CHAPTER XI
The Return of the Queen
The magnitude of the queen’s achievement may be measured by the obvious and immediate boost the pope provided to her position in the aftermath of her acquittal. On April 22, Clement issued a bull legitimizing Joanna’s marriage to Louis of Taranto. On May 7, the pope sent a strongly worded letter to Bertrand de Deux with instructions to deny Louis of Hungary’s demand to be crowned king of Naples. “However, and even though in point of fact Queen Joanna had been dispossessed of her states,” wrote Clement, “she could not be deprived of them legally as she was neither convicted nor condemned of the crime of which she was accused. Even if she had been, her kingdom would go to the child Charles Martel rather than to her opponent. Finally… all civil and religious laws concur that anyone who took over someone else’s property of his own accord and judgment, even if he had a remote right to do so, must be dispossessed of them… We have nothing to blame ourselves about, having done all we could both for Andrew’s coronation and for the punishment of his murderers. On the other hand, the king of Hungary has committed multiple and grievous offenses against the Holy Church. Charles Martel’s capture and transport away from the Kingdom trespassed on their rights and the respect owed to them. Charles of Durazzo’s execution was both an injustice, since this prince was innocent, and an illegality, since, had he been guilty, his judgment and punishment would be the domain of the Church; and he had been executed without any form of justice.”
Whether Louis of Hungary was ever acquainted with this papal remonstrance is unclear. By the time the letter was written, Bertrand de Deux had escaped to Rome. Even if the legate had remained in Naples, he would not have been eager to forward its contents to the volatile conqueror. Not that the chiding would have made much difference to the king. Louis of Hungary was preoccupied with much more tangible obstacles, the majority of his own making. Soon after securing his hold on the capital city, the king of Hungary had begun a reign of terror in order to ferret out all possible accomplices in the death of his brother. The Hungarian troops were particularly brutal in their investigations. According to Domenico da Gravina, many innocent people had their hands and noses cut off during interrogation. “Nor was any mercy shown by the invaders for the people,” lamented the chronicler, who previous to this had sided with Andrew and the Hungarians in his account of events. No one was immune from prosecution. Members of the highest nobility were threatened with death unless they produced suspects from within their own families. Louis of Hungary’s methods were considered extreme, even by a populace inured to the effects of boiling oil and red-hot pincers. One aristocrat “was put to the question in the presence of the king, and confessed everything anyone wanted,” Domenico da Gravina recounted. “Louis [of Hungary] chose for him a particularly refined punishment: the condemned man was placed above a wheel outfitted with razor-sharp blades, which as it turned tore him to pieces… The business lasted from halfway through third mass until well past vespers… Assuredly it was unheard-of and utterly cruel,” the chronicler observed.
Not surprisingly, as a result of policies like these, Louis of Hungary had difficulty winning over the native baronage, a necessary step toward consolidating his authority over the kingdom. He needed noble families like the Balzos and Sanseverinos as administrators, but the barons and lords of these houses, appalled by Hungarian excesses, refused to cooperate and instead plotted rebellion. (To give a sense of how little the king of Hungary understood his new subjects and their relationship to his late brother, he appropriated property belonging to the Pipini brothers and banished the elder sibling from Naples, a course of action that naturally resulted in the entire family going over to the opposition, where they made a potent contribution.) In the beginning, this rebellion took the form of noncompliance: when the king of Hungary demanded that a count or baron present himself at court and do obeisance to his new sovereign, Louis invariably received the polite reply that, unfortunately, illness prevented the vassal from appearing for an audience.
