By spring of 1379, the rupture within the church had escalated to the point where both Clement and Urban had actually raised armies in the hopes of settling the question by force. A battle between the two regiments took place on April 30 on the outskirts of Rome. Clement had his Breton mercenaries, but Urban had a Roman militia led by a veteran general, the count of Cuneo; there were also rumors that Hawkwood, who was in the vicinity, would join on the side of the Italian pope. Fearful of the participation of the English free company, some of the Bretons, who were holding the Castel Sant’Angelo and its huge store of treasure for Clement, abruptly defected to Urban. Although Hawkwood and his men never materialized, the Roman forces were able to take advantage of the enemy’s confusion to deliver such a resounding defeat to the army of the French pope that Clement found it necessary to vacate his position at Fondi in search of safer quarters to the south. He and his cardinals fled to Joanna’s court, arriving in the capital city on May 10.
With the arrival of the French pontiff, the events of Joanna’s tumultuous life came full circle. Where once she had stood before a pope, Clement VI, to plead for her crown and her legitimacy, Clement VII now stood before her seeking protection for his tiara and throne. Joanna granted this favor in a manner entirely reflective of her belief and commitment to his cause. The Castel Nuovo was at once given over to the pope and his entourage, and the queen ceremonially knelt to kiss Clement’s foot at a spectacle of such pomp, luxury, and grandeur as to leave no doubt of its majestic intentions.
But again the condemnation of her subjects interfered. Led by Ludovico Bozzuto, a militant cleric who had been named archbishop of Naples by Urban VI and subsequently deprived of his position by the queen when Clement VII was elected, violence broke out in the streets of the capital city. The palace of the new archbishop of Naples was attacked and looted by a mob, as was a monastery. A large crowd, including a number of armed men brandishing their weapons, assembled ominously outside the Castel Nuovo, chanting threatening slogans derogatory to Clement and demanding that the queen recognize Urban as the true pope.
Under the circumstances, Clement, while appreciating Joanna’s support, felt that Naples was perhaps not the best place to set up his court. Much to the satisfaction of the French cardinals, it was decided that the papacy should return yet again to Avignon. Joanna agreed and offered to provide transportation. Three days later, on May 13, Clement and his suite hastily withdrew from Naples and returned to Fondi to await the promised ships. These appeared some days later, and on May 22, to their evident relief, the French pope and his court left Italy for good in a Neapolitan galley and sailed back to Provence. They reached Marseille safely on June 10, 1379, and were soon ensconced once again in their splendid châteaux in Avignon, amid the sumptuous surroundings and elegant company for which they had pined while in Rome, and where in short order the privations and discomforts they had endured in Italy, particularly the limitation on the number of courses that could be served at any one meal, faded into the background.
Unfortunately, the violence in the streets of Naples persisted even after Clement’s exit, and threatened to escalate. The situation became so critical that the queen, deprived of military support—her husband, Otto of Brunswick, was in northern Italy overseeing her Piedmont territories—was forced to resort to subterfuge in order to pacify the kingdom. On May 18, by royal proclamation, Joanna suddenly reversed her position and officially recognized Urban as the true pope after all. To further placate her subjects and perpetuate the charade, the queen sent ambassadors by ship to Rome on June 30, charged with conveying her obedience to Urban.
The scheme worked; the rioting quelled and civil order was restored. But this short-term domestic stability was purchased at the price of the kingdom’s trust. In July, when Otto returned with troops, Joanna immediately recalled her ambassadors to Rome and again officially recognized Clement as pope. In the wake of the reversal, her subjects, disgusted by the deception, turned against the queen in a manner from which she would not recover. Joanna had never done anything like this in the past and must have felt herself severely threatened to have resorted to such a measure, but it was a mistake that in the end would cost her dearly.
In Rome, Urban, aware of the unrest in Naples and infuriated by the royal reception Joanna had lavished on his competitor, was again preparing to lash back at the queen. On June 17 he issued a proclamation in which he accused Joanna, “the new Jezebel and the height of impiety,” of the crimes of heresy and schism. Then, in what would ordinarily have been just another toothless order, Urban officially excommunicated and deposed Joanna from the throne of Naples in favor of her heir, Charles of Durazzo, and his wife, Margherita, the queen’s niece.
