QUEEN JOAN OF NAPLES
Of all feminine sinners known to history, Joan of Anjou, Queen of
Naples and of Jerusalem, affords, perhaps, the most conspicuous
example of the perils attendant upon what are known as “marriages of
State”—that is to say, marriages brought about for reasons of State
and without reference to the personal inclinations of the contracting
parties themselves.
[Illustration: QUEEN JOAN OF NAPLES.]
The elder of the two daughters born to Charles, Duke of Calabria,
and Marie of Valois—both of whom had predeceased their father and
father-in-law, Robert, King of Naples—Joan was married, as a child of
fourteen, to her cousin Andrew the grandson of King Charles of Hungary,
the brother of King Robert; and on the death of the latter in the month
of January 1343, succeeded him as his granddaughter on the throne of
Naples. At that time Joan, although not yet fifteen years old, was
beautiful with the beauty and grace of a grown woman; her eyes were of
a shade of brown so deep as to be almost black; whilst the pallor of
her complexion was enhanced by the lustrous dark hair of her, which she
wore, according to the fashion of the day, in two long and heavy plaits
that fell nearly to her knees. Moreover, her tall, slender figure added
several years to her appearance, whilst the expression of her face,
albeit sensitive and gentle, was one of determination and of a latent
strength of purpose far beyond that of most girls of her age. For Joan
of Anjou had already learned the meaning both of love and of hate—the
hate of her husband, and the guilty love of another than he.
The name of the man for whom she had, even then, betrayed her Hungarian
husband was Robert of Cabano, the son of Filippa Cabano, and her
husband Raymond, a Saracen, bought out of slavery by another Raymond
Cabano who had given him his own name in baptism and had procured for
him the post of head cook to Charles the Hammer, King of Naples and
elder brother of King Robert, the grandfather and precursor of Queen
Joan. From being head cook, Raymond had since risen to the most eminent
post of Seneschal of the Kingdom of Naples.
The way of Joan’s loveless marriage—the source of all her sins and
misfortunes—to her cousin Andrew of Hungary was this: it had been
arranged by her grandfather, King Robert, in the intention of making
amends to Andrew for having usurped the sovereignty of Naples from
Andrew’s father, Carobert of Hungary, the eldest son of King Robert’s
brother, Charles the Hammer. With this object, King Robert had caused
Andrew to be brought as a child to his Court at Naples, that the boy
might become fitted by education and surroundings to be the husband of
Joan, and share with her the crown of Naples and of Jerusalem. For, be
it said, the Hungarian-born Andrew was by nature uncouth and savage
and cold, and altogether unsuited, both in his temperament and his
views of life, to fulfil King Robert’s expectations of him. Instead
of growing more tender, more responsive and affectionate in the genial
surroundings of the Neapolitan Court, as had been hoped might prove to
be the case, he seemed, on the contrary, to become daily more reserved,
more imbued with the sense of his own importance, more generally
domineering and less sympathetic towards those about him.
However, his marriage with Joan had been duly solemnized some months
before the death of old King Robert in order that the latter’s fondest
wish might be accomplished betimes; but, to the rage and disappointment
of Andrew, as soon as the King was dead, Joan alone had been proclaimed
as his successor by her cousin, Charles Duke of Durazzo and Albania,
who had presented her as their sole, legitimate sovereign, to the
populace assembled below the windows of the Castel Nuovo in a room of
which King Robert’s dead body, the breath but scarcely gone out of it,
lay still warm upon the bed on which he had died. Moreover not only
Charles of Durazzo, but others, including principally Robert of Cabano
and another cousin of the Queen, Louis of Taranto, had absolutely
refused to do homage to Andrew of Hungary; to Joan alone had they bent
the knee and sworn fealty.
Only one person of all those present had protested energetically
against the exclusion of Prince Andrew from the immediate proclamation
of sovereignty; this was a certain Father Robert, a monk, the tutor
of Andrew, whom he had accompanied from Hungary to Naples and whom
he never deserted as long as the prince lived. This Father Robert
earned the especial dislike of Petrarch, to whom the monk’s austere
and masterful personality was as gall on the tongue, to judge from the
poet’s description of him.
