I.
“Like Queen Giovanna” was, alas! a common saying in the Two Sicilies what time Giovanna II. was Queen of Naples. A term of immeasurable reprobation, it implied the stripping of the woman of every shred of moral character, the baring of the Queen of every claim to honour. If Isabeau of Bavaria was the worst Queen-consort, then Giovanna II. was the worst Queen-regnant, perhaps, the world has ever seen. Her story needs telling truthfully with care.
Giovanna II., Queen of Naples, was the only surviving daughter of Charles III., “Carlo della Pace,” King of Naples and Count of Provence. Her mother was Margaret, daughter of her great-uncle Charles, Duke of Durazzo; hence her parents were cousins, and were both in the direct line of succession from Charles I., Count of Anjou, the fourth son of King Louis IX.,—St. Louis of France,—who had married Beatrix, Countess of Provence in her own right. Giovanna had seven brothers and sisters, all of whom died in infancy except Ladislaus, born in 1376; she was his senior by five years, having first seen the light of day on April 27, 1371.
GIOVANNA II. DA NAPOLI AS THE VIRGIN MARY
From a Painting by Antonio Solario (“Lo Zingaro”). (Circa 1420.)
National Museum, Naples
To face page 216
The Queen’s father’s predecessor as occupant of the throne of Naples had been his second cousin, Giovanna I., the eldest surviving grandchild of King Robert, “Roberto il Buono e Saggio.” She died childless in 1382, although twice married, first to Andrew, King of Hungary, and secondly to Lodovico, Prince of Taranto. By her will she purposely passed over the Princes of the Durazzo family, and named as her successor Louis II. d’Anjou, King of Sicily and Jerusalem and Count of Provence. The Queen’s first marriage was celebrated September 24, 1333, when she was only seven years old, her boy-husband being fifteen. The Pope created Prince Andrew King of Naples six years later, upon his succession to the throne of Hungary. Without the slightest compunction, Charles, son of Lodovico, Count of Gravina, seized his cousin’s empty throne, and maintained himself thereupon for five years, his little daughter Giovanna being just ten years of age. The death of Queen Giovanna I. was due to the instigation of Charles. He entered Naples at the head of a strong force of cavalry, seized the palace, and took the Queen prisoner. She was conducted to the Castle of Muro, overlooking the road from Naples to Melfi, and there, with her lover, Otto of Brunswick, suffocated under a feather bed by two Hungarian soldiers. This outrage was committed in revenge for the death of King Andrew, which was ordered by Giovanna I., his consort.
Charles III., King of Naples, died in 1386, leaving to his son Ladislaus the royal succession, with his widow, Queen Margaret, as Regent. They with the Princess Giovanna, sixteen years of age, were fugitives from castle to castle, pursued by the troops of Louis d’Anjou. Nevertheless, Margaret was an astute mother, for when Ladislaus was eighteen years old she espoused him to Constance, daughter of the Count of Clermont in Sicily, a very wealthy heiress. What matrimonial projects were hatched or addled on behalf of Princess Giovanna during her father’s lifetime we know not, but almost the first matter taken in hand by King Ladislaus was an advantageous marriage for his sister. This was a very complicated business. First of all, neither he nor she cared very much for matrimony; he was a libertine, and she shared his freedom and his depravity. Next, each suitor for the hand of Giovanna retired disgusted by the loose morals of the Neapolitan Court and by the avarice of the King and his sister. However, at length a match was arranged between the Princess and Prince William, son of Leopold III., Duke of Austria. The actual nuptials, however, were postponed for one reason or another until 1403, when Giovanna had reached the considerable age of thirty-two. The princely couple went off to Austria, where they remained more or less unhappy until 1406, when the Prince died suddenly and suspiciously, many said by the hand or direction of his ill-conditioned wife.
