III.
Whilst Louis was strengthening his position at Naples, Duke René of Bar and Lorraine was languishing in the Tour de Bar at Bracon, vanquished at Bulgneville and crushed by the Duke of Burgundy. Louis added his protest against his brother’s retention in captivity to that of all the Sovereigns and peers of France, and his appeal was carried by Queen Margherita to her father, the Duke of Savoy, whose influence was great with the Court of Burgundy. René’s release on parole for a year was largely due to the intercession of his brother. Giovanna expressed a wish to see “my other cousin of Anjou,” as she put it, and Louis pressed his brother to bend his steps to Naples and recruit his health and spirits in the sunny, merry South. The Duke’s first step, however, was to hurry off to Nancy to fold his heroic wife Isabelle and darling children to his breast; here, too, to regulate many affairs of State awaiting his decision. To Angers next he boated, to pay his filial homage to his courageous, resourceful mother, Queen Yolande, and to relieve her of some of the worry of government. René, too, had much business to do at the Court of King Charles of France, and his loyal, devoted subjects in Provence demanded his presence. So passed nearly the whole of his twelvemonth’s grace.
Giovanna’s reception of her “cousin” was affectionate in the extreme, and she was warm in her admiration of “another handsome Prince of Anjou.”
Nothing, however, would suit her until René became her guest, and as such he went through all the weird experience of his elder brother. It mattered not to the Queen that he was a married man with a loving wife and dear children; what mattered to her was that he was good-looking, brave, and gallant. To be sure, René’s serious manner disconcerted her, and his artistic tastes bored her, but under his studious courtesy she tried to believe that he was hiding a lively response to her amorous advances. In the presence of “il galantuomo Re,”—by which term she always saluted Louis,—Giovanna named René second heir to her kingdom, and successor to the title and estates of the duchy of Calabria. She carefully refrained from inquiries about Duchess Isabelle; indeed, she ignored her existence altogether, and in this line of conduct she was quite consistent, for she had declined to receive the young Queen Margherita when Louis entered Naples with her in state.
René, however, was instrumental, whilst under the fascination of Queen Giovanna, in effecting two matters of importance for the kingdom of Naples and its people. She had instructed Giovanni Capistrani, a perfervid son of Rome, and at the same time an admirer of the Queen, whom she had appointed Court Chamberlain, to persecute the Jews and drive them away from Naples; all such as refused exile he was ordered to put to death. René interposed in the interpretation of these decrees, and gained the Queen’s consent to allow the persecuted race to remain on two conditions: (1) That they should not exact unjust usury; and (2) that they should be marked by a yellow cross to differentiate them from the Christian subjects of the Crown. René further suggested to Giovanna that the Church needed her patronage, that she herself would go the way of all flesh, and that some accommodation with Heaven was very desirable. The Queen laughed his counsel to scorn, and badgered him for a crusader and a churchling, but his words went home even to her hardened, sensuous heart. Capistrani’s unexpected action, moreover, greatly moved her; he resigned his Court offices and emoluments, and meekly entered a monastery of St. Francis d’Assisi.
Duke René returned to his prison at Dijon, and King Louis took his bride off to Cosenza, the capital of Calabria, where a second marriage was celebrated on August 15, 1433, to allay the scruples of prejudiced adherents of the Neapolitan throne. A rumour had been spread,—originating, it was said, with the Queen herself,—which affirmed that Margherita was not the wife, but the mistress, of the royal Duke! Eighteen short months of marital bliss were enjoyed by Louis and Margherita, broken, alas! by a fresh attack by Alfonso in force on Naples. A naval battle off Gaeta, 1434, ended disastrously for the fleet of Aragon. Arrayed against it were the allied forces of Genoa, Venice, Florence, and Milan. Alfonso and his brother Juan were taken prisoners, and carried off to Milan by Duke Filippo Maria. Then a blow fell on the young Queen and upon the whole kingdom of Naples, which made itself felt even in the morbid heart of Queen Giovanna. King Louis caught fever besieging the city of Taranto, and was borne swiftly off to Cosenza, where he died, in his own fond Queen’s arms, on November 15, 1434. Few Princes have made themselves so universally loved as Louis III. of Sicily and Naples, and never were there so many sad hearts and tearful eyes in the kingdom of Naples as when his beloved body was laid out for burial in the Cathedral of Cosenza.
