At the opposite extreme, between 1362 and 1430 three women, all over the age of thirty, successfully governed important European kingdoms for at least fifteen years without any male associate—a novelty in Latin Christendom. After 1450 joint rule reemerged as the dominant form of female sovereignty in Europe, with husbands of heiresses again playing prominent rules—a model incarnated in Spain by the best-known and most successful late medieval “power couple,” Isabel and Ferdinand.
The Divorce of France and Navarre
Both female inheritance and female exclusion acquired special importance after Europe's largest hereditary monarchy annexed its smallest monarchy, and the same princess was involved in both developments. Her experiences offer dramatic evidence that the rights of heiresses were more easily accepted in smaller and weaker monarchies because in 1328 a woman who had just been excluded for the third time from her father's inheritance in France was invited to rule her father's (and grandmother's) small kingdom of Navarre, which thus became separated from the French crown to which it had been joined for fifty-four years.
In 1300 the “Very Christian King” Philip IV of France was Latin Christendom's most powerful monarch. His wife, Jeanne of Navarre, was the only child of the king of a small state near the southwestern corner of modern France, and also heir to some French provinces; she was one of several heiresses that Capetian kings of France married in order to increase their territory, wealth, and status. Navarre may well have been Europe's smallest kingdom, but even the meanest monarchy outranked any duchy or principality in prestige, and Philip IV's seals identify him as the first king of both France and Navarre.3 After Jeanne's death in 1305 Navarrese authorities insisted that her oldest son, nineteen-year-old Louis, not his father, was now their legitimate ruler. After brief hesitation Philip IV sent his son, escorted by senior royal officials, to Navarre's capital at Pamplona, seat of its only bishopric, for a coronation. When the dauphin returned to Paris an official seal (now in the French national archives) described him as the “oldest son of the king of France and king of Navarre.” Louis had the seal for four years until his father's death in 1310, but no documents attest to its use in Navarre. Afterward, he became Louis X of France and Navarre and ruled both kingdoms for six years.
Jeanne I had become heiress to Navarre when she was three years old. Her first grandchild, a girl, was barely four when her father died in 1316. When a posthumous brother, whom French genealogies call Jean I, died after a few days, Capetian France “fell to the distaff” for the first time. However, royal succession followed different trajectories in very large and very small kingdoms. After 1274 Navarre had been governed by regents until its heiress married. In France the obvious regents in 1316 were her father's two younger brothers. The older one bypassed his young niece and claimed the throne himself, staging a hastily organized coronation ceremony at Rheims.
Navarrese notables accepted this fait accompli and sent a delegation to the French court to offer homage. The new king promised in Paris to uphold Navarre's traditional privileges, or fueros, rights about which Navarrese remain extremely prickly seven centuries later. When Philip V died after a six-year reign, he left daughters but no sons. Following recent precedent, his younger brother Charles succeeded him and informed his Navarrese subjects that they could perform homage when he visited Toulouse, the seat of royal administration in southern France.4 Navarrese sources insist that this king never swore to uphold their fueros, and they gave him a strikingly different nickname: in France he is Charles the Handsome (Charles le Bel), while in Navarre he is Charles the Bald (Carlos el Calvo).
History proceeded to repeat itself: this king also died after a six-year reign also leaving a daughter but no sons. At this point (1328) the succession issue acquired special urgency in both kingdoms. Its resolution in France, where the Capetian male line had finally ended, proved extremely significant in European history. France's political nation rejected a claim from England's crown prince (who, like France's two previous kings, was a descendant of Philip IV, but on his mother's side) and provoked what became the Hundred Years’ War with England. Although the term would not appear until 1358, the fully developed Salic law had become operative in Europe's largest and most prestigious hereditary kingdom: henceforth only the strictest possible direct descent through an unbroken male line provided a legitimate claim to its throne.5
However, when describing the momentous choice of a new French king in 1328, both French and English historians tend to overlook its consequences for the long-standing union of the French and Navarrese crowns. While French political notables reinforced their taboo against female succession, those in Navarre vigorously asserted a woman's hereditary right to their throne. They had an heiress, one directly descended from another heiress two generations earlier, who was now sixteen years old. She was also legally an adult because, like most other princesses in the later Middle Ages, she was already married—to a French prince, Philippe of Evreux, with only a remote claim to the French throne.