The widow returned at once to Naples to fill the place of honour vacated by her brother’s wife, his second consort, Maria di Lusignan. Queen Constance he had divorced in 1391, and married the daughter of the King of Cyprus the same year. The ostensible reason for rejecting Constance was the failure of her father to pay her dowry. She was a lovely girl and virtuous,—a rare quality at that time,—and became the idol of the Court. Queen Maria had scarcely been seated on the throne, when she also fell from her high station. Ladislaus said she was delicate and in consumption, and no wife for him. One day, when she and the King were assisting at Mass in the cathedral, she heard with the utmost astonishment and dismay the Archbishop read a Bull of Pope Boniface IX. annulling her marriage with Ladislaus. At the conclusion of the citation the prelate advanced to the Queen’s throne and demanded her wedding-ring. Too stupefied to resist, the pledge of her married state was torn from her finger, and she was carried away to a remote convent under the care of two aged nuns. Three years after this outrage the King relented of his cruelty, and married her to one Andrea di Capua, one of his favourites. He took a third wife in 1406, Marie d’Enghien, the widow of Raimondo d’Orsini, some six months after the return of his sister from Austria. She is said to have survived Ladislaus. Some letters of hers are preserved at Conversano, near Bari, in the Benedictine convent.
The advance of Louis d’Anjou upon the capital roused Ladislaus to action, and he hastily gathered together an undisciplined army, and set forth to withstand his rival to the throne. A decisive battle was fought at Rocca Secca, May 19, 1411, wherein Ladislaus’s troops were routed, but Louis failed to follow up his advantage, and Ladislaus retained his throne and continued his debauches.
Early in 1412 Queen Margaret, mother of the King and of Giovanna, died somewhat suddenly. She and her entourage had taken refuge from a visitation of plague, which spared neither prince nor peasant, at her villa at Acquamela, six miles from Salerno. She was buried privately in the Cathedral of Salerno, in the crypt over against the marble sarcophagus which contained the ashes of St. Matthew. Whatever influence she may have exerted during the youth of her son and daughter for their good was speedily dissipated, and as soon as Ladislaus had obtained the crown he took steps to circumscribe the liberty of his mother. She appealed to her daughter Giovanna for sympathy, but found none, and the poor old Queen, who had survived her consort, Charles, for six-and-twenty years, was consigned to the Convent of the Annunciation, “so as to be out of the way of mischief,” as her daughter phrased it. The natural rôle of mother was entirely out of place in a palace or at a Court ruled by a libertine and a prostitute.
Ladislaus died sadly and alone. His unnatural sister refused to be with him, and all his butterfly courtesans gave to themselves wing when sickness and death entered the royal palace. He died August 6, 1414, leaving no lawful offspring by his three wives, but a numerous family of natural children. No Salic Law governed the succession to the throne in the kingdom of Naples, consequently Giovanna became Queen.
The widowed Queen Giovanna had not married again, although she counted lovers by the score; but within a few months of her accession she took steps to ally herself with a Prince who should be the handsomest and wittiest of the time. This determination of Giovanna was noised abroad all over the capitals and Courts of Europe, and forthwith a troop of eligible suitors passed through the ports of Marseilles and Genoa, each bent on taking the ribald Queen at her word. The romance reads like a fairy tale, for each princeling and prince was put through his paces to show his qualifications in person and in purse; for, desperately wicked as she was, the Queen had a commercial sense, and her exchequer stood sorely in need of replenishment. Taken for all in all, Juan d’Arragona, son of King Ferdinand, was the champion of physical beauty, knightly courtesy, and financial competence; but he was no more than a precocious lad of seventeen, whilst the Queen was forty-five. A matrimonial union was ruled to be impossible, and the pride of Aragon would not suffer a scion of her royal house to become the plaything of a lewd Queen.
Giovanna very unwillingly transferred her affections to an older suitor,—the champion, if we may so write, of the heavy weights,—Jacques de Bourbon, Comte de la Marche, of the Royal House of France, and their nuptials were celebrated in the Cathedral of Naples on August 10, 1415. He very soon discovered that, strong man as he was, he had a wily woman to contend with. He began to assert his marital rights, and required Giovanna to accord him equal honours with herself; at the same time he utterly failed in the reformation of the conduct of his wife. She served herself upon him as she willed, but she mostly willed to serve him not at all, and to transfer her favours, as before their marriage, indiscriminately to whilom paramours. Like a lion wounded in his den, Roy Jacques,—for so he called himself,—struck out at his supplanters, and, with his past-master knowledge of the rapier and its uses, he pricked to death not one but many lovers of the Queen. The Neapolitans were man for man with Giovanna, and indignant with her consort. Strange to say, perhaps, for us who read the story of the time, evil royal communications had wholly corrupted the morals and the manners of all classes in the realm.