As has been told, then, by the time that King Robert passed away,
leaving his kingdom to Joan and to Andrew her consort, these two had
been man and wife for long months; during which period Joan had loved,
not her husband, but the handsome, swaggering Saracen, Robert of
Cabano. But by now, when she was become Queen of Naples by the death
of her grandfather, Joan had grown weary of the insolence of Robert’s
dominion over her, and was minded to throw off the yoke of it. Also,
her affections—which, be it said in justice to her, had formerly been
consistently offered to her husband and as consistently rejected by
him—had turned towards one of the very few completely disinterested
and unselfish persons at the Court. This was Bertrand of Artois, whose
father, Charles of Artois, had been appointed by King Robert’s will
one of the regents of the kingdom until Andrew and Joan should have
attained their twenty-fifth year.
Joan had only one sister, Mary, a mere child, who was scarcely thirteen
years old when Joan came to the throne; this Princess Mary, by the
terms of King Robert’s testament, was to inherit the throne in the
event of her elder sister’s dying without issue; in addition, the old
king had expressed a wish that Princess Mary should be affianced either
to Louis, King of Hungary, elder brother of Andrew, or, failing Louis,
to the Duke of Normandy, eldest son of the King of France. In case of
the death without heirs of both Joan and Mary, the sovereignty would by
rights fall to Charles of Durazzo, eldest son of King Robert’s younger
brother who had died some years previously, John, Duke of Durazzo and
Albania. John of Durazzo had left behind him a widow, Agnes, and two
younger sons besides Charles; these were Ludovico, Count of Gravina,
and Robert, Prince of the Morea. The youngest brother of King Robert,
Philip, Prince of Taranto, who had likewise predeceased him, had also
left a widow who bore the title of Empress of Constantinople inherited
from her grandfather, Baldwin II, and three sons, Robert, Philip, and
finally, Louis of Taranto, the handsomest and most accomplished knight
of his day, then but barely turned three-and-twenty.
There had survived King Robert, too, his widow, Sancia of Aragon, a
character as noble and holy as the majority of those composing the
Neapolitan Court were debased and self-seeking and unscrupulous. Before
departing this life, King Robert had obtained from Queen Sancia a
promise to the effect that she would remain in the world and at Court
for a whole year in order to watch over the young King and Queen,
Andrew and Joan—it being Queen Sancia’s announced intention to enter
as soon as possible into a convent, there to end her days in peace and
prayer—and to protect their relationship to one another from the perils
which, as the dying man had clearly foreseen, must inevitably menace
it. And, very particularly, he had warned his widow to be on her guard,
where Joan was concerned, against three especial dangers—the love of
Bertrand of Artois, the beauty of Louis of Taranto, and the ambition of
Charles of Durazzo.
So that, no sooner was King Robert dead, than his wishes in respect to
the mutual sovereignty of Andrew and Joan were contemptuously put aside
by those who proclaimed Joan, and Joan alone, as their new Queen to
the Neapolitan people; but Joan’s acquiescence in their proclamation of
her as sole sovereign cannot be overlooked, foreshadowing, as it would
almost seem to do, some already half-formed instinctive project of
becoming actually that which she had been proclaimed to be—the single
occupant of the throne.
Instantly, moreover, her Hungarian husband and his partisans, Father
Robert the Dominican Friar, together with divers Hungarian nobles,
and Giovanni Pipino, Count of Altamura, one of the most powerful
lords of the kingdom and the most hated by the people, held counsel
among themselves as to how they might best defeat the projects of the
Queen’s party. This, they decided, could only be done by acquainting
King Andrew’s mother, Elizabeth of Poland, and his brother, King Louis
of Hungary, with the terms of King Robert’s last will, and of how a
conspiracy had been set on foot to deprive King Andrew of his rightful
share in the government of Naples. Also, a complaint in the same
terms was to be sent to the Pope at Avignon and a request made of the
Holy Father that he would issue a Bull of coronation on King Andrew’s
behalf, thereby duly confirming him in his rights of, at least, equal
sovereignty with Joan his wife. At the same time, Father Robert tried
to impress upon Andrew the advisability of coming as soon as possible
to some kind of understanding upon the subject with Joan herself before
her favourites should have alienated her affections entirely from him.
