still uncertain, for, although the pope had managed to coordinate a number of separate militias under an umbrella strategy, the troops at his disposal were by no means overwhelming. Bernabò was an experienced warrior; additionally, he had hired John Hawkwood and his mercenary band to fight on the side of Milan. Before a single blow was struck, however, Gregory was the recipient of an enormous piece of luck. Hawkwood worked by the job, and his contract with Bernabò was due to expire in September 1372. The two entered into negotiations for a renewal of the Englishman’s term of employment. Giovanni Pico, a Mantuan nobleman familiar with the details of the haggling, explained the situation in a September 12 letter. “Bernabò wanted to sign him again according to the previous agreement, by which the English were to have 100 lances in Cremona and 100 lances elsewhere,” Pico wrote. “The English [Hawkwood] did not want that, but wanted to augment their band by 200 lances and 200 archers. According to the general opinion, they are coming toward Saint Benedict and will stop there and sign an accord either with my lord Bernabò or with whoever will give them the best terms.”
Just before the outbreak of a serious war would seem an odd time to antagonize the mainstay of one’s mercenary army, but Bernabò chose to refuse to meet Hawkwood’s demands, insisting instead on the original military formula. Rather than continue to bargain with the Visconti, Hawkwood, a shrewd businessman, simply changed sides and opened negotiations with the papacy. In an instant, the Holy See went from being the leading persecutor of the free companies in Italy to their most lucrative employer. Gregory not only promised Hawkwood the requested lances and archers but also threw in a salary of forty thousand florins. The resources of the church being somewhat overtaxed at this time, Gregory turned to Joanna for the money. The queen must have had dealings with Hawkwood in the past, because the pope mentioned in a letter that he was aware that the Englishman had extorted an annual pension out of Naples some years earlier as a price for leaving the kingdom unmolested. “Most dear daughter in Christ,” Gregory wrote in September. “Recently it has reached our ears that you made or gave… to our beloved son, the noble John Hawkwood, knight now for many years, a certain annual provision… Since, however, the same John, whom we take from the services of Bernabò Visconti, enemy and persecutor of the whole church, intends to come over to the church and not to offend, invade or damage its subjects, and lands… we strongly ask and urge your Serene Highness that you make good to the said John Hawkwood his provision which you previously so liberally granted.”
Aided by Hawkwood’s free company, the papal forces scored a number of victories. In October 1372, fighting in Piedmont, the count of Savoy took Cuneo and by January 1373 had captured many other castles and towns in the surrounding area, all of which he was legally obligated by treaty to hand over to Joanna, who claimed them as part of her original legacy from Robert the Wise. As the count of Savoy was naturally reluctant to do this, wishing to keep the gains for himself, the queen was compelled on January 8, 1373, to notify her government in Provence of her intention to take back Piedmont, at which time she authorized Niccolò Spinelli to receive, or recover by force, the captured territory from the count of Savoy. Aware that the queen of Naples was his most important ally in the struggle against Milan, Gregory intervened, and the count of Savoy handed Cuneo over to Spinelli on February 14. Spinelli, who proved to be every bit the warrior his predecessor, Acciaiuoli, had been, also recaptured Centallo in the queen’s name on August 2, 1373, and for the first time since the days of King Robert, Naples again ruled a substantial portion of Piedmont.
Faced with mounting losses from papal forces to the west and south, and a renewal of the plague, the Visconti family sued for peace. Gregory, who lacked the money necessary to continue prosecuting the war—Hawkwood’s men were already owed back wages, a dangerous situation—agreed to come to terms, and a treaty was signed in June 1374. As a result, although some territory changed hands, Milan remained a potent force in Italian politics. For all Gregory’s military effort, the only tangible outcome of the conflict was the perception that the pope intended to take and hold fiefs in Italy much more aggressively than in the past, an unsettling image that would in the end prove far more destructive to Europe than the bloody warfare that precipitated it.
The period following the cessation of hostilities between Milan and the church was marked by a series of deaths that altered the cultural and political landscape of Europe. The ink was not yet dry on the parchment of the Visconti peace treaty when the world learned to its great sorrow of the passing of Francesco Petrarch, probably on the evening of June 18, 1374, at his home in Arquà, between Venice and Ferrara. His political judgment might have been flawed, but no man in history did more for the promotion of learning. Petrarch’s great love of reading, his devotion to the classics, and his contagious enthusiasm for a life of letters spawned a generation of scholars equally committed to intellectual pursuits and laid the foundation for the Renaissance. Fittingly, the seventy-one-year-old was discovered to have died in his chair “with his head and arms resting on a pile of books.” In recognition of his many accomplishments, his corpse was dressed in red satin and his casket hidden beneath a cloth of gold bordered with ermine, as it would have been for an emperor or king. “Now art thou risen, dear my lord / unto the kingdom, to mount to which still waits / every
soul chosen [thereto] for that by God / on its departure from this wicked world… Now with… Dante livest thou, sure of eternal rest… Ah! If thou didst care for me wandering about here below, / draw me up to thee,” penned a passionate Boccaccio upon hearing the news. Perhaps Petrarch did hear his plea, for the next year, on December 21, 1375, Boccaccio followed his mentor to the grave. Unlike the world-renowned Petrarch, Boccaccio was buried simply, leaving instructions in his will for a very modest epitaph, but one of his mourners, who shared a love of literature with his friend, added the following lines:
Why, O illustrious poet, do you speak of yourself so humbly?
You with your limpid notes have exalted pastoral verses;
You with your arduous labors have numbered the hills and the mountains;
You have described the forests and springs and the swamps and marshes;…
You bring before us great princes, relating their trials and downfalls,…
Labors past counting have made you famous among all the people
Nor will an age ever come that will pass over you in silence.
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