After the discomfiture of the Hungarians the Pope confirmed the marriage of the Queen to her cousin, Louis of Taranto, and bestowed upon the latter the title of King of Naples and of Jerusalem; he had already, on March 27, given him the Golden Rose. Simultaneously the Holy Father sent an apostolic legate, Cardinal de Boulogne, to the King of Hungary, at Naples, to persuade him to cede the kingdom peaceably to its rightful sovereigns.
While the Cardinal was engaged on this difficult task Nicholas Acciajuoli betook himself, likewise, into Naples and set about raising an army wherewith to drive out the Hungarians in the event of their refusing to listen to the Cardinal’s arguments. But to maintain such an army great expenses were unavoidable; and the Queen, who had sent him in answer to a deputation of Neapolitans entreating her to return and rule over them, was now obliged to raise money by every means at her disposal. For this purpose she sold all her jewels; but these proving insufficient, she begged the Pope to buy of her the city of Avignon. To this he consented, and, on June 19, 1348, gave her for it a sum about equal to sixty thousand pounds of our money. Which amply disproves the statement made by Alexandre Dumas,[12] who says that the sale took place on the day immediately prior to Joan’s trial, suggesting as he does that the Pope’s decision was influenced by his eagerness to acquire possession of the city—for the trial was held almost at once after Joan’s arrival at Avignon on March 15.
In the meantime the King of Hungary had declined to accede to the Pope’s instance that he should retire from Naples to his own kingdom; and so there was nothing left for Joan and Louis of Taranto to do but to dispossess him at the sword’s point. Thanks to the indefatigable efforts of Acciajuoli—and, in perhaps even greater measure, to the misrule of the Hungarian himself—matters were now ripe for an armed intervention in Naples, where every strong place had surrendered to the enemy, with the glorious exception of the castle of Melfi, of which Lorenzo Acciajuoli, the son of Nicholas, was the commander. From Melfi, where he had conferred with his son, Nicholas Acciajuoli travelled throughout the country, crying the Queen’s acquittal and the confirmation of her union with Louis of Taranto, and proclaiming far and wide the great indulgences and blessings promised by the Pope to all who should submit themselves to their lawful rulers, Queen Joan and her consort, King Louis. And, finding himself everywhere greeted with tumultuous declamations of loyalty towards Joan, and of detestation of the Hungarian, Acciajuoli returned to the Queen at Avignon with the news that she might safely entrust her cause to her own people.
On September 10, 1348, she left Provence for Naples, accompanied by her husband and her sister and the counsellors Acciajuoli and Spinelli. But when they came to the shores of Naples they could not land in the harbour because all the castles on that side of the city were occupied by the Hungarians, so that they had to go on to where the mouth of the classic river Sebeto was crossed by a bridge, the Ponte Guiscardo; thence they were escorted by the nobles and townspeople to the Palazzo Adjutorio by the Porta Capuana, where they proceeded to establish themselves and their Court.
For many months the fortunes of war inclined first to one side and then to the other. It began by Nicholas Acciajuoli’s blockading the Hungarians in their strongholds, whilst Louis of Taranto employed his energies in reducing various of the rebellious barons to allegiance. Little by little he extended his operations from the city of Naples into the farthest confines of the kingdom; until, by dint of perseverance, he had contrived to make himself, as it appeared, master of it. But suddenly his good fortune deserted him, owing to his abandonment by one of the King of Hungary’s mercenaries whom Louis had seduced to the side of the Queen by heavy bribes. This was that Werner who styled himself “the enemy of God,” and who now resold himself to the Hungarian, to whose Vicar-General, Conrad Wolf (Conrado Lupo, as the chronicler makes it), he opened the gates of Benevento.
The consequence of Werner’s treachery was to force Louis of Taranto to fall back upon Naples; when the King of Hungary, on learning of it, made all speed to rejoin his troops—he had fled from Italy for a while to escape an epidemic of the plague—before Aversa, bringing with him heavy reinforcements. Landing at Manfredonia, he advanced, practically unopposed, so swiftly as to take his adversary completely by surprise. Having made himself master of the fortresses of Trani, Canosa, and Salerno in rapid succession, thus hemming in Louis of Taranto on the east and on the south, he proceeded to lay siege to Aversa on the north of Naples. This new move threatened disaster to Joan and her husband, who, being forced to remain on the defensive in Naples, were obliged to witness the spectacle of as gallant a resistance as was ever made by any beleaguered garrison; and that without being able to come in any way to the assistance of Pignatelli, the commandant of the place, and his heroic soldiers, who only numbered about five hundred men, as against some seventeen thousand of the enemy’s forces. During three months Pignatelli flung back the King of Hungary’s attacks upon the town; until, finally, despairing of taking Aversa by assault, the Hungarian resolved to reduce it by starvation.
Gradually the circumstances of the little garrison became hopeless; so that Pignatelli was confronted with the alternative of surrender or of death either by starvation or in a last grapple with the besiegers. To add to the general distress, a fleet of vessels bringing reinforcements to Queen Joan from Provence under the leadership of Renaud des Baux—some relation this, I fancy, of that terrible Chief Justice, the Count of Monte Scaglioso—and upon the timely arrival of which all depended, was delayed by contrary winds so that none could say where it was or whether it would ever arrive at all.