Incited by toadies and sycophants, Giovanna at last took the upper hand against her spouse, and on September 13, 1416,—little more than a year after their marriage,—she ordered his imprisonment in the Castella dell’ Ovo, a fortress of such strength that Froissart said: “None but the devil can take it!” Thence, however, he escaped, but with a price upon his head,—fixed by his inconstant mistress,—and took up his residence at Besançon, with the white cord of St. Francis d’Assisi round his loins. There he died, having renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil, a wiser and a disillusioned man, in 1436.
Giovanna, released from the bonds of matrimony, greatly to her relief, gave herself unreservedly into the arms of every man dare-devil enough to risk the consequences. Of these, perhaps the first whose name and maldoings chroniclers have preserved was Pandolfo Alopo, a base-born athlete, a very handsome fellow, and a seductive guitarist to boot. He responded to his royal mistress’s amours, and she appointed him Seneschal of the kingdom, with authority to use her signet-ring. Very soon, mentally and morally undisciplined as he was, he exceeded the length of Giovanna’s tether, by exciting her jealousy with respect to her Maids of Honour. Short was his shrift. Seized, bound, and tortured with nameless indignity and cruelty, his mutilated body was cast into the sea off the fair island of Nisida, where the vicious vixen held orgies equal in atrocity and bestiality to those of Tiberius in Capri.
Sforza da Colignola stepped gaily in the bloody footmarks of Alopo. He was the chief of the Queen’s pages, and had been reared under her eye and at her will; he had, moreover, a fell influence over his mistress, as witness time out of mind, ever since his teens, of her enormities. He, indeed, gained the upper hand of Giovanna, and, being an adept in martial exercises, held his own against all comers. For a time he left the intimate service of the Queen, and became a soldier of fortune, winning laurels and prizes all along his way. Secretly he sympathized with the claims of the House of Anjou, judging shrewdly enough that under the white lilies of Louis he would have a better hold upon his position at the Court of Naples than he would under the red bars of Alfonso of Aragon.
Giovanna felt the thraldom of Sforza’s strength of character and his knowledge of her past, and because no one seemed willing to take her at her word, and rid her of his presence, she turned herself about and fixed her confidence on Sergianni Caracciolo. Upon him she showered riches and honours, but in return he made himself her master.
The Queen’s choice of favourites was not, however, confined to men of merit or of high degree. Every good-looking youth or well-favoured man upon whom her eyes chanced to rest was enrolled in her household. She frequented athletic meetings incognita to view the personal qualifications of vigorous youths, and spent her evenings in surreptitious visits to her stables and her kennels. The men of her choice were offered no alternative, but when the guilty intercourse was consummated the lucky-luckless companion of her couch was expected to commit suicide or for ever leave his home on pain of imprisonment and torture if he tarried four-and-twenty hours.
Perhaps no figure of a man fascinated Queen Giovanna more completely than did the handsome person of Bartolommeo Colleone of Bergamo. His family had become impoverished by the bitter feuds of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, so at eighteen the young lad bid his parents farewell and started off to win his way in military adventures. He travelled south to Naples, and at twenty was as lusty and as strong as any man he met. Of a strict habit of body, he performed feats none others dared. Giovanna sent for the good-looking stranger, and pitted him against the ablest youths of Naples. In leaping, running, and casting of heavy weights, no one could surpass him. Instantly the Queen fell in love with him, and appointed him her esquire, with ready access to her boudoir, where she denied him nothing. His final reward was the cloister of St. Francis d’Assisi, which became his prison, and his mouth was sealed. How he escaped torture no one has recorded.
It would be long, and certainly distasteful, to give a full list of all those who shared the vampire caresses of the peccant Queen; but brief is her story of how Giovanna destroyed the fair fame of her house and the honour of her country. Of her it was written: “Ultima Durazza fiet destructio regnum” (“The last Durazzo shall destroy the kingdom”).