#elizabeth casteen

[nanshe-of-nina]

Women’s History Meme || Empresses (2/5) ↬ Catherine de Valois-Courtenay (before 15 April 1303 – October 1346)

The official Neapolitan investigation into Andrew of Hungary’s murder targeted Johanna’s closest supporters and left her isolated and vulnerable. Her aunt, Catherine of Valois, took advantage of that vulnerability to become the queen’s confidant in order to make certain that one of her sons would be Naples’s next king. At first, it appeared that this son would be Robert, the eldest of the Tarantini, who for a time seemed to be winning the competition between the Angevin princes for power and whom Johanna requested a papal dispensation to marry. Soon, however, Louis gained the upper hand, and Johanna’s requests for dispensations began to identify him as her intended. — From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples by Elizabeth Casteen Of the many relatives who chose to avail themselves of the glittering social whirl of the capital, one stood out: Joanna’s aunt, Catherine of Valois, widow of Robert the Wise’s younger brother Philip, prince of Taranto. Catherine was Joanna’s mother’s older half-sister (both were fathered by Charles of Valois). Catherine had married Philip in 1313, when Philip was thirty-five and she just ten. Catherine was Philip’s second wife. He had divorced his first on a trumped-up charge of adultery after fifteen years of marriage and six children in order to wed Catherine, who had something he wanted. She was the sole heir to the title of empress of Constantinople. … Catherine was twenty-eight years old, recently widowed, and a force to be reckoned with when the newly orphaned Joanna and her sister, Maria, first knew her at the Castel Nuovo in 1331. Shrewd, highly intelligent, and vital, Catherine was supremely conscious of her exalted ancestry and wore her title of empress of Constantinople as though it were a rare gem of mythic origin. Even the death of her husband, Philip, in 1331 had not dissuaded her from persisting in her efforts to reclaim the Latin Empire for herself and her three young sons: Robert, Louis, and Philip. A series of shockingly inept leaders had left the Byzantine Empire vulnerable to attack from the west, and this state of affairs was well known in Italy. Moreover, Catherine was used to getting her way. — The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily by Nancy Goldstone

[dwellordream]

my proposed Johanna I of Naples TV show: The She-Wolf of Naples

hello. one of my historical woman fixations is late medieval queen Johanna I of Naples (Giovanna I), who ruled the kingdom of Naples (in what is now modern day Italy) from 1343-1382. 

Johanna’s grandfather was the legendary Robert the Wise, called so for his role as a patron of the arts, knowledge, and his efforts to transform Naples into a peaceful, beautiful city. 

orphaned at a young age, Johanna was largely raised by her step-grandmother, Sancia of Majorca, who had no children of her own. she was acclaimed as Robert’s heir, as both his legitimate sons died young, and betrothed to her cousin Andrew of Hungary, who some argued had his own claim to the throne of Naples. 

nevertheless, Robert insisted that Johanna alone would succeed him, and that her husband would be a prince consort, rather than a king. 

my take on it would be heavily inspired by the biographical novel From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples by Elizabeth Casteen

below i detail the first two episodes, purely for my own enjoyment.

EPISODE 1: A MULTITUDE OF WOLVES (1343)

“I am really alarmed about the youthfulness of the young queen, and of the new king, about the age and intent of [Sancia], about the talents and ways of the courtiers. I wish that I could be a lying prophet about these things, but I see two lambs entrusted to the care of a multitude of wolves, and I see a kingdom without a king. How can I call someone a king who is ruled by another and who is exposed to the greed of so many and (I sadly add) to the cruelty of so many?” - Francesco Petrarch, 1343

Robert ‘the Wise’, King of Naples, struggles to settle the matter of his succession. With his only son who survived to adulthood, Charles, dead, leaving behind just two daughters, he names his elder granddaughter, Johanna, heir. yet Robert’s nephew, Carobert of Hungary, insists the throne is rightfully his, and that Robert remains an usurper. 

to avoid further conflict with the line of Carobert, the Angevins, Robert agrees to wed Johanna to Carobert’s second son, Andrew, while her younger sister Maria will marry Carobert’s heir, Louis. 

6 year old Andrew is brought to Naples to wed the 8 year old Johanna and be reared in Robert’s court, but struggles to fit in and is frequently bullied and harassed by the Neapolitans. Johanna and he clash almost immediately, and Andrew is humiliated to find the youth of the court firmly in her favor. 

nine years later, when Robert dies, Johanna is 17, and Andrew 15. the marriage remains unconsummated, and adding to the tension, neither spouse can wield any real political power until they turn 25. instead, the council is ruled by Sancia’s, Robert’s widow. 

irritated by what she views as an infantilization, Johanna appeals to Pope Clement, who refuses to intervene. at the same time, Johanna’s 14 year old sister Maria is abducted and forced to marry a Neapolitan duke, Charles of Durazzo. 

Andrew’s family, the Angevins, are incensed that Andrew will never be acclaimed king of Naples, even when he comes of age, and begin a rumor that Robert changed his mind on his deathbed and acclaimed Andrew as his heir instead. this only fans the flames between husband and wife, who now openly loathe one another. 

EPISODE 2: ABOMINABLE AND INSIDIOUS SAVAGERY (1344-1345)

alarmed by reports of the political tensions in Naples and Johanna’s continued attempts to exert herself as queen before her 25th birthday, Pope Clement decides to intervene and insist that Andrew be acclaimed as Johanna’s co-ruler, rather than merely her consort. 

Johanna steadfastly refuses, framing herself as Andrew’s guardian against an increasingly derisive and volatile court, while at the same time news of her first pregnancy is announced. yet many doubt the marriage has been consummated, and when Sancia dies in the summer of 1345, the ruling council splinters, and Johanna seizes control of Naples. 

Andrew privately insists Johanna is dabbling in affairs with multiple men, but chiefly with her charismatic and cunning cousin Louis of Taranto. Johanna meets the rumors with incredulous scorn, and publicly mocks Andrew, resulting in him swearing revenge once he comes into his own inheritance. Clement begins to fear open civil war will erupt between Johanna and Andrew, and attempts to placate Andrew’s rage, to little avail. 

by September of 1945, the marital discord is at a breaking point. the pregnant Johanna and Andrew travel with their respective retinues to a hunting lodge in Aversa. in the night, Andrew is lured from his bed by his own chamberlain, and viciously attacked by a group of courtiers and men at arms. beaten and strangled, his body is thrown into the gardens, where the dying Andrew is discovered by his childhood nurse. 

public outrage ensues, both due to the murder and the humiliating nature of it. many hold Johanna and her cousins responsible, while Johanna’s brother in law Duke Charles decides they must give a farce of an investigation to stave off revenge from the Angevins. 

the murder is largely pinned on servants and the Cabanni and Catani families, members of Johanna’s inner circle but now blood relations, including Johanna’s beloved nurse Filippa and her childhood best friend Sancia de’Cabanni, despite Johanna’s protests. Filippa, Sancia, and the other accused are tortured and burned at the stake. 

Johanna gives birth to Andrew’s posthumous son, Charles, on Christmas Day, 1345, but is tormented by the memories of her toxic relationship with his father, and the infant boy’s frail health.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“MAN MUST PROVE HE IS A BIGAMIST,” Toronto Star. February 17, 1933. Page 2.  ----- Accuses Himself, But Must Produce Documents Too, Court Holds ---- A troubled conscience caused William Payne to surrender to the police yesterday. He said he had gone through a form of marriage with one Christina Casteen, in October, 1923, although legally married in Winnipeg in 1921. 

"There are some peculiar circumstances to this case," said Assistant Crown Attorney Snyder. "He tried to get a divorce in the United States, I believe. 

"We'll have to hold the case over," he added, "as Mr. Payne, although he has pleaded guilty, has not given us sufficient documents as proof." 

The accused was accordingly released on bail on a remand until Feb. 24.

Amateur Sleuth Rose Davis acted as an amateur sleuth, she told the court. 

Suspecting a Ukrainian woman of stealing a dress from her shop, she went several evening to the Ukrainian Hall to see. if the dress would appear on the dance floor. It did not. 

"Then I read the paper, and saw where this woman had been accused of taking goods from a store," she added, in charging Sadie Zulyn with theft, "and I had good reason to think she was the thief, as she was the last customer in my store on the day the dress disappeared." 

The evidence not being all presented, the case was adjourned until Feb. 24. The alleged theft took place early last November. 

Elizabeth Commander, three times convicted of drunkenness, went to the Ontario reformatory for three months. 

"Give me a chance, I'll go to Montreal," requested Nellie Allen, who pleaded guilty to keeping a resort. 

She had been in jail for two years on a vagrancy charge before and had recently been given a suspended sentence. 

"She has been given two chances already." decided Magistrate Patterson. "She'll go to the Mercer reformatory for three months." 

Woman Dentist Charged Dr. Margaret Kinsman, a dentist of Windsor, was charged with criminal negligence while driving automobile. She was alleged to have injured Miss Alberta Douglas. 

"She had a scalp laceration and a fracture of the leg," said Dr. McGow, who had attended the injured woman in the General hospital. 

"I haven't Margt. Kinsman here," said her counsel. who pleaded not guilty for his client, "as I thought! there was going to be a settlement made within three weeks." 

The case was remanded until March 10. 

Restitution having been made, the charge against Fanny Waisglass of false pretences was dismissed. 

Mrs. Irene Cutler, convicted of theft, was asked by the court to sign a bond of $200 to keep out of departmental stores for the next two years. 

"I think her daughter's should also be on the bond," declared the crown. 

The two women accordingly signed the bond together. 

Mary Brindle. who possessed a lengthy police record, was sentenced to the municipal reformatory for three months, on a charge of keeping a resort on Oak St. 

Robert Small, found in, paid a fine of $10. 

Wm. Colleman, found in, also was given a fine of $10. 

Pasquale Facchini, up for sentence on a conviction of assaulting and beating his wife, was bound over to keep the peace towards both his wife. and sister-in-law on a bond of $200.

[itmeansapricot]

I am always 100% pro-queen, but since reading about Andrew of Hungary's murder I am honestly shook.

On the night of September 18, 1345, the power struggle between Johanna and Andrew ended in violence and death. Andrew, Johanna, their extended family, and their retinues had traveled to a royal hunting retreat in Aversa, a short distance from Naples, where they spent their time in sport and feasting while they awaited Aimery’s arrival. After Andrew had retired to bed, his chamberlain, Tommaso Mambriccio, called him from his chamber. Then the partially clothed, unarmed prince was attacked by a group of men, beaten, suffocated, and strangled with a cord. His cries went unheard by all—including, she insisted, his sleeping wife—but his absence soon alarmed his Hungarian nurse, who went to find him. Frightened by her approaching light, Andrew’s assailants threw his bruised body over the wall of the castle into the garden below, where his nurse found it and raised the alarm.

Both the royal and the papal accounts of the corpse, bloodied from desperate struggle, attest that Andrew fought violently. This much was evident from flesh found in his mouth, torn from the hand of one of his assailants. The damage to his body was extensive, revealing a degree of savagery that stunned commentators: His hair was torn out in clumps, his face lacerated, and his nostrils bloodied; his lips bore the marks of iron gauntlets and his torso those of violent pressure, while his genitals were mutilated.

(from From She-Wolf to Martyr: the Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples by Elizabeth Casteen)

He was 18.

