It was now, in 1376, that Johanna married her fourth husband, Otto of Brunswick, a seasoned soldier whom she undoubtedly chose because he could lead a military response if necessary. Otto of Brunswick was one of the papacy’s main supporters, and Johanna’s marriage to him after James of Majorca’s death in 1375 was an act of support for the papacy, and a way for the papacy to support her. James of Majorca’s death had another consequence, since his sister and heir Isabelle of Majorca, Countess of Roussillon and Cerdagne, chose Duke Louis I of Anjou as her own heir. In 1376 she ceded Louis her rights to Achaea, Morea and the Latin Empire, giving him the ancillary claims that went with the throne of Naples, and putting him in a prime position to be Johanna’s heir even if she resented his attempts to seize her throne.11
It is intriguing to consider where the negotiations between Hungary and France would have ended, but two events intervened. First, Catherine of Hungary died in 1378. Second and more importantly, the Western Great Schism in the papacy erupted. In previous struggles between Johanna and Louis the Great, the unshakeable support of the papacy had been the key to Johanna’s survival and ultimate success in retaining her throne. After 1378, relying on the papacy was an altogether different proposition, and required the extraordinary choice of which pope.
The Western Great Schism
Returning the papacy to Rome had been advocated by many figures, including Petrarch and Birgitta of Sweden, and when Urban V decided to visit the city in 1367 Johanna sent ships to escort him. In 1368 she attended his court, and when he awarded the Golden Rose (to the most eminent person attending the papal court on the fourth Sunday in Lent), it was to Johanna, the first woman to be so honoured, and this despite the fact that Peter I of Cyprus and his son were there. The situation was especially tense because both Peter and Johanna claimed the titular throne of Jerusalem, and Peter had been crowned king in 1359 despite Johanna’s claim. Nevertheless, Johanna joined the line of Angevins such as Fulk Réchin, Louis of Taranto and Niccolo Acciaiuoli who had received the Golden Rose. However, Urban’s residence in Rome was brief and he returned to the safer environs of Avignon in 1370.
Urban’s example proved decisive though, and in 1376 Pope Gregory XI, despite being old and infirm, decided the time had come to move the papacy back to Rome for good. This was despite the opposition of the French cardinals – who were now the majority of the college – and many who argued that at such a critical time in the Hundred Years War it was the pope’s duty to remain nearby to help negotiate. Gregory was obdurate and arrived in Rome in January 1377, dying there in March 1378. Now there had to be a new election, and with the French cardinals divided on whom to elect and the Roman people in an uproar, rioting in the streets and demanding that a Roman be elected to the throne of St Peter after so many French popes, the cardinals were deadlocked. As a compromise they finally decided on the Archbishop of Bari, a Neapolitan who took the name Urban VI. However, he soon proved high-handed and divisive – or outright insane, if the French cardinals were to be believed – and the cardinals determined to overthrow him. The cardinals appealed to Charles V and the University of Paris for sanction to depose him, and although they wisely refrained from giving a definitive opinion, the cardinals elected the cardinal Robert of Geneva as Pope Clement VII.12
Despite Johanna’s predisposition to support the pope’s return to Rome, Urban VI chose to attack her, stating that a woman should not rule and threatening to depose her. This forced Johanna and the renegade cardinals into each other’s arms, and after being driven from Rome Clement VII took refuge in Naples. Johanna became the first monarch to recognize Clement VII as pope, on 31 October 1378, though this was disastrous for her reputation and ultimately her crown. Although France and the political entities generally favourable to France – Aragon and Castile, Leon, Scotland and Cyprus – supported Clement, most of Italy was solidly behind Urban. When Johanna allowed Clement to lodge in the Castel dell’Ovo, the people of Naples rioted and Clement was forced to flee to Avignon, where he established his court in June 1379.