These favourites whom the good monk had in mind were some of them men
and some of them women. Of the men—Robert of Cabano, Louis of Taranto,
and Bertrand of Artois—we have already seen something; of the women we
have as yet made acquaintance with only two, Filippa Cabano, the mother
of Robert the half-breed, and formerly governess to the princesses
Joan and Mary; and the Empress of Constantinople, their aunt and the
mother of Louis of Taranto and his brothers. Besides Donna Filippa
and the Empress, however, there were three others who had influence
over Joan—the Countesses of Terlizzi and Morcone, daughters of Donna
Filippa, and, lastly and supremely, a young and lovely girl of sixteen,
known simply as “Cancia,” who occupied, officially, the position of
tiring-woman to the young Queen.
Cancia had been put into this employment by her protectoress, Donna
Filippa, in order that by her wiles and companionship she might corrupt
the spirit of Joan, and render her the more averse to the remonstrances
of Father Robert the Dominican on behalf of Andrew of Hungary his
pupil, and so bring her more and more under the influence of her lover,
Robert of Cabano, Filippa’s own son. And Cancia had played her part so
effectually that, it is said, Joan loved her more even than she did her
own sister, Princess Mary.
And as it happened, Donna Filippa was beginning to suspect that, at
last, Joan was tiring of her intrigue with Robert, and that she might
at any moment turn elsewhere for the love denied her by her rightful
husband—for life without love was insupportable to Joan’s passionately
affectionate nature.
Old King Robert—Robert the Wise, as he is commonly styled—was buried
behind the high altar in the Church of Santa Chiara that he had built
himself, and where his splendid Gothic tomb may be seen to this day,
having on it his likeness both as King and as Franciscan monk; for
he was a tertiary of Franciscans and died, as becomes one, in their
uniform. In the same church are to be found the tombs, too, of many of
the actors in the tragedy of Queen Joan; of her father and mother and
her little sister Maria, and of Maria’s children by three successive
husbands, together with the graves of Charles of Durazzo and of
Raimondo Cabano the Seneschal. And here, in passing, I would like to
say that there are no churches in the whole world that can compare with
the old churches of the city of Naples for the number and the beauty
and the poignant interest of the tombs that these contain.
Some days after King Robert’s burial in Santa Chiara, Joan was
approached by Filippa Cabano with a request that she would create
Filippa’s son Robert Grand Seneschal of the Kingdom in succession to
his father, who was but shortly deceased; also that he might receive
the title of Count of Eboli. To both these outrageous demands the young
Queen at first turned a deaf ear; not until Filippa—who was accompanied
by Robert in person—threatened to make known to all the world the fact
of Joan’s new intrigue with Bertrand d’Artois did the young Queen
surrender to her demands. It would seem that Filippa had, for some
time, suspected the cooling of Joan’s fondness for her son, and so had
determined to obtain from her for Robert a commanding and unassailable
position in the State.
In that same State of Naples, then, there were already two increasingly
definite factions, each with a different aim; the party of the
Dominican Father Robert and of the Hungarian nobles, that sought to
bring about the supremacy of King Andrew and the subjugation of Queen
Joan; and the party of Donna Filippa with their programme of “Naples
for the Neapolitans”—that is, firstly of securing sole sovereignty for
the Queen, and secondly of making the Queen herself the puppet of their
own will and the instrument of their aggrandizement.
And round about these openly contending factions there prowled,
watchful and ruthless, Charles of Durazzo, seeking only the opportunity
to make himself master of the situation. There were no lengths to which
Duke Charles was not prepared to go in order to attain his aim and to
satisfy the ambition that devoured him; no crime, however frightful,
from the contemplation of which he shrank as a means to his end.