[nanshe-of-nina]

Women’s History Meme || Virtually Unknown Women (5/10) ↬ Agnès de Périgord (d. 1345)

Élie de Talleyrand was the brother of Agnes of Périgord, the mother of the three Durazzeschi princes, and was thus intimately involved in the politics and intrigues of the Neapolitan court. — From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples by Elizabeth Casteen Catherine’s freewheeling lifestyle and generally conceited demeanor excited the jealousy and resentment of another cadet branch of the family— that of John, now styled duke of Durazzo as a result of the recent transaction with his sister- in-law. John had also taken a French girl, Agnes of Périgord, as a second wife after his first, a princess of Achaia, had refused to consummate the marriage and been imprisoned for her temerity. Agnes came from very good stock— not quite as grand as Catherine’s, but still very distinguished and aristocratic— and she resented her sister-in-law’s unquestioned air of superiority. The rivalry between the two women only deepened when John died in 1336 and his lands and titles devolved upon Agnes’s eldest son, Charles of Durazzo, who was thirteen at the time of his father’s death. Agnes was devoted to Charles and very ambitious for his advancement. She knew that Catherine’s sons held a slight advantage in rank over hers, owing to their father’s having been older and therefore closer to the throne. But Agnes, while less flamboyant than Catherine, was every bit a match for the empress of Constantinople in terms of enterprise and calculation. — The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily by Nancy Goldstone

[nanshe-of-nina]

Women’s History Meme || Scandals (big or small) (4/5) ↬ The abduction of Marie of Calabria

This task became increasingly difficult, particularly after the rivalry between the Tarantini and Durazzeschi was exacerbated by the clandestine (and possibly forced) 1343 marriage of Mary of Naples (then only thirteen) to Charles of Durazzo (1323–48). Mary stood second in line to the throne; the marriage, which made Charles the husband of Naples’ possible future queen, violated the terms of Mary’s betrothal to Louis of Hungary but had tacit papal approval. Naples became a hotbed of intrigue that threatened to erupt into open feuding. Clement VI was obliged to maintain constant contact with the Neapolitan branches of the Angevin family, with Johanna and her advisors, and with the increasingly irate Hungarians as he struggled to sustain the fragile peace within this most dysfunctional of families. — From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples by Elizabeth Casteen But Agnes [of Périgord], having anticipated this response, was ready for it. Two days later, on March 28, the house of Durazzo launched the second, covert half of its plan. One of Maria’s ladies- in- waiting, a young woman by the name of Margherita di Ceccano, herself the niece of a cardinal, was an accomplice to the plot. With Margherita’s help, Charles of Durazzo quietly lured his young fiancée into the west garden of the Castel Nuovo, which abutted the grounds of his family’s estate. According to Domenico da Gravina, from there he “abducted” her to his castle, where a sympathetic priest was waiting. This priest, by the power invested in him in accordance with one of the secret bulls signed by the pope, then hurriedly and secretly married the couple. But the performance of so unorthodox a nuptial sacrament was not enough to assure Charles of his bride. So just to make certain that there was no going back, as soon as the priest was finished, the duke of Durazzo took the precaution of consummating the marriage. Or, as Domenico da Gravina, relaying information that was obviously common knowledge at the time, reported, “having intercourse, it is said, and keeping her in his own palace.” Even an environment as sexually permissive as court life in Naples apparently had its limits. Charles’ and Maria’s behavior scandalized the kingdom. Worse, it goaded the house of Taranto to drop its diplomatic effort in favor of a strategy centered on armed conflict. — The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily by Nancy Goldstone

[dwellordream]

“...Both Robert and Johanna conceived of Johanna as heir not merely to Robert’s throne but also to his sovereignty. Despite having a large pool of eligible potential male successors, Robert was determined that his direct line should rule Naples. While he sought to sooth the ire of the Hungarian Angevins by marrying Johanna to Andrew, Robert had no intention of allowing them to control Naples or of allowing Andrew to rule in Johanna’s place or in her name (as many contemporaries expected). As far as Robert was concerned, Johanna’s blood legitimated her queenship, and her sex should present no obstacle. Robert’s conception of Johanna’s sovereignty proved difficult for many contemporaries to accept, and Johanna would battle public opinion that favored other heirs throughout her reign. Indeed, Johanna was as controversial as she became because she insisted on her sovereignty. She defined her role as a regnant queen as active and powerful, one that entailed divinely sanctioned rulership without the interference or participation of her consort. 

…Throughout her long reign, Johanna occupied an important place in Europe’s cultural imaginary. Her reputation evolved as it did because she mattered—deeply— to her contemporaries, whether they admired or hated her. Her public image became caught up in a larger cultural conversation about women that would come to be called the querelle des femmes, or “woman question.” She was always, even for her apologists, most noteworthy as a woman and representative of the virtues, potential, weakness, or threats associated with femininity. After Andrew of Hungary’s murder, she became typed as a she-wolf—a sexualized, bloodthirsty predator—while as a papal ally she became the loving, obedient daughter of the Church. During the schism, Clementists described her as saintly and self-sacrificing, even as Urbanists denounced her as the embodiment of female irrationality and vice. 

On both sides of the ecclesiastical divide, Johanna was incontrovertibly significant, a potent figure whose motivations and character were crucial to understanding the crisis facing the Church and European society. Modern scholarship has paid substantially less attention to Johanna and accorded her less importance than did her contemporaries. Scholars of Angevin Naples—a vibrant, flourishing field—conventionally treat Johanna’s reign as a decisive break, a rupture that represents the end of Angevin greatness. The definitive study of Johanna was published between 1932 and 1936 by the French scholar Émile Léonard. No English-language study of her reign has appeared in more than a century, and most surveys of the period anachronistically dismiss her as an ineffective ruler with little impact on history.

Scholarly neglect of Johanna serves as a reminder of the power of historical memory and the lingering potency of reputation: One eminent historian of southern Italy characterizes Johanna’s reign as “a constant record of court intrigues,” while a recent survey of medieval queenship speaks only fleetingly—in one sentence—of Johanna’s reign immediately after noting, “many queens-regnant ruled for short periods of time and often in moments of crisis.” Johanna’s reign was long by any standard, and for much of it, her contemporaries described her as a wise, able ruler. Yet because of her posthumous reputation, modern accounts focus on scandal and crisis, as on her supposed sexual licentiousness—perhaps explaining why, until quite recently, political history has ignored her reign. Fortunately, the tide is turning. 

…Many contemporaries perceived her as a successful monarch, and her sovereignty, under the right conditions, was accepted and even celebrated. Johanna’s position as the sole regnant queen on the European stage during most of her reign, the scandals of her court, and her relationship with the papacy kept her in the public eye. Her reputation gained international dimensions, spreading via oral rumor that is largely irretrievable, but also in chronicles, prophecies, letters, poetry, and art, much of which echoes and refracts rumor. Such texts reveal not only how Johanna was perceived by her contemporaries but also how those contemporaries sought to define her and how they understood the complex of problems—queenship, femininity, royal succession—at whose nexus she stood. The commentators who helped to shape Johanna’s reputation likely did so consciously. 

Reputation was of paramount—and growing—importance in medieval Europe. A person’s reputation, or fama, had crucial implications for her or his ability to take part in public life and determined her or his place in society and in what Daniel Lord Smail has called the medieval “economy of honor.” Fama was accepted as a form of proof in canon law at the turn of the twelfth century. By the thirteenth century, the great canonist Hostiensis accepted as a matter of course that criminal trials began with an inquiry into the reputation of both defendant and accuser, because public estimation was integral to identity and spoke to reliability and character. Fama had probative value and could serve as legal evidence, while infamia (infamy) was a legal status incurred by those who had committed (or were thought to have committed) a crime of which “certain public knowledge” was “so widespread as to constitute in effect the testimony of an eyewitness.”

In cases when no one came forward to lodge a formal accusation, infamia could be personified as the accuser, not only testifying against the defendant but also initiating an inquest. This was particularly common in later medieval Italian communes, which provided the social and cultural context for much of the textual consideration of Johanna’s reputation. It was understood that fama and infamia reflected communal knowledge, and even what we would now call hearsay had legal standing. In many parts of Europe, “common knowledge” was sufficient to convict a person of a crime—or at the very least to justify the use of torture to elicit a confession. The consequences of infamy were dire. Thirteenth-century French judges were empowered to imprison the defamed, who represented a danger to their communities. In both Roman and common law, infamy carried with it a range of “legal disabilities” designed to shame the infamous and bar them, and even their children, from full participation in society.

As Edward Peters argues, later medieval Europe was “a world in which status, capacity, reputation, and honor were not merely widely known and closely linked, but culturally reinforced by rigid exclusionary practices” that led to the marginalization and isolation of the infamous. For women, whose political and social activities were more proscribed than those of men, fama was of even greater significance: A woman’s reputation could condemn her if she were accused of a crime—particularly adultery or prostitution—and it had direct bearing on her social standing, her ability to marry, and the status of her children. Fama, in both the legal and cultural senses, was powerful, but it was also—late medieval commentators recognized—unstable and easily manipulated. 

Given the cultural and legal importance of fama, studying reputation reveals a great deal about the people who constructed fama and the values and beliefs they held. Max Gluckman argued in a seminal 1963 article that “gossip and scandal” are “among the most important societal and cultural phenomena” for anthropological analysis. He points out that they maintain group unity and morality and help control competing factions within a community. Chris Wickham, building on Gluckman, argues that gossip is an especially important object of historical study because of what it reveals about communal values and identity. This is particularly true when it comes to discerning the cultural significance of a woman like Johanna. She lived at the center of a constantly accruing mass of gossip, which makes her reputation a particularly instructive window on later medieval culture. 

Fama, as Thelma Fenster and Daniel Smail argue, is always under negotiation and shaped by multiple and competing pressures. Gossip, or “talk,” to use Fenster and Smail’s preferred term, is the medium by which “we monitor and record reputations,” and which “in medieval societies . . . did many of those things that in modern society are handled, officially, by bankers, credit bureaus, lawyers, state archives, and so on.” As the conduit for communal bias, morality, and self-policing and self-definition, fama is one of the most important indices of medieval mentalities that remains to us. As such, talk or gossip tells us a great deal about the people who feed, report, and shape it—more even than about the people who are its subject. 

Medieval commentators were well aware of the power of fama, as of its usefulness and slipperiness. Chroniclers, polemicists, and writers of conduct literature touted the importance of royal reputation. The reputations of queens, in particular, were contested and subject to almost prurient attention. Queens faced “propaganda and character assassination” by political opponents, “because the question of fitness to rule and legitimacy” centered on their sexual morality, and because royal courts were places where “the politics of the personal produce a hotbed of gossip, intrigue, and suspicion.” Indeed, chronicles reveal “preoccupation with queenly sexuality” that often led to accusations of adultery and “other royal misbehavior to blame queens for past conflicts” or to discredit or delegitimize their husbands and heirs.

Fascination with the character and reputation of queens reflects the political significance and the ambiguity of queenship. For much of European history—and, indeed, for most modern historians—a queen was defined as “the king’s wife.” Most recent studies of medieval queenship, driven by feminist concerns, have striven to demonstrate queens’ agency, analyzing the power and influence many queens wielded as the wives and mothers of kings. Such studies demonstrate that queens consort and regent were able administrators, and that their cultural activities often won them great respect and admiration—even as their proximity to power and central position in the court gossip mill rendered them vulnerable to slander. Throughout Europe, the queen was “an integral part of the institution of monarchy”—something scholars have stressed in analyzing queens’ roles as intercessors, mothers, wives, and patrons, often within a well-defined familial context.

Perhaps most valuably, Theresa Earenfight has convincingly argued for the “corporate character of monarchy,” demonstrating that queens were as vital as kings to the functioning of monarchy. Johanna’s career deviates substantially from that of most medieval queens in that she ruled in her own right rather than via a husband or son. Indeed, monarchy as she practiced it could not be corporate, because Johanna could not brook competition from her consort. She stood on the cusp of a period in which women did frequently inherit thrones: She was the only regnant queen during most of her life, but the generation after her saw a woman crowned king of Poland and regnant queens in Hungary, Sicily, the united Scandinavian kingdoms, and Portugal, while her great niece, Johanna II, held the Neapolitan throne from 1414 to 1435.

She was in some sense a test case, a prominent queen whose reign witnessed the articulation of ideas about the feasibility and pitfalls of regnant queenship and paved the way for future sovereign queens like Elizabeth Tudor and Isabella of Castile. Queens were always under scrutiny, even when they played more traditional roles. Louise O. Fradenburg has argued that, in medieval literature and political thought, “the queen is a paradoxical figure because she links sovereignty to the feminine.” The power—direct and indirect, symbolic and concrete—that queens wielded made them both fascinating and troubling. They represented a disquieting incongruity, a fracture in “the structure of thought.” Johanna’s unusual position and eventful reign made her particularly fascinating, even beyond the borders of her realm. 

