The Maid and the Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Any hopes for the appearance of a third royal suitor were dashed the following year when King John, out riding in yet another hunt—perhaps not the happiest choice of sport for a man with epilepsy—was thrown, or more likely fell, from his horse and died. Yolande of Bar did everything she could to retain ownership of both her crown and the royal castle at Zaragoza, even going so far as to claim that she was pregnant with the king’s posthumous male heir. But after a few months this ruse was inevitably discovered, and the queen was forced to give way to the new king of Aragon, John’s younger brother, Martin.

  The responsibility for choosing Princess Yolande’s future husband now fell to her uncle, and the issue was revisited almost immediately when yet another ambassador, this one representing the French court, appeared in Zaragoza. The indefatigable Marie of Blois had prevailed upon the French king to help her bring about the union of her house with that of Aragon, and to please her Charles VI sent one of his most trusted knights to lobby for the marriage of Yolande to Louis II. The new king of Aragon, with an unmarried sixteen-year-old girl on his hands, was receptive to the idea, but negotiations again foundered, this time because the bride herself opposed the match. Her objection to Louis II did not seem to be personal—after all, she’d never met the man—but rather political. Yolande, having been raised in Aragon, identified with her native kingdom. Louis II’s interests in Sicily clashed with those of her homeland. If she married him, she knew she would be expected to support French ambitions in Italy over those of Aragon, and this she did not wish to do.

  Yolande’s willingness to set herself in opposition to this marriage, and so attempt to exert some control over her future, demonstrated both considerable spirit and a sophisticated understanding of the political situation. But against a veteran campaigner like Marie of Blois she was outmatched. With the return of the now twenty-two, still unmarried Louis II to Provence in July 1399—remarkably, his forces had managed to hold the capital city of Naples for nine years until he was ousted by an adept rival—Marie sent her ambassadors again to Aragon on her son’s behalf, and this time succeeded. With his niece rapidly approaching an age when she would no longer be considered quite as desirable as a bride, King Martin came to terms with the Provençal envoys. His relief in having the matter settled may be inferred from the alacrity with which he agreed to pay the 200, 000-franc dowry. Princess Yolande was forced to publicly retract her objection to the marriage.

  The wedding, to be held in Arles, was planned for the following December. The bride, accompanied by a splendid retinue, left Zaragoza in the fall of 1400 and began the long journey to Provence. King Martin, with more pressing business to attend to, declined to leave Aragon for the ceremony, and delegated one of his cousins as his surrogate.

  Yolande of Aragon’s reputation for handsomeness preceded her. The Monk of Saint-Denis, writing of her at the time of her marriage in the monastery’s official chronicle, rhapsodized, “This princess captivated all eyes with her exceptional beauty, the charms of her face and the dignity that emanated from her whole person. In a word, she was a genuine treasure of graces. The wise said that Nature had enjoyed creating her and bestowed on her every possible perfection; she lacked only immortality. I will not attempt to describe her beauty; suffice to say that she was beyond compare.” She was “one of the most beautiful creatures that one could see,” agreed the chronicler Jean Juvenal des Ursins, who knew her.

  Anxious to set eyes on so admirable a paragon of feminine charm (or more likely suspicious that the accolades were a little too effusive to be true), the prospective bridegroom found himself too impatient to wait at Arles for Yolande to appear as protocol demanded. Instead, Louis II raced to Montpellier, which was along the wedding party’s route. There he disguised himself and hid among the crowd that had massed to view the royal procession in all its magnificence. The princess of Aragon and her entourage passed through as planned; Louis was able to get a good long look at his intended without being observed himself; and, finding (no doubt to his intense relief) that she passed muster, galloped back to Provence with a light heart in plenty of time for the official reception.

  Yolande of Aragon arrived in Arles on December 1, 1400. She made a grand entrance into the city, a canopy of gold cloth embroidered with her coat of arms and those of her future husband held over her head by four syndics. She was received by her husband-to-be and future mother-in-law “with all expressions of honor and joy,” and was married the next day by a cardinal in front of an audience that included many high-ranking members of the Church and the Provençal aristocracy. Afterward, the newlyweds repaired to their castle to receive the homage of the local baronage, and the following days were given over to feasting and merrymaking, to mark the momentous and glorious nature of the occasion.