Giovanna never again recovered her spirits; to be sure, she did not renounce her evil ways, but she set about in a hurry to put into execution Duke René’s suggestions. Among belated pious deeds, she rebuilt and refounded the Church of Santa Maria dell’ Annunziata by way of penance for her bad life, and there she was buried in front of the high-altar. A simple slab of marble points out, in the absence of a grandiose monument, the place of her sepulture. She died February 2, 1435, and no woman wept for her, and no man felt grieved. If it is true that “the evil which men do dies with them,” then we must not rake up the tainting memories of an evil past. Giovanna II., Queen of Naples, has passed to her last account, and before Heaven’s tribunal will she stand, alongside with the victims of her vampire-love. Faraglia, in his “Storia della Regina Giovanna II. d’Angio,” makes a brave attempt to whitewash the character of the Queen, and he records many interesting details in her daily life. “Every morning,” he says, “she rose with the sun, spent one hour at Mass and private devotions; then she applied herself to the study of music and literature; at noon she breakfasted, generally alone, the afternoon she gave to exercise, and before dinner she bathed in a bath supplied with the milk of one hundred asses.” Apparently the Queen gave no time to affairs of State, and she had not much leisure for company. Undoubtedly Queen Giovanna was the friend of art and craft, but only so far as their exponents helped to enhance her own attractions and luxuries. Antonio Solario—“Il Zingaro”—was her favourite painter, and, by the oddest of irrational conventions, he has represented her in an altar-piece as the Virgin Mary with the Infant Christ, and surrounded by a court of saints!
With what feelings the news of the death of Louis III. at Cosenza was received by René in his prison chamber at Tour de Bar we may well imagine. The hold of his house upon the kingdom of Naples was, of course, of the weakest; and if the late King upon the spot, free to move what troops and stores he had at will, was unable to retain command of Naples, how could a captive Prince away in Burgundy hope to enforce successfully his claim as his brother’s heir?
In Provence and Anjou and beyond the borders of his dominions, with Bar and Lorraine, and with the sympathy and assistance of friendly Sovereigns and Princes at home and abroad, he had, of course, numberless loyal subjects, friends, and allies, but among them all not one could enthuse his cause as he could himself in person. Three devoted Princesses,—Yolande, Isabelle, and Marguerite,—were doing all they could to free him from his captivity. Their efforts were in the schools of sympathy and politics, but they could not lead troops or command a victorious army. No doubt René was depressed and in despair at the apparent paralysis of all effective assistance. Then came the crushing intelligence that Giovanna, the Queen of Naples, was dead, and that he (René) was de facto King. This must have made him desperate. He had no resources, and there appeared no possibility of his obtaining possession of his rights. How he chafed and fumed as he paced his spacious chamber, and how defiantly he must have gazed through its barred windows and at its closed door! Duke René’s brain must have reeled.
Relief, however, came in quite an unexpected sort of way. One morning the bolts of his door were noisily shot back, and upon the threshold he beheld two foreign gentlemen unknown to him. They knelt and kissed his hand; then they offered him a permit from the Duke of Burgundy, a sealed letter from Duchess (now Queen) Isabelle, and a great official despatch from the lately deceased Queen Giovanna. The two emissaries were devoted adherents to the House of Anjou-Provence—Baron Charles de Montelar and Signore Vidal di Cabarus. They came, as their credentials ordered, directly from the deathbed of the Queen, to tell him from her that, “for the sake of the love I had for King Louis,—now, alas! departed,—I chose his noble brother René as my heir and successor. Long live King René!” Into his hand the two gentlemen delivered the Sovereign’s medallion and its royal chain of gold, and again they did obeisance to their new Sovereign.