As scholars of queenship have recognized, queens regnant “presented conceptual and legal difficulties.” They represented the tension in political thought between concerns of gender and concerns of lineage. Queens regnant challenged and were challenged by prevailing gender norms, which taught that women were intellectually, physiologically, and morally inferior to men. The prevailing understanding was that “a woman who inherited supreme authority would marry and produce a son to replace her implied submission to a husband as prescribed by Christian teaching.” Female monarchs were conceived of as placeholders upholding hereditary principle, their blood allowing them to  occupy the throne only “to transmit that power to their sons.” They were “representatives of their families, agents for their fathers, husbands, and sons,” and contemporary commentators often described them in a familial context rather than portraying them as rulers in their own right.

At the same time, queens regnant, because of dynastic concerns, needed to marry and were placed at risk by marriage. As Anne J. Duggan has pointed out, “the rights of the king-by-marriage were ill-defined.” The usual expectation was that kings consort actively ruled, either in place of or alongside their wives, often generating controversy about the introduction of a foreign prince to the throne or the equally problematic elevation of “a non-dynastic male” from within the kingdom. Johanna’s many marriages were the subject of rampant gossip, both because of her refusal to allow her consorts to rule and because of the potential threat each posed to her autonomy and the interests of Naples’s ruling class. Johanna’s assertion of personal sovereignty clashed with expectations of women and wives, and it lay at the center of discussions about her, which always pondered her femininity. 

Medieval antifeminism, building on classical precedent, posited that women should be subject to male authority, and that any subversion of the gender hierarchy—including within marriage—was unnatural and even dangerous. Learned opinion throughout the high and late Middle Ages barred women from positions of authority and defined them as, at best, in need of care and guidance and, at worst, an active danger to men. For Johanna’s reputation, as for descriptions of powerful women more generally, one of the key differences between men and women was that women were thought to be more lustful. In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville—whose Etymologies remained influential throughout the Middle Ages—reported that the Latin femina derived from the Greek for “fiery,” a reflection of women’s greater lust.

Theorists posited that “women’s capacity for sexual pleasure” far outstrips that of other animals (with the exception of mares) and “deviates from the ideal course of nature.” It was “an expression of irrationality and lack of control”—a form of weakness that meant women required strict oversight and that Johanna’s critics cited in their arguments against her. The arguments of medical theorists and natural philosophers dovetailed— although they never fully agreed—with theological wisdom that saw women as easily led astray and prone to temptation. Similar arguments shaped both legal and literary culture. Medieval literature of all kinds portrays women as lustful and weak. Women’s natural defects were a legal commonplace; canon law, for instance, identified women as less credible witnesses than men.

In many parts of Europe, women were denied the right to inherit immovable property, and they were excluded from most positions of political power—hence prevailing suspicion of queens. There were, however, important regional differences in inheritance patterns and aristocratic power structures. In some places, women of high birth attained positions of great wealth and power, particularly in southern France and Provence, where aristocratic women often acted as territorial lords. Elsewhere, women had less access to dynastic power. Such differences led to divergent attitudes toward female rule that helped to shape Johanna’s reputation—her rule was never as contested in Provence as it was in Naples, where women could not generally inherit immovable property and enjoyed less legal autonomy. 

All of these factors contributed to widespread ambivalence to regnant queenship and to Johanna herself. They form the cultural matrix or discursive field within which her reputation took shape, and they set the terms of talk or gossip about her throughout her life. The sovereignty she asserted was provocative; the reputation she strove to create for herself, like those her contemporaries created for her, reveals the contradictions and tensions inherent in the very idea of regnant queenship, the instability of the concept of sovereignty, and the power and malleability of reputation.”

- Elizabeth Casteen, “Introduction.” in From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples

[dwellordream]

“...Johanna’s date of birth is unknown, but she was likely born in 1326 or 1327, the daughter of Marie of Valois (1309–32) and Charles of Calabria (1298–1328), the son and heir of King Robert of Anjou (r. 1309–43). Charles’s death made Johanna and her sister, Mary (b. 1329), Robert’s only direct lineal heirs; Robert designated Johanna his successor in 1330. …Johanna grew up in a court noted by contemporaries for its scholarly culture—although she apparently received no formal education. Instead, she came under the tutelage of her step-grandmother, Sancia of Majorca (ca. 1285–1345), after her mother died in 1332. Sancia was famous for her piety, her devotion to the Franciscan order, and her active religious patronage, and she provided an important model for Johanna. She lived austerely even before widowhood, when she retired to a Clarissan convent, and she had more interest in contemplation and prayer than in the more worldly aspects of queenship, but she wielded great power at court and took a forceful role in the dispute about evangelical poverty. 

The Angevin court was not entirely given over to piety, however. The Angevins had long patronized arts and letters, and Robert was famous for his learning. His court attracted and fostered the leading lights of fourteenth century culture, including Giotto, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. It was frequented as well by Robert’s younger brothers, Philip, prince of Taranto (1278–1331), and John of Gravina, duke of Durazzo (1294–1336), and their wives and children, including six sons whose rivalry dominated court gossip and helped shape the first two decades of Johanna’s reign. Johanna was thus the product of a court marked, on the one hand, by religious fervor and a fledgling humanist culture and, on the other, by intrigue and simmering factionalism. In 1343, Johanna succeeded Robert ahead of nine male cousins who could (and did) stake claims to her throne. She would struggle with their resentment, as with their plays for power. 

From the outset, she faced criticism for the perceived iniquity of her succession, along with uncertainty about what it actually meant for her to inherit Robert’s throne. Would she truly govern? Would she incorporate her husband into her reign, or would he become the kingdom’s ruler? The conceptual and political importance of the Kingdom of Naples made such questions particularly pressing. It was the most significant European polity yet to be ruled by a woman in her own right. From their capital in Naples, the Angevins ruled the southern half of peninsular Italy, the counties of Provence and Forcalquier, and portions of the Piedmont, Albania (the duchy of Durazzo), and Greece (the Morea). Under Johanna’s forebears, the Angevin realm had approached empire; its kings exercised de facto rule over much of northern Italy while aggressively spreading their territory to the East. 

Until 1282, it also included the island of Sicily; even after its loss to Aragon in the Sicilian Vespers, Angevin kings fought to reclaim the island and referred to their realm as the Kingdom of Sicily—although historians refer to the kingdom as it existed after 1282 as the Kingdom of Naples, or simply as the Regno. In addition, the Regno’s kings had claimed the symbolically potent (but territorially empty) title king of Jerusalem since 1277, when the first Angevin king, Charles I (1227–85), bought the title from Marie of Antioch. By the time of Johanna’s succession, the Regno’s rulers were as prominent as the king of France or England or the emperor himself. The competing claims of the senior branch of the Angevin family, which ruled Hungary, rendered Johanna’s succession particularly controversial. 

According to the rule of primogeniture—widely accepted by the fourteenth century—Robert, the third son of Charles II (1254–1309), should not have become king. Rather, the son of his eldest brother, Charles Martel (1271–95), should have done so. However, when Charles Martel died, his young son, Charles Robert, or Carobert (1288–1342), was removed from the line of succession to protect the Regno from instability. Charles II’s second son, the future St. Louis of Toulouse (1274–97), had become a Franciscan friar and bishop and renounced his hereditary rights, so Robert succeeded Charles in Naples, while Carobert inherited the Hungarian crown. Carobert insisted that he and his sons were the Regno’s rightful rulers—a charge that his son, Louis “the Great” of Hungary (1326–82), took up in his turn. 

That Robert should bequeath his kingdom to a female child when Carobert’s youth had barred him from the succession added insult to injury and was to have profound ramifications for Neapolitan history. The thorny question of the Hungarian Angevins’ rights to Naples formed the backdrop to the early years of Johanna’s reign. As a child, she was betrothed and then married to Andrew of Hungary (1328–45), the second of Carobert’s three sons, in an effort to secure peace and stability. The Hungarians saw their union as reparation for Robert’s unjust succession. Yet Johanna refused to accept Andrew as a co-ruler, and he was murdered after a protracted power struggle in 1345. The ensuing scandal, which included accusations that Johanna had first cuckolded and then murdered Andrew, would haunt her throughout her reign. It also nearly cost her kingdom: Louis of Hungary twice invaded Naples (1348–50) to avenge his brother and claim what he insisted was his birthright—an argument with which many contemporaries agreed. 

Marriage, and the balance of power within marriage, posed a consistent challenge to Johanna. It had important implications for her reputation, as contemporary expectations of marriage and femininity shaped how contemporaries responded to Johanna. After Andrew’s death, she married Louis of Taranto (1320–62), another cousin with designs on her throne. Louis was the only one of Johanna’s four husbands to rule in his own name, effectively co-opting her power from 1350 to 1362 and inspiring sympathy for Johanna. Her subsequent two marriages proved less problematic for her exercise of sovereignty. Her third husband, James IV of Majorca (1336–75), was reportedly insane, and Johanna was able to enforce his secondary status and govern independently without incurring contemporaries’ ire. 

Her fourth husband, Duke Otto of Brunswick-Grubenhagen (1320–98), acted as the Regno’s military leader without seeking the throne and supported Johanna loyally until her death. The latter half of Johanna’s reign differed starkly from its beginning, which was wrought with scandal, violence, and strife. Johanna emerged, over the course of the 1360s and 1370s, as a respected figure on the European political stage. She became a noted papal ally and a leader in the league that defended papal prerogatives in northern Italy. She helped to return the papacy from Avignon to Rome, and she formed friendships with the most celebrated female religious of her day, Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, and Katherine of Vadstena. She emulated her grandparents in patronizing religious orders and foundations, and she helped to foster a vibrant artistic culture in Naples. 

In the process, Johanna became known and acted as a legitimate, sovereign monarch. Ironically, her leading role in religious politics proved Johanna’s downfall after the Great Schism of the Western Church began in 1378. She was the first monarch to recognize Clement VII as pope. Her abjuration of Clement’s rival, Urban VI, led many of Johanna’s former allies to turn against her. It also resulted in her deposition and, ultimately, in her death, after Urban crowned her cousin, Charles of Durazzo—backed by her old enemy, Louis of Hungary—king in her place. Johanna died in prison, reportedly at Charles’s hand, in 1382. Childless, she had adopted the French prince Louis of Anjou as her heir; Louis and Charles waged a long war that permanently divided Johanna’s realm, plunging Angevin lands into disorder. Johanna’s reign ended even more bloodily than it had begun, leading many—particularly in Urbanist lands—to see violence and suffering as her legacy to her people.”

- Elizabeth Casteen, “Introduction. “ in From She-Wolf to Martyr:  The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples

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“When Robert of Naples named Johanna his successor, he faced the lingering question of the Hungarian Angevin claim to Naples. Johanna’s sex left her vulnerable to charges that her reign was illegitimate and reignited charges that Robert had usurped his throne from his nephew, Carobert of Hungary. With these concerns in mind, and in the interest of stability, Robert arranged a compromise with the Hungarian Angevins: Johanna’s younger sister, Mary (1329–66), would marry Louis, Carobert’s eldest son and the heir to the Hungarian throne, while Johanna would marry Andrew. In 1333, Andrew, then only five years of age, came to Naples to be educated in what was widely understood as his future kingdom. Indeed, Robert preached a sermon in honor of his arrival on Matthew 3:17, greeting the young prince with the words, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased,” thus seeming to proclaim Andrew his heir.

