Socially and politically, however, the elevation of the former laundress to so powerful an office as mother to the heir to the throne was more problematic. Already Philippa’s rise, and that of her husband, was viewed with suspicion and jealousy by the nobility. The couple made no attempt to hide their good fortune and flaunted their wealth, particularly through their children, for Philippa, too, had sons for whom she was ambitious. “You would think they were the children of a king rather than of a slave,” Boccaccio complained. Through the years of Joanna’s childhood and young adulthood, Philippa’s influence at court remained unparalleled. According to Boccaccio, “nothing serious, arduous, or great was accomplished unless it was approved by Robert, Philippa, and Sancia.”
This, then, was the politically charged environment into which Joanna and her sister, Maria, were thrust. And just when it seemed impossible for the situation in Naples to become more complex, or for the competing ambitions at court (already unhealthily focused on Joanna as a conduit to the throne) to become more volatile, in 1333 a new, powerful, and highly dangerous player suddenly propelled himself into the mix.
Carobert, king of Hungary, forgotten eldest son of Charles Martel, the original heir to the throne of Naples, had decided to retrieve his birthright.
CHAPTER III
The Kingdom of Hungary
Surely one of history’s wittier little mischiefs is that Carobert, who had been summarily dismissed from Naples on the grounds of youth, should turn out to be the family’s most successful warrior. Arriving with his small band of knights in Hungary in 1301, thirteen-year-old Carobert had been crowned king with a makeshift diadem by a local archbishop. The new king’s reign had been immediately contested by some of the realm’s most powerful barons, who elected their own candidate, twelve-year-old Wenceslas, son of the king of Bohemia, in his place. Carobert and his supporters were forced to retreat to southern Hungary, where they marshaled new allies and engaged in a guerrilla war against the pro-Wenceslas party.
Luckily for Carobert, his mother, Clemencia, had been a Habsburg and the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor. Carobert appealed to this powerful branch of the family for aid against his enemies. By 1304, two of his mother’s brothers, the king of Germany and the duke of Austria, had entered the fray on the side of their nephew, at which point Wenceslas, who was never much of a king anyway (“The barons did not concede him a single castle, nor any sort of power or office, not even a parcel of royal authority,” a Hungarian chronicler sniffed), called for his father to come and get him and withdrew to Bohemia, taking his crown with him. When Carobert and his uncle, the king of Germany, pursued his former rival into Bohemia in 1305, Wenceslas hastily renounced the crown and his rights to Hungary in favor of his cousin Otto. Otto in turn went to Transylvania, at the outskirts of his new realm, as far away from Carobert and his army as possible, and had himself crowned king.
Carobert continued to make inroads into central Hungary, and by 1307 he was clearly the victor. Still, Carobert could not officially be crowned king because the Hungarians insisted that only the “Holy Crown” could be used for coronations, and Otto had the Holy Crown. It took several years to get it back, as Otto had himself lost it to another Transylvanian baron. Eventually the crown was tracked down and returned, and Carobert was proclaimed the legitimate king of Hungary “with great solemnity and joy” on August 27, 1310.
The rite of the Holy Crown only took the new king so far, however, and Carobert soon discovered that the task of subduing the kingdom over which he was now the legitimate sovereign was far from over. The twenty-two-year-old king faced stout opposition from Hungary’s landed aristocracy, some of whom had grown so powerful that they functioned effectively as independent monarchs. One by one, with methodical determination, Carobert attacked these men and their families, besieging, expropriating, and then redistributing their vast estates and castles to himself and a rival set of barons, thereby creating a new ruling class loyal to the crown. His authority would not be consolidated for a further ten years, but at the end of that period, Carobert found himself the undisputed ruler of a realm that stretched from Bosnia and northern Croatia on the bank of the Adriatic Sea in the west, to Wallachia and Moldavia on the Black Sea in the east, and to Transylvania and the Carpathian Mountains in the north. Having been deprived of his birthright because it was feared he could not take Sicily, Carobert controlled an area approximately three times the size of the kingdom of Naples by the 1330s.