René accepted their homage chivalrously, if sorrowfully, but his eye wandered to the smaller packet held by di Cabarus, for he saw it was addressed to him in his dear wife’s handwriting. Tearing open the cover, he read with tears in his eyes the startling news that—
“Even whilst thou, my fond spouse, readest these presents, I, thy loyal wife and royal consort, am setting off at once, well mounted and numerously attended, to Marseilles to take shipping for Naples, there to receive in thy name the homage of the Estates and to assume the government. I am taking with me our second boy, Louis, with Yolande and Marguerite, to show them to thy Neapolitan subjects, but Jean I shall send to thee to comfort thee, by the grace of the Duke of Burgundy. My sweet mother will accompany him to cheer thee and to tell thee of my good estate. Fare thee well, beloved.
“Your Isabelle.
“At Nancy, 1434.”
Isabelle had learned promptness and wisdom from her good mother-in-law, Queen Yolande, as well as decision and courage from her father, Duke Charles, and all these royal virtues she exhibited magnificently at this extraordinary juncture. The two Neapolitan envoys had, it appeared, gone direct to Nancy to learn their new Queen’s pleasure, and had thus become the bearers of her exhilarating mandate. René received the intelligence of the masterful action of his spouse with mixed feelings. He knelt at his prie-dieu, and thanked God and the saints for the noble self-sacrifice of his wife; then, rising proudly from his knees, he embraced his two visitors, bestowed upon each a ring from his own fingers, and gave them instructions to carry his duty to the Duke of Burgundy, praying for his instant release, and then to proceed to Marseilles to convey to Queen Isabelle his blessing and his approval of her splendid enterprise. No sooner was he left to himself once more than he collapsed, weeping like a child and chiding his Maker and his captor in language lurid and forcible. The irony of his position nearly drove him mad.
Queen Isabelle landed at Naples in due course, and became the object of an extraordinary outburst of enthusiasm. Hailed as Queen, and with King René’s name ever reverberating from loyal lip to loyal lip, she made no mistake, she had no illusions, for she faced the fact at once that there were other claimants for the vacant throne and the uneasy crown. The King of Aragon she knew as a traditional rival, and with him she had to deal most seriously and methodically. He, indeed, directly news of the Queen’s death reached him, had seized the Castle of Gaeta, and thence had issued a proclamation claiming the vacant throne. The Duke of Sessa, the husband of Queen Giovanna’s favourite confidante, Duchess Sancia, claimed the throne as representing,—in descent from Robert, Count of Avellino, her second husband,—Maria of Calabria-Durazzo, sister of Queen Giovanna I. The Prince of Taranto, grand-nephew of Giovanna I.’s third husband and of her sister Maria’s third spouse, the Emperor of Constantinople, entered his claims to the whole kingdom. He pretended also that King Louis III., René’s brother, had before his death at Cosenza made him his heir of all Calabria. From a distant kingdom came still another claimant. The King of Hungary, Andrew, first consort of Giovanna I., had by her a son, it was affirmed, but who it was alleged had died in infancy. This child, it was maintained, was living, now grown to man’s estate. The child who died, and was buried as the Queen’s son, was the son of a servant in the royal suite, whilst the young Prince was removed from his mother’s care and carried off to Hungary, and thus reared.
Isabelle brushed all these claims aside,—save that of Alfonso, who alone of the pretenders to the crown was prepared to take up, as he had done for years, the rights of Aragon in Naples, by force of arms. Everywhere throughout the kingdom the Anjou dynasty was popular; the country people swore by Louis III., and acclaimed the proclamation of René. The army alone was disaffected, and was corrupted by Spanish gold. The royal treasury at Naples was empty, the pay of the loyal troops was in arrears; corruption and fraud filled every department of State. The country gentry and peasantry were ruined; they had been taxed and supertaxed by the minions of Queen Giovanna II. From Provence and Anjou not much monetary help could be expected, and Lorraine and Bar were impoverished. All France was suffering from the wreck of the Hundred Years’ War. René’s ransom required almost every penny Yolande, Isabelle, and Marguerite, could raise by love and threat. What could be done?