…Andrew was called upon to acculturate, to find a place for himself in a distinctive, fashion-conscious court. To some extent, he must have done so, but court records and reports by observers suggest that he never became a true member of court society, and instead that he remained separate from his Neapolitan cousins, including his future wife, who slighted and mocked him. Indeed, numerous chroniclers report that Andrew was subject to constant taunts and humiliation. In 1343, Robert died, and the throne passed to Johanna. She was seventeen; Andrew was only fifteen. The court at whose head they found themselves was split into multiple factions that vied to influence, control, or supplant the young couple. The most prominent divisions were between Provençal and Italian (primarily Neapolitan and Florentine) courtiers and the Hungarians who had accompanied Andrew to Naples and gradually won their own supporters. 

Added to this already volatile mixture were the three Tarantini (descended from Philip of Taranto) and three Durazzeschi (descended from John of Gravina), who, as Angevin princes, had hoped to succeed ahead of Johanna or to ascend the throne through marriage to Robert’s granddaughters—something that likely sharpened their resentment of Andrew. It was in the interest of the Hungarians to garner as much power and influence for Andrew as possible and in the interest of the other factions—particularly the Tarantini and Durazzeschi—to prevent this. Robert had foreseen that factionalism might lead to chaos. Under the terms of his testament, neither Johanna nor Andrew was to come into their full inheritance before the age of twenty-five—long after the customary age of majority. Until then, they would be guided by a governing council appointed by Robert and overseen by Sancia. The council included Robert’s closest advisors, whom he trusted to guide Johanna until she was ready to rule alone. 

This state of affairs was unsatisfactory to all of the factions. Johanna, for her part, balked at the unusual provision in Robert’s will that barred her from attaining her majority at eighteen. Andrew and Johanna had both already reached the age of discernment, customarily set at fourteen. Neither, therefore, was a child according to conventional definitions, and neither welcomed subjection to the governing council. Pope Clement VI (r. 1342–52) was disturbed as well by the creation of the council, which usurped his suzerain rights over Naples and his prerogative as Johanna’s legal guardian—something Johanna herself clearly recognized. Shortly after Robert’s death, she wrote to the pope, requesting that Andrew be awarded the title (though not the power) of king, most likely with the intention of ingratiating herself with the Hungarians and shortening the term of her minority. Clement refused.

In papal correspondence, Johanna was entitled regina Sicilie, a title Sancia also retained. Clement seldom addressed the governing council, which he resented, and only rarely addressed Andrew in his letters during the period immediately following Robert’s death, a clear mark of his reluctance to recognize Andrew’s claim to kingship. Papal interests were best served by maintaining firm control of Johanna and checking the ambitions of the Hungarian Angevins. Clement was thus faced with overseeing a contentious dynastic situation in a valuable papal fief. This task became increasingly difficult, particularly after the rivalry between the Tarantini and Durazzeschi was exacerbated by the clandestine (and possibly forced) 1343 marriage of Mary of Naples (then only thirteen) to Charles of Durazzo (1323–48). 

Mary stood second in line to the throne; the marriage, which made Charles the husband of Naples’s possible future queen, violated the terms of Mary’s betrothal to Louis of Hungary but had tacit papal approval. Naples became a hotbed of intrigue that threatened to erupt into open feuding. Clement VI was obliged to maintain constant contact with the Neapolitan branches of the Angevin family, with Johanna and her advisors, and with the increasingly irate Hungarians as he struggled to sustain the fragile peace within this most dysfunctional of families. The Queen Regnant and Her Prince-Consort Johanna’s attempts to maintain good relations with Andrew and his family ended soon after she ascended the throne. Robert had ruled alone, refusing to share his administration with his brothers, who received the duchies of Taranto (in southern Italy) and Durazzo (in Albania) as their patrimonies. 

According to Robert’s testament, Johanna was to rule as the sole inheritor of all of her grandfather’s possessions, delegating none of her power. The Hungarian Angevins might have planned to rule Naples through Andrew, but their designs were thwarted by Johanna’s refusal—supported by both the governing council and the pope—to allow him to be publicly entitled king, to swear fealty to the papacy, or even to control his own finances. Andrew was commonly referred to in person and in correspondence as “king,” but this was merely a mark of courtesy. Only the pope could confer the regal title, and Clement VI declined to do so. Johanna treated Andrew as her consort rather than as a co-ruler, thus assuming her grandfather’s position and consigning Andrew to that formerly held by Sancia. 

…While Johanna’s actions and those of the governing council fulfilled Robert’s wishes, they were unusual enough to draw critical notice and at variance with what Robert’s intentions had seemed—at least to some contemporaries—prior to his death. Carobert had sent Andrew to be raised in Robert’s court with every expectation that he would eventually rule Naples. Léonard argues that Robert “had placed Andrew, as a child, on the same footing as his granddaughter; it could not have been to debase him before her for his entire life.” Yet, as Léonard also notes, Robert’s testamentary provisions incontrovertibly established just such an imbalance. Indeed, Andrew—who was entitled prince of Salerno rather than duke of Calabria, the title reserved for the heir to the throne—was denied the right to succeed to the throne even if Johanna predeceased him. 

The question of Andrew’s rightful position would trouble Angevin politics long after his death. His supporters alleged that Robert had meant for Andrew to succeed him. They insisted that Robert had changed his mind about the disposition of the kingdom on his deathbed and made Andrew his heir. Such claims persisted throughout Johanna’s reign and intensified with Andrew’s murder. According to their arguments, Johanna was not the lawful heir to the throne—she ruled only through the unnatural debasement of Naples’s true sovereign, and her only claim to queenship was as Andrew’s consort. Andrew’s succession, from a certain perspective, was logical: It would have adhered to the hereditary principle favoring male candidates and mirrored the Valois succession in France. 

Furthermore, it reflected the common practice by which powerful men ruled territories inherited by their brotherless wives. Andrew’s partisans, therefore, both before and after his death, could assert his threefold legitimacy as king by descent (through his grandfather), by inheritance, and as Johanna’s husband. These arguments would underpin narrative attacks on Johanna after Andrew’s death, when Andrew’s just claim to Naples’s throne became the backdrop against which the story of his murder was ultimately told. Thus, in the years between Robert’s death and Andrew’s murder, two rival arguments circulated about Andrew’s rightful position. According to the first, Andrew was Johanna’s prince-consort, not entitled and not equipped (due to his youth) to rule. According to the other, he was the legitimate king of Naples, designated by Robert as his immediate and sole successor.”

- Elizabeth Casteen, “The Murder of Andrew of Hungary and the Making of a Neapolitan She–Wolf.” in From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples

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“...After Louis of Taranto’s death, one of Johanna’s first concerns was necessarily dynastic. Although her children had died—Catherine, the last, sometime around 1362—she was in her mid-thirties and might still bear an heir. It was necessary, therefore, for her to marry quickly and wisely. A husband—the right husband—might provide a shield, protecting Johanna from political rivals and her reputation from the hazards of single womanhood by containing her sexuality and checking the independence that had so worried earlier commentators. At the same time, remarriage brought the dangerous ambiguities attendant on the problem of kings consort to the fore. Opening the Regno’s administration to a second Louis of Taranto was one threat, while the controversy surrounding Andrew of Hungary’s marginalization threatened to arise again as well. 

 …Instead, she married James IV of Majorca. The great nephew of Sancia of Majorca, James was substantially younger than Johanna and had the added attraction of being largely unconnected and politically inexperienced. Born in about 1336, James had spent much of his childhood and young adulthood imprisoned—reportedly in an iron cage—at the court of his uncle, Peter IV “the Ceremonious” of Aragon (1319–87), after his father, James III (1315–49), died attempting to regain Majorca from Peter. In May 1362, James escaped from Barcelona and fled to Naples, where he was welcomed and harbored. He seemed a suitable choice to be Johanna’s third husband, and her counselors advised her to marry him. His sad history elicited great sympathy, particularly because of his relationship to Sancia, and, given the emptiness of his royal title—which meant nothing, since Peter ruled Majorca—and his lack of resources, his marriage to Johanna presented few obvious difficulties for her exercise of sovereignty. 

Their marriage contract, which denied James any Neapolitan title besides that of duke of Calabria (which made him theoretically the foremost nobleman in Naples), was finalized in December 1362, and the marriage took place early the following year. As a matter of course, he was excluded from the succession and legally defined—like Andrew and Louis before him—as Johanna’s consort. He presented little threat either to Johanna’s autonomy or to papal interests, and Urban accepted the match with equanimity. James’s role as consort was limited and minimal; he played only a scant part in the papal politics with which Urban and Johanna were concerned. Indeed, in official correspondence with the Neapolitan court, Urban excluded James, addressing Johanna as the sole ruler of Naples, while James, if addressed at all, was referred to only by his Majorcan title. 

Johanna’s third marriage, despite these precautions, proved initially as tumultuous as her previous two. While she did conceive, she suffered a miscarriage in 1365 and never bore another child. James was sickly and—perhaps unsurprisingly, given his history—reportedly mentally unstable. Archbishop Pierre d’Ameil wrote to Urban during the summer of 1363 that Johanna was afraid of her husband, and both he and Johanna wrote alarmed letters to the pope about James’s behavior. He was purportedly paranoid, and his humiliation over his marginalization at court made him irrational and even violent. According to Pierre, he was willfully stubborn and prone to rages, which were particularly intense when he drank wine.

He insisted on being admitted to meetings on affairs of state and threw frightening tantrums when his will was thwarted. At times he was lucid, but periodically—according to Johanna, during certain cycles of the moon—he became maddened, and anything that might be used as a weapon had to be removed from his chamber. Johanna reported to Urban that she was forced to placate James to keep him calm in public, soothing him by allowing him into secret councils against the better judgment of her advisors. He refused, she wrote, to be content with the “honorable status” accorded him in their marriage contract. 

When reminded of the legality of his position, James raged scandalously: He had frequently remarked in public, while making certain vile gestures, that, if he were able to rule, he would not renounce it either for the pope or for the Church, because he did not care to obey them. Indeed, I urged him not to say such words publicly, but he replied to the contrary that he should have revealed it openly, to which I demanded what he would dare to do. Then he hurled back that he would even pierce the body of Christ with a knife. What is certain, Sustaining Father and Lord, is that he had already made fifty pledges of donation to his familiars, some for three thousand florins, some for two thousand, some for a thousand, some for more, some for less.

When Johanna reprimanded him for pledging sums to his followers from the royal treasury to which he had no right, James became violent and slanderous: And with fury he threw himself toward me and seized me by the arm in the presence of many people, who almost believed that I would fall to the ground. And although there might then have been many exceedingly impatient to prevent actual injury to my person, I, lest due to mischief something worse occur, ordered explicitly that no one should dare to move to punish him, giving them to understand that he had done what he did not from wicked intention, but in order to comfort himself, not believing that he had dragged me so forcefully. And turning toward me, he descended into disgraceful words to defame my reputation, saying in a loud voice that I was a viricide, a vile harlot, and that I collected pimps around me who brought men to me during the night, and that he would exact an exemplary vengeance on them.

She goes on to relate that James’s erratic behavior and defamatory charges became common knowledge, causing public scandal. The Tarantini sent their wives to comfort and spend the night with her, presumably to shield her both from James and from suspicions that pimps were procuring her lovers; Mary even brought a number of armed guards. James’s crazed behavior cemented his marginal position. In deliberation with her cousins and her council, Johanna (out of necessity, she stressed to the pope) decided that she should limit contact with her husband, spending time with him alone only when her advisors deemed it safe. All of this, she insisted, depended on Urban’s approval, and she would adhere to his counsel like a good daughter (“filialiter inherebo”). There is very little doubt, given the archbishop’s corroboration, that this episode did occur, but it worked ultimately to Johanna’s benefit. 

Everyone was eager to limit James’s influence. Johanna, to this end, presented herself to Urban as a loving wife who defended her husband, expressing compassionate understanding for the tribulations that had led to his insanity. As she had in her refusal to marry Philip of Touraine, she cast her assertion of independence in a pious light, presenting it not as insistence on her own will but as the only responsible course of action. James’s behavior was dangerously sacrilegious and scandalous, while hers in checking him revealed her devotion to the papacy, to the Church, and to God, whose transubstantiated flesh she charged James had threatened. Affirming the necessity of her actions, Johanna marginalized James, ruling alone and free of his interference even as she averred her love and concern for him. 

