He returned afterwards to Pisa, where he lived for many years, and performed many wonders, healings, and conversions before he died, and his tomb is in the wall of the Duomo, where an altar has been erected to his memory.
CHAPTER XI QUEEN JOAN OF NAPLES
A Conspicuous Feminine Sinner—Marriage of State—Her Beauty—Her Hungarian Husband—Petrarch and the Monk—Joan’s Ascent to the Throne—The Naples Succession—Her Favourites—The Churches of Naples—Joan’s Lovers—Factions of Naples—Charles of Durazzo—A Bold Proposal—Charles’ Ambitious Plots—War of the Factions—Disappearance of Maria—Becomes the Wife of Charles—Joan’s Horror.
Of all feminine sinners known to history, Joan of Anjou, Queen of Naples and of Jerusalem, affords, perhaps, the most conspicuous example of the perils attendant upon what are known as “marriages of State”—that is to say, marriages brought about for reasons of State and without reference to the personal inclinations of the contracting parties themselves.
The elder of the two daughters born to Charles, Duke of Calabria and Marie of Valois—both of whom had predeceased their father and father-in-law, Robert, King of Naples—Joan was married as a child of fourteen to her cousin Andrew, the grandson of King Charles of Hungary, the brother of King Robert; and, on the death of the latter in the month of January, 1343, succeeded him as his granddaughter on the throne of Naples. At that time Joan, although not yet fifteen years old, was beautiful with the beauty and grace of a grown woman; her eyes were of a shade of brown so deep as to be almost black; whilst the pallor of her complexion was enhanced by the lustrous dark hair of her which she wore, according to the fashion of the day, in two long and heavy plaits that fell nearly to her knees, moreover, her tall, slender figure added several years to her appearance, whilst the expression of her face, albeit sensitive and gentle, was one of determination and of a latent strength of purpose far beyond that of most girls of her age. For Joan of Anjou had already learned the meaning both of love and of hate—the hate of her husband and the guilty love of another than he. The name of the man for whom she had, even then, betrayed her Hungarian husband was Robert of Cabano, the son of Filippa Cabano, and her husband, Raymond, a Saracen, bought out of slavery by another Raymond Cabano, who had given him his own name in baptism and had procured for him the post of head cook to Charles the Hammer, King of Naples and elder brother of King Robert, the grandfather and precursor of Queen Joan. From being head cook, Raymond had since risen to the most eminent post of Seneschal of the Kingdom of Naples.
The way of Joan’s loveless marriage—the source of all her sins and misfortunes—to her cousin Andrew of Hungary was this: It had been arranged by her grandfather, King Robert, in the intention of making amends to Andrew for having usurped the sovereignty of Naples from Andrew’s father, Carobert of Hungary, the oldest son of King Robert’s brother, Charles the Hammer. With this object, King Robert had caused Andrew to be brought as a child to his Court at Naples, that the boy might become fitted by education and surroundings to be the husband of Joan and share with her the crown of Naples and of Jerusalem. For, be it said, the Hungarian-born Andrew was by nature uncouth and savage and cold, and altogether unsuited, both in his temperament and his views of life, to fulfil King Robert’s expectations of him. Instead of growing more tender, more responsive and affectionate in the genial surroundings of the Neapolitan Court, as had been hoped might prove to be the case, he seemed, on the contrary, to become daily more reserved, more imbued with the sense of his own importance, more generally domineering and less sympathetic towards those about him. However, his marriage with Joan had been duly solemnised some months before the death of old King Robert in order that the latter’s fondest wish might be accomplished betimes; but, to the rage and disappointment of Andrew, as soon as the King was dead, Joan alone had been proclaimed as his successor by her cousin, Charles, Duke of Durazzo and Albania, who had presented her as their sole, legitimate sovereign to the populace assembled below the windows of the Castel Nuovo in a room of which King Robert’s dead body, the breath but scarcely gone out of it, lay still warm upon the bed on which he had died. Moreover, not only Charles of Durazzo, but others, including principally Robert of Cabano and another cousin of the Queen, Louis of Taranto, had absolutely refused to do homage to Andrew of Hungary; to Joan alone had they bent the knee and sworn fealty. Only one person of all those present had protested energetically against the exclusion of Prince Andrew from the immediate proclamation of sovereignty; this was a certain Father Robert, a monk, the tutor of Andrew, whom he had accompanied from Hungary to Naples and whom he never deserted as long as the Prince lived. This Father Robert earned the especial dislike of Petrarch, to whom the monk’s austere and masterful personality was as gall on the tongue, to judge from the poet’s description of him.
As has been told then, by the time that King Robert passed away, leaving his kingdom to Joan and to Andrew, her consort, these two had been man and wife for long months; during which period Joan had loved, not her husband, but the handsome swaggering Saracen, Robert of Cabano. But by now, when she was become Queen of Naples by the death of her grandfather, Joan had grown weary of the insolence of Robert’s dominion over her and was minded to throw off the yoke of it. Also, her affections—which, be it said in justice to her, had formerly been consistently offered to her husband and as consistently rejected by him—had turned towards one of the very few completely disinterested and unselfish persons at the Court. This was Bertrand of Artois, whose father, Charles of Artois, had been appointed by King Robert’s will one of the regents of the kingdom until Andrew and Joan should have attained their twenty-fifth year.
Joan had only one sister, Mary, a mere child, who was scarcely thirteen years old when Joan came to the throne; this Princess Mary, by the terms of King Robert’s testament, was to inherit the throne in the event of her elder sister’s dying without issue; in addition, the old King had expressed a wish that Princess Mary should be affianced either to Louis, King of Hungary, elder brother of Andrew, or, failing Louis, to the Duke of Normandy, eldest son of the King of France. In case of the death without heirs of both Joan and Mary, the sovereignty would by rights fall to Charles of Durazzo, eldest son of King Robert’s younger brother, who had died some years previously, John, Duke of Durazzo and Albania. John of Durazzo had left behind him a widow, Agnes, and two younger sons besides Charles; these were Ludovico, Count of Gravina, and Robert, Prince of the Morea. The youngest brother of King Robert, Philip, Prince of Taranto, who had likewise predeceased him, had also left a widow, who bore the title of Empress of Constantinople, inherited from her grandfather, Baldwin II, and three sons, Robert, Philip, and finally Louis of Taranto, the handsomest and most accomplished knight of his day, then but barely turned three-and-twenty. There had survived King Robert, too, his widow Sancia of Aragon, a character as noble and holy as the majority of those composing the Neapolitan Court were debased and self-seeking and unscrupulous. Before departing this life King Robert had obtained from Queen Sancia a promise to the effect that she would remain in the world and at Court for a whole year, in order to watch over the young King and Queen, Andrew and Joan—it being Queen Sancia’s announced intention to enter as soon as possible into a convent, there to end her days in peace and prayer—and to protect their relationship to one another from the perils which, as the dying man had clearly foreseen, must inevitably menace it. And, very particularly, he had warned his widow to be on her guard, where Joan was concerned, against three especial dangers—the love of Bertrand of Artois, the beauty of Louis of Taranto, and the ambition of Charles of Durazzo.
So that, no sooner was King Robert dead, than his wishes in respect to the mutual sovereignty of Andrew and John were contemptuously put aside by those who proclaimed Joan, and Joan alone, as their new Queen to the Neapolitan people; but Joan’s acquiescence in their proclamation of her as sole sovereign cannot be overlooked, foreshadowing as it would almost seem to do some already half-formed instinctive project of becoming actually that which she had been proclaimed to be—the single occupant of the throne.