The Schism was a real crisis for Johanna, because Urban VI promptly excommunicated her, at precisely the time Louis the Great had re-emerged as a threat. Of course Johanna had the support of Clement VII, and it was he who now suggested that she adopt Duke Louis of Anjou as her heir. Although Clement still needed Johanna, France, and by extension Louis of Anjou, were his most vital allies, and French interests were always more important to him. This was shown most strikingly when, before Johanna adopted Louis, Clement proposed creating a new kingdom in Italy to reward Louis for his support. This was to be the ‘kingdom of Adria’ that Clement wanted to create from a constellation of papal territories in central Italy, which obviously were currently held by Urban, and weren’t Clement’s to offer. The new kingdom would have consisted of Ravenna, Ferrara, Bologna, the Romagna, Massa Trabaria, the March of Ancona, Perugia, Todi and the duchy of Spoleto. Most notably, Clement copied the bull offering this new kingdom to Louis directly from the bull that had granted the kingdom of Sicily to Charles of Anjou, entirely appropriately, given that if there were ever a case of ‘offering someone the moon if only he could unhook it from the sky’, this was it.13 This notional new kingdom died a quiet death when Clement was able to convince Johanna to adopt Louis as heir to the throne of Naples, which had the advantage of actually existing.
Although Johanna had struggled throughout the 1360s and 70s to maintain her independence in the face of encroachment from France and Louis himself, she now had little choice. She adopted Louis, emphasizing his remarkable qualities and the fact that they were ultimately from the same family. This adoption would form the basis for the Second House of Anjou’s claim to Naples, one which would later be reinforced by another adoption, of King René by Queen Johanna II, and would embroil Anjou and then France in Italian affairs for the next 150 years. Such an adoption was considered unusual at the time, and Honoré Bonet in his Tree of Battles questioned whether Johanna even had the right to pass her kingdom to an adopted heir. In the French chronicles, Louis’s acceptance of the claim to Naples was portrayed as a generous act designed to support Johanna, childless and beset by enemies. This was patently false, as Louis had previously tried to wrest Provence from Johanna and the adoption was purely political in purpose.
Urban in turn offered Louis the Great the throne of Naples, but Louis, perhaps remembering how much he was loathed in the Regno, decided to put his support behind Charles of Durazzo. Urban duly branded Johanna a heretic, deposed her through his authority as her suzerain, and summoned Charles of Durazzo from Buda to replace her. In 1380 Charles led a Hungarian army into Italy, and he was crowned King Charles III of Sicily in Rome on 1 June 1381. Johanna retaliated by publishing the articles of adoption and making it known that Louis was her successor, but Charles marched on Naples.
Although Otto of Brunswick led an army to defend the Regno, he was defeated and Charles took Naples on 16 July 1381. Johanna and Otto were besieged in the Castel Nuovo for nearly two months waiting in vain for Louis of Anjou’s arrival, but Johanna was finally forced to submit on 2 September and was imprisoned. Louis’s failure to do anything to rescue Johanna when Charles of Durazzo imprisoned her suggests that he was only interested in taking the kingdom for himself, rather than assisting Johanna. Yet perhaps it is unfair to criticize him too much, since Charles V of France had died on 16 September 1380, and Louis became regent for the eleven-year-old Charles VI, which contributed to the delay. In fact, Louis’s eventual departure from France to go to Naples could be seen as a dereliction of his duty to France.14
The Death of Queen Johanna
Johanna’s deposition and later murder are a key part of the ‘Black Legend’ of the Neapolitan Angevins that has also led them to be called the ‘Accursed Kings of Naples’, like the ‘Rois Maudits’, the accursed progeny of Philip IV. The cycle of murder, retribution and usurpation sparked by Andrew of Hungary’s death is perhaps most tragically represented by Johanna, though it did not end with
her. Her reputation never recovered from Andrew’s murder, and contemporaries attributed her death to the violence she had initiated. The chronicler Dietrich von Niem, who wrote a chronicle of the Schism, noted that Otto of Brunswick’s brother was executed in the same place Conradin had been executed by Charles of Anjou, another example of Angevin violence against Germans continuing through the 14th century.15
When Louis of Anjou learned of Johanna’s defeat, he became more active and sent representatives to Naples, but it was too late. Clement VII and Louis made a great show in Avignon of preparing an expedition to rescue Johanna, always identified as Louis’s ‘mother’, and Louis was created Duke of Calabria, the title of the King of Sicily’s heir. This mission was consciously associated with Charles of Anjou’s original conquest of the Regno and called a Crusade, but despite all this rhetoric Louis didn’t set out until June 1382, by which time Charles of Durazzo was well established in the Regno. Charles was not blind to the theatrical element of kingship, and he had been crowned again in Naples on 25 November 1381 with his wife Margaret and their son Ladislas, emphasizing their unification of two claims to the throne and the fact that the succession was secured. Ladislas was created Duke of Calabria as the ‘real’ heir to the kingdom in opposition to Louis of Anjou.16
Louis of Anjou’s delay in setting out was fatal to Johanna. She had been imprisoned since September 1381, and on 27 July 1382 Charles announced that she was dead. Charles claimed that she had died of natural causes, but most sources state that he murdered her. Because she had been excommunicated by Urban VI, Johanna was not entitled to a funeral or Christian burial. She had prepared a tomb for herself in the church of Santa Chiara near the tombs of Robert the Wise and Sancia of Majorca, but she was not allowed to be buried there and the location of her grave is unknown. Her sister Maria, who had died in 1366, was instead reburied in Johanna’s tomb in honour of her position as Queen Margaret’s mother. Johanna’s undeniably troubled reign ended with her in a sense being erased from history, with the ‘Anjou-Durazzo’ line claiming descent from Charles II through John of Gravina-Durazzo, and from Robert the Wise through Maria, not Johanna.