Johanna thus won her independence. She was married, but without the potential pitfalls that marriage could present to regnant queens. James spent little of what remained of his life in Naples, focusing instead on regaining Majorca. His relationship with Johanna continued to be uneasy, marked by short periods of reconciliation and longer periods of estrangement. For a time, he fought with the papal league against the Visconti in northern Italy. When Peter IV “the Cruel” of Castile went to war against Aragon in 1365, James offered his services. He was captured and held for ransom at Valladolid in late 1367. Johanna, after some prodding by Urban V, helped James’s sister, the marchioness of Montferrat, to ransom him. Continuing to eschew the Neapolitan court, where Johanna reigned alone and unchallenged, James continued his military endeavors—and he was sane enough to be taken seriously by Castilian chroniclers—fighting in the Hundred Years’ War as an ally of the Black Prince until he died of a fever at Soria in January 1375.”

- Elizabeth Casteen, “A Most Loving Daughter: Filial Piety and the Apogee of Johanna’s Reign.” in From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples

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“On the night of September 18, 1345, the power struggle between Johanna and Andrew ended in violence and death. Andrew, Johanna, their extended family, and their retinues had traveled to a royal hunting retreat in Aversa, a short distance from Naples, where they spent their time in sport and feasting while they awaited Aimery’s arrival. After Andrew had retired to bed, his chamberlain, Tommaso Mambriccio, called him from his chamber. Then the partially clothed, unarmed prince was attacked by a group of men, beaten, suffocated, and strangled with a cord. His cries went unheard by all—including, she insisted, his sleeping wife—but his absence soon alarmed his Hungarian nurse, who went to find him. Frightened by her approaching light, Andrew’s assailants threw his bruised body over the wall of the castle into the garden below, where his nurse found it and raised the alarm.

 Both the royal and the papal accounts of the corpse, bloodied from desperate struggle, attest that Andrew fought violently. This much was evident from flesh found in his mouth, torn from the hand of one of his assailants. The damage to his body was extensive, revealing a degree of savagery that stunned commentators: His hair was torn out in clumps, his face lacerated, and his nostrils bloodied; his lips bore the marks of iron gauntlets and his torso those of violent pressure, while his genitals were mutilated. Perhaps most troubling to commentators was the indignity of Andrew’s death. Andrew was a king, even if in name only, but he had been beaten and strangled like a common criminal. The Venetian doge wrote to the count of Arbe that King Andrew was dead and had not died a good death. Petrarch bewailed the “abominable and insidious savagery” (“tam nefarias et tam truces insidias”) with which Andrew was slain and wished that “he had been killed by a sword or through some other form of manly death so that he would appear to have been killed at the hands of men, not mangled by the teeth and claws of beasts.” 

In these lurid details alone, accounts of Andrew’s murder agree. Theories as to the identity of the guilty party proliferated rapidly, but no consensus was ever reached. Johanna’s supporters were widely held responsible. Reports differed as to the degree of Johanna’s collusion, if any, and which, if any, of the Angevin princes were involved. Neapolitan factionalism shaped the stories told by chroniclers, many of whom argued that the ultimate responsibility lay with Johanna and her Tarantini cousins, led by their mother, Catherine of Valois (1303–46), titular empress of Constantinople. Domenico da Gravina asserted that Johanna and her retainers arranged the hunting trip for the sole purpose of assassinating Andrew, while others, particularly propapal authors, insisted on Johanna’s complete innocence. The Hungarian faction, led by Louis of Hungary, held the entire Neapolitan royal family responsible and begged the pope to take appropriate action.

Officially, however, none of the royal family was found guilty of Andrew’s death. Instead, members of Johanna’s inner circle, including the Cabanni and Catania families, were condemned and executed for the crime. Johanna herself insisted in a letter to Siena and Florence on September 22 that an unnamed servant (Tommaso Mambriccio, who had been executed on September 20) was one of only two assailants. Charles of Durazzo, Johanna’s brother-in-law, however, responded quickly to the public outrage that engulfed Aversa and Naples, and he took the lead in discovering and prosecuting Andrew’s murderers—in part to prevent a Hungarian invasion of Naples—all the while portraying himself as Andrew’s loyal friend and supporter. 

His investigation uncovered a vast conspiracy allegedly including the count of Terlizzi, Gasso de Denicy; Roberto de’ Cabanni, count of Eboli and grand seneschal of the realm, as well as Johanna’s reputed lover; Raimondo de Catania, knight and maggiordomo to the queen; Charles Artois, King Robert’s illegitimate son and count of Santa Agata and Monteodorisio, along with his son, Bertrand; Niccolò di Melizzano, Johanna’s chamberlain; Tommaso Mambriccio; and a number of other prominent members of the court. Also charged were Johanna’s nurse, Filippa Catanese—later immortalized by Boccaccio as a nefarious criminal—and her granddaughter, Johanna’s childhood companion Sancia de’ Cabanni. In the summer of 1346, Bertrand des Baux, who acted as papal delegate in the case, oversaw the punishment of the alleged masterminds. Bertrand Artois confessed under torture. Despite Johanna’s attempts to protect them, the chief conspirators were publicly tortured and burned in a series of gruesome and well-attended spectacles.

Tommaso Mambriccio, executed in the immediate aftermath of the murder, was rumored to have had his tongue removed so that he could not implicate his true accomplices. There was rampant speculation that those executed were merely scapegoats or accomplices of the real murderers, who escaped punishment. Johanna herself did not escape suspicion, despite having been exonerated by the dubious investigation and despite continuing papal support. Her subjects’ initial response after Andrew’s death was to publicly condemn her, although the prosecution and punishment of the supposed conspirators soon calmed the public outcry. Further afield, however, common report continued to condemn Johanna, and speculation about the truth surrounding Andrew’s murder was fodder for discussion long after Johanna had been formally exonerated.

Johanna’s behavior after Andrew’s murder outraged not only his family but also observers across Europe. Her letter to Florence and Siena callously seemed to hold Andrew partially responsible for his fate, which she attributed to childish imprudence that led him to walk about at night unaccompanied despite the counsel of those who had his best interests at heart. Mere weeks afterward, in the midst of open hostilities between the Angevin princes in Naples, who vied for power and sought access to the throne, Johanna requested a papal dispensation to marry her cousin, Robert of Taranto, and then, after that was denied, permission to marry Robert’s brother, Louis. Both Tarantini were widely believed to have been Johanna’s lovers before the murder, which they were thought by many to have orchestrated. 

Indeed, some, including Domenico da Gravina, saw Louis’s attachment to Johanna as proof that he and his mother had schemed to murder and replace Andrew. In August 1347, Louis moved into the royal residence. When Clement VI refused to allow their marriage, Johanna and Louis married secretly on August 22. Arrangements for Johanna’s remarriage enraged Louis of Hungary and provided him additional justification to invade Naples. His vengeance was swift and brutal. During the winter of 1347, as Hungarian forces and their swelling ranks of supporters marched down the Italian peninsula, Johanna and Louis of Taranto fled separately to Avignon. Johanna was pregnant with her second child and abandoned Charles Martel, her son with Andrew (born Christmas Day, 1345), to a papal guardian. Louis of Hungary quickly captured the Regno, and he sent Charles Martel to Buda, where he died in 1348. 

Louis then established himself as the ruler of Naples and continued to agitate for Johanna’s condemnation and punishment, even as he avenged himself on the rest of the royal family. Among his first victims was Charles of Durazzo, whom he executed in Aversa in January 1348. Johanna arrived in Avignon accused of murder, seemingly bereft of supporters, illicitly married to a cousin whose child she was carrying, with her kingdom overrun by a mortal enemy and her already fatherless son left motherless. To make matters worse, the Black Death reached Avignon not long after she did, leading Louis Heyligen (1304–61) to charge in a letter to Petrarch that Andrew’s assassination had caused the pestilence. Johanna’s iniquity seemed to have infected all of Europe. Perhaps if matters had stayed as bleak for Johanna as they seemed when she arrived in Avignon, her reign would have appeared less iniquitous and illegitimate to her contemporaries, even to those already disposed to be her enemies. However, Johanna’s fortunes quickly improved after her arrival in Provence. 

Although she was taken prisoner by the Aixois and forced to wait three months at Châteaurenard because of Hungarian pressure on Clement VI, she reached Avignon on March 15, a day after the arrival of Louis of Taranto and his advisor, Niccolò Acciaiuoli (1310–65), who had fled Naples when it became clear that they could not defend the city. Clement almost immediately awarded the royal couple a dispensation for their marriage and appointed a commission to investigate the charges against them. Johanna appeared before the pope and Curia in consistory to defend herself against the charge that she had been complicit in Andrew’s murder. She must have had a compelling, charismatic presence; her powers of persuasion were apparently sufficient to charm the cardinals into clearing her name.

On March 30, the pope awarded Louis of Taranto the Golden Rose, the highest papal honor, customarily given to the most illustrious person at the papal court on the fourth Sunday during Lent. In early May, Clement arranged to buy Avignon—which Johanna ruled as countess of Provence—for 80,000 florins, which she would use to finance her return to Naples. Within a matter of months, the plague had driven Louis of Hungary from Italy. Johanna and Louis of Taranto returned to Naples on August 17, 1348, as its king and queen, their innocence and legitimacy tacitly affirmed by the papacy.”

- Elizabeth Casteen, “The Murder of Andrew of Hungary and the Making of a Neopolitan She-Wolf.” in From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Disreputed Reputation of Johanna of Naples

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“Historians of medieval Europe must struggle with the question of how reliable their sources are, particularly when it comes to chronicles. Chroniclers were not historians in the modern sense, and their understandings of the purposes of history are distinctly at variance with modern academic sensibilities. As Gabrielle M. Spiegel has pointed out, it is the task of the historian to analyze “the social logic of the text, its location within a broader network of social and intertextual relations” and to “seek to locate texts within specific social sites that themselves disclose the political, economic, and social pressures that condition a culture’s discourse at any given moment.” In so doing, we must remember that the modern distinction between historical truth and fiction was of less concern to chroniclers than was depicting a deeper truth—one easily comprehensible to contemporary readers—that transcended the facts surrounding a given event. Paul Strohm argues that “fictionality [is] a common characteristic” of medieval chronicles and that their “fictions offer irreplaceable historical evidence in their own right.”

…The historical fictions that fourteenth-century chroniclers grafted onto the story of Andrew of Hungary’s murder must thus be read both as descriptions of specific events and circumstances and as commentaries about contemporary conditions that chroniclers as historians and storytellers were empowered to articulate. Johanna’s succession to the Neapolitan throne was in many ways an extraordinary event. She became a regnant queen as Naples was losing the support of many of the northern Italian communes, when the papacy was growing weaker as a territorial power in Italy and losing many of its traditional allies, and when laws of succession and inheritance were hardening to bar women from positions of dynastic power. Indeed, throughout most of Italy, women could not inherit immovable property of any sort, let alone large and influential kingdoms.

As Naples’s monarch, Johanna became the representative of a dynasty in which primogeniture and agnatic succession had long been favored and ahead of not one but many male relatives whose claims to her throne many of her contemporaries viewed as legitimate. In an age when Angevin kings had been seen as quasi-sacerdotal champions of the Church and Angevin blood was understood to confer holiness, the succession of a young and reportedly immoral woman to the Angevin royal title was in itself remarkable. Andrew’s murder was even more remarkable and outrageous. It was inevitable that the story of his death should have found its way into literature of all types. Yet how authors interpreted the murder and what they chose to say about it reveals far more about their reactions to the Angevin succession than about the circumstances of the murder itself. 

