The Accursed Kings Series Books 1-3: The Iron King, the Strangled Queen, the Poisoned Crown
Page 23
The pretensions of the Anjous to the kingdom of Hungary, pretensions that were to triumph, issued from the marriage of Charles the Lame with Marie of Hungary, daughter of Etienne V and grand-daughter of Bela IV, of the Arpadien dynasty – a parallel marriage to that of Isabel of Anjou, sister of Charles the Lame, with Ladislas IV, brother to Marie. Ladislas IV, having died childless in 1290, Queen Marie claimed the throne of Hungary for her eldest son, Charles Martel, who bore the title but did not reign and who died in 1295, while the Hungarian lords preferred to him the King of Bohemia, Wenceslas, another grandson of King Bela IV.
It took another fifteen years of fighting and intrigue between Naples, Buda and the Holy See to make the Hungarian lords accept the son of Charles Martel, Charobert, whose sister Clémence was proposed to Louis X of France as his second wife.
It is to be remarked that Charles of Valois’s second wife, Catherine de Courtenay, titular Empress of Constantinople, was also a member of the family of Anjou.
10. The habit of keeping a lighted lamp over one’s bed all night lasted throughout the Middle Ages. It was a practice intended to keep away evil spirits.
11. From his marriage with Jeanne of Burgundy, Philippe of Poitiers had only daughters; as for Charles, who became Count of la Marche, his wife Blanche of Burgundy had only produced two children who were born dead. It is important to realize that at this period it had never been established that it was impossible for women to succeed to the throne of France, and for the simple reason that as yet no such case had arisen. During the three centuries of the first Capet dynasty, the Kings of France had always had a son to whom to hand on their inheritance, and no accident had occurred to interrupt the normal devolution of the Crown, a fact pretty well without parallel in the history of dynasties. But there was nothing in law which excluded women from the succession or incapacitated them from reigning. The notorious Salic Law was drawn up and promulgated only during the years with which we are concerned and in circumstances that will be made clear in a future volume.
12. Jeanne of Burgundy (the Halt), sister of Marguerite of Burgundy (therefore of the ducal branch) and wife of Philippe of Valois, must not be confused with the other Jeanne of Burgundy, wife of Philippe of Poitiers. These two Jeannes, moreover, were both to become, separated by only ten years, Queens of France, one as the wife of Philippe V, and the other as the wife of Philippe VI.
It is to be remarked that, during this period, nearly all the women at the Court of France were called either Jeanne or Marguerite and the men Philippe, Charles or Louis, which does not make the historian’s task any the easier and has frequently given rise to confusion.
13. The fighting between the Guelfs, partisans of the Pope, and the Ghibellines, partisans of the Emperor, bathed a whole section of medieval Italy, and particularly Tuscany, in blood.
Dante and the father of Petrarch, both Ghibellines, were exiled from Florence by Charles of Valois.
14. The importance accorded to relics was one of the most marked exterior signs of religion in the Middle Ages. Belief in the virtue of sacred relics degenerated into universal and widespread superstition, everyone wishing to possess a large relic for their homes, and small ones to take with them on journeys attached to their necks. People had relics in proportion to their wealth. The trade in relics was most prosperous during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even during the fourteenth. Everyone bought and sold these holy remains; abbots, in order to augment the revenues of their monasteries or acquire the favour of great personages, yielded up the fragments of the sainted bodies in their charge; crusaders returning from Palestine could make a fortune for themselves with the pious detritus collected on their expedition. The Jews had a huge international organization for the sale of relics. The goldsmiths encouraged the trade, because they received orders for shrines and reliquaries which were among the finest objects of the period and reflected the vanity as much as the piety of their possessors.
The most celebrated and most prized relics of the period were naturally pieces of the True Cross, fragments of the wood of the manger, the arrows of St Sebastian, and many stones as well, those from Calvary, the Holy Sepulchre, and the Mount of Olives. In France, for obvious reasons, the most prized were the relics of King Saint Louis, but they never left the circle of the royal family.
15. Roberto Oderisi was the most celebrated of the Giottesque Neapolitan painters, and was the one with the greatest local reputation of his time. His most celebrated works are the Crucifixion in the Church of St Francis of Assisi at Eboli, and particularly the frescoes of the Incoronata at Naples which until recently were attributed to Giotto himself.
Having first come under the influence of Giotto, whose apprentice he was, he then came under the influence of Simone de Martino and finally became head of the Neapolitan school of the fourteenth century. In 1315 Giotto was wholly employed in painting the frescoes of the life of St Francis on the walls of the Santa Croce at Florence.
16. It was not yet the Palace of the Popes that we know. This was built in the following century.
17. This Eudeline, natural daughter of Louis X, and a nun in the Convent of the Clarisses of the Faubourg Saint-Marcel of Paris, was authorized by a Bull of Pope John XXII, of August 10th, 1330, to become Abbess of Saint-Marcel, or of any other convent of the Clarisses, in spite of her illegitimate birth.
Author’s Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to Georges Kessel, José-André Lacour, Gilbert Sigaux and Pierre de Lacretelle for their assistance in gathering material for this book; to Christiane Grémillon for help in compiling it; and to the Bibliothèque Nationale for indispensable aid in research.
BY MAURICE DRUON
The Accursed Kings
The Iron King
The Strangled Queen
The Poisoned Crown
The Royal Succession
The She-Wolf
The Lily and the Lion
The King Without a Kingdom
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1956
Century edition 1985
Arrow edition 1987
Published by HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Maurice Druon 1955
Maurice Druon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Source ISBN: 9780007491278
Ebook Edition © April 2013 ISBN: 9780007492220
Version 1
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