GUARINI DA VERONA PRESENTING HIS TRANSLATION OF STRABO’S WORK ON GEOGRAPHY TO KING RENÉ
From a Miniature by King René. Albi Library
To face page 246
The new Queen had come to Naples to claim and hold the kingdom for her husband, and she made up her mind that she would try every expedient to that end, cost what it might. To steal and to borrow were not lines of conduct that appealed to her, but she could beg, and beg she did. Upon this circumstance historians have fastened, and have written more or less eloquently in praise of a dauntless Queen. After making up her mind to this course of action, Isabelle at once put it into operation, and an immense sensation was created in the city when their beautiful and virtuous Queen, clothed simply in native Neapolitan garb, without jewels or marks of royalty, took her place morning by morning outside the palace, in the open square, a macaroni basket in her fair, white, ringless hands, and there pleaded eloquently, in her sweet and musical voice, for contributions for the honour of the King and for the defence of the city. By her side, clad in Neapolitan costumes, were her three little children—innocent, fresh, and comely. “It was,” wrote a chronicler, “a spectacle to move the heart and soul of a marble statue—if such it hath. A Queen of high degree and impeccability humbling herself for her new country’s good. Looking upon her and her children, one conjured up the base contrast offered to our outraged nature by the late Queen, of infamous memory.”
Money flowed in fast and full, and the wicker cash-box daily carried almost more weight of copper and silver, and of articles of jewellery, than the fine strength of the virago Queen could support. Isabelle set about a thorough overhauling of the resources of the national exchequer. She personally rallied troops, and inspected militarily her recruits; arrears of pay were forthcoming, and the better-disposed men of affairs she intuitively selected, and thus purged the seats of government. The King of Aragon, amazed at Isabelle’s courage and ability, refrained from attacking Naples. “I’ll fight with men,” he said, “not with a woman!” he exclaimed. “Let us see what she will do.”
The state of Naples in general, and of the Court in particular, was worse than that of any Augean stable. Indeed, of Court, strictly speaking, there was none, for the less disreputable nobles had long ago gone away to their country estates, taking the seeds of corruption with them to sow among their tenantry. The coteries which gathered around the abandoned Queen like eagles round a carcass were split up into murderous, lustful parties, and divided among evil-conditioned brothels. Every man was every woman’s prey, and every woman at the mercy of a libertine. The whole city was a colossal orgie, and its inhabitants sunk in the slough of unmitigated filth. The turpitude of Pompeii found a parallel in the unrighteousness of Naples. To pull aside the veil which merciful Time has placed over those years of banality and crime would be a sacrilege.
“Down among the dead men let them lie!”
Queen Isabelle, aghast, pulled her veil more closely over her fair features, fixed her teeth, and clenched her hands. Giovanna and all her doings were taboo to her, and by the example and precept of a good woman she gradually accomplished what appeared to be a Herculean task—she brought the Neapolitans to their senses. Mind, in those rapidly pulsating Southern natures, quickly controls action, and the human animal is not all bad even when so predestined by Providence. Isabelle’s administration of the kingdom of Naples during the three years of her sole government was by way of being a moral renascence of humanity, and, when René joined his noble consort, the roses which decorated his triumphal entry were richly perfumed by his wife’s sweet culture.
