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Praise for
The Lady Queen
“The Lady Queen weaves the story of one of the most extraordinary (and unjustly overlooked) rulers of the Middle Ages. The incredible episodes in Joanna’s history—not only murder and plague, but also cannibalism and even a medieval-style credit crunch—sometimes seem like something out of one of Boccaccio’s more fantastical tales. In bringing it all together, Nancy Goldstone has produced the most compelling history of the ‘calamitous fourteenth century’ since A Distant Mirror.”
—Ross King, author of Brunelleschi’s Dome, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, and The Judgment of Paris
“This is a remarkable story about a remarkable woman told with skill and verve. Nancy Goldstone re-creates the fourteenth-century world of intrigue, family feud, and skullduggery with a flourish.”
—Wendy Moore, author of Wedlock
“Living two centuries earlier than Elizabeth I of England, Joanna I was the first European woman ever to govern a realm in her own name. Written in vivid, pellucid prose, Nancy Goldstone’s terrific biography of this unique and extraordinary woman gives us a glimpse of the significant political power exercised by many women in the Middle Ages, and is nothing short of riveting.”
—Francine Du Plessix Gray
“If your tastes run to medieval European politics, then there is nothing better than a good, meaty biography of royal intrigue and murder… Goldstone reminds us of Queen Joanna I’s shrewdness, as well as the delicious infamy of her reign and times.”
—McClatchy Tribune
“The Lady Queen is a murder mystery, a tale of hard-earned political power, and a harrowing drama of family discord guaranteed to keep readers turning pages late into the night.”
—Connecticut Post
“Veteran author Goldstone expertly describes bloodthirsty fourteenth-century politics and the complex family entanglements that encouraged siblings and cousins to clash over kingdoms like toddlers brawling over toys… Packed with action and effortless to read, Goldstone’s account will satisfy scholars and entertain book clubs with a heroine who had persistence and unbounded dedication to her realm.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Goldstone gives a good, solid account of Queen Joanna, unlike previous works that tend to portray her in an overly flowery or overly critical tone… A fascinating read that will appeal to anyone interested in the Middle Ages.”
—Medievalists.net
“The Lady Queen is a fascinating account of the life of Joanna I. It provides a sympathetic appraisal of the notorious queen, placing her rule within the broader historical context. This includes her navigation of the political realities of the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, economic downturns, and the papal court’s movement between Avignon and Rome. In an age dominated by men, this previously obscure historical figure fought scandal, betrayal, and personal tragedy to rule in her own name for over a quarter century.”
—Historical Novels Review
“In scholarly but accessible prose, popular historian Goldstone underscores the many significant accomplishments of this exemplary queen. A thoroughly intriguing portrait of a neglected historical figure.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Court intrigue, the murder of a member of a royal house, and a sensational trial: many authors use these elements in combination to forge page-turning medieval mysteries. Goldstone, author of Four Queens (2007), proves once again that truth is often stranger and more intriguing than fiction. Choosing as her subject Joanna, the notorious queen of Naples and titular queen of Jerusalem and Sicily from 1343 to 1382, she chronicles the fascinating life of one of the few women in her time who ruled in her own name… A life well worthy of historical examination.”
—Booklist
A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF FOURTEENTH-CENTURY MONEY
The fourteenth century was all about gold—Hungarian gold, to be specific. Previously, the vast majority of coins struck in Europe were made of silver. Throughout the thirteenth century, for example, kings and queens had always used silver in coins, bars, and sometimes even plates and other decorative items to finance their wars and pay royal dowries; merchants had reckoned their accounts in silver; and peasants had scraped together small tarnished silver pennies, known as denari in Italy and deniers in France, to buy bread and the other necessities of life.
All this changed when Carobert discovered gold in the 1320s and began minting Hungarian gold florins and aggressively importing goods and services, mostly from Venice and Florence. Hungarian gold suddenly flooded into Italy, and from there, thanks to the super-companies, to the rest of Europe. Gold, intrinsically more valuable than silver, was a much more convenient medium for large transactions, and it quickly became the specie of choice for the aristocracy and international merchant class. Although the average medieval citizen or peasant never saw a gold coin, let alone handled one, the great payments of the age—the ransom of King John of France, the financing of the Hundred Years’ War, the huge transactions associated with the super-companies—were all paid in gold florins.