Cost what it might, he would be King of Naples and of Jerusalem. The
chroniclers describe him as a pale man with close-cropped hair and a
thick beard; and, when agitated, he had a trick of frowning. Charles of
Durazzo had felt greatly aggrieved at the bestowal of Joan’s hand in
marriage upon Andrew of Hungary; for of all King Robert’s nephews he,
Charles, had been the nearest in blood to the throne; and to him, as
such, Joan ought to have been given. But never for an instant had he
allowed so much as a glimpse of his disappointment to be seen by any
one; never once had he suffered a breath of complaint to escape him.
Nevertheless, his resolve was only the stronger for the iron
self-discipline of the man; and, now that Joan was Queen, the hour
was come for him to try the first of the two alternatives by which
he was to achieve his object. He was still a bachelor, and Joan had
found favour in his eyes by reason of her loveliness; therefore, before
having recourse to the other expedient that he had laid out for himself
in case of need, Charles had determined to attempt the enlistment of
Joan’s co-operation in his designs.
With this object he obtained a private audience of the Queen, and
straightway proceeded to lay siege to her sympathies by every kind of
flattery and the most skilful hints of the dangers that threatened
her from the side of ungrateful and grasping favourites. Though he
named no names, yet Joan understood only too well whom he meant, and
could not help evincing signs both of her comprehension and of her
agreement with him. From that he went on to speak more particularly of
the popular rejoicing at her succession to the throne, and, finally, of
the universal regret that she should be compelled by an unkind fate to
share that throne with one in every way unworthy both of herself and of
it.
Seeing clearly who it was to whom he referred in these terms, Joan
attempted feebly to protest; but was powerless to prevent him from
continuing with what he had to say of the certainty he felt that, if
Andrew of Hungary were ever to be admitted to an actual share in the
government, the people of Naples would infallibly rise in arms against
him and the detested Hungarians who surrounded him. It would, indeed,
Duke Charles assured the unhappy Queen, be only another instance of the
Sicilian Vespers; the Neapolitans would, of a surety, rise up as one
man and exterminate their foreign oppressors, including Andrew himself
and the monk whose mistaken counsels had inspired him with so suicidal
an ambition.
“But of what fault do they accuse Andrew?” asked Joan uncertainly.
In reply, the Albanian said that the people hated the Prince for his
stupidity, his coarseness and savagery; that the nobles accused him
of violating their privileges and of surrounding himself to their
detriment with the basest adventurers; and that, lastly, he himself,
Charles of Durazzo, accused Andrew of making Joan’s life a misery to
her.
And then, before she could recover from her amazement at his boldness,
Charles wound up by offering to remove Andrew from her path by
murdering him; whereupon, the better part in Joan triumphing for a
moment over the lower side of her nature, she dismissed Charles angrily
from her presence, calling him coward and insolent. Without undue haste
or appearance of anger, Charles left her, merely reminding her that it
was not altogether impossible that some day it should be his turn to
condemn and hers to be judged.
So that Duke Charles, having failed in his attempt to obtain Joan’s
consent to the murder of Andrew, must, instead, have recourse to the
second of the alternatives that had presented themselves to him.
This was to make himself the husband of the next heir to the throne—the
thirteen-year-old Maria, sister of Queen Joan. On reaching his own
palace, therefore, he sent for a notary, one Nicholas of Melazzo,
whose fate he held in his hands by means of a certain knowledge, and
ordered him to draw up a contract of marriage between the Princess
Maria, his cousin, and himself, Charles of Durazzo. This the notary,
albeit terrified at the audacity of the thing (seeing that Maria, as
will be remembered, was intended by the terms of King Robert’s will to
be the wife of either King Louis of Hungary or of the Duke of Normandy)
consented to do; and then Duke Charles ordered him at the same time to
seek out Tommaso Pace, the valet of King Andrew and the notary’s own
closest friend, and to find out if Pace had been approached at all by
any of Queen Joan’s partisans with a view to drawing him into any plot
against Andrew’s life. For, as Charles argued, if such a conspiracy
should ever arise, those concerned in it would be almost sure to
endeavour to win over the King’s valet to their undertaking in order
the more easily to carry it into effect.
