It interests lovers of Provence to know that only one Frenchman escaped the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers, a Provençal of the great name of Porcelet (whose sombre old house still stands intact at Les Baux) and he was spared because of the great benevolence and nobility of his character.
One of the great events in the history of the country is the transference of the Papal Court to Avignon. Philip le Bel successfully intrigued to place on the Papal throne as Clement V. a Frenchman living in France: Le Gotto, Archbishop of Bordeaux. Having quarrelled with Boniface VIII., Philip desired to have the management of the Papacy in his own hands. Avignon goes back to the Stone Age, so its claims to antiquity were as great as those of Rome herself.
"In the air was ever a clashing of bells, mingling with the sound of fife and drum; the people danced for joy, danced day and night on the famous bridge, while the fresh air blew about them and the rapid river flowed beneath. Such was Avignon, says tradition in the days of the Popes."
But to return to the Angevin rulers of Provence. The most famous of these were "la Reine Jeanne" (Queen of Naples and Sicily and Countess of Provence) and the good King René: both of them beloved and admired by the Provençals to this day: Queen Jeanne because of her wonderful beauty and grace, and King René for his goodness, his charm, his bonhomie, his genius.
There are accounts of the coming of the brilliant Queen to Avignon in order to obtain a dispensation from the Pope to marry Louis of Taranto. "Ravishingly beautiful, she arrived with great pomp, with a retinue on the Rhone," met doubtless by the Cardinals in their scarlet robes, and proceeding amongst the acclaiming people to the palace.
Froissart, in an account of a later interview, makes the Queen tell his Holiness that her father, son of Robert the Good of the first Angevin Counts of Provence, had advised her on his death-bed, if she had no heirs to yield all her territory to whomsoever should be Pope. "In truth, Holy Father, after his decease, with the consent of the nobles of Sicily and Naples, I wedded Andrew of Hungary—he died, a young man, at Aix-en-Provence...."
LA LICE, ARLES.
By Joseph Pennell.
(As the Queen had had him murdered and thrown out of a window at Aversa, her account of his death lacked completeness.) She then casually mentions her next husband, Prince of Taranto, and in the same sentence alludes en passant to his successor, James, King of Majorca.