  Marie of Blois had succeeded in corralling the daughter-in-law of her choice. Little did she know that in doing so, she had also saved France.

  FOR A MARRIAGE that had begun with the wife’s repeated refusal of the husband, Yolande of Aragon and Louis II got along very well together. They would be married for seventeen years and there was never a hint of scandal or infidelity about either one of them. They seem actually to have loved each other.

  Portrait of Louis I of Anjou and his wife, Marie of Blois, Yolande of Aragon’s formidable mother-in-law.

  Of course, the readiness with which Yolande and Louis II fell into a harmonious conjugal relation might easily be traced, at least in the beginning, to their opulent, carefree, and highly agreeable lifestyle. The revenue from the rents and taxes on Louis’s holdings in Anjou, Maine, and Provence were substantial, and this income, in combination with Yolande’s impressive dowry, vaulted the young couple into the realm of the extremely wealthy. They owned more castles than they knew what to do with, and these were so conveniently placed that every year they could spend the hottest months of the summer in Anjou in the north and then migrate south for the cold of winter to warm and sunny Provence. Louis II’s castle in Angers, the capital city of Anjou, was one of the largest and most important fortresses in France. It was capable of housing an entire army and was composed of seventeen massive stone towers, each of which rose nearly one hundred feet in the air. The area enclosed by the outside walls was so expansive that Louis II’s father, Louis I, had been able to erect his own luxury palace within the fortress’s grounds—a castle within a castle—and to decorate its main hall with a magnificent tapestry that measured a full seventy-five feet in length depicting the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. Louis II and Yolande also owned an exquisite castle in Saumur, whose storybook looks and crenellated towers were immortalized in a famous illustration in The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry. Additionally, they possessed several castles in Provence, including the strategically placed stronghold of Tarascon and a more elegant citadel in Aix.

  Naturally, the upkeep on all of these estates required a substantial investment. Adding no doubt to the felicity of the nuptial experience, Louis II generously allotted his wife an annual allowance of 10,000 gold francs, an immense sum. With this, Yolande paid the expenses of her numerous household: chamberlain, valets, kitchen staff, greengrocers, stablemen, riders, guards, kennel keepers (for her hunting dogs), tailor, furrier, shoemaker, chaplain, and secretary. She also kept ten maids of honor and three ladies-in-waiting, all of whom were chosen from among the most aristocratic families within their respective provinces. Further reconciling Yolande to the rigors of early married life was the need to dress in accordance with her husband’s royal status. The new queen of Sicily’s clothes were breathtaking—silks and velvets in brilliant hues of ruby, azure, emerald, and violet; cloth of gold trimmed in the rich fur of white ermine; tiaras and brooches encrusted with pearls, diamonds, and sapphires, and for official state occasions, a crown of gold. Extravagant cone-shaped hats called turrets and extra-wide sleeves were all the fashion in the fifteenth century, and no one’s turret rose higher or sleeves trailed longer than Yolande of Aragon’s. Her wardrobe was so splend
id that she provoked a number of sermons by disapproving clergymen on the evils of earthly vanity.

  Many similarly happy marriages in the Middle Ages foundered when the wife failed to produce an heir quickly, but here too the king and queen of Sicily were blessed. Yolande’s first child, born in 1403, was a son, Louis III, followed quickly by a daughter, Marie, in 1404. Her second son, René, who would inherit his mother’s passion for literature, was born in 1409; then came another daughter, Yolande, in 1412; and, finally, a third son, Charles, in 1414. Although she did lose a third daughter in infancy, in general Yolande was spared her own mother’s terrible childbearing ordeal as her five remaining progeny all survived into adulthood. No wonder, then, that the king and queen of Sicily, surrounded by wealth and privilege, and with a hereditary line firmly established, were envied for their affectionate relationship, so much so that the chronicler Jehan de Bourdigné recorded that “it was joyful to see the warm, fervent love between these two young people.”