Except this time, the gesture had potency. For waiting in the background for just such an opportunity was an opponent who did have the means to dispossess the queen of Naples of her kingdom: Louis the Great, king of Hungary.
Louis the Great had been monitoring events in Italy closely. The king of Hungary had officially pronounced Urban to be the legitimate pope at the beginning of June 1379, just prior to the Italian pontiff’s deposal of Joanna; the timing of these announcements would seem to indicate collusion between the two courts. In any event, this latest pontifical act served Louis’ interests very well. The king of Hungary’s eldest daughter, Catherine, originally engaged to the son of the king of France, had unfortunately died the year before, leaving her father with a problem. His two remaining daughters, Mary and Hedwig, were slated to inherit his two kingdoms, Hungary and Poland, respectively, but this arrangement had left Charles of Durazzo, his previously adopted heir, without a realm, a situation Louis recognized as inherently dangerous. Charles was now an adult, an experienced warrior with long-standing expectations of sovereignty, and since the king of Hungary’s daughters were still children, he could easily overpower his female cousins in the event of Louis’ death, thus disrupting the legitimate line of succession. Louis of Hungary understood that he needed to find his ambitious kinsman a kingdom of his own to divert Charles’s attention from the crown of Hungary.
Urban conveniently provided one. Louis had already dispatched Charles in the autumn of 1379 to Venetia, in northern Italy outside Venice, with an army to interfere in Hungary’s favor in a skirmish between Venice, Padua, and Genoa. When Urban instead urged Charles through emissaries to march his company south and conquer Naples, Louis the Great agreed to allow Charles to use his Hungarian troops for this purpose in exchange for Charles’s sworn renunciation of any future right to the throne of Hungary. Charles accepted this condition, and plans were made to invade Naples.
In Avignon, Clement VII heard of these developments with mounting concern. Although Joanna believed Otto of Brunswick was fully capable of protecting her and her kingdom—she would later write that her husband would “fill the world with the renown of his victories”—the French pope was much less sanguine about the Hungarian threat and sought an ally to champion her cause. The obvious choice was Louis, duke of Anjou, younger brother of the king of France, an ambitious, energetic, and experienced warrior. More important, as a member of the French royal family, he had access to the resources necessary to raise an army of sufficient size to challenge Charles of Durazzo. Louis could not be expected to mount a war effort on Joanna’s behalf without some form of compensation, but Clement was confident a suitable incentive could be found and invited Louis to meet with him in Avignon in January 1380 to discuss the matter.
The upshot of this negotiation was a detailed agreement whereby the duke of Anjou offered to undertake to protect the sovereignty of the queen of Naples in exchange for Joanna’s adopting him as her legal heir. Louis was specific about what he was prepared to do for the queen. He would put four armed galleys and a supply of money at her immediate disposal, in case she needed to flee Naples and required transportation or financing. He promised to take up arms in her defense in a timely and effective manner and to raise an army at no expense to the queen. (In a side agreem
ent, Clement pledged to fund the entire enterprise out of church income raised by taxes on France and Spain.) Cleverly, Louis also agreed never to impinge on Joanna’s authority, or that of her husband, while she was alive. The queen would continue to rule as she always had. Only at her death would Louis claim his inheritance and take over the government of the kingdom. The duke of Anjou’s proposals seemed so reasonable, and the foreign situation so threatening, that without even waiting for Joanna’s response, Clement went ahead and issued a bull on February 1, 1380, officially appointing Louis as the heir to the kingdom of Naples and county of Provence.
Despite the danger, the queen was loath to take this step. Her realm had been established by her illustrious great-great-grandfather Charles of Anjou to rival the kingdom of France, not be incorporated into it. The loss of independence implied by an acceptance of the count of Anjou’s proposal would be as much an admission of defeat as a loss in battle to the Hungarians. Joanna did not like it and knew her subjects would also be opposed. She was not yet so desperate as to clutch at straws. Accordingly, she stalled. No official proclamation in support of the arrangement with France was issued by the queen of Naples at this time.