This excuse took on a new and far more menacing undertone at the end of April with the arrival in Naples of the plague. Boccaccio, who was in the kingdom during the Hungarian occupation, left a searing description of the Black Death in The Decameron: “The violence of this disease was such that the sick communicated it to the healthy who came near them, just as a fire catches anything dry or oily near it. And it even went further. To speak to or go near the sick brought infection and a common death to the living; and moreover, to touch the clothes or anything else the sick had touched or worn gave the disease to the person touching… Such fear and fanciful notions took possession of the living that almost all of them adopted the same cruel policy, which was entirely to avoid the sick and everything belonging to them… What is even worse and nearly incredible is that fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children, as if they had not been theirs… In this way many people died who might have been saved if they had been looked after… Many ended their lives in the streets both at night and during the day; and many others who died in their houses were only known to be dead because the neighbors smelled their decaying bodies. Dead bodies filled every corner.” It is estimated that within three months the kingdom of Naples lost nearly half its population.
Given these circumstances—a hostile citizenry, the lack of papal support, and the sudden appearance of a terrifying, uncontrollable, mortal disease—Louis of Hungary abruptly reconsidered his decision to remain in southern Italy. On May 24, 1348, accompanied by only a small retinue, he quietly slipped away by ship from the port of Barletta on the eastern coast, leaving the bulk of his army behind. So stealthily did the king retreat that it took nearly a week for many of his new subjects to realize that the invader had gone.
The news of Louis of Hungary’s personal withdrawal, an unlooked-for piece of good fortune, reached Avignon almost as soon as it became widely known in Naples and infused Joanna and her now-legitimate husband with fresh purpose and a sense of immediacy. On May 31, Louis of Taranto dispatched a letter to Florence advising the city that he and the queen were preparing to return to Naples to reclaim the kingdom, and on June 3, Joanna issued a summons to her regional government to appear on June 15 in Aix-en-Provence in order to marshal support for a counteroffensive. But nothing could be done without money, and this was in short supply. Already, the queen had had to pawn all her most valuable possessions, including two velvet-and-gem studded saddles, her jewelry, several gold statuettes, one in the form of an eagle, and even the coronet she had worn to address the consistory, just to pay for her daily living expenses, and these together had brought her only eighteen thousand florins. She needed substantially more than that to mount a war effort.
There was only one way to quickly raise the sum she needed: to sell property. On June 6, the queen and her chief financial adviser, Niccolò Acciaiuoli (now, in recognition of his inestimable service to his sovereign, the new count of Terlizzi), entered into negotiations with the papacy to transfer the city of Avignon to the authority of the church. Clement, who had no intention of returning to Rome, and who had already invested a great deal of money in the papal palace as the new permanent seat of his court, had apparently coveted this consignment for some time. Voluntary alienation of a segment of her realm was not part of Joanna’s upbringing; the queen clearly took this step reluctantly and only as a last resort. She intended the transaction to be temporary; she pawned the city as she had pawned her jewels, a standard practice in the Middle Ages. In three subsequent letters the queen made reference to verbal promises the pope had made to her, in the presence of at least one cardinal, that she would be able to redeem Avignon at any time upon repayment of the sum advanced. With this condition agreed to, it took only three days to complete the deal. On June 9, a contract was signed whereby Joanna received eighty thousand gold florins in exchange for delivery of the city of Avignon. Eighteen thousand of this went to redeem the queen’s valuables. She wasn’t going back to Naples without her crow
n.
Once these funds were obtained, preparations for Joanna and Louis’ departure proceeded at an accelerated pace. On June 11, the queen sent letters to Naples enlisting various high-ranking members of the aristocracy, including members of the Sanseverino and Balzo families and a former admiral of the navy, in the struggle to recover the kingdom. Four days later, the representative assembly at Aix-en-Provence volunteered two hundred knights toward the war effort. And on June 23, Clement issued a bull granting the queen a tenth of all annual church income in Provence, which ordinarily should have been reserved for the prosecution of a crusade, to be used instead to win back her realm. Twelve galleys and an armored vessel were then engaged to carry Joanna and Louis and their forces to Naples. At this time Joanna also lent the king of Majorca an additional fleet of Provençal ships to assist him in the reclamation of his kingdom, a strong indication that her royal cousin had indeed been of aid to her in her pursuit of papal support.