Johanna has a considerably more vivid afterlife than many medieval figures. Froissart gave a long account of her life and tribulations, but converted the story into something resembling an Arthurian legend. The highlight came when Charles of Durazzo besieged Johanna and Otto of Brunswick in the Castel dell’Ovo and employed a sorcerer who used marvellous enchantments to compel them to surrender. Froissart also described Louis of Anjou’s meeting with the sorcerer who had helped Charles: the wizard tempted Louis with an offer to betray Charles and capture the castle through a demonic enchantment, but Louis remained pious and the sorcerer was beheaded.17
As is so often the case, Johanna’s reign was fixed by a few key studies, and these judgements are then repeated by most modern historians. Although in one case a Victorian biographer, Welbore Baddeley St Clair, exonerates Johanna from murdering Andrew, his reasoning – that she was simply too beautiful, virtuous and generally lovely to be guilty of a crime – probably works against her and modern historians are tempted to be too harsh. They certainly don’t mince words: one of the leading historians of the papacy describes Johanna as ‘infamous, dissolute and incompetent’; the editor of St Catherine of Siena’s correspondence calls Johanna ‘licentious, violent, and fickle, an opportunist of the first degree’; and the biographer of the early humanist Coluccio Salutati calls her ‘a licentious and indolent queen, committed to bedroom intrigues’.18
This flies in the face of an outstanding 14th-century source that unfortunately, much like Baddeley St Clair, seems to do more harm than good by being too positive. Boccaccio’s prolific output included a work entitled On Famous Women, which provides brief biographies of a variety of women from antiquity down to his own age, and Johanna is the centrepiece of the work. This is most likely because Boccaccio would have liked Johanna to be a patron, and he says in his introduction that he first planned to dedicate the book to her, but since he feared the greater light might eclipse the lesser, he dedicated the work to Lady Andrea Acciaiuoli in Florence and instead devoted his final chapter to Johanna’s reign. This describes Johanna as so perfect that his words almost seem ironic, but his fundamental message that she overcame ‘the grim ways of her husbands’, internal struggles with her family and foreign invasion ‘with her lofty and indomitable spirit’ seems an accurate assessment of her reign. As well as its fulsomeness, the sincerity of the work is undermined by Boccaccio’s previous scathing allegorical denunciations of Johanna as Andrew’s murderer.19
Johanna almost seems to play hide and seek with us in the available sources. We have fantastic accounts like that of Froissart and more informed, but still hyperbolic, accounts like that of Boccaccio, but we also have her letters about Andrew’s murder in which we hear her own words and we get a distinct sense of her personality, and her later correspondence with Saints Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena also gives us an insight into her thoughts, feelings and the kinds of friends she chose for herself. At other times, notably during her marriage to Louis of Taranto, she almost disappears, obscured behind her husband until finally and most tragically she literally disappears, imprisoned, deprived of her throne and murdered by Charles of Durazzo.
Charles III of Durazzo
Charles III of Durazzo was now King of Sicily, and he is known as Charles ‘the Peaceful’ or ‘the Short’. Given that his great-grandfather was Charles the Hunchback, the second name is not surprising, and the epithet ‘the Peaceful’ demonstrates a historical truism about royal names: any ruler known as the ‘the Peaceful’ is a disaster. It also seems quite unwarranted given the way Charles took the throne of Naples, but his later actions will explain it.