Fortune would favor Carobert beyond even these considerable military triumphs. For no sooner did he establish his prerogative in Hungary than gold was discovered in Slovakia, northwest of Budapest. The Hungarians had found gold before, most notably in Transylvania, but not like this. Suddenly, Carobert found himself sitting on the world’s largest supply of the world’s most precious metal. It is estimated that, starting in the 1320s, Hungary mined between two thousand and three thousand pounds of gold a year, or “one third of the total production of the world as then known, and five times as much as any other European state.” Almost immediately, the kingdom entered an era of prosperity that even today is called, without irony, its golden age. Carobert levied taxes on his mining operations so that nearly 40 percent of the profits were diverted to the crown, and the royal income soared. There was at once enough gold for the kingdom to mint its own coins, which made procuring luxury goods and agreeable trading partners much easier. Even more to Carobert’s interests, he now had enough gold to fund an army sufficient to carry out his expansionist plans and to intimidate his neighbors. Though the new king’s tax policies were more demanding and oppressive than those of any previous monarch in Hungarian history, the populace neither rebelled nor took offense. That much gold excused a great many sins.
Despite the many years away from the land of his birth, and through all his trials and successes, Carobert never lost sight of his ancestry. Politically and culturally his ambitions and tastes were distinctly Angevin, not Hungarian. His improvements at court were Western European in nature. He organized his army along the sort of chivalric feudal lines familiar to his French forebears but strange to his Hungarian vassals. Similarly, his sweeping interpretation of the power of the monarchy, his contempt for the Hungarians’ representative public assemblies known as Diets, and his “habit of granting privileges ‘out of his special grace’ (de speciali gratia), with no regard to the customs of the realm… probably derived from the political traditions of the kingdom of Sicily [Naples].” Carobert’s administrative system, his attitude toward property (unless specifically deeded to an avid supporter or the church, it was his), and his insistence on recording documents in written registers came straight from a blueprint originally formulated by his great-grandfather Charles of Anjou seventy years before. When Carobert issued his first silver coin—conveniently they’d found silver mixed in with all the gold in the mines—the royal minters copied the style of those struck in Naples by his uncle Robert the Wise. Even Western European sporting preferences were foisted on his subjects: in 1318, the Hungarians were introduced to their first-ever competitive jousting tournament, a spectacle that was thereafter held annually.
When it came to matrimony, however, the king of Hungary wedded for tactical advantage, not lineage, as is evidenced by his marriage to Elizabeth of Poland in 1320. Elizabeth, Carobert’s fourth and last wife, was the daughter of Wladyslaw I, king of Poland, known as Wladyslaw the Elbow-High. The king of Hungary had been an early champion of the diminutive Wladyslaw and by this marriage cemented their relationship, thereby achieving regional hegemony and presenting a formidable combination to opponents.
Elizabeth was fifteen to Carobert’s thirty-two when the pair married. Her three predecessors had died young and childless, and the new queen of Hungary knew she was expected to provide her husband with an heir. To her and her husband’s great joy and relief, Elizabeth fulfilled this obligation, giving birth to five sons, three of whom survived: Louis, born in 1326; Andrew, in 1327; and Stephen, in 1332.
With Elizabeth, Carobert acquired an exceptionally determined and energetic partner—manipulative, capable, and eager for power. The queen maintained her own household and senior advisers (another monarchical custom borrowed from Western Europe) and managed several important Hungarian estates and townships in her own name. Elizabeth did not shrink from adversity and was not inclined toward leniency. In 1330, her brother Casimir had deflowered one of her ladies-in-waiting, a naive young woman named Claire, during a visit to his sister’s court. Distraught, Claire’s father, Felician Záh, a minor baron, had barged into the royal dining room at supper time, sword drawn, to exact revenge for his daughter’s stolen honor. He was pierced through by some alert guards, but not before he managed to stab Elizabeth through the hand. In the months following this incident, the queen showed neither mercy to her assailant nor sympathy for her former attendant. Felician’s body was severed of its various appendages and then dispersed throughout the kingdom as a grim reminder of the perils of failed assassination attempts. “His head was sent to Buda, and his two legs and two arms to other towns,” reported John, the Franciscan minister provincial of Hungary at the time. The baron’s wife and children, including the hapless Claire, were rounded up and gruesomely tortured before being put to death, as were all their relatives “within the third degree of kinship.” The crown’s handling of this affair made quite an impression on the citizenry: neither Elizabeth nor any member of her family was ever bothered by a disgruntled subject in this fashion again. The queen seems to have accepted this outcome as a vindication of her methods.