When they notice it at all, French historians usually see the divorce between France and Navarre in 1328 as essentially amicable. Navarrese historians, on the other hand, emphasize its violence, which included some anti-Jewish riots. The rupture came even before France had resolved its disputed succession. An assembly composed of eight aristocrats (ricoshombres), forty-three lesser nobles (caballeros), plus deputies (infanzones) from Navarre's six administrative districts (comarcas) and forty-four communities met where the two main pilgrimage roads to Santiago de Compostela converge at Puente la Reyna and overthrew their unpopular French governor, replacing him with two local ricoshombres. Acting as regents, they promptly summoned a broader assembly (Curia general) at Pamplona, the traditional capital of the kingdom, in May 1328. With the notable exception of Navarre's lone prelate, the French-born bishop of Pamplona, it declared that the crown belonged “by right of succession and inheritance” to the princess who had been passed over in 1316 and 1322 and invited her to claim their throne in person as soon as possible.6
When news of the uprising and the offer reached them in northern France, the heiress and her husband rapidly reached an agreement with the new French king in July 1328. After she dropped her claims, through her grandmother, to another French province, he permitted them to accept the Navarrese throne. Each spouse quickly accredited three representatives; her husband (who had received no official invitation) already entitled himself king of Navarre. A month later, from Avignon, the pope, possibly unaware of the actual terms of the proposals, offered his congratulations to her husband, but not to his wife, as Navarre's new monarch.7
As these representatives hurried south to arrange the official coronation they encountered Navarre's emissaries just north of the major pass across the Pyrenees headed in the opposite direction. Preliminary discussions were followed by hard bargaining with Navarre's interim regents south of the summit at Roncesvalles. His chief agent reported to the heiress's husband that the Navarrese laid down four preconditions:
First, you and Madame must come here together.
Next, the two of you must take the oath jointly.
Next, the oaths made to you must be made jointly.
Afterward, our Lady (Madame) is raised [on a shield] and throws money [to spectators], because she is the heiress [dame naturele] and no one can be raised except an authentic heir [seigneur naturel].
These terms, so radically different from what was happening in France, were confirmed in separate meetings over the next few weeks with representatives of Navarre's towns, its secular Estates, and its clergy. Surviving summaries of these negotiations offer a precious glimpse into fourteenth-century gender politics because the crucial issue was the exact status of the new monarch's husband. Navarrese officials insisted that the crown was hers alone, while the representatives from both husband and wife insisted on a fully joint coronation in which both were raised on shields and threw money.8 Local authorities ultimately yielded and, as a gesture of good will, abandoned the
ir siege of their former French governor in southern Navarre.
Within six weeks, in midwinter, the new royal couple crossed the Pyrenees to Pamplona. Their coronation oaths, in local dialect, remain in Pamplona's archive. Navarre's new sovereign then officially handed her kingdom to her husband during his lifetime, together with a magnificent gift of one hundred thousand livres tournois. Two months later they concluded an agreement about the succession, stipulating that if her husband survived her and remarried he ceased to become the guardian of their children.9
In important respects Navarre's situation changed very little after 1328. Its newly restored heiress was a French princess who never mastered Navarre's language. For the next fifty years French officials continued to represent its usually absent monarchs. Until 1375 all eight chancellors were French; none of them even visited Navarre until 1364. The first Navarrese-born treasurer was appointed in 1363. Even when residing there for two years after their coronation the royal couple never became accustomed to their distant little kingdom; their presence always seemed provisional, and they spent nothing on their Navarrese residences. Apart from a second visit in 1336–37 to conduct official business, they lived at her husband's seat in Normandy or at the French court.10
The most significant political feature of their reign is the minor official role played by Navarre's female sovereign. Her husband visited Navarre more often and conducted most actual governmental business. Pamplona's archives preserve eighty-five official decrees from the fourteen years of their joint reign (1329–43). Just under half of them (forty-one) were issued in the names of both king and queen: seventeen are in Latin, nineteen in the local Romance, and five in the Languedoil of northern France. Philip of Evreux issued an almost equal number of decrees (thirty-eight) exclusively in his name: seventeen in Romance, eleven in Latin, and ten in northern French. Only six decrees, less than 10 percent, were issued exclusively in his wife's name. After Philip died at the end of 1343 Jeanne II ruled alone until her death in autumn 1349. She remained in northern France and issued another sixteen documents, only three of which were in Latin and none in Romance.11
Thus functioned what I propose to call the Navarrese solution to female inheritance. It became the dominant form among European monarchies confronting this issue in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and was followed in Navarre itself on every subsequent occasion (1425, 1483, and 1555) when a woman inherited its crown. A young heiress to a small kingdom, usually one struggling to maintain (or, as in the case of Navarre in 1328, to recover) its autonomy, was married as quickly as possible to a suitable prince in hopes of producing a male heir. Upon her predecessor's death, she and her husband were jointly invested with sovereign powers. Afterward, he took primary responsibility for governing his wife's kingdom, particularly its military affairs. Such political arrangements seemed obvious to contemporaries. As her Hungarian mother-in-law argued in the mid-1340s to a much more important royal heiress, Joanna I of Naples, “Didn't she agree that for the good of the kingdom as well as for her own peace of mind, it would be preferable that her husband assist her in sharing the burden of power? … There exist issues that their subjects would rather see a man tackle than a woman, and if enemies had to be repulsed, this would be a matter for the husband more than the wife…. All that would be needed would be to set limits that he should not infringe upon.”12
If the couple had a son to succeed her (which actually happened on all five occasions between 1274 and 1555 when women inherited the throne in Navarre), the new king had a different dynastic name but royal government functioned essentially unchanged. If the heiress outlived her husband, she governed essentially as a regent for their son. But problems arose if her husband outlived the heiress; after this happened in Navarre in 1441 the consequences permanently compromised the little kingdom's long-term political stability. Moreover, heiresses of other kingdoms adopting a similar policy often left no surviving children, while their husbands frequently outlived them and inherited their kingdom.