The prisoner of Bracon was set unconditionally free in 1437, and he hurried away to Marseilles, passing through his beloved country of Provence, hailed everywhere and by everyone with ecstatic devotion. At his port of departure for Naples he was met by Queen Yolande. Never was there a more affecting scene: the mother,—still bearing traces of her early beauty and grace,—bowed down with grief and aged prematurely; the son grown older than his age under the rigours, mental and physical, of his long imprisonment, but still devoted, grateful, and chivalrous. Yolande had fain pressed René to remain in France and comfort her declining years, for, were they parted, she felt that she never more should fold him to her heart—a heart pierced deeply by the premature death of Louis. Yet she played the Spartan mother, not spectacularly but sincerely, and, hushing the sobs of parting, she bravely waved the King of Naples her last farewell. His father and his brother had both traversed the way René was taking; their experience would doubtless be his.
René had a great reception at Naples, and his joy was unclouded when he embraced his noble wife and his four young children, with tears coursing down his cheeks. His recognition as Sovereign was celebrated in the cathedral. There he and Isabelle knelt hand in hand in thankful confidence. Not long did the new King remain in the bosom of his family. Alfonso broke his parole, and prepared a fresh expedition to attack Naples. René went off at once to Rome, Florence, Venice, Genoa, and Milan, to rally help in his emergency. During his captivity the King of Aragon had played the cards so adroitly that he had succeeded in detaching the Duke, his captor, from the triple alliance. Moreover, he gained over to his side Pope Eugenius IV. by promising to make Sicily a fief of the Church. The Aragonese attack failed, though the forces at King René’s command suffered terribly.
At this juncture Queen Isabelle and her children, except the heir to the throne, returned to France, much against her will, but obedient to her royal consort’s wishes. Jean, Duke of Calabria, now a promising lad of nearly thirteen, remained with his father at the post of danger. Alfonso was by no means discouraged; he intended to be master of Naples cost him what it might. In 1440 and 1441 he made fresh assaults on Naples and other seaports of the Calabrian peninsula. All of these René resisted triumphantly, but at Troia, on October 21 in the latter year, Alfonso in person defeated René’s army under the command of Sforza and Sanseverino, and made good his footing in the kingdom of Naples. He further pressed home his attack upon the capital by seizing the island of Ischia, where he compelled the women, whether married or not, to wed his victorious soldiers. René wearied of the contest; he had been warring for twenty years, and he yearned for repose. The Neapolitans quickly took his measure, and his indecision and slackness of energy disheartened his principal supporters. His troops fell away from him, and when, in May, 1442, the King of Aragon once more summoned the capital to surrender, René meekly handed over the keys to his enemy, and made his escape to Marseilles. Alfonso on June 2 entered Naples in triumph, and put an end to the rule of the Angevine Kings.
Alfonso has been styled “the Magnanimous”; perhaps “the Philosopher” would fit his character better. He was a student of metaphysics and a classicist to boot, and, moreover, he had a ready wit. He hated dancing and frivolity, and once remarked that “a man who danced only differed from a fool because his folly was shorter!” An ideal domestic menage appeared to him to be “a blind wife and a deaf husband.” His treasurer was one day giving out scrip for 20,000 ducats, when an officer standing by exclaimed: “Alack, if I only had that amount I should be a happy man!” “Take it,” replied the King!
Nevertheless, Alfonso was hated by his new subjects quite as thoroughly as René had been beloved. The war dragged on; in Calabria the Prince of Taranto raised once more the banner of Anjou, and Giovanni Toreglia, a cousin of Lucrezia d’Alagni, Alfonso’s last mistress, seized Ischia for Jean, Duke of Calabria, René’s eldest son. René himself made two more attempts to regain Giovanna’s inheritance: in 1458 and 1461; but Charles VII. and Louis XI. each failed him in turn with reinforcements. Last of all, Jean, Duke of Calabria, was decisively defeated at Troia in 1462 by Ferdinand I., Alfonso’s bastard son, who succeeded to the throne of Naples after his father’s death in 1458, a man treacherous and vindictive, and a libertine. “Sic transit gloria mundi” may be written as a footnote to the story of Naples in the fifteenth century.