The men who wrote about the Neapolitan regicide were clerics or, like Villani, members of an emergent merchant class with vested interest in the political affairs of Italy and the stability of their male-dominated, patrilineal society. Johanna’s queenship—which violated commonly accepted norms of inheritance and sovereignty, not to mention femininity—and the early disasters of her reign were thus frightening, threatening, and titillating by turns. Her cultural presence was powerful, and chroniclers who wrote about the early years of her reign grappled with what she represented and what her reign portended. The anxieties many felt about regnant queenship and the doubtless genuine shock and horror that Andrew’s murder inspired were joined to the political and religious concerns of those who wrote about Johanna. They had at hand a long-standing rhetorical tradition that associated women as “unredeemed flesh” with carnality and deceitfulness with which to malign her.

Indeed, their criticisms of Johanna both accused her of failing to embody tropes of feminine virtue and of being too female. It was a truism—one as effective in satire as in moral texts—in late medieval literature that, in the (ironic) words of Andreas Capellanus, Every woman in the world is . . . lustful. A woman may be eminent in distinction and rank and a man most cheap and contemptible, but if she discovers that he is sexually virile she does not refuse to sleep with him. But no man however virile could satiate a woman’s lust by any means. Boccaccio’s adulterous Neapolitan noblewoman, Fiammetta, like many of the women in his Decameron, exemplifies this tradition of oversexed literary women, and it is impossible not to see contemporary textual portrayals of Johanna as part of a larger, flourishing trope. Indeed, it was an obvious trope with which to malign her, as so many of the stock antifeminist exempla in the medieval canon revolved around libidinous or unfaithful queens, such as Guinevere and Eufeme, the treacherous queen of the thirteenth-century Roman de Silence. 

In fact, queenly adultery was a cornerstone of medieval romance—as Peggy McCracken has argued, in romance, “there are only two stories to tell about the royal female body: a tale of maternity or a story of adultery.” This is not to deny that Johanna may have engaged in much of the behavior of which she was accused—we cannot know whether she did or not—but the literary preoccupation with her sexuality is telling and significant, reflective of a general “preoccupation with queenly sexuality” among medieval chroniclers, but also reflective of Johanna’s special circumstances. On the one hand, the easiest, clearest way to defame a queen was to cast aspersions on her chastity, while on the other, exposing the perceived moral failings of a woman in a position of power was one of the few mechanisms available for punishing her transgressions. The Decretum classifies adultery as one of the worst sexual sins, far more egregious than mere fornication. As such, its penalties were quite severe, particularly for women, who were treated in canon law as the offenders in adultery cases.

Most frequently, adulteresses were punished via humiliation, for instance by being paraded through city streets with their heads shaved. Accounts of Johanna’s adultery served in part to punish her by humiliating her and making her shame public. She went unpunished under law, but her textual shaming acted as what Muir has called a “literary substitute” for revenge. The attack on Johanna’s sexual morality also served, however, as a referendum both on her rule and on the concept of regnant queenship. It drew on timeworn and commonly accepted—and therefore potent and believable—tropes to defame Johanna, providing literary proof of her mala fama that was also an unrealized but legally plausible argument for her deposition. The two crimes of which she stood accused—adultery and husband murder—were intimately linked, arising from and reinforcing one another. 

Female sexuality was commonly held to transgress natural law in ways that “attack the integrity of the family,” giving rise to “adultery, incest, and the murder of parents, husbands, and children.” Inherent in the very concept of active female sexuality was the threat of violence against men, a fear that led the natural philosopher Pseudo-Albertus Magnus to elaborate a medieval version of the myth of the vagina dentate, charging that “some women or harlots”—“out of vindictiveness and malice,” a commentator adds—insert metal spikes into their vaginas because “they wish to injure the penis.” At its most extreme, such antifeminist diatribe described women as actively predatory, preying on men because of an inborn antipathy. At the same time, as Carol Lansing notes, “the irrational appetite that is the source of violent injustice was considered feminine,” while “immoderate appetite” (in the gastronomic or sexual sense) “led to violence and political injustice” in late medieval Tuscan texts.

In attacking Johanna’s sexuality, chroniclers partook in a long-standing tradition vilifying powerful women that extended forward in time from Roman descriptions of Cleopatra and Messalina and would later be used to defame Margaret of Anjou—Shakespeare’s “She-Wolf of France”—who was also smeared as monstrous and adulterous by those seeking to curtail her power. All of the narratives designed to defame Johanna ultimately act as illustrations of her unfitness to rule. They begin with the understanding that Andrew was the rightful king of Naples through descent and inheritance, making Johanna’s usurpation doubly unjust. In the accounts of Andrew’s murder written in the years following his death, these factors shape the narrative. 

Underlying these narratives is a concern with female rule—articulated in terms of uncontrollable, destructive feminine sexuality easily manipulated by Johanna’s lovers—that renders these stories effectively parables about the dangers of queenship and the outcome of illegitimate power. Obscuring the historical fact of Robert’s designation of Johanna as his heir, they seek to demonstrate Johanna’s usurpation and incapacity by presenting her as an adulteress and viricide. Thus, the story of Andrew’s murder was constructed as a tale about the destruction of masculine prerogative and the triumph of illegitimate female rule, described as the triumph of chaos, immorality, and injustice. In the process, Johanna herself became an archetypal she-wolf, one whose fama testified against her right or ability to rule.”

- Elizabeth Casteen, “The Murder of Andrew of Hungary and the Making of a Neapolitan She-Wolf.” in From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples

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“Andrew of Hungary’s murder proved pivotal in the formation of his widow’s public persona. The much-discussed crime brought Johanna and the Neapolitan court international scrutiny, and chroniclers and other writers competed to define Johanna’s reputation and codify their own version of the story of Andrew’s murder. The ability to shape and manipulate fama was an invaluable political tool, one of the most potent available to those not born to power and one wielded most effectively by Johanna’s opponents. Literary accounts of Andrew’s death that presented Johanna as a murderess were calculated to delegitimate her, to manipulate and shape her fama. They worked to establish her ill repute—because fama, once created, took on a life of its own, exercising power and a claim to truth simply by being known—to demonstrate both her guilt and her unfitness to rule one of Europe’s most important polities. 

At the same time, accounts that vilified Johanna acted as a means to punish her and to expose the dangers inherent in allowing a woman to rule. Those who supported Johanna, particularly those whose sympathies lay with the papacy, attempted to portray the murder in a manner that deflected guilt and preserved her honor. The Swiss Franciscan chronicler John of Winterthur (d. after 1348) insisted that Johanna had only escaped sharing her husband’s fate through hasty flight. The prolific Franciscan prophet John of Rupescissa (d. 1366) defended Johanna from his prison cell in Avignon, deploring Andrew’s death as a great and ominous evil while attesting to Johanna’s innocence and arguing that she had been falsely implicated. To Rupescissa, Andrew’s death and the Hungarian invasion of Naples presaged the coming of Antichrist and the return to power of the Hohenstaufen following the decline of the three French kings—those of France, Naples, and Hungary—who had been the protectors of the Church. The conspiracy that felled Andrew was thus far greater and more evil than Johanna, whom Rupescissa insisted would be found blameless before God. 

Giovanni da Bazzano (ca. 1285–1364) contended in his Chronicon Mutinense, written shortly after Louis of Taranto’s death in 1362, that it was not the queen but the Tarantini and their supporters who should be held responsible for Andrew’s gruesome fate. Giovanni’s narration of Andrew’s murder—which is beholden to Johanna’s letter to Florence and Siena—presents a touching scene in which Johanna, sensing that something is amiss, begs Andrew not to answer the summons into the hallway. Reckless and heedless of his wife’s pleas, Andrew tears his cloak from her hands and goes to meet his assailants. In these renditions of Andrew’s death, Johanna is an innocent and even victimized bystander, more harmed than helped by her husband’s murder. She is womanly and physically weak, condemned by her femininity to the role of helpless witness. It is her fate to be wrongfully accused and even, in the Chronicon Mutinense, to fall into the power of enemies who killed Andrew to gain control of her and, through her, of her kingdom. 

Such narratives presented Johanna as sympathetic and defenseless, even pitiable. The negative characterizations of Johanna and the damaging accounts of the murder constructed by her enemies, however, held equal and often greater currency. They would follow her throughout her life, remaining for posterity as enduring hallmarks of her reputation. Authors antagonistic to Johanna also portrayed her as hopelessly feminine, but the definition of femininity they drew on was characterized by irrationality, violence, and lustfulness. They emphasized her malice and the dissolution of her court, portraying her as a vicious usurper who, driven by self-interest and hunger for power, had barred Andrew’s ascent to the throne. Whereas Johanna’s supporters either ignored the issue of Andrew’s right to rule or described him after his death as implicitly equal in rank and power to his wife, those who supported Hungarian claims insisted that Johanna ruled only through violation of Andrew’s legitimate (masculine) position. 

Among Johanna’s supporters, Andrew’s worth and kingliness became a given. Petrarch forgot his earlier estimation that Andrew was neither a king nor kingly and excoriated Aversa for allowing regicide to occur on its soil. In his account, Andrew is no longer a noble-minded boy with future promise but has become a “king and just lord” who, embodying “the sacred person of a public servant,” fully realized his inheritance as a holy Angevin king. Giovanni da Bazzano reports that Andrew’s kingship was formalized by Guillaume Lamy, who crowned his mutilated corpse. Clement VI—an architect of Andrew’s secondary position in Naples—wrote after the murder to Louis of Hungary and Elizabeth of Poland that he was more injured than they, because he had lost the protection of a king destined to be a champion of the Church. His lamentation for Andrew’s lost greatness, like Petrarch’s, obscured Andrew’s marginalization. 

Johanna’s enemies, however, described Andrew’s humiliation and debasement at length. Because their aim was not to glorify Andrew but to denigrate and discredit Johanna, they emphasized not the heights Andrew would have attained had he lived but the ignominy to which he was subject in life. Johanna’s sex rendered her inheritance of the throne, arguably unjust on dynastic grounds, all the more deplorable, and hostile accounts invariably strive to impugn not only her right to rule but also her morality in gendered, sexualized terms. Such accounts configure the relationship between Johanna and Andrew as predatory, portraying Andrew as the innocent victim of his licentious wife. Although Petrarch had earlier described both Johanna and Andrew as lambs among wolves, after Andrew’s death, Johanna herself became the wolf in literary treatments, while Andrew was the innocent lamb led to slaughter. 

Giovanni Boccaccio, despite his later praise of Johanna in De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women) (ca. 1362/63), cast her in his Eclogues as a rabid, pregnant she-wolf, encapsulating a sense of her as monstrous and inhuman common to most accounts of Andrew’s murder that sought to demonstrate her guilt. Johanna’s insistence on her right to rule and on Andrew’s status as her consort inverted natural order as it was commonly understood. Johanna’s critics thus accused her of failure to comport herself as a woman should, as of sexual misconduct. The very terms of her marriage to Andrew made her vulnerable to criticism: Her sovereignty subverted what Jean le Fèvre, in The Lamentations of Matheolus, would call “the natural order of things,” upending the marital power dynamic and creating a situation in which “confusion reigned.”

Since the incorporation of Roman law into canon law in the twelfth century, a husband’s lordship had been legally codified and husbands seen to stand in the place of God with their wives. Gratian’s Decretum (ca. 1140) insisted on the legal and moral imperative that women be subject to their husbands (C. 33 q. 5 cc. 11–20). Gratian argues that it is the “natural order among humans that women serve men,” because it is men and not women who are made in God’s image (C. 33 q. 5 cc. 12, 13). Drawing on Jerome, he states that “when a Christian woman wants to command a man, the word of God is blasphemed,” although even among “gentiles” women serve men, according to natural law (C. 33 q. 5 c. 15). Johanna’s relationship to Andrew thus existed in a state of imbalance that could be extended to apply to her assertion of sovereignty, which gave her rule not merely over one man but over many. 

Accordingly, Johanna’s critics amplified her refusal to conform to gender norms. They presented her as devoid of appropriate womanly propriety or feeling, ruling only through an inversion of the natural order that should have made Andrew king. In retelling the story of Andrew’s murder, Johanna’s enemies presented the events leading up to his death and the crime itself as evidence of her unfitness to rule, framing their critiques as an indictment of Johanna’s sexual morality and, implicitly, of regnant queenship. Andrew’s mother was among the first to formally accuse Johanna of murder and to use that accusation to argue for the Hungarian right to rule Naples. Writing to Clement VI after she learned of Johanna’s proposed remarriage, Elizabeth of Poland excoriated her former daughter-in-law for her immorality, accused her of viricide, and demanded that the Kingdom of Naples be ceded to Louis of Hungary.