The Heiress with Four Husbands
The next female succession in fourteenth-century Europe occurred very soon after the heiress excluded in Capetian France had been crowned as Navarre's monarch. Close family ties also united this larger kingdom, located in southern Italy (known as the regno, or kingdom) and southeastern France (the county of Provence), to the now rigidly female-exclusionist French crown. Its rulers, technically kings of Sicily and Jerusalem, were a cadet branch of French royalty; the mother of its child heiresses designated in 1330 was a sister of the prince who acquired the French throne in 1328 (she died in 1331, leaving both daughters orphans). Like France in 1316, an heiress was also dynastically unprecedented here, and the previous king had two younger adult brothers.
Nevertheless, after his only son died in 1328 Robert the Wise of Naples chose female succession. In the light of recent French history—and King Robert had followed the events of 1328 closely—his decision seems remarkable. In 1330 he not only bypassed his younger brothers, thereby ignoring the order of succession followed by France in 1316, but also excluded them from a regency council headed by his widow. Instead, he bestowed his extensive domains on a four-year-old granddaughter and made his principal vassals acknowledge her as his heir. Twelve years later Robert reaffirmed this choice in a final testament that left virtually everything to his now-adolescent granddaughter—or, if she died childless, to her younger sister.
Like her grandfather, the woman who inherited Robert's title to the kingdoms of Sicily and Jerusalem in 1343 never ruled either of them. Because her actual possessions were governed from Naples modern English usage usually identifies Europe's first major royal heiress as Joanna I of Naples. Because Joanna was unmarried and thus technically a minor, Robert's widow became regent, heading a large council. The dying king ordered his heir to marry her fiancé—the younger son of a Hungarian king and her second cousin, who had lived at Robert's court for over a decade—as soon as possible but gave him no specific privileges.13
From the standpoint of female sovereignty this remarkable royal testament had equally remarkable consequences. Before this heiress died almost forty years later, she had had four marriages (a record among these thirty female monarchs) but left no surviving children. Her earlier marriages show similarities to Navarrese-style joint rule. Her first husband's representatives negotiated a joint coronation which never took place. Her second husband enjoyed an official coronation and used it to exclude her from exercising significant political authority until his death, making Joanna a Navarrese-pattern female monarch for ten years. Afterward, contemporaries agree that during her final two marriages she governed her large inheritance by herself for almost twenty years. Her posthumous fame is as uneven as her personal authority. Joanna acquired a negative reputation in her Neapolitan capital, while Provence, where she lived for some years, remembers her as bello reino Jano, “good Queen Jeanne.” Contemporaries provide much evidence about her, including generally favorable but occasionally very negative opinions from such well-known people as Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch, and St. Bridget of Sweden.
Joanna needed official recognition of her position from the popes. Then residing at Avignon (a city she inherited and eventually sold to them in 1348), they claimed suzerainty over her Italian possessions under a charter dating from 1262. Although her grandfather had carefully excluded papal representatives from the regency council, a French legate arrived shortly after his death and promptly nullified his testament. Meanwhile, uncertainty about the future political role of Joanna's husband provoked intervention with the papacy from his anxious relatives. Joanna's formidable mother-in-law, who later made her older son king of her native Poland, traveled from Hungary to promote her younger son's coronation at Naples. Before she returned in spring 1344 the Avignon papacy had awarded her son a royal title but without specific political rights.
A political stalemate ensued at court between Joanna's faction, strongly opposed to sharing authority, and those favoring her even youn
ger husband, Andrew of Hungary. Describing the power imbalance between them, Matteo Villani argued that these problems stemmed from the fact that the wife was “both master and lady of her Baron, who, as her husband, should have been her lord.”14 After spring 1344 Clement VI, the Avignon pope, addressed his official letters to both as king and queen, but his instructions to his legate about the kingdom's major business (for example, Joanna's oath of fealty to her papal suzerain or negotiating a truce in Sicily) never mention her husband. Yet the political situation of King Andrew gradually improved. By December 1344 Clement ordered her not to exclude him from her kingdom's administration. Six months later he told Joanna not to make “contrary suggestions” against having her husband crowned, anointed, and allowed into her administration.
By mid-1345 the papacy had decided that Joanna's seventeen-year-old husband should play a real role in Neapolitan government. A legate was sent to Naples with a bull empowering him to perform a double coronation in which, as at Pamplona in 1329, husband and wife would be anointed together as corulers. But even at this juncture, with their child soon to be born, Andrew still possessed no specific powers. Instead, he had to sign a document stating that he could not inherit if his wife died without surviving children, and the Neapolitan clergy and nobility swore a public oath that if Joanna died they would not declare him king.
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