  But these advantages were accompanied by significant responsibilities. It was understood that Louis II’s primary task was to raise an army, return to Naples, and recapture the kingdom of Sicily. For all the titles, the clothes and the jewels, the great estates and deferential treatment, a king who could not control his realm was not really a king, and Louis II was determined to bend southern Italy to his rule.

  That meant that the administration of his other properties—the great French duchies of Anjou and Maine in the north and the independent county of Provence in the south—would have to be left to his wife. Yolande would be expected not only to collect customs and rents, but to sit on governing councils, settle disputes among the baronage, make decisions concerning the raising or lowering of taxes (subject to approval by the French throne in the case of Anjou and Maine), keep the peace, and ensure the loyalty of her husband’s subjects during his many absences. And she had to do all of this for large tracts of territory that were separated by nearly four hundred miles, a journey that took the fastest courier a full two weeks to cover on horseback. It took even longer for the household to make this trip: whenever they moved from Anjou to Provence or back, Yolande and Louis eschewed the overland route and instead traveled with all of their possessions, family members, and servants by barge either up or down the Loire and Rhône (depending on whether they were coming or going), a cruise that could take as long as eight weeks. Yolande was also obliged to help Louis II raise and outfit an invasion force, after which it was her responsibility to continue to supply him through the port of Marseille, or to marshal additional ships and troops in the event of unforeseen difficulties.

  Emotionally and intellectually, Yolande’s upbringing was of great help in tackling these numerous duties. Even more important, she did not come to her marriage as an unprepared child of thirteen or fourteen, but rather as a secure and poised young woman of nineteen who understood the nature of rule.

  But it is one thing to understand how power works in a general way through observation, quite another to master the details, especially for regions as diverse culturally, economically, and politically as Anjou and Provence. The inhabitants of Louis II’s northern territories did not even use the same calendar as those of his Provençal subjects.* The feudal customs were different and the privileges granted to each baronage varied from place to place, sometimes from town to town. In Provence, exports of salt from the mines of Hyères provided a large source of income and had to be monitored; in Anjou there were rents on manors to be collected. Competent officials had to be identified and appointed to ensure the smooth functioning of each local government, and the opinions and grievances of the various regional councils had to be duly noted and addressed.

  A daunting undertaking for any young woman, but in this instance too Yolande’s path was smoothed by careful instruction from a highly experienced mentor: her mother-in-law, Marie of Blois. For the first four years of their marriage, Louis’s mother was a dominant presence in the life of the young couple, and her daughter-in-law clearly benefited from the older woman’s knowledge and contacts. There was no aspect of governance with which Marie was not familiar, and her grasp of finance was impressive. “For twenty-two years she had indeed administered with such order and foresight the income derived from Provence, Anjou, and Maine, that she was able to support, in the name of her eldest son Louis, the war for Naples begun by his father, and to provide this son with the upkeep needed to maintain his royal status,” confirmed the official chronicler for the monastery of Saint-Denis. “Her intimate counselors insist that she had amassed from the revenue of these domains a private treasure of 200,000 écus of gold.” Even on her deathbed, Yolande’s mother-in-law left the young couple with a sage (and prophetic) example of her uncanny ability to anticipate and compensate for future adversity. “When her last hour approached, she devoutly received the final sacraments of the Church; after which she called her son to her and revealed to him this secret,” wrote the Monk of Saint-Denis, referring to Marie’s extensive savings. “The young prince, justifiably surprised, gently demanded why, during the time where he had recently been in distress, she had not been more generous with him. She responded that she had been afraid that he would be taken prisoner, and that she had always wanted to have money in reserve, to save him from the shame of having to beg his ransom from everybody and anybody.”

  This issue of ransom was central to fifteenth-century warfare. The expenses associated with raising and maintaining armies were prohibitive, and a favorite way to recoup costs was to capture a royal antagonist and hold him hostage for a crippling sum. As usual, Marie had seen clearly to the core of this issue: with so much money at stake, not even the closest of friends or allies could be relied on for funds; only members of the immediate family would care enough to bankrupt themselves to ransom a loved one. Her son’s royal rank ensured that this threat of capture and ransom would dog him whenever he undertook to assert his rights to southern Italy, and she was warning him, and by implication Yolande, of the need to be prepared for this eventuality. This last admonition on the part of her mother-in-law was one that would resonate with Yolande of Aragon.