Encouraging tidings from within the kingdom of Naples arrived in Provence. On June 18, the admiral, in combination with a party of noblemen, forced a confrontation with the enemy and won the engagement; and Niccolò Acciaiuoli’s son, Lorenzo, held Melfi, in the very center of the kingdom, against a prolonged siege by the invader. Emboldened by these military successes, the queen’s banner had been raised in the capital city of Naples and a delegation sent to Avignon urging Joanna to return to the realm as quickly as possible. It had only taken a few months of Hungarian rule to convince the native aristocracy of the merits of their former sovereign’s administration.
The queen was in the final weeks of pregnancy and could not risk a sea voyage, but she sent Niccolò, armed with a quantity of specie and promoted to grand seneschal of the kingdom, ahead to Tuscany to recruit mercenaries and allies. On June 30, she gave birth to a daughter, Catherine, and on July 3 she and Louis of Taranto formally solicited Clement’s protection for the child. The next day, the pope made a point of sending letters and emissaries to Joanna’s supporters in Naples, encouraging the baronage and church officials to continue in their efforts to resist the Hungarians and advising them to remain loyal to the queen.
By the end of the month, Joanna was ready to travel. She and Louis, together with their fleet, embarked from Nice on August 1; by the 17th they had arrived on the shore just outside Naples. “Since the castles of Naples… [and] the harbor and the armory were in the hands of the king of Hungary’s men, they [Joanna and Louis] could not land at the harbor or in its vicinity; but rather outside of Naples… where they came ashore,” reported Matteo Villani. “Then they went to the church of Notre-Dame to wait for the barons and the ambassadors of Naples, who were to let them into the city.” As soon as it was made known that they had landed, a great procession, led by members of the Sanseverino and Balzo families flaunting “ostentatious outfits, with great celebration and joy,” arrived to welcome the queen and her husband. The chronicles are unanimous in their descriptions of the rapturous reception with which Joanna and Louis were greeted. “The Florentine, Sienese and Luccan merchants, the Genovese, Provençal and other foreigners were grouped by country of origin, dressed in sumptuous velvet, silk and wool robes and followed by a throng with all sorts of musical instruments,” Matteo Villani declared. The Chronicon Siculum reported that the whole of the capital city was illuminated in celebration of the homecoming that evening.
While Joanna must have rejoiced at this outpouring of affection, she was under no illusions as to the enormity of the task ahead. The vast majority of the Hungarian army remained in Naples. Louis of Hungary’s soldiers held important castles in all the major cities and provinces, including Campania, Aversa, Capua, and Abruzzi. In the capital city itself the enemy held both the Castel Nuovo and the Castel dell’Ovo, and these strongholds were so well supplied and fortified that they were capable of resisting a siege for months, possibly even a year. The queen still had to take back her kingdom.
At first, fueled by the momentum of her homecoming, Joanna’s side in this conflict made great progress. The castle at Capua was recovered within a month. The army split up in order to cover the maximum possible territory. Louis of Taranto took three thousand mercenaries and fifteen hundred horsemen to Apulia; by December 1 he had retaken Calabria. Joanna stayed behind to besiege the capital with a strong force and was rewarded with the recapture of both the Castel Nuovo and the Castel dell’Ovo when their disgruntled Hungarian occupiers, by now several months in arrears on their salaries, surrendered on January 17, 1349.
But medieval warfare was rarely characterized by a string of unbroken successes, and the reclamation of the kingdom proved to be no exception. Louis of Hungary, hearing of the return of the queen and of Louis of Taranto’s victories, made plans to return to Naples with reinforcements. The Hungarian army, buoyed by this information, regrouped at Foggia and beat back the queen’s forces. Louis of Taranto, frustrated and bitter, particularly at a lack of promised support from Florence, was forced to retreat to the capital. He arrived in February, at which point the war entered a new and distinctly less promising stage.
