Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Naples

King Robert of Naples was a grandson of Charles, Count of Anjou, brother of St. Louis, and, true to the tradition of his house, stood as the champion of the Popes against imperial claims over Italy. Outwardly he was by far the most powerful of the Italian princes of his day; but in reality he sat uneasily on his throne. The Neapolitans had not learned with time to love their Angevin rulers, but even after the death of Conradin remembered the Hohenstaufen, and envied Sicily that dared to throw off the French yoke and give herself to a Spanish dynasty.

It is difficult to provide a short and at the same time connected account of the history of Naples from the death of King Robert in 1343 until 1435, when it was conquered by the House of Aragon. For nearly a century there is a dismal record of murders and plots, with scarcely an illuminating glimpse of patriotism or of any heroic figure. It is like a ‘dance of death’, with ever-changing partners, and nothing achieved save crimes and revolutions.

King Robert’s successor was a granddaughter, Joanna I, a political personage from her cradle, and married at the age of five to a boy cousin two years her senior, Andrew of Hungary, brother of Louis the Great. We cannot tell if, left to themselves, this young couple, each partner so passionate and self-willed, could have learned to work together in double harness. What is certain is that no one in that corrupt court gave them the chance, one party of intriguers continually whispering in Joanna’s ear that as queen it was beneath her dignity to accept any interference from her husband, while their rivals reminded the young Prince Andrew that he was descended from King Robert’s elder brother, and therefore had as great a right to the throne as his wife. Frequent quarrels as to whose will should prevail shook the council-chamber, and then at last came tragedy.

In 1345 Joanna and Andrew, then respectively eighteen and twenty, set out together into the country on an apparently amicable hunting-expedition. As they slept one night in the guest-room of a convent the Prince heard himself called by voices in the next room. Suspecting no harm he rose and went to see which of his friends had summoned him, only to find himself attacked by a group of armed men. He turned to re-enter the bedroom, but the door was locked behind him. With the odds now wholly against him, Andrew fought bravely for his life, but at length two of his assassins succeeded in throwing a rope round his neck, and with this they strangled him and hung his body from the balcony outside.

Attendants came at last, and, forcing the door, told Joanna of the murder; on which she declared that she had been so soundly asleep that she had heard nothing, though she was never able to explain satisfactorily how in that case the door of her bedroom had become locked behind the young king. Naturally the greater part of Europe believed that she was guilty of connivance in the crime, and King Louis of Hungary brought an army to Italy to avenge his brother’s death. He succeeded in driving Joanna from Naples, which he claimed as his rightful inheritance, but he was not sufficiently supported to make a permanent conquest, and in the end he was forced to hurry away to Hungary, where his throne was threatened, leaving the question of his sister-in-law’s guilt to be decided by the Pope.

The Pope at this time looked to the Angevin rulers of Naples as his chief supporters, and at once proclaimed Joanna innocent. It is worthy of note that three princes were found brave enough to become her husband in turn; but, though four times married, Joanna had but one son, who died as a boy.

At first she was quite willing to accept as her heir a cousin, Charles of Durazzo, who was married to her niece, but soon she had quarrelled violently with him and offered the throne instead to a member of the French royal house, Louis, Duke of Anjou. This is a very bewildering moment for students of history, because it introduces into Italian politics a second Angevin dynasty only distantly connected with the first, yet both laying claim to Naples and waging war against one another as if each belonged to a different race.

Joanna in the end was punished for her capriciousness, for in the course of the civil wars she had introduced she fell into the hands of Charles of Durazzo, who, indignant at his repudiation, shut her up in a castle, where she died. One report says that she was smothered with a feather-bed; another that she was strangled with a silken cord—perhaps in memory of Prince Andrew’s murder.

After this act of retribution, Charles of Durazzo maintained his power in Naples for four years, though he was forced to surrender the County of Provence to his Angevin rival. Not content with his Italian kingdom, he set off with an army to Hungary as soon as he heard of the death of Louis the Great, hoping to enforce his claims on that warrior’s lands. Instead he was assassinated, and succeeded in Naples by his son Ladislas, a youth of fifteen.