The heinous siege conditions ground on. By the third week of August, the food stores had dwindled to the point where it was clear that unless help arrived quickly, those huddled within the shelter of the castle would be forced to surrender or face starvation. Still, the queen, at the age of fifty-five, believed she could repeat the experience of her youth by once again making the journey to Avignon to appear before the papal court and appeal for aid. “She not only designed to make her escape, but to go in person to persuade… Pope Clement to give her powerful assistance, in order to return with her adopted heir [the count of Anjou] and drive out the enemy.” On August 20, to bargain for time, Joanna sent a personal emissary, the count of San Severino, to Charles of Durazzo to negotiate the terms of a truce. Charles agreed to give her five days “after which time, if Prince Otto did not come to relieve the castle and raise the siege, the Queen must deliver herself up into his hands.”
To encourage her submission, Charles adopted a charmingly chivalric attitude and expressed concern for her person. “And San Severino being returned with these conditions, Charles sent after him some servants with a present to the Queen of some fowl, fruit, and other eatables, and ordered daily to be sent whatever she should think fit to command for her own table… But what is more… to excuse himself… he [said] that he sincerely esteemed her as Queen, and would continue to do so, and respect her; that he would not have taken the kingdom by force of arms, but would have waited till it had fallen to him by succession, if he had not seen the Prince, her husband… kept up a powerful army; whence it appeared very plain that he [Otto] would have been in a position to keep possession of the kingdom, and to deprive him [Charles] the only branch of the race of Charles I.” Joanna’s reaction to this ingenuous explanation is not known; most likely she was far more interested in having achieved a postponement of captivity, however slight, than in her persecutor’s rationalizations. The first day of the five passed, and then the next, and the next, and still the ships from Provence did not arrive.
Then suddenly, on the fourth day, Otto struck. Down from the Castel Sant’Elmo, which overlooked the city, he and his horsemen thundered toward Piedigrotta and the waterfront to break through Charles’s fortifications and open a supply line to the Castel Nuovo to lift the siege. The Hungarians mobilized quickly, and the army marched out to meet the threat. The Neapolitan forces under Otto made a valiant effort. “They fought with so much bravery, that for a great while the victory was doubtful. At last the Prince [Otto] rushed forward towards King Charles’ royal standard with so much boldness, that none durst follow him; so that being surrounded by the best of the enemy’s cavalry, he was forced to surrender, and by his being made prisoner his army was routed.”
In the wake of the defeat of the Neapolitan forces and the capture of her husband, Joanna had no choice but to surrender. She sent the count of San Severino again to Charles to arrange a parley. On the morning of August 26, the queen descended to the garden of the Castel Nuovo and met her former ward to bargain for terms. The chroniclers indicate that Charles maintained his chivalric posture throughout these discussions. Negotiations between the two continued until evening, at which time a document was apparently drawn outlining the terms of Joanna’s surrender. Her first concern was for the safety of those of her subjects and vassals who had supported her in the crisis. “The Queen sent Hugo San Severino to surrender, and to beg of the conqueror to take those who were in the castle with her under his protection. The same day the King [Charles], with his guard and San Severino, entered the castle and saluted the Queen, assuring her that he would perform whatever he had promised, and would have her remain in an apartment of the castle, not as prisoner, but as Queen, and to be served by the same servants as formerly.” The terms of her capitulation having been established, Joanna went back inside the Castel Nuovo and had Charles’s colors and flag displayed outside the walls of the palace to indicate that he now held possession of both the fortress and the government of Naples. Then she officially surrendered herself to him.
What happened in the immediate aftermath of Joanna’s capture is not altogether clear. There is a chronicler’s report, sufficiently detailed as to be credible, claiming that on September 1, 1381, less than a week after the queen’s surrender, the promised galleys—ten armed ships under the command of the count of Caserta, the personal ambassador whom she had sent to Clement and Louis of Anjou to beg for help—at last appeared. According to this account, Charles of Durazzo allowed the captains of these galleys to visit Joanna in her confinement on condition that the queen announce to the Provençals that she had decided to make him, and not Louis of Anjou, her legitimate heir. Joanna then tricked Charles by agreeing to speak to the captains without specifying what she intended to say:
As soon as they [the Provençals] were entered, the Queen spoke to them thus: “Both the behavior of my ancestors, and the sacred tie under which the county of Provence was to my crown, required greater dispatch than you have made in coming to relieve me, who, after having suffered all those hardships which are not only grievous to women, but the most robust soldiers, even to the eating of the filthy flesh of unclean animals, have been forced to deliver myself up into the hands of a most cruel enemy. But if this, as I believe, has been through negligence, and not out of any ill intention, I conjure you, if there be remaining in you the least spark of affection toward me, or the smallest remembrance of your oaths, and of the favors you have received from me, that by no means you ever accept of this ungrateful robber [Charles of Durazzo] for your lord, who from a Queen has made me a slave; and even if ever any writing shall be mentioned to you or shown you whereby I may have appointed him my heir, believe it not, but look upon it as if it were a forgery, or extorted from me against my will; because my will is that you should have the Duke of Anjou for your lord, not only in the county of Provence and my other dominions beyond the mountains [Piedmont], but likewise in this kingdom, to all which I have already appointed him my heir, and to be my champion in order to revenge this treason and violence. Go, then, and obey him; and if you are not void of all sense of gratitude for the love I have showed to your country, and of pity for a Queen under such calamity, you will go and take revenge with your arms, and pray to God for my soul, and I not only advise you so to do, but as you are yet my subjects, I command you.”