Paradoxically, given the tumult at the end of Johanna’s reign, the accession of Charles III marked a return to the expansionist policies of Charles of Anjou. Charles III became the greatest power in Italy, and similarly to Robert the Wise was hailed by leading humanists as the new master of Italy. He also made contact with various cities in Provence and began steps to take the county back from the Dukes of Anjou. More importantly, he had an interest in Hungary.
Louis the Great’s success in backing Charles of Durazzo for the throne of Naples was about to backfire spectacularly. With his health deteriorating, the pious Louis retired from public life and died on 11 September 1382 at Trnava. He was buried at Székesfehérvár with Carobert and other Hungarian kings, and he had left instructions for his eldest surviving daughter Maria, who was eleven, to succeed him, with his wife Elisabeth as regent. It would seem to be a supreme irony that after all Louis’s efforts to overthrow Johanna, he himself should be succeeded by a woman, although through ‘masculinization’ Maria succeeded as king, not queen. Maria was crowned on 17 September, but there was unrest among the nobility over being ruled by a woman, and they sent word to Charles of Durazzo asking him to take the throne.
At the end of 1382 Charles of Durazzo was in no position to concern himself with Hungary, because Louis of Anjou had invaded Naples in June, ostensibly to avenge Johanna’s death, but of course mainly to take the Neapolitan inheritance that he had coveted for years. Louis’s army was compared to the army of Xerxes in its pomp and magnificence, and included the retinue of Amadeus, the ‘Green Count’ of Savoy, who travelled with lavish paraphernalia and livery in his trademark colour, but Louis faced grave political disadvantages that put him in a very difficult position.
Most importantly, the papal schism meant that virtually all of Italy was enemy territory, even Guelf states like Florence that were traditional Angevin allies. Florence retained the services of Sir John Hawkwood to keep Louis’s army away, and with the necessity of avoiding Florence and Rome, Louis was forced down the east coast of the peninsula where his army was harried by various enemies rather than receiving a welcome. Although Louis did succeed in conquering the eastern part of the Regno, Charles of Durazzo, like his namesake Cha
rles V in the Hundred Years War, simply refused to be drawn into battle, and Louis was forced to wait in Bari and Brindisi for additional funds and troops from France. Unfortunately for Louis, though perhaps appropriately given the consequences of his delay in assisting Johanna, the reinforcements from France simply took too long to arrive. Louis died of a fever on 20 September 1384 at Bari and his army disbanded. He was succeeded by his young son Louis II of Anjou.20
Charles of Durazzo now re-established his authority in the Regno, formed an alliance of Provençal cities to dispossess the seven-year-old Louis II of Anjou of the county and finally had time to consider his invitation to take the throne of Hungary. Hungary was now suffering from the claims to multiple thrones that had seemed such a part of Louis the Great’s greatness. Louis had succeeded Casimir the Great as king of Poland, and his heir Maria should have inherited the throne as well. However, the Polish council refused to accept a ruler who did not live in Poland, leading the regent Elisabeth to consider an invasion. This was a poor option when Hungary itself faced a potential invasion by Charles of Durazzo, so Elisabeth decided to send her second daughter Hedwig to Poland instead, where she was eventually accepted as ‘King Jadwiga’. Elisabeth also repudiated Maria’s betrothal to the future Emperor Sigismund in favour of a French alliance, in hopes that this would provide support to Louis of Anjou and help him depose Charles of Durazzo. Louis’s death in 1384 put paid to that plan, and Charles’s position quickly improved.
Invited by the Hungarian nobles to take the throne, Charles landed in Dalmatia in September 1385 and marched on Buda. Elisabeth returned to the original plan and married Maria to Sigismund in October, but now Charles of Durazzo entered Buda in peace, without an army, and at the invitation of his supporters convened a diet to choose the kingdom’s ruler. Charles was chosen by an overwhelming majority, forcing Maria to abdicate and Sigismund to flee to Prague. Charles was crowned King of Hungary on 31 December 1385, and his assumption of power by consent earned him the sobriquet ‘the Peaceful’.
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 44