Mrs. Hugh Fraser

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.

Instantly, moreover, her Hungarian husband and his partisans, Father Robert, the Dominican Friar, together with divers Hungarian nobles and Giovanni Pipino, Count of Altamura, one of the most powerful lords of the kingdom and the most hated by the people, held counsel among themselves as to how they might best defeat the projects of the Queen’s party. This, they decided, could only be done by acquainting King Andrew’s mother, Elizabeth of Poland, and his brother, King Louis of Hungary, with the terms of King Robert’s last will, and of how a conspiracy had been set on foot to deprive King Andrew of his rightful share in the government of Naples. Also, a complaint in the same terms was to be sent to the Pope at Avignon, and a request made of the Holy Father that he would issue a Bull of coronation on King Andrew’s behalf, thereby duly confirming him in his rights of, at least, equal sovereignty with Joan, his wife. At the same time, Father Robert tried to impress upon Andrew the advisability of coming as soon as possible to some kind of understanding upon the subject with Joan herself before her favourites should have alienated her affections entirely from him.

These favourites whom the good monk had in mind were some of them men and some of them women. Of the men—Robert of Cabano, Louis of Taranto, and Bertrand of Artois—we have already seen something; of the women we have as yet made acquaintance with only two—Filippa Cabano, the mother of Robert the half-breed, and formerly governess to the Princesses Joan and Mary; and the Empress of Constantinople, their aunt and the mother of Louis of Taranto and his brothers. Besides Donna Filippa and the Empress, however, there were three others who had influence over Joan—the Countesses of Terlizzi and Morcone, daughters of Donna Filippa, and, lastly and supremely, a young and lovely girl of sixteen, known simply as “Cancia,” who occupied, officially, the position of tiring-woman to the young Queen.

Cancia had been put into this employment by her protectress, Donna Filippa, in order that, by her wiles and companionship, she might corrupt the spirit of Joan and render her the more averse to the remonstrances of Father Robert, the Dominican, on behalf of Andrew of Hungary, his pupil; and so bring her more and more under the influence of her lover, Robert of Cabano, Filippa’s own son. And Cancia had played her part so effectually that, it is said, Joan loved her more even than she did her own sister, Princess Mary.

And, as it happened, Donna Filippa was beginning to suspect that, at last, Joan was tiring of her intrigue with Robert, and that she might at any moment turn elsewhere for the love denied her by her rightful husband—for life without love was insupportable to Joan’s passionately affectionate nature.

Old King Robert—Robert the Wise, as he is commonly styled—was buried behind the high altar in the Church of Santa Chiara that he had built himself; where his splendid Gothic tomb may be seen to this day, having on it his likeness both as King and as Franciscan monk; for he was a Tertiary of Franciscans and died, as becomes one, in their uniform. In the same Church are to be found the tombs, too, of many of the actors in the tragedy of Queen Joan; of her father and mother and her little sister Maria; and of Maria’s children by three successive husbands, together with the graves of Charles of Durazzo and of Raimondo Cabano, the Seneschal. And here, in passing, I would like to say that there are no Churches in the whole world that can compare with the old Churches of the city of Naples for the number and the beauty and the poignant interest of the tombs that these contain.

Some days after King Robert’s burial in Santa Chiara, Joan was approached by Filippa Cabano with a request that she would create Filippa’s son, Robert, Grand Seneschal of the Kingdom in succession to his father, who was but shortly deceased; also, that he might receive the title of Count of Eboli. To both these outrageous demands the young Queen at first turned a deaf ear; not until Filippa—who was accompanied by Robert in person—threatened to make known to all the world the fact of Joan’s new intrigue with Bertrand d’Artois did the young Queen surrender to her demands. It would seem that Filippa had, for some time, suspected the cooling of Joan’s fondness for her son; and so had determined to obtain from her for Robert a commanding and unassailable position in the State.

In that same State of Naples, then, there were already two increasingly definite factions, each with a different aim: the party of the Dominican Father Robert and of the Hungarian nobles, that sought to bring about the supremacy of King Andrew and the subjugation of Queen Joan; and the party of Donna Filippa, with their programme of “Naples for the Neapolitans”—that is, firstly, of securing sole sovereignty for the Queen, and, secondly, of making the Queen herself the puppet of their own will and the instrument of their aggrandisement.