Her visitors, the chronicler continued, “with sad lamentation excused themselves [for not having arrived sooner] and appeared most sensibly affected with her captivity, and promised to do what she had ordered them, and then ventured abroad of their galleys, and set sail for Provence.”
Although the sentiments and commands expressed in Joanna’s speech are certainly in keeping with her previous attitude and behavior, other records indicate that the ships in question were still being outfitted in Marseille on September 8, and seem never to have been launched at all. And yet, lending further credibility to the story, on September 2, the day after this incident supposedly took place, Charles of Durazzo abruptly reneged on all his promises to the queen. Instead of allowing Joanna to live at the Castel Nuovo, where a number of high courtiers and members of the royal family, including Otto of Brunswick, Niccolò Spinelli, Jeanne of Durazzo and her new husband, Robert of Artois, were also being held, he suddenly separated the queen from her court and had her transferred to much more austere quarters at the Castel dell’Ovo, accompanied by just a few of her ladies-in-waiting. Nor was she treated with the respect due her position, as was specified by the terms of her surrender. Instead, Joanna was relegated to the position of prisoner. She was held in isolation, unable to communicate with anyone, another indication she had refused to legitimize Charles’s occupation by publicly naming him her heir.
Joanna’s situation became even more desperate in December when Robert of Artois, who had earlier feigned homage to Charles in order to gain his freedom, was arrested and accused of plotting to assassinate the usurper and rescue the queen. After that, Joanna was hastily moved during a violent storm to the cast
le of Nocera, in the interior of the kingdom southeast of Naples, closer to Salerno. Charles allowed her only one lady-in-waiting and three Tartar servants for company.
The queen was not without powerful international allies, however. In Avignon, agitated by the news of Joanna’s surrender and imprisonment, Clement sent emissaries to Paris to put pressure on Louis of Anjou to honor his obligations under the recent agreement with Naples. By January 1382, the French pope had succeeded in wresting a promise from the duke that an army would be raised and ready to leave for Italy by May 1. That this time Louis was serious was made clear when the duke of Anjou left his regent’s post in Paris to travel to Avignon to meet with the pope, arriving on February 22. Sufficient progress was made during these discussions that the next week Clement officially awarded Louis the title of duke of Calabria and threw church support and monies behind the effort to assemble a legion strong enough to defeat the Hungarians.
French preparations for an assault on Naples were noted with some trepidation by Charles of Durazzo. In reaction, the queen’s Nocera prison was suddenly judged insufficiently secure in the event of a rescue attempt. On March 28, 1382, the new king of Naples ordered that Joanna be forcibly removed again, this time to the desolate castle of Muro, in the remote, mountainous region of the Apennines of Basilicata, near Venosa, about halfway between Naples and Bari. For good measure, Otto was also transferred out of the capital at this time to the fortified castle of Altamura, in Apulia, inland of the city of Bari.
With this latest move, Joanna’s situation deteriorated alarmingly. To act as her warden at the castle of Muro, Charles appointed Palamede Bozzuto, the Neapolitan captain who had been instrumental in opening the gates of the city to the Hungarians. Palamede was a ferocious Urban partisan whose brother Ludovico had recovered his position as archbishop of Naples under Charles’s regime. He despised the queen for her espousal of Clement. Under Palamede’s direction, Joanna’s incarceration took on a new and frightening level of brutality. Her jailer treated her with scorn, at one point tearing the rings from her fingers. Her food was limited and of poor quality, and even this could be denied at any time based on her tormentor’s whim. She saw no one but Palamede, her one lady-in-waiting, and her three servants.
Yet time was running out for the Hungarians. Joanna in her isolation could not have known it, but help was on the way. With Clement’s backing, Louis of Anjou had raised a huge army and on June 13, 1382, led his force out of Carpentras and toward Italy. Although Florence, Bologna, and Genoa remained loyal to Urban and refused to lend their support to the invasion, Louis and Clement had succeeded in convincing both the count of Savoy and the Visconti family of Milan to contribute men and arms, and the result was a massive force—some sixty thousand men by Louis’ own estimation, the largest army ever to cross the Alps (although recent scholarship has put the number closer to fifteen thousand). For his expenses, which included the possibility of hiring mercenaries and further encouraging Italian defections from Urban, it was rumored by the chroniclers that the duke of Anjou carried with him more gold than could be found in the vaults of the rich city of Milan. War was now inevitable, and the advantage in men, arms, and money was on the side of those allied with the queen, still recognized by the majority of Europe as the legitimate ruler of Naples.