It is easy to see why. It took, on average, fourteen times as much silver by weight to equal the purchasing power of gold, and because gold was also denser than silver, silver coins took up twenty-six times more room in a saddlebag or a wagon than their equivalent in gold. So, for example, when a member of one of the Florentine super-companies was sent to England to lend money to Edward III in exchange for licenses to import wool, he could take gold florins, which weighed approximately 3.5 grams per coin, or silver grosso, which were large silver coins, each weighing 1.7 grams. But to use silver meant taking twenty-eight grosso in place of each florin, as two grosso equaled the weight of one florin, and then you needed fourteen times as many to get the same purchasing power. And, obviously, carrying twenty-eight large light silver coins instead of one small heavier gold coin meant taking a much larger bag, particularly when dealing with sums in the hundreds of thousands, or, in the case of England, the one and a half million florins Edward III borrowed from the Bardi and Peruzzi families.
Naturally, every kingdom minted its own coins, with the name, weight, and quality of fineness varying from place to place, although Florentine gold florins were accepted everywhere as the principal international currency. The kingdom of Naples continued to mint large silver coins, called gigliati or carlini, and used them to pay sailors and other militia in the never-ending war for Sicily, or exchanged them for gold florins, at an approximate rate of twelve gigliati per florin, for the annual payment to the pope. France began striking its own gold coins, the franc à cheval, largely equivalent to a florin, in the 1360s, but before that the kingdom minted primarily small silver deniers (pennies) and, like Naples, exchanged them for florins when the crown needed money for large political payments. England began striking its first gold coin, “the noble,” which was more than twice the size of a florin (the English always had to be different), in 1351 but also minted pennies. Dauphiné, near Avignon, began striking its own gold florins as early as the 1340s to accommodate the many bribes and purchases made to and by Pope Clement VI’s lavish court.
All the sums mentioned in The Lady Queen are denominated in Florentine florins unless otherwise indicated. For more on this subject, I strongly recommend Peter Spufford’s Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe and its companion book, A Handbook of Medieval Exchange. And if you are interested in the super-companies, you simply cannot do better than Edwin S. Hunt’s The Medieval Super-companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence.
One last point of interest: A stable and strong currency is generally accepted as a measure of a sound political regime. To meet the many pressing financial needs associated with the Hundred Years’ War, Catherine of Valois’ brother, King Philip VI of France, much to the detriment of his kingdom, chose to devalue the national money supply s
even times over the course of his reign, so that where sixty silver coins were struck from a weight of silver in 1336, two hundred and forty coins were struck from the same weight in 1342. By contrast, Joanna, whose need for money was certainly equally urgent to that of her cousin, never resorted to devaluation to meet her expenses. The currency of Naples remained stable, and even strengthened from twelve gigliati per florin in 1350 to ten gigliati per florin toward the end of her reign, another intelligent policy decision for which the queen is never given credit.
A NOTE ON THE SOURCES CITED AND USED TO RESEARCH THE LADY QUEEN
I think that one of the reasons Queen Joanna I has not been written about in English in this century may be attributed to the difficulty in obtaining primary source material relating to her reign after the wanton destruction of the Angevin register by the German army during World War II. This is a sad story, which bears repeating, particularly in the light of the recent lootings of antiquities and other valuable artifacts in Iraq. An eyewitness account of what happened, titled “Report on the Destruction by the Germans, September 30, 1943, of the Depository of Priceless Historical Records of the Naples State Archives,” written by Count Riccardo Filangieri of the Royal State Archives of Naples, may be found in the American Archivist, vol. 7, no. 4 (October 1944), pp. 252–55. Count Filangieri was the Neapolitan official responsible for overseeing the safety of a large trove of historical documents during the war. The following summary is taken from his report:
At the beginning of World War II, worried about the vulnerability of the thousands of years’ worth of historical documents that made up the State Archives of Naples to Allied bombing, Count Filangieri was asked by the Italian Ministry of the Interior to oversee the transfer of the oldest and most valuable of these to a place of safety. Count Filangieri accordingly packed up some thirty thousand books and an additional fifty thousand parchments into 866 strong wooden crates and had these removed to a quiet villa about twenty miles outside Naples. There they remained undisturbed through most of the war.