From that day on it was noticed that a complete change had taken
place in the manner of the Duke of Durazzo towards King Andrew—or, to
give the latter the only title hitherto accorded to him, the Duke of
Calabria. For whereas hitherto Charles had shown himself the reverse
of friendly towards Andrew, and had been ever the loudest in his denial
of Andrew’s right to be crowned King of Naples, he now overwhelmed the
Hungarian with every kind of courtesy and friendly advance. Charles
even took pains to propitiate Andrew’s shadow, the honest Dominican,
excusing himself to Father Robert for his outrageous conduct in
proclaiming Joan alone as their new Queen to the people of Naples by
pleading the necessity of making an apparent concession to the popular
dislike of the Hungarian element in the kingdom. He did not hesitate
to declare to Father Robert his detestation of the persons who were
bent upon estranging the young Queen from her husband for their own
ends; finally he concluded by placing what power he possessed at the
monk’s disposal for the purpose of defeating the machinations of Joan’s
treacherous favourites directed against her rightful husband and the
legal partner of her throne.
To these assurances Father Robert lent a willing, although not an
entirely believing ear; for he could only attribute the change in
Duke Charles to some misunderstanding with the young Queen. At the
same time Charles and Andrew of Hungary were become the closest of
comrades; never, now, was Andrew seen in public without his Albanian
cousin-by-marriage; never did he withdraw himself from the circle of
his friends to the seclusion of his apartments but Charles of Durazzo
walked at his elbow.
And so things went on for a while, until at length the whole Court
was ranged definitely on one side or on the other: on that of
Queen Joan and the Neapolitan people itself, to whom Andrew and his
followers were entirely odious; or else on that of Andrew and those
who hoped eventually to make him sole sovereign of Naples to their own
advantage—the Hungarian “Heyducs,” the Count of Altamura, and their
kind.
The war of the factions had begun by the omission of Andrew’s name from
all the proclamations, warrants, and so forth issued by the Queen in
her own sole name. In retaliation for this indefensible slight, Andrew
had ordered his followers to break open all the prisons within reach
and to liberate their tenants, criminal or otherwise, in his name
alone and in honour of his succession to the throne of Naples. He had
also loaded the members of his own party—and especially the execrated
Altamura—with honours and riches by means of patents signed by himself
only, as the one supreme temporal authority in the kingdom. It may be
added that in all these arbitrary and illegal measures, so admirably
calculated to arouse the bitterest anger and the most murderous
hatred of the Queen’s supporters against him, Andrew of Hungary’s
one confident adviser was none other than his evil genius, Charles of
Durazzo.
From that moment the party of Joan, led by the Counts of San-Severino,
Mileto, Terlizzi, Balzo, Morcone, Catanzaro and Sant’ Angelo, and,
more especially, by the Queen’s ex-favourite Robert of Cabane, Count
of Eboli, and his successor in her affections, Bertrand d’Artois, was
resolved upon ridding the land of Andrew and of his minions. Of all the
angry barons who had rallied to Joan’s support, the last-mentioned,
Bertrand d’Artois, really loved her for herself, and was actuated by
no motive of personal gain, except—alas!—his lawless hope of becoming
united to her in matrimony once her husband were removed from the
path of his criminal passion. In vain his father, the brave and
noble Charles of Artois, one of the regents of the kingdom, strove to
dissuade him from the perilous course of a love as treasonable as it
was immoral; nothing was of any avail to hold back the young man from
the pursuit of his designs.
More successful, however, was the restraining influence of another
parent over another child in the same situation—the influence of the
Empress of Constantinople over her youngest-born, the handsome Louis of
Taranto, who, in deference to his mother’s entreaties, turned away his
eyes as well as he could from his lovely ill-mated cousin.
After the rupture between Joan and the Duke of Durazzo, many weeks
elapsed without her either meeting him or hearing much of his doings,
beyond that he was become the inseparable comrade of her husband;
although, indeed, at times she cannot have helped wondering what shape
his enmity towards her might eventually assume.