This threat signed her death warrant. Without Joanna, Charles’s legal claim to the kingdom was much stronger. He was a direct descendant of the original patriarch, Charles of Anjou, as was his wife, Margherita, the queen’s niece. Joanna’s subjects were far more likely to accept—in fact they had accepted—Charles and Margherita as rulers than they were to support the claims of a member of the French royal family. However, if the queen lived and was freed from captivity, she would undoubtedly legitimize the duke of Anjou’s enterprise and might yet swing popular opinion away from Charles, particularly if stories of her ill treatment became known.
On July 27, 1382, just as the duke of Anjou’s massive army was making its ponderous way into Italy to rescue her, Joanna I, queen of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem, and countess of Provence, was secretly assassinated somewhere within the confines of the castle of Muro. Although Charles of Durazzo, in his official announcement, claimed that she died of natural causes, other documentary sources are unanimous in reporting that the queen was murdered. Because the violence was committed clandestinely, in a remote location, the accounts of the manner in which she was slain vary. As with any sensational event, the chroniclers were perhaps prone to exaggeration and sometimes to outright fantasy. Some say she was poisoned; others that she died of self-imposed starvation. Since only Joanna and her assailants were present at the act, it is impossible to say definitively which of the differing reports is accurate. Still, from within the multitude of rumor, two accounts may be distinguished as having the advantage of some measure of authenticity.
The source of the first of these is Thomas of Niem, who held the position of secretary to Urban VI. According to his version, which was probably supplied by Hungarian informants associated with Charles of Durazzo, Joanna was kneeling in prayer at the private chapel to which she had access within the castle of Muro when four Hungarian soldiers rushed in behind her, took the queen by surprise, and strangled her with a silken cord. The use of strangulation in this instance was obviously intended to replicate the death of Andrew of Hungary and may be seen as retribution for that act.
The second credible source is Marie, wife of Louis of Anjou, who later reported the circumstances of Joanna’s death, based on information received from sources within the kingdom, in a letter of August 20, 1385. Marie, like Thomas of Niem, affirmed that Joanna was killed by four men, presumably Hungarian, who overpowered her. But in Marie’s version, instead of going to the trouble of strangling her, the thugs simply tied the queen’s hands and feet and then smothered her between two feather mattresses. Although no mention is made of the crime’s taking place in any particular part of the castle, the presence of the mattresses would indicate that Joanna was killed in her bedroom, which functioned as her cell, and not in the chapel, as was indicated in Thomas of Niem’s statement. Marie’s story is more prosaic, less loaded with the sort of symbolic detail—the chapel, the strangulation, the silken cord—so favored by storytellers of the period, which perhaps gives it more of the ring of truth.
Whatever the specific circumstances, what can be said with certainty is that, after months of hardship, Joanna died violently and alone, bereft of friends or family, deprived even of the final sacraments from which this most religious of queens would have found solace.
Although Charles announced her passing in an official proclamation, this seems not to have been enough to satisfy the capital, so to settle the matter, the new king of Naples had Joanna’s corpse transported by litter from the castle of Muro to the church of Santa Chiara, where for several days the queen’s body, surrounded by candles, was displayed to the public to prove she was dead. However, this had the opposite effect, as the privations and anxiety Joanna had suffered during the months of her captivity, coupled with the brutality of her murder, had evidently greatly altered her appearance. A large number of the people who crowded in to see her corpse reportedly did not recognize her. As a result, one of the chronicles asserted that “many people thought she was dead but others thought she was not,” which fueled gossip that Joanna was still alive and that Charles was trying to cover up this fact by substituting another woman’s body for the queen’s. Because of the confusion, Joanna’s death would not be officially recognized in Provence for nearly two years.
After the viewing there followed the problem of what to do with her remains. Since Urban had excommunicated Joanna, the queen could not be buried in consecrated church property, nor did Charles of Durazzo feel the need to honor in death the woman who had, at least until recently, been his benefactor in life. There would be no great funeral statuary erected for Joanna to memorialize the many achievements of her long reign as there had been for her grandfather King Robert, or even
a place for her by his side or by that of her sister, Maria, or her father, Charles of Calabria, or her mother, Marie of Valois, all of whom lay in state in the great gloom of the sanctuary of Santa Chiara.
In the end, a compromise solution of sorts was settled on, apparently at the initiative of the Poor Clares, to whom the queen had been so generous throughout her reign. Just outside the edge of the nave, in the lowly space that occupies the entranceway to a back door that leads from the main body of the church of Santa Chiara to the cloister behind, was a deep well covered by a stone slab, into which the bones of the dead were often discarded. Into this well went the remains of Joanna I, to lie unmarked and forgotten through the centuries.
The Lady Queen Page 38