The decline in military fortunes was accompanied by a similar and far more ominous deterioration in the conjugal relations between the queen and her champion. Their daughter, Catherine, died about this time, and this would have added an extra strain to their intimacy. But even given the adverse conditions in Naples during the spring of 1349, the speed with which Joanna’s marriage collapsed is breathtaking. Within two months of Louis of Taranto’s return to the capital, Joanna and her husband were engaged in a fierce struggle for power marked by the arrest of her chamberlain Enrico Caracciolo on a trumped-up charge of having engaged in adulterous relations with the queen.
The accusations against Joanna and Enrico were clearly false; this was a coup d’état by Louis of Taranto orchestrated by Niccolò Acciaiuoli and his cousin the bishop of Florence, now keeper of the royal seal. Enrico, one of those members of Joanna’s household who had fled the capital with her only to be detained in Provence under suspicion of complicity in Andrew’s murder, had been freed along with the rest of Joanna’s household by Clement after her acquittal in consistory. He had then accompanied his sovereign on her return to Naples the previous August. Enrico made a very convenient pawn; in just this way had Louis of Taranto’s father, Philip of Taranto, rid himself of his first wife in order to marry the empress of Constantinople. Likely, Joanna’s second husband never cared for her and had seen the marriage only as a conduit to power, a salient truth that the pope, who instantly took the queen’s side in this affair, did not fail to note. In a letter dated September 4, 1349, Clement wrote to Louis:
Although of royal birth, you were by inheritance poorly off. By your union with the Queen, who openly honored you with preference above your kindred, you have become possessed of abundance and an exalted position. We were not unnaturally hopeful that in return you would prove grateful to her, and show her the affection which is not only her due, but would benefit your own honor. You, however, as is a matter of common report (and we are sadly surprised to hear it), forgetful of all of this, not merely do not treat her as behooves a wife and a Queen, but scornfully curtailing the area of her prerogative, you have caused her to be reckoned rather a slave than a spouse. It is further reported that, ruled by the promptings of advisers (at whose mere nod you make and unmake the administration of the kingdom, to which she so affectionately admitted you), you have deprived her of the society and audience of her trusted servants, so that without your permission and that of the aforesaid advisers, no one is given speech of her. Moreover, you have taken the royal seal and handed it over to the Bishop of Florence and certain others, who, it is said, in the face of the Queen’s protest, and greatly to her prejudice, impudently seal letters of state concerning all things, both important and unimportant, under her name and title… For the rest, since, as we understand, the Queen, conscious of her innocence, fears for her good fame on account of the imprisonment of Enrico Caracciolo… we exhort yo
u, out of consideration for her… to act with clemency and defer to her wishes.
Joanna hotly defended herself against the charge of adultery in a subsequent letter to Clement, written on November 12, which demonstrates that the queen was well aware of what was said of her and how the strategy of adding new insinuations to those for which she already stood accused was being employed deliberately to undermine public confidence in her ability to rule.
Most blessed Father (in Christ), your letters touching… my husband and privately certain of my affairs, have been respectfully received… I proffer a humble oblation of thanks to the Holy Father, and trust that it may be agreeable to him that the investigation should lie with him… For I call God to witness (nor do I misdoubt the testimony of my lord and husband himself) that I have never licentiously done anything derogatory to his honor, or forgotten either due respect or submission to him. If, however, occasionally, in domestic confidence (as between man and wife is wont to occur), I am accused of annoying unthinkingly, there was no aversion, nor does there exist any (far be such), but rather (it was intended) to stimulate the force of stronger love… I admit that I preferred him in marriage to all the princes; and still I prefer him to all other men to the degree that I trust no other but him… I shall none the less strive to comfort myself that the truth of my words will more and more become confirmed. Verily, what with those things alleged to the weight of my transgression, concerning my impatience with my former husband [Andrew], and my annoyance arising out of the arrest of Enrico Caracciolo… I am vexed beyond measure; now this and now that, heaped up or over-colored by repetition, these greater actions are put down to a predilection for disorder, those lesser, to unlawful lapses of the passions. But indeed it shall be my consolation to make manifest my innocence, to preserve indifference to the tongues of slander, and to submit myself as a daughter to the judgment of your Holiness, whose integrity is infallible.
The Lady Queen Page 21