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”).