Carobert had never resigned himself to the usurpation of his rights of primogeniture in southern Italy. From the day he had been shunted off to Hungary, he had continued to protest, both to Robert the Wise and to the pope, the 1309 decree expediently consigning the sovereignty of the kingdom of Naples to his uncle rather than himself. During his adolescence and early manhood, while the outcome of the Hungarian campaign remained in doubt, Carobert’s protestations had not carried much weight in Naples or Avignon. In 1317, the king of Hungary had tested the waters by sending his brother-in-law, the dauphin of Vienne, to Naples, charged with reclaiming the principality of Salerno as a precursor to larger demands, but even this modest proposal was rebuffed. However, as time progressed and his situation improved, Carobert’s complaints became more difficult to ignore. By the early 1330s, between his fortunate alliance with Poland through his wife, Elizabeth, and his immense financial resources, the advantage had swung undeniably in the king of Hungary’s direction.
Suddenly John XXII, who had managed to ignore completely Carobert’s pleas for justice for the previous fifteen years, took it upon himself to write to Robert the Wise to urge him to recognize the king of Hungary’s claims and find a way to make satisfactory restitution. Deducing the reasons for the pope’s abrupt solicitude for Carobert’s cause is not difficult. Despite his unsuccessful Italian campaign, the Holy Roman Emperor, Louis of Bavaria, remained a threat to papal interests. To John XXII’s great annoyance, the emperor was using the safety of his court to harbor outspoken theologians who held views on apostolic poverty and other spiritual matters antithetical to those of the pope. Since the emperor’s theologians were decidedly more erudite than John XXII himself, support for their positions was gaining throughout Europe. Carobert, on the other hand, was viewed as a loyal servant of the church, having already demonstrated his allegiance to papal orthodoxy by enforcing all of John’s edicts within his domain. (Unlike Robert the Wise and Sancia, the king of Hungary unmercifully persecuted the Spiritual Franciscans, driving them from the realm.) John XXII hoped Carobert would use his influence to counteract that of Louis of Bavaria in Eastern Europe. In addition, just at this time, John was also busy intriguing with the king of Bohemia against the emperor for control of northern Italy, and this could not be accomplished without Carobert’s approval, or at least his willingness to sign a nonaggression pact.
Moreover, if there was ever a pope who appreciated the value of a gold florin, that pope was John XXII. Under his administration all sorts of new taxes and fines were levied, and the pontifical income rose accordingly. Though the pope was a reputed miser, his clerks were astounded by the treasure of gold plate, precious gems, and coins that were found in the papal vaults upon his death. John had regularly to remind Robert the Wise that the king was in arrears on the annual payment of seven thousand ounces of gold due the papacy according to the terms of the original agreement with Charles of Anjou. The extravagant wealth of the king of Hungary would not have gone unnoticed by John XXII.
For these reasons, then, the pope began pushing hard for reconciliation between Naples and Hungary. John knew that Robert would never have accommodated his nephew Carobert’s demands while his own son and heir, Charles of Calabria, was still alive. But Charles had died in 1328. In his place was a little girl, only four years old on November 4, 1330, the day Robert had formally declared Joanna heir to all his lands in a public ceremony at the Castel Nuovo. And therein lay the pope’s opportunity. He wasted no time in capitalizing on it. In a letter to Sancia dated December 15, 1330, John XXII proposed his solution to the problem: marry Joanna to one of Carobert’s sons and let the eldest child of their union inherit Naples. To John, this arrangement must have seemed ideal—a clever plan to appease the king of Hungary without ever having to admit wrongdoing in the first place. For only in this way could Carobert’s grievance be rectified without compromising the integrity of the kingdom of Naples or Robert’s rule.