In September 1943, however, the Germans knew that an Allied invasion was imminent and discipline seems to have broken down. The area near the villa was plagued by small bands of German soldiers armed with submachine guns intent on stealing food and other valuables and destroying both public and private buildings. (I think of them as the twentieth-century version of the free companies.) On the afternoon of September 28, one of these bands, consisting of three privates, appeared at the villa and found, not the calves they were hoping for, but the 866 wooden crates. It was explained to the soldiers that the crates held documents of scholarly interest only, and the soldiers went away.
The next morning, a German officer appeared and ordered one of the boxes opened. The director of the depository stood with the officer and explained the contents of the box and impressed upon him the irrelevance of the collection to the current war effort, at the same time emphasizing its importance for historical research. The officer, apparently satisfied, said, “All right,” and left.
Although not seriously worried, Count Filangieri, who lived nearby, at this point wrote a letter to the local German commander again stressing the purely scholarly nature of the documents. This letter was delivered to the villa the next morning, September 30, just as another three-person squad of soldiers, this time armed with incendiary materials, arrived. The director tried to read them the letter, but one of the Germans grabbed it and threw it away, shouting, “Commander know everything, order burn.” The soldiers then proceeded to spread straw and gunpowder throughout the villa and set it ablaze. The collection went up in flames in minutes. The staff heroically worked to save a few cartons, but for the most part, everything was destroyed, including what remained of the records of the thirteenth-century reign of Frederick II, known as the “Wonder of the World,” one of the greatest of the German emperors.
Count Filangieri wrote of this tragic episode: “Their [the documents’] destruction has created an immense void in the historical sources of European civilization, a void which nothing will ever be able to fill.” First among the most precious of the documents lost, the count listed the 378 registers of the Angevin Chancery, covering the years 1265 through 1435—the annals relating to Joanna’s reign. Gone were the records of what the queen ate and wore, the edicts she directed, the letters she wrote, the money she took in and spent—all the tools a biographer needs to re-create a life lived in the long-ago past—senselessly, needlessly, appallingly destroyed.
This is where an unlikely hero, but a hero nonetheless, Émile-G. Léonard, steps in. In 1932, Léonard, then a graduate student at the University of Paris, decided to do his doctoral dissertation on Joanna I. Because this was before the war, Léonard, who spent time in Naples to do his research, had available to him all the documents later destroyed, and he used these at length in his dissertation. His thesis, titled “La Jeunesse de Jeanne Ire, Reine de Naples, Comtesse de Provence” (The Youth of Joanna Ist, Queen of Naples, Countess of Provence), is written entirely in French and Latin and runs over thirteen hundred pages in two volumes. Although it covers only the early years of Joanna’s life and reign, up to her crowning, with Louis of Taranto, in 1352 when she was twenty-six, Léonard’s work is invaluable. To make his many points, as would any graduate student, Léonard quoted long passages from primary sources and reprinted in full many letters and other documents, as well as lists of the accounts from the Angevin registers of the period. By doing so, not only did he earn his degree, but he also defeated the ignorance of the German army. More than this, after the war, understanding that he was one of the few scholars who had studied the lost documents, he published other works on the period based on copies he had made and notes he had taken while writing his dissertation, including Les Angevins de Naples. Today, every international scholar interested in this period relies on and refers to Léonard’s research in his or her own work.