  Marie died peacefully in June 1404. It was well for Yolande that she had had the benefit of this remarkable woman’s counsel. For not even Marie of Blois could have anticipated the terrible darkness, the pernicious violence, the wanton destruction and bloodshed that would overtake the once-mighty kingdom of France in the coming decades. A storm of epic proportions was brewing, brought about in equal parts by insanity, ambition, and greed, and this tempest would rage until Joan of Arc, an obscure peasant girl of extra ordinary courage, suddenly stepped out of the shadows to quell it.

  * Charles V, king of France, had three brothers—Louis I, duke of Anjou; Jean, duke of Berry; and Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy—and three sisters—Joan, queen of Navarre; Marie, duchess of Bar; and Isabelle, duchess of Milan.

  * In France, this title was always referred to as simply “King of Sicily”—the rest was understood.

  * Three years later, when his French bride was still only nine, an heirless Richard would be summarily deposed by his cousin Henry IV. He should have married Yolande.

  * In Anjou they used the French calendar, which began the New Year at Easter. In Provence they used the Italian calendar, which started the New Year on January 1.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Mad King

  of

  France

  ISTORY IS COMMONLY depicted as a tangled skein of cause and effect, design and fate, so interwoven as to make it impossible to isolate any one factor as key to the progression of human affairs. But this was not the case in France during the first two decades of the fifteenth century, where almost every disturbance in the political arena can be traced back to one fundamental determinant: the insanity of Charles VI. Here was a madness so pervasive, so destabilizing, that it afflicted not only a king but a kingdom.

  Possibly the most poignant aspect of the whole predicament was the potential Charl
es VI exhibited at the start of his reign. He inherited his throne in 1380 when he was just eleven and his younger brother, Louis, later duke of Orléans, eight. The old king, Charles V, had managed to recover most of the territory lost to England during the first half of the Hundred Years War and so was able to leave his eldest son a relatively strong and peaceful kingdom. The specter of conquest by England, which had haunted France in the middle of the century, faded, and in the boy king’s youthful energy there was every hope for the future.

  Charles VI was a charming scamp, high-spirited, fun-loving, and sociable. Christine de Pizan, who knew him, described Charles as a tall, well-built young man, attractive even with his prominent nose. (Both Charles and his younger brother Louis, duke of Orléans, inherited their father’s distinctive proboscis.) Unlike Charles V, who had been sickly, preferring books and scholars to physical activity, Charles VI was an athlete who loved nothing better than a good joust, a trait that augured well for his ability to protect his kingdom in times of strife. His personality too differed markedly from Charles V’s in a manner that, in hindsight, betrayed his later affliction: the son was quixotic and impetuous where the father had been coldly calculating.

  Because the new king was still so young, until he came of age France was ruled by his uncles, the dukes of Berry and Burgundy, acting as regents. Unfortunately, they used this transitional phase to seize as much money, power, and territory as was possible. During this period, for example, the duke of Berry stole the castle of Lusignan.

  But while the duke of Berry was certainly avaricious, he was also timid. As a result, he was no match for his brother the duke of Burgundy, who displayed no such weakness. “The Duke of Burgundy,” declared the chronicler Jean Froissart, “was the greatest personage in France next to the King.” Known as Philip the Bold for his predatory policies, the duke of Burgundy busied himself during Charles VI’s minority with extending his influence to the north and east of France. He had earlier married the countess of Flanders, heir to one of the richest provinces in Europe, and so gained an interest not only in her domain but in Belgium and the Netherlands as well. Nearer to his home demesne of Burgundy in eastern France, he sought an alliance with his neighbor, the duke of Bavaria, with the intention of encircling France along its outer boundaries. As his power grew, he could then by degrees close in on his nephew’s territories.