Those who opposed Johanna’s rule quickly took up Elizabeth’s charges. Boccaccio, who had spent much of his youth in Naples and who, with his patron, Francesco degli Ordelaffi, may have joined the Hungarian troops besieging Naples in 1348, wrote about Andrew’s murder in his third eclogue. In the poem, Andrew’s poetic double, Alexis, is murdered by a rabid, pregnant she-wolf (lupa), whom most critics agree is Johanna. In Latin and Italian, lupa means both she-wolf and prostitute. On one level, Boccaccio equated Johanna’s sexuality with bestial irrationality, drawing on the Thomistic teaching that submission to bodily desires renders humans animal-like. Ovid, one of Boccaccio’s poetic models, ironically portrayed female sexuality as bestial, or even rabid, without bounds and far exceeding that of men, playing on tropes about female sexuality that were already timeworn when he wrote.

Albert the Great provided the natural philosophical corollary to this argument, representing the insatiability of female sexuality as subhuman, something that “deviates from the ideal course of nature.” Boccaccio amplifies this: His Johanna is not merely rabid, she is an animal. Sex and violence are wed in her, her characterization as a prostitute tied to her violent, maddened animal nature in a metaphor that Edward Muir argues Italian chroniclers often used to “explain human violence by showing how [perpetrators] had crossed the line into bestiality.” Boccaccio thus stripped Johanna of her humanity, discursively making her both a wolf and a prostitute and linking her to a long line of disordered queens, from Empress Messalina (ca. 17–48 AD) to The Golden Legend’s Lupa, antagonist of James the Greater, who were also typed as wolves.

Similarly, a previously unknown epistolary manifesto written in the voice of the Neapolitan people on the eve of the first Hungarian invasion laments Andrew’s death and the loss of his potential for greatness, faulting Johanna’s “charms” for the murder and claiming that her training as a queen had accomplished nothing beyond the impending doom of her people. The manifesto, written in highly rhetorical Latin, echoes papal letters about Andrew’s death in presenting the slain prince as the lost hope of the Neapolitan people—a future crusader, a just and devoted king, and a virtuous innocent whose demise signified the loss of a promising future and the commencement of a time of tragedy and suffering. In its estimation of Andrew’s unrealized potential, the letter recalls Clement’s description of his own loss and Rupescissa’s prophetic foreboding about the significance of Andrew’s death, although it diverges from these accounts in its treatment of Johanna. 

For this author, Johanna, as the instrument of her husband’s murder, was also the cause of her people’s anguish, having robbed them of the golden age that would have been under Andrew’s rule only to expose them to the imminent depredations of Hungarian invaders. All such defamatory narratives cast aspersions on Johanna’s chastity. In asserting their right to the Neapolitan throne, the Hungarians and their supporters indicted Johanna not only for murder but also for sexual crimes—the charms alluded to by the Neapolitan manifesto—and proffered her licentiousness as evidence that she was unfit to rule her kingdom. Indeed, they portray Andrew’s murder as yet another expression of Johanna’s debased moral character, inextricably linked to her adultery and the dissipation of her court. 

A Hungarian manuscript of Gentile of Foligno’s commentary on the prophecy Ve mundo in centum annis, for instance, identifies a prediction of a slain king with Andrew’s murder. Gentile’s commentary, likely written around 1332, links the murder of the strangled king with his long and reluctant endurance of the “abominable wantonness” of his queen, which is how Gentile interprets the prophecy’s statement that the unnamed Apulian king “gulps down the menstruations of the bride.” Sometime around 1348, an anonymous glossator read Gentile’s commentary as a reference to Johanna’s notorious cuckolding of Andrew, creating a new prophetic tradition that found its way into the Hungarian manuscript. The glossator notes that the Hungarians will seize the kingdom in retribution, “because they have not anointed their lord and king, but rather have killed him with quite a terrible death.” The kingdom as a whole will suffer for the queen’s sins: “they will be cast down on the earth, and they will find no aid on that day . . . because she is the murderess of her lord.”

Thus, like the author of the Neapolitan manifesto, the anonymous glossator effectively argues that Johanna’s refusal to allow Andrew’s anointing and her infamous sexual profligacy were the source of Naples’s ruin as well as of Andrew’s murder. According to the standards of Roman law set down in the Digest and recognized in both common and canon law, the adultery and murder of which Johanna stood accused qualified her as legally infamous and, consequently, unfit to hold public office. In legal terms, the very fact of Johanna’s infamy might have invalidated her rule. While the textual campaign waged against Johanna could not depose her, it could demonstrate the consequences of her rule and expose her inappropriateness—in moral and sexual terms—as a ruler. It could also condemn her in the court of public opinion, creating a negative reputation—a mala fama—that rendered her morally dangerous through its very existence. 

Thus, the story of Andrew’s murder became in the hands of many commentators a way to argue for Johanna’s deposition. Andrew’s unrecognized legitimacy and horrible death form the narrative substance in these accounts, but their primary function was to expose the iniquity of Johanna’s reign. Chroniclers who sought to demonize Johanna stressed Andrew’s meekness and innocence to expose her wickedness. Although none went so far as to suggest Andrew’s canonization, they presented him as nearly saintly, and his suffering and patience—hallmarks of fourteenth-century sainthood—serve to render him within such texts a martyr sacrificed to his wife’s ambition. As a result, chroniclers often portrayed Johanna and her companions tormenting Andrew and living dissolutely, drunk on their own misbegotten power. 

The author of the later fourteenth-century Storie Pistoresi, for example, drew on reports that Johanna had willfully exposed Andrew to mockery to cast her and her court as villains who preyed on him and took advantage of his youth. Domenico da Gravina (echoing Petrarch) describes Andrew as “a little lamb among wolves,” badly treated by his queen and her court. He dubs Andrew “the wretched duke” (dux miser) and describes his blind trust in those who wished him ill, leading him to acquiesce, with childlike trust, to his murderers’ invitation to accompany them to Aversa. Domenico goes on to report that Johanna failed to weep for Andrew and left his corpse unattended and unmourned until a canon took mercy on it and buried it in a manner befitting a king—suggesting that the canon recognized Andrew in death as the king he had been by right in life.”

- Elizabeth Casteen, “The Murder of Andrew of Hungary and the Making of a Neapolitan She–Wolf.” in From She-Wolf to Martyr

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“On May 29, 1343, Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) wrote to Robert’s former secretary, Barbato da Sulmona (d. 1363), about the state of affairs in Naples.  …Petrarch’s letter describes his grief over Robert’s death and his fears about impending disaster in the divided court: I am really alarmed about the youthfulness of the young queen, and of the new king, about the age and intent of [Sancia], about the talents and ways of the courtiers. I wish that I could be a lying prophet about these things, but I see two lambs entrusted to the care of a multitude of wolves, and I see a kingdom without a king. How can I call someone a king who is ruled by another and who is exposed to the greed of so many and (I sadly add) to the cruelty of so many? …Some days later, Petrarch wrote again to Cardinal Colonna to describe the gangs of noblemen who terrorized Naples by night and the bloody gladiatorial games staged there by day. 

The royal family sanctioned the games, and, according to Petrarch, on the day he accidentally happened upon them, “the Queen was present, as was Prince Andrew, a boy of noble mind, if ever he were to assume the long-deferred crown.” Petrarch saw a troubling connection between the nightly brigandage and daytime gladiatorial games. He presented the Regno’s chief city as mired in immorality, a place where evil was tolerated and even supported by those designated to rule. Furthermore, he seems in this letter to anticipate the day when Andrew would don the “long-deferred crown” and restore order to the kingdom. His letter suggests that he hoped Andrew would grow from a noble-minded boy into a mature king who would rule alongside Johanna, whom Petrarch unquestionably recognized as the Regno’s queen. His picture of her rule, however, suggests that she was as yet unfit to reign and that the governing council meant to prevent disorder had led Naples into chaos and violence. 

…As time passed and Johanna became increasingly intractable and her supporters—to whom she alienated vast amounts of territory—were increasingly reputed to control Naples, Clement began to insist that Andrew be recognized as Johanna’s co-ruler, in name if not in fact. On March 31, 1344, he wrote to the Regno via Aimery, informing its people that Andrew and Johanna were to be anointed as king and queen, thus giving Andrew public recognition as Johanna’s titular equal. From mid-April onward, Clement insisted that Andrew be allowed some part in the administration, and he began to address both Andrew and Johanna in official correspondence. Yet Clement’s letters to Aimery about the Regno’s administration continue to refer solely to Johanna as monarch. In a letter of May 22, 1344, regarding Johanna’s oath of fealty to her papal suzerain, no mention is made of Andrew at all.

…Attempting to persuade Johanna of Andrew’s merit, Clement described his beata stirps and royal lineage, insisting that he was possessed of innate goodness and virtue, with elegance, circumspection, and diligence—to the extent that his age would allow. Furthermore, the pope wrote, Andrew had inherited and exhibited the attractive ways of his forebears, which, with the aid of divine grace, must (one day) make him a vigorous man with many virtues. Yet Andrew’s potential lay in the future—what Clement saw in him was but the promise of the man he might become, and he seems to have had little idea of allowing Andrew to actually rule Naples. Matters came to a head early in the summer of 1345. Aimery, despite Clement’s initial determination to recall him from Naples in December 1344, had remained to monitor the explosive situation.

Writing to Philip VI of France on May 11, Clement explained that Johanna continued to make territorial alienations and refused to allow Andrew to participate in government business. On June 10, 1345, Clement instructed Johanna in no uncertain terms to allow Andrew to be crowned, anointed, and allowed into her administration. In a second letter of the same day, Clement again told her that she should allow Andrew to partake in the administration of the realm and not hinder his kingship with “contrary suggestions.” Yet, despite Hungarian threats, Neapolitan plots, and the growing impatience of the papacy, Johanna refused to capitulate. She wrote to Clement objecting to Andrew’s elevation, expressing her determination to retain control of her administration and arguing that no one could better look after Andrew’s interests and honor than she herself—suggesting an interesting inversion in Johanna’s understanding of gender roles within her marriage.

Clement’s irritation with Johanna was clearly growing. On July 9, he threatened her with excommunication if she continued to make territorial alienations. He attributed the bad blood between Andrew and Johanna to the machinations of their familiars—including the very people to whom Johanna was making such large donations—who sowed discord between them to further their own interests and influence. Aimery’s reports depict the Neapolitan court as the proverbial house divided against itself, its factionalism approaching mayhem. Yet later in the summer, partially owing to the intervention of Guillaume Lamy, bishop of Chartres (d. 1349), who replaced Aimery as papal nuncio and Johanna’s advisor in February 1345, the situation seemed to have ameliorated. Clement could praise both Andrew and Johanna for having surrounded themselves with wise, God-fearing advisors.

It was at about this time that Johanna’s pregnancy, and thus the imminent birth of an heir, was announced, and it seemed that impending parenthood might bring peace to Naples’s embattled royal couple. The brief peace was not to last. On July 28, 1345, Sancia died, and with her death the ruling council Robert had established—already rendered formally defunct by Aimery—died as well. Without her influence, bedlam broke out. Johanna was reportedly engaged in numerous adulterous affairs, including with her cousin, Louis of Taranto (d. 1362). Guillaume Lamy wrote to Clement in frustration that Johanna had abandoned her husband to the mockery of her retinue. The Tuscan scholar Donato degli Albanzani, commenting on his friend Giovanni Boccaccio’s Eclogues, later wrote of rumors that Johanna and her followers openly laughed at Andrew, while the Neapolitan Domenico da Gravina (d. ca. 1355) recorded in his Chronicle that Andrew grew incensed by his ill treatment and made childish demonstrations of military prowess as a threat of future retaliation against his enemies, should he ever come into power.