And round about these openly contending factions there prowled, watchful and ruthless, Charles of Durazzo, seeking only the opportunity to make himself master of the situation. There were no lengths to which Duke Charles was not prepared to go in order to attain his aim and to satisfy the ambition that devoured him; no crime, however frightful, from the contemplation of which he shrank as a means to his end. Cost what it might, he would be King of Naples and of Jerusalem. The chroniclers describe him as a pale man with close-cropped hair and a thick beard; and, when agitated, he had a trick of frowning. Charles of Durazzo had felt greatly aggrieved at the bestowal of Joan’s hand in marriage upon Andrew of Hungary; for he, Charles, had been the nearest in blood of all King Robert’s nephews to the throne, and to him, as such, Joan ought to have been given. But never for an instant had he allowed so much as a glimpse of his disappointment to be seen by any one; never once had he suffered a breath of complaint to escape him.

Nevertheless, his resolve was only the stronger for the iron self-discipline of the man; and, now that Joan was Queen, the hour was come for him to try the first of the two alternatives by which he was to achieve his object. He was still a bachelor, and Joan had found favour in his eyes by reason of her loveliness; therefore, before having recourse to the other expedient that he had laid out for himself in case of need, Charles had determined to attempt the enlistment of Joan’s coÖperation in his designs.

With this object he obtained a private audience of the Queen, and straightway proceeded to lay siege to her sympathies by every kind of flattery and the most skilful hints of the dangers that threatened her from the side of ungrateful and grasping favourites. Though he named no names, yet Joan understood only too well whom he meant and could not help evincing signs both of her comprehension and of her agreement with him. From that he went on to speak more particularly of the popular rejoicing at her succession to the throne; and, finally, of the universal regret that she should be compelled by an unkind fate to share that throne with one in every way unworthy both of herself and of it.

Seeing clearly who it was to whom he referred in these terms, Joan attempted feebly to protest; but was powerless to prevent him from continuing with what he had to say of the certainty he felt that, if Andrew of Hungary were ever to be admitted to an actual share in the government, the people of Naples would infallibly rise in arms against him and the detested Hungarians who surrounded him. It would, indeed, Duke Charles assured the unhappy Queen, be only another instance of the Sicilian Vespers; the Neapolitans would, of a surety, rise up as one man and exterminate their foreign oppressors, including Andrew himself and the monk whose mistaken counsels had inspired him with so suicidal an ambition.

“But of what fault do they accuse Andrew?” asked Joan, uncertainly.

In reply, the Albanian said that the people hated the Prince for his stupidity, his coarseness, and savagery; that the nobles accused him of violating their privileges and of surrounding himself to their detriment with the basest adventurers; and that, lastly, he himself, Charles of Durazzo, accused Andrew of making Joan’s life a misery to her.

And then, before she could recover from her amazement at his boldness, Charles wound up by offering to remove Andrew from her path by murdering him; whereupon, the better part in Joan triumphing for a moment over the lower side of her nature, she dismissed Charles angrily from her presence, calling him coward and insolent. Without undue haste or appearance of anger, Charles left her, merely reminding her that it was not altogether impossible that, some day, it should be his turn to condemn and hers to be judged.

So that Duke Charles, having failed in his attempt to obtain Joan’s consent to the murder of Andrew, must instead have recourse to the second of the alternatives that had presented themselves to him.

This was to make himself the husband of the next heir to the throne—the thirteen-year-old Maria, sister of Queen Joan. On reaching his own palace, therefore, he sent for a notary, one Nicholas of Melazzo, whose fate he held in his hands by means of a certain knowledge, and ordered him to draw up a contract of marriage between the Princess Maria, his cousin, and himself, Charles of Durazzo. This the notary, albeit terrified at the audacity of the thing (seeing that Maria, as will be remembered, was intended by the terms of King Robert’s will to be the wife of either King Louis of Hungary or of the Duke of Normandy), consented to do; and then Duke Charles ordered him at the same time to seek out Tommaso Pace, the valet of King Andrew and the notary’s own closest friend, and to find out if Pace had been approached at all by any of Queen Joan’s partisans with a view to drawing him into any plot against Andrew’s life. For, as Charles argued, if such a conspiracy should ever arise, those concerned in it would be almost sure to endeavour to win over the King’s valet to their undertaking in order the more easily to carry it into effect.