I am fortunate to live by Yale University, which owns one of the few published copies of Léonard’s thesis, and so he was my source, too, for much of the primary documentation on Joanna’s life. Although the queen had earlier English-language biographers—most notably St. Clair Baddeley in the late nineteenth century—none were nearly as rigorous in their approach as Léonard, and so their books lack much of the material that I am pleased to be able to provide for the first time in English in The Lady Queen.
This is not to say that The Lady Queen merely parrots Dr. Léonard’s work. I disagree strongly in many ways with his portrait of Joanna. To name just one point, Léonard asserted that the queen was illiterate and could not even read or write her own name. He based this idea on a letter Joanna sent to Pope Clement VI in 1346, in which, in response to Clement’s asking her to defend herself against the charge of conspiracy in Andrew’s death, the queen wrote that she was only a lowly woman and was not capable of writing well enough to do this. Since this letter was written in Latin, and Joanna and Clement had by this time been corresponding with each other in Latin for three years, I believe Joanna simply used the standard “I’m only a lowly woman” excuse as a ploy not to have to put down on paper arguments that could be twisted, taken out of context, or later used against her by lawyers. Her grandmother Sancia also referred to herself as only a lowly woman in her letter to the Franciscans, a letter, that she nonetheless made a point of noting “was written in her own hand.” If Sancia, who was in no way particularly brilliant or accomplished, and who was responsible for Joanna’s education, could read and write, it is likely that Joanna could do so as well. Also, the Latin used in Joanna’s letters was often not polished, another indication that she composed them herself. There were very few eloquent writers in the fourteenth century, Petrarch being the great exception. Cardinal Talleyrand of Périgord, for example, communicated notably poorly in Latin and was always begging Petrarch to write more simply, so he could understand him.
The other principal difficulty I have with Léonard’s work is his obvious prejudice against his subject. Readi
ng his thesis, it is pretty clear that he undertook the project as a reaction to St. Clair Baddeley’s portrayal of Joanna. Baddeley made the common biographical mistake of falling in love with his subject; his is an overly romantic, paternalistic, almost quaintly chivalric view of her person and reign. Léonard, not without some justification, found this approach offensive and used his dissertation to volley many scathing remarks in Baddeley’s direction. This is not quite fair, as Baddeley, who seems to have relied primarily on papal records and chroniclers, was accurate on many points. But Baddeley was an Englishman and Léonard a Frenchman, and so there was inevitable competition in this arena as well, which resulted in Léonard’s taking an unnecessarily harsh interpretation of Joanna’s life. Somewhere between Baddeley’s fawning and Léonard’s criticism lies the true nature of Joanna’s reign, and although more research needs to be done about this important figure, I hope The Lady Queen, which seeks to navigate between these two extremes, is a first step in this direction.
Of course, there were many other primary sources available to me. Petrarch’s Letters on Familiar Matters has been translated into English and published in three volumes by Aldo S. Bernardo, and almost all Boccaccio’s work has been published in translation as well (although it would be nice if someone would collect and publish all his letters in one place as Bernardo did with Petrarch’s). Letters and documents relating to the Avignon papacy are currently available in French and Latin but only sporadically in English; now there’s a project for some enterprising church scholar, as I’m sure there would be great interest in America in this material. Excerpts from Villani’s Chronicle up to the year 1321 were translated into English and published in 1906, but there is no English text of the material covering Joanna’s reign—another oversight—so the passages attributed to the Villanis in The Lady Queen came from other sources, including Léonard. (There were actually three Villanis—the first, Giovanni, began writing in 1300 and died of plague in 1348; he was succeeded by his brother, Matteo, who wrote the chronicle until his death, also of plague, in 1363. Filippo Villani, Matteo’s son, then took over for his father and finished the chronicle in 1364.) Excerpts from Domenico da Gravina’s chronicle (who also died of plague in 1348) occasionally appear in English in academic articles but these are mostly paraphrased—so the long passages attributed to this chronicler in The Lady Queen are again from Léonard because he quoted them in full. Lastly, all the primary source material pertaining to the Hundred Years’ War, including Froissart’s marvelous chronicle, have been published and are readily available in English.
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