Joanna may also have been unable to accept that Charles and Margherita, whom she had protected and raised to the highest position of nobility as children, would turn against her in this way. She had already as much as made them her heirs; she had stood host at their wedding and ensured that they were married in grand style; she had shown them nothing but affection; they owed her their gratitude and obedience. This was especially true of Margherita, who had been living in Naples with her children for the previous four years, having returned from Hungary in the summer of 1376. And Margherita’s behavior in the aftermath of the schism indicated that, at least initially, she supported her aunt’s position. Margherita displayed no outward partiality for Urban; on the contrary, she had been present at the welcoming ceremony for Clement VII at the Castel Nuovo in May 1379 and had willingly done obeisance to the French pope, along with Joanna and the rest of the court, at that time. There was no evidence whatsoever of a break or quarrel between the queen and her niece. In fact, by her continued separation from Charles, Margherita gave every indication of preferring her aunt’s company to that of her husband.
Yet Margherita suddenly left Naples with her children on June 6, 1380. The chroniclers offer conflicting accounts of her departure. One report asserts that Joanna had her niece under surveillance but that Margherita, taking advantage of an outbreak of violence on the streets of the capital city that day, managed to slip away with her children unnoticed in the confusion. But another source indicates that Margherita asked permission to leave in order to join her husband, and that Joanna granted her request, even providing a military escort to ensure her safety and that of her children on the journey. Whichever of these versions is closer to the truth, the withdrawal of her niece from the royal court at Naples jolted Joanna into acceptance of the danger at hand. In a letter to Clement written on June 29, 1380, the queen officially adopted Louis, count of Anjou, as her successor and granted him the rights and title to the duchy of Calabria, the traditional honorific accorded to Neapolitan heirs to the throne. Clement VII quickly ratified her decision in bulls of July 22 and 23.
The queen’s acceptance of assistance came not a moment too soon. By July, Charles of Durazzo, at the head of an army of five thousand Hungarian horsemen and some two thousand foot soldiers, was in Romagna, moving rapidly toward Tuscany. By August, he had taken the towns of Gubbio and Arezzo without a struggle, and by late September was on the outskirts of Florence. Joanna reacted by sending the brother of Cardinal Orsini as an emissary to Tuscany to hire mercenaries and seek an alliance with Florence against the aggressor. But the Florentines favored Urban in the schism and much preferred to get out of Charles’s way than to fight on the side of the queen of Naples, so recently their opponent in the struggle against Gregory XI. At the beginning of October the city-state proclaimed its neutrality “with benevolence towards the invader.” (Sensing that good wishes, however well meant, might not be enough to ensure their safety in this instance, the Florentine government also prudently bribed Charles with forty thousand florins to leave the city alone.) By November 11, 1380, in an eerie replication of the first Hungarian invasion, without ever engaging in battle, Charles and his army had made their way to the Eternal City, where Urban immediately rewarded his new ally by naming him senator of Rome.
Naples prepared for war. Some minor skirmishes occurred on the border of the kingdom over the next few months, but for the most part Charles’s forces remained quiescent during the winter. Although Joanna’s troops acquitted themselves well in these initial clashes, the size of the Hungarian company was sufficiently disheartening to provoke great fear in the capital. Bowing to necessity, the queen called on Louis of Anjou to make good his promise and come quickly to Naples to relieve her in her moment of need.
But the count of Anjou was unprepared to answer her summons. His eldest brother, Charles V, king of France, had died on September 16, 1380, and Louis had been required to hurry to Paris to act as regent on behalf of Charles’s eldest son, the future Charles VI. To leave comfortable France, where for the moment he enjoyed considerable power, in order to undertake a dangerous and expensive adventure to Naples was highly inconvenient. Louis remained in Paris.
The final preamble to armed conflict occurred with the advent of summer. On June 1, 1381, the pope, who had so inveighed against the corruption of the French cardinals that he had provoked a schism, officially invested Charles of Durazzo with the kingdom of Naples on the condition that, once Charles and his army had removed Joanna from her throne, Urban’s nephew would receive the lucrative towns of Capua, Caserta, Aversa, Nocera, and Amalfi, along with a few other rich demesnes. Charles agreed to everything, just as he had with Louis the Great, and the next day, June 2, he was further rewarded by Urban with a solemn coronation ceremony. Six days later, Charles of Durazzo, now Charles III of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem, rode out of Rome at the head of a fierce Hungarian army, which had been supplemented over the course of the winter by an additional company of Italian mercenaries numbering some one thousand men. The entire fighting force, consisting of approximately eight thousand hardened warriors and all the cruel machinery of medieval warfare, including three massive catapults, lumbered out of the city and took the road south to Naples.