From that day on it was noticed that a complete change had taken place in the manner of the Duke of Durazzo towards King Andrew—or, to give the latter the only title hitherto accorded to him, the Duke of Calabria. For, whereas hitherto Charles had shown himself the reverse of friendly towards Andrew, and had been ever the loudest in his denial of Andrew’s right to be crowned King of Naples, he now overwhelmed the Hungarian with every kind of courtesy and friendly advance. Charles even took pains to propitiate Andrew’s shadow, the honest Dominican, excusing himself to Father Robert for his outrageous conduct in proclaiming Joan alone as their new Queen to the people of Naples by pleading the necessity of making an apparent concession to the popular dislike of the Hungarian element in the kingdom. He did not hesitate to declare to Father Robert his detestation of the persons who were bent upon estranging the young Queen from her husband for their own ends; finally he concluded by placing what power he possessed at the monk’s disposal for the purpose of defeating the machinations of Joan’s treacherous favourites directed against her rightful husband and the legal partner of her throne.

To these assurances Father Robert lent a willing, although not an entirely believing, ear; for he could only attribute the change in Duke Charles to some misunderstanding with the young Queen. At the same time, Charles and Andrew of Hungary were become the closest of comrades; never, now, was Andrew seen in public without his Albanian cousin by marriage; never did he withdraw himself from the circle of his friends to the seclusion of his apartments but Charles of Durazzo walked at his elbow.

And so things went on for a while, until at length the whole Court was ranged definitely on one side or on the other: on that of Queen Joan and the Neapolitan people itself to whom Andrew and his followers were entirely odious, or, else, on that of Andrew and those who hoped eventually to make him sole sovereign of Naples to their own advantage—the Hungarian “Hey-ducs,” the Count of Altamura, and their kind.

The war of the factions had begun by the omission of Andrew’s name from all the proclamations, warrants, and so forth issued by the Queen in her own sole name. In retaliation for this indefensible slight, Andrew had ordered his followers to break open all the prisons within reach and to liberate their tenants, criminal or otherwise, in his name alone and in honour of his succession to the throne of Naples. He had also loaded the members of his own party—and especially the execrated Altamura—with honours and riches by means of patents signed by himself, only, as the one supreme temporal authority in the kingdom. It may be added that, in all these arbitrary and illegal measures, so admirably calculated to arouse the bitterest anger and the most murderous hatred of the Queen’s supporters against him, Andrew of Hungary’s one confident adviser was none other than his evil genius, Charles of Durazzo. From that moment the party of Joan, led by the Counts of San-Severino, Mileto, Terlizzi, Balzo, Morcone, Catanzaro, and Sant’ Angelo, and, more especially, by the Queen’s ex-favourite, Robert of Cabano, Count of Eboli, and his successor in her affections, Bertrand d’Artois, was resolved upon ridding the land of Andrew and of his minions. Of all the angry barons who had rallied to Joan’s support, the last mentioned, Bertrand d’Artois, really loved her for herself, and was actuated by no motive of personal gain, except—alas!—his lawless hope of becoming united to her in matrimony once her husband were removed from the path of his criminal passion. In vain his father, the brave and noble Charles of Artois, one of the regents of the kingdom, strove to dissuade him from the perilous course of a love as treasonable as it was immoral; nothing was of any avail to hold back the young man from the pursuit of his designs.

More successful, however, was the restraining influence of another parent over another child in the same situation—the influence of the Empress of Constantinople over her youngest-born, the handsome Louis of Taranto, who, in deference to his mother’s entreaties, turned away his eyes as well as he could from his lovely, ill-mated cousin.

After the rupture between Joan and the Duke of Durazzo, many weeks elapsed without her either meeting him or hearing much of his doings, beyond that he was become the inseparable comrade of her husband; although, indeed, at times she cannot have helped wondering what shape his enmity towards her might eventually assume.