One radiant morning of spring, however, as she was in her room in
the Castel Nuovo, looking out over the town and the sea beyond, all
shimmering in the sunlight, towards Sorrento, there came a knock on the
door, and Donna Filippa Cabano, mother of the Grand Seneschal, entered
precipitately, her face blanched with alarm and anger, to say that
Princess Maria, Joan’s little sister, was nowhere to be found.
A short while previously the child had been playing happily by herself
in the castle grounds; and then, soon afterwards, she had simply
disappeared, none could say where or in what direction.
Joan’s consternation may be more easily imagined than described. Her
love for Maria was the one perfectly innocent, unspoilt love of her
whole existence, the very tenderest spot in all her heart. And now
Maria was gone from her; the horror and grief of it were such that she
shrieked as though a live coal had been laid upon her breast. That,
however, was only in the first anguish of her loss; recovering herself
quickly, she broke out in a storm of anger upon those responsible, by
their want of vigilance for the catastrophe; such was the Queen’s fury,
indeed, that Filippa fled from her in fear for her life. Instantly the
whole castle was in an uproar, its inhabitants scouring every nook and
cranny, indoors and out; but without success; and, presently, the whole
city of Naples was bent distractedly upon the same quest, hunting high
and low for the beloved little girl. All, though, was in vain; and
albeit during that day, and many days and nights to follow, the search
was diligently pursued, yet in spite of every effort no trace could be
found of the lost Princess.
The only drop of comfort vouchsafed to Joan during all those weary
hours of agonizing anxiety came from Bertrand d’Artois, who had been
led, somehow, to suspect the agency of the Duke of Durazzo in respect
to Maria’s disappearance; a drop, however, that Joan refused to accept,
saying that such a thing was beyond the bounds of probability. For no
one, even of Duke Charles’s household, let alone the Duke himself, had
so much as set foot within the castle precincts since the day when he
had left the place in anger. No stranger, even, had set foot, that
morning of Maria’s disappearance, inside the gates, except Nicholas
of Melazzo, for whose integrity Tommaso Pace, Prince Andrew’s own
body-servant, was willing to answer on his life.
In this manner a month went by, bringing to Joan despair of ever seeing
her sister again, until on April 30, 1343, there occurred an event
so amazing as to deprive her at first of every other sensation; until
her astonishment turned to fury at the insolent daring of it. On first
learning of it, she refused to believe it, and then, as the certainty
of it took the place of incredulity, her indignation knew no bounds.
For, on the stroke of noon on that day, she learned that her sister
had become the legal wife of Charles of Durazzo, having been publicly
married to him at an altar erected in the open air and in sight
of all the people before the church of Saint John by the Sea, not
a bowshot distant from the great gates of the Palazzo Durazzo.
The marriage had been solemnized by Duke Charles’s chaplain, the
necessary dispensation for the marriage of cousins, one of them being
a minor, having been received from Rome the day before; and, at its
conclusion, the newly-wedded pair had faced the spectators hand in
hand, and had solemnly declared that they took one another as husband
and wife, calling upon God and the people to bear witness to it.
Their announcement had been acclaimed with tumultuous vociferations
of applause and delight; after which the Duke and Duchess of Durazzo
received the Papal benediction, prior to being escorted in procession
round the city by their men-at-arms and the sympathetic populace to the
beating of drums and the blowing of trumpets.
So that Charles of Durazzo was now the husband—and, it need hardly be
said, the master—of the thirteen-year-old heir to the throne. And when,
after curbing the useless rage in her heart, Joan summoned the pair to
receive her congratulations, she realized her folly in quarrelling with
that all-daring and remorseless man; also she understood that nothing
short of the throne itself—let the price be what it might—would ever
satisfy his lust of power and glory and hate.
Thenceforth the temptation of Joan to be in very truth at once the
real ruler of her own dominions and at the same time the arbiter of
her own destiny increased and grew to terrific powers; the desire to
satisfy her wishes absolutely in everything became a kind of diabolical
possession, sweeping away every consideration of virtue and of mere
worldly prudence; save only when, in rare intervals of reaction, she
would fall upon her knees in the solitude of her chamber, her face in
her hands, sobbing as though her heart would break with the horror of
her situation.