Joanna made one last, desperate attempt to enlist the aid of Louis of Anjou. In response to the crowning of Charles III, the queen issued a royal proclamation on June 4 publicly announcing the adoption of the duke of Anjou as her heir and promising him a say in her government during her lifetime but only if he kept to the original agreement and appeared in Naples with an army. She also dispatched a private, high-ranking ambassador, the count of Caserta, to Provence and Paris with an urgent message to Louis and Clement to release the promised galleys and to send these, along with a fighting force, to her as quickly as possible.
Then Otto of Brunswick left the queen within the thick-walled fortress of the Castel Nuovo and bravely led a regiment of Neapolitan lances and foot soldiers out of the capital city to try to block the road and repel the invasion.
The two armies met at Palestrina, twenty-five miles southeast of Rome, on June 24. Otto’s forces were hopelessly outmatched, and the Neapolitans were forced to withdraw. The Hungarians did not even bother to pursue their fleeing opponents but continued their single-minded, unrelenting march forward. Four days later, Charles of Durazzo penetrated the northern border of Joanna’s kingdom.
Otto regrouped and fell back on the capital, hoping to make a last stand outside the Porta Capuana, one of several locked gates to the city. He and his knights arrived on July 16, the same day that Charles of Durazzo and his army reached the outskirts of the city of Naples. As night was falling and it was too late to fight, both armies made camp—Otto at the Porta Capuana, Charles at a different gateway, the Porta del Mercato—and prepared to do
battle the next day.
But Charles did not have to wait until morning. Under cover of darkness, partisans of Urban VI betrayed the queen’s forces. According to seventeenth-century Italian historian Pietro Giannone, referring to earlier chronicle accounts of these events, “then Palamede Bozzuto [brother of Ludovico, Urban’s choice for archbishop] and Martuccio Ajes, two Neapolitan knights and captains of the horse, advanced with their troops; and being guided by certain of those who had come out of the city, they moved to the seaside, waded, and entered by the Porta della Conceria; for those within, having trusted to its being washed by the waves, it was neither locked nor guarded; and from thence having marched to the market-place, with a great ‘Huzza,’ they shouted ‘God save King Charles and Pope Urban!’ Then, being followed by those who were in the market-place, they easily beat off those of the Queen’s party, and forced them to retire to the castle, while they opened the Porta del Mercato, at which Charles with his army entered; and having posted a strong guard at that gate, he [Charles] marched to the Porta Capuana, where he also posted a good guard, and sent another to that of St. Gennaro, while himself and the rest of the army took up their quarters at Santa Chiara, so that they could hinder the enemy from entering by the Porta Donnoroso and the Porta Reale.” Otto was informed of the treachery only after Charles of Durazzo had secured the portals. Although the Neapolitan forces managed to pick off members of the Hungarian rear guard who were late making camp, the queen’s champions were effectively locked out of the capital. But for the stone walls of the palace, Joanna was suddenly without defense.
Charles left nothing to chance, and the next morning began a violent siege of the Castel Nuovo. Using his three catapults, he bombarded the fortress with boulders while his engineers tunneled under the walls; when there were no rocks convenient, the Hungarians flung sewage and other filth, including the bodies of the dead, in an effort to intimidate those inside. Many were killed and wounded by the barrage. Even so, Joanna herself might have withstood the assault for months had she not previously opened her doors to some five hundred of her subjects, including her two remaining nieces, Spinelli and the other members of her government, and two cardinals who had remained behind when Clement returned to Avignon. “The next day Charles laid siege to Castel Nuovo, whither, besides the Duchess of Durazzo [Jeanne] with Robert of Artois her husband, almost all the ladies of the best quality had flocked, who, because of their sincere affection for the Queen, were afraid of being ill-used; there was likewise a vast number of noblemen with their families, which occasioned so sudden destruction; for the Queen, partly out of the mildness of her disposition, and partly because she hoped that the galleys of Provence would quickly arrive, received and fed them all with the provisions of the castle, which perhaps would have been sufficient for the garrison for six months, but were consumed in one,” Giannone recounted.
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