Evidence exists, however, that members of the Neapolitan royal family, already jostling for position within the kingdom as early as 1330, were far less enthusiastic about this matrimonial project than was its author. Ominously, Robert’s brother Philip, the prince of Taranto, and his wife, Catherine, the empress of Constantinople, had refused to attend the November 30 ceremony investing Joanna with the rights of inheritance to the kingdom and so had not sworn the oath of fealty to his granddaughter demanded by Robert at that time. It took several months and much persuasion on the part of the pope to bring Philip to terms with his brother’s decision, and even then the prince of Taranto refused to take the oath himself, claiming a bad case of gout. A hastily deputized subordinate was sent to the Castel Nuovo on March 3, 1331, as a substitute. Philip’s truculence provoked the antagonism of Robert’s other brother John, and his wife, Agnes of Périgord, who had dutifully sworn obeisance to Joanna, perhaps to win Robert’s approval and improve the chances for a marriage between this valued granddaughter and one of their own sons. Already deeply in competition with each other, neither of these branches of Robert’s line was willing to admit the rights of their Hungarian nephew.
Even Philip of Taranto’s death in December 1331 did not stop Catherine from intriguing to place one of her sons on the throne of Naples. Aware of the pope’s proposal, she appealed to her brother Philip of Valois, the powerful king of France, to secure marriage alliances between her sons, Robert and Louis, and Joanna and Maria. Philip intervened mildly, indicating approval for his sister’s request, but the pope seems to have been prepared for this maneuver. In a March 1332 letter, John advised the French king that, unfortunately, Joanna and Maria had already been promised to their Hungarian cousins. Then, just to make sure there was no lingering doubt in anyone’s mind as to where the church stood on this question, John issued a bull dated June 30, 1332, officially decreeing that Joanna and Maria marry the sons of the king of Hungary.
Robert and Sancia capitulated. In June 1332, they acceded to papal pressure and came to terms with Carobert. The diplomatic initiative eventually agreed to by both parties specified yet another double marriage. The first would be between Joanna and Carobert’s second son, Andrew. Andrew would become duke of Calabria, effective immediately upon his betrothal, and upon reaching his majority (Andrew was only five), he would be crowned king of Naples. The eldest male child of this union, or eldest surviving daughter if the couple produced no sons, would inherit the throne and rule
the kingdom.
The second marriage, meant to further tighten the bonds between the two kingdoms, would be between Joanna’s younger sister, Maria, and Carobert’s eldest son, Crown Prince Louis. Upon Louis’ ascension to the throne, Maria would be crowned queen of Hungary, and the eldest surviving child of their union would inherit and rule the kingdom. This engagement would not take place immediately, however, because the treaty also stipulated that if Joanna died before her marriage was consummated, Andrew would marry Maria instead. “Maria was bound to wed one or the other… in view of mishap to her sister [Joanna], to whom she was heiress-presumptive, she was… looked upon as a reserve claim for Hungary in rebinding itself to the House of Naples.”
Ironically, the precise and comprehensive nature of this alliance, which was clearly intended to anticipate every contingency, disguised a deep flaw in communication between the Hungarians and the Neapolitans. Although Robert the Wise agreed to have Andrew crowned king when he was older, he meant as consort to the queen only. Robert never intended Andrew to rule or participate in the Neapolitan government; that responsibility would reside solely with Joanna, whom Robert had already designated his legitimate heir. This distinction was very important to the king of Naples, for it touched on the old complaint that he had stolen the realm from his nephew. If Robert admitted Andrew’s right to rule, he admitted guilt, which was out of the question. From the Neapolitan point of view, then, Andrew’s future coronation was conceived as an empty honor, designed to raise the Hungarian prince to his wife’s rank as a courtesy, nothing more.
Although the Hungarians later claimed to have been ignorant of Robert’s true intent, Carobert likely did understand that the agreement with Naples was intended to redress his rights through the medium of the next generation and not the current one—that it would be the king of Hungary’s grandchild, and not his son, who would rule. Carobert may well have chosen to gloss over this condition, knowing that, for the moment, this was the best deal he was likely to get. Whatever his reasoning, he accepted his uncle’s terms without hesitation.
The Lady Queen Page 5