One radiant morning of spring, however, as she was in her room in the Castel Nuovo, looking out over the town and the sea beyond, all shimmering in the sunlight, towards Sorrento, there came a knock on the door, and Donna Filippa Cabano, mother of the Grand Seneschal, entered precipitately, her face blanched with alarm and anger, to say that Princess Maria, Joan’s little sister, was nowhere to be found.

A short while previously the child had been playing happily by herself in the castle grounds; and then, soon afterwards, she had simply disappeared, none could say where or in what direction.

Joan’s consternation may be more easily imagined than described. Her love for Maria was the one perfectly innocent, unspoilt love of her whole existence, the very tenderest spot in all her heart. And now Maria was gone from her; the horror and grief of it were such that she shrieked as though a live coal had been laid upon her breast. That, however, was only in the first anguish of her loss; recovering herself quickly, she broke out in a storm of anger upon those responsible by their want of vigilance for the catastrophe; such was the Queen’s fury, indeed, that Filippa fled from her in fear for her life. Instantly, the whole castle was in an uproar, its inhabitants scouring every nook and cranny, indoors and out; but without success; and, presently, the whole city of Naples was bent distractedly upon the same quest, hunting high and low for the beloved little girl. All, though, was in vain; and, albeit, during that day and many days and nights to follow the search was diligently pursued, yet, in spite of every effort, no trace could be found of the lost Princess.

The only drop of comfort vouchsafed to Joan, during all those weary hours of agonising anxiety, came from Bertrand d’Artois, who had been led, somehow, to suspect the agency of the Duke of Durazzo in respect to Maria’s disappearance; a drop, however, that Joan refused to accept, saying that such a thing was beyond the bounds of probability. For no one, even, of Duke Charles’ household, let alone the Duke himself, had so much as set foot within the castle precincts since the day when he had left the place in anger. No stranger, even, had set foot, that morning of Maria’s disappearance, inside the gates, except Nicholas of Melazzo, for whose integrity Tommaso Pace, Prince Andrew’s own body-servant, was willing to answer on his life.

In this manner a month went by, bringing to Joan despair of ever seeing her sister again, until on April 30, 1343, there occurred an event so amazing as to deprive her at first of every other sensation; until her astonishment turned to fury at the insolent daring of it. On first learning of it, she refused to believe it, and then, as the certainty of it took the place of incredulity, her indignation knew no bounds.

For, on the stroke of noon of that day, she learned that her sister had become the legal wife of Charles of Durazzo, having been publicly married to him at an altar erected in the open air and in sight of all the people before the Church of Saint John by the Sea, not a bow-shot distant from the great gates of the Palazzo Durazzo. The marriage had been solemnised by Duke Charles’ chaplain, the necessary dispensation for the marriage of cousins, one of them being a minor, having been received from Rome the day before; and, at its conclusion, the newly wedded pair had faced the spectators hand in hand, and had solemnly declared that they took one another as husband and wife, calling upon God and the people to bear witness to it. Their announcement had been acclaimed with tumultuous vociferations of applause and delight; after which the Duke and Duchess of Durazzo received the Papal benediction, prior to being escorted in procession round the city by their men-at-arms and the sympathetic populace to the beating of drums and the blowing of trumpets.

So that Charles of Durazzo was now the husband—and it need hardly be said, the master—of the thirteen-year-old heir to the throne. And when, after curbing the useless rage in her heart, Joan summoned the pair to receive her congratulations, she realised her folly in quarrelling with that all-daring and remorseless man; also, she understood that nothing short of the throne itself—let the price be what it might—would ever satisfy his lust of power and glory and hate.

Thenceforth, the temptation of Joan to be, in very truth, at once the real ruler of her own dominions and, at the same time, the arbiter of her own destiny, increased and grew to terrific powers; the desire to satisfy her wishes absolutely in everything became a kind of diabolical possession, sweeping away every consideration of virtue and of mere worldly prudence; save only when, in rare intervals of reaction, she would fall upon her knees in the solitude of her chamber, her face in her hands, sobbing as though her heart would break with the horror of her situation.