Further rumors of this sort reached Clement, who wrote to Johanna in May 1346 about sinister allegations regarding her conduct during Andrew’s life. Late in the summer, Clement decided that Andrew must quickly be given a real role in government. He instructed Aimery to crown and anoint Andrew, and plans for the coronation went forward. The legate set out for Naples from Avignon with a papal bull empowering him to perform a double coronation of the king and queen, who would be anointed together and recognized as co-rulers of the Regno. Clement began to send letters addressed only to Andrew regarding how he should treat papal representatives, probably because he feared Johanna would attempt to prevent the coronation. Indeed, on September 20, more than a day after Andrew’s murder, he wrote to Johanna warning her not to temporize about being crowned and anointed; the next day he wrote to Andrew, telling him to delay the ceremony no longer.

Even at this juncture, Andrew was not accorded specific powers; indeed, he was forced to sign a document stating that he had no rights to the kingdom. Johanna’s pregnancy made the issue of who should succeed her if she died in childbirth urgent. Andrew and all of the Neapolitan clergy and nobility were required to swear a public oath that Andrew would not be declared king if Johanna died. Whatever his claims about Andrew’s suitability for rulership, Clement clearly believed that he would seize the throne if given the opportunity—an eventuality Clement feared and sought to prevent. Johanna was unquestionably the queen regnant, and it was she whom Clement meant to rule Naples. Up to this point, Clement had trusted Andrew only with small matters and had placated him with virtually empty concessions. Even in preparing for his coronation, Clement felt the need to ensure that Andrew could not wield power independently. The pope’s caution, however, proved insufficient to calm the anxieties plaguing the factions in Naples, whose members must have feared the power that fatherhood and even nominal kingship would give Andrew.”

- Elizabeth Casteen, “The Murder of Andrew of Hungary and the Making of a Neapolitan She–Wolf.” in From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples

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“...What did it mean for Birgitta and Johanna to be friends? Birgitta saw the world in black and white, starkly distinguishing between good and evil. Eva Österberg has argued that Birgitta’s essentially dualist worldview made her see “temporal friendship as evil and disastrous.” In Birgitta’s thought, friendship was a snare, a possible seduction away from God. The only acceptable friendship was based on faith in God, one in which friends turned to one another for spiritual comfort. As a spiritual advisor, Birgitta offered such friendship to her followers, including Johanna, to whom she was in some sense both friend and mother. It was an edifying relationship, one built around divine service and predicated on Birgitta’s moral and spiritual superiority. This was not a Ciceronian friendship between two equals but rather one that united a spiritual advisor and an acolyte in an unequal partnership governed by conformity to God’s will. 

Yet, in the case of Birgitta and Johanna, it also played the classical role of enhancing the virtue and standing of both. Johanna appears to have happily accepted the role of Birgitta’s spiritual daughter and friend, receiving Birgitta’s rebukes and instruction and allying herself with others who welcomed the saint’s maternal role in their lives. It is in this light that we should read Birgitta’s prophecy for Johanna: It was a sign of her friendship and concern, the opposite of the flattery Birgitta warned queens against. Her reception of Birgitta’s harsh maternal criticism aligned Johanna with Birgitta’s biological daughter, Katherine, whom Birgitta also guided with a stern hand and for whom she also received critical visions and instructions. Katherine’s fifteenth-century biographer reveals that when, as a young widow in Rome, Katherine began to long for Sweden and married life, Birgitta had her literally whipped her into acceptance of a life devoted to divine service, so that her sanctity was in large measure due to her mother’s discipline.

Birgitta was a harsh taskmaster, and those who accepted her maternal guidance had to accept her strict, sometimes painful, instruction. Medieval friendship, like friendship as theorized by Cicero or Aristotle, might be private—a potentially risky enterprise fraught with moral danger—or public. The latter type of friendship applies to the case of Johanna and Birgitta, who, whatever their personal feelings and whatever real intimacy or familiarity they shared, performed their friendship in public. If we step back and look at their friendship as contemporaries would have perceived it, what we see is the performance. Birgitta’s prophetic diatribe against Naples, for instance, was delivered in a public forum provided by Johanna, who asked her to pray and prophesy for her people—in whose best interest Johanna thus publicly acted. It was delivered to a panel of theologians called by Johanna to examine Birgitta, giving her friend a public platform to earn the theological approval that would be crucial to securing her canonization. 

Birgitta’s saintliness reflected well on Johanna, because it suggested that she was worthy of Birgitta’s concern, while Johanna’s status as both reformed sinner and pious queen reflected well on Birgitta, who inspired some of Johanna’s most public acts of piety. It was not merely Birgitta’s prophetic voice and judgment that Johanna helped to publicize, but also a vision of Christ’s birth that Birgitta received in Jerusalem. Birgitta’s vision was central to her Marian piety, and Johanna’s decision to help disseminate it demonstrates her determination to foster Birgitta’s cult and to be associated with it. …Numerous scholars have noted the increase in religious foundations during the years of Johanna’s friendship with Birgitta and hypothesized that her contrition for the sins Birgitta exposed drove her to make such bequests. Johanna’s decision to display Birgitta’s vision of the Nativity in the new royal foundation of Sant’Antonio Abate certainly suggests a connection between her religious patronage and her friendship with Birgitta. 

Whether or not she was prompted by contrition, Johanna took pains to appear to heed Birgitta, demonstrating her reception of the saint’s message and the depth of her religious commitment. Of particular note is a clear instance of Johanna following a public directive given by Birgitta. As mentioned above, Birgitta railed during her public revelation against the practice of keeping Muslim slaves who were not forced to convert to Christianity and sold as prostitutes. In response to this criticism, Johanna freed an enslaved Turkish woman and sent her to Birgitta in Rome. Birgitta died before meeting her, but the woman—who became Katerina Magnusadottir, combining the names of Birgitta’s daughter, Katherine, and Magnus Petri—accompanied Birgitta’s family and companions when they took her relics to Sweden. Vadstena Abbey’s memory book reveals that she remained there as a nun until her death some years later. After Birgitta’s death, Johanna continued to assert her personal devotion by insisting on Birgitta’s sainthood. Katherine traveled to the Regno as part of her campaign to canonize her mother, while Bernard du Bousquet, Johanna’s firm ally, began taking depositions about Birgitta’s miracles there in 1376.

…Birgitta’s sanctity was evident, Johanna argues, through the innumerable visions she received in her capacity as Christ’s bride, as through her determination not to remain in Sweden but to illuminate the world—including Naples—with her piety. Johanna insists that Birgitta’s blessedness was beyond all doubt and calls upon Gregory to hear the supplication of his “devoted daughter” that Birgitta be entered into the catalog of saints. In so doing, she stresses her own links to the saint and evokes her special relationship to the pope, simultaneously asserting the veracity of her experience of Birgitta’s holiness and the value of her voice in extolling it. She thus became in a sense, through her patronage as through her experience, a partner in Birgitta’s sanctity. Johanna’s share in Birgitta’s sanctity was also revealed by a miracle that the saint performed at her behest for the son of James of Majorca’s sister, Isabella, marchioness of Montferrat (1337–1406). 

Proof of Birgitta’s posthumous miracles was crucial to demonstrating her sainthood, and it is significant that Johanna herself provided that evidence. During the canonization trial, Katherine described a letter she received from Johanna as proof of her mother’s posthumous intercessory power. The letter, which survives in a Swedish manuscript, is very straightforward. Johanna wrote to inform Katherine of the miracle, saying that she knew her friend was always eager to hear “happy news” (leta nova). She explains that her nephew, William of Montferrat (1365–1400), was so ill that the doctors despaired of his life, prompting Johanna to pray to Birgitta for help. Shortly thereafter, the boy returned to health. Katherine’s account of the letter, however, is more complex. She embroidered Johanna’s narrative in a way that redounded to Johanna’s credit as well as to Birgitta’s, heightening the drama and expanding Johanna’s role in it. 

In her deposition, Katherine revealed a letter by the lady Johanna, queen of Sicily, which she sent to Lady Katherine giving witness, in which was contained a miracle for a certain son of the marchioness of Montferrat, whom the doctors judged to be nearly departed from life. And then the aforesaid lady queen touched him with a certain small golden cross, which the Blessed Birgitta had given her, and called upon her in prayer, and the aforesaid boy was immediately well. This lady queen entrusted the news of this miracle in that same letter, sealed with her secret seal, and said therein that quite thirty persons were present, who abundantly filled the place, when the aforesaid boy rose up, healed. In the initial act of sending such a letter, Johanna created a partnership between herself and Katherine, the two women united to prove the sanctity of the woman who was the spiritual mother to one and the earthly mother of the other. 

Johanna portrayed herself to Katherine—who subsequently portrayed Johanna to the canonization commission—as enjoying a friendship with Birgitta that continued after the saint’s death, ensuring her Birgitta’s intercession and protection. Katherine’s expanded account emphasizes the two women’s closeness, which inspired Birgitta to give the queen a gift—the golden cross—that, Katherine suggests, Johanna carried with her thereafter. Katherine also evoked a domestic, maternal Johanna, a devoted queen and loving aunt who kept vigil at the sick child’s bedside. Reaching for the golden cross given to her by a woman already renowned for her sanctity, Katherine’s epistolary Johanna is pious and compassionate, demonstrating her faith in her friend’s power, as in Christ’s, when hope in medicine had failed. Katherine’s rendition of events emphasizes Johanna’s piety, relying on it to underscore Birgitta’s sanctity. Birgitta’s holiness suffuses Johanna, who is a fitting conduit for Birgitta’s healing power. Thus, the Birgittine investment in Johanna’s reputation was great, tying Birgitta’s miracle directly to Johanna’s behavior and building the case for Birgitta’s sanctity, at least in part, on Johanna’s role as her devoted follower and friend.”

- Elizabeth Casteen, “An “Especially Good Friend” to Saints: Friendship, Politics, and the Performance of Sovereignty.” in From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples

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“Among scholars of late medieval spirituality, Johanna is perhaps best known for her relationship with Birgitta. For many modern scholars—as for Margareta Clausdotter—the friendship between the fastidious Swedish prophetess and Naples’s purportedly lascivious queen has long presented a conundrum. Birgitta’s rich, prolific career intersected Johanna’s at crucial junctures, and there is abundant evidence for their friendship. Birgitta’s biting prophetic invective against Naples’s queen, as well as her apparent affection for her, are often remarked on in Birgittine scholarship. Despite Birgitta’s visions of Johanna (discussed below), there is overwhelming evidence of their mutual regard. Johanna was a prominent supporter of early efforts to canonize Birgitta and promote her cult, and she played an important role in the saint’s later years.

…Johanna’s patronage of Birgitta had its reward: In the Regno and elsewhere, especially in early Birgittine literature, Johanna was memorialized as the saint’s “especially good friend.” Johanna’s friendship with Birgitta began in 1365, when Birgitta visited the tomb of St. Thomas at Ortona. After she miraculously healed the son of Lapa Buondelmonte, Niccolò Acciaiuoli’s sister, Birgitta entered court circles and met Johanna. …Birgitta stopped again in Naples as she traveled from Jerusalem back to Rome, where she had lived since 1350, remaining for several months as Johanna’s guest while she recovered from the arduous journey. She gained fame in Naples for her public attacks on the city’s immorality—prompted by Johanna herself, who asked Birgitta to pray and prophesy for her people and arranged for a panel of theologians to examine her prophecies—and for the healing miracles she performed. Birgitta spoke out against what she perceived as Neapolitan depravity and gave Johanna herself a long, detailed vision about the precarious condition of her soul. 

After Birgitta’s death, Johanna promoted her canonization, lobbying Gregory XI to recognize her friend’s sanctity and sponsoring the gathering of witness testimony in Naples. She even testified that Birgitta worked a posthumous healing miracle for her, evoking a relationship that continued beyond the grave. Scholars have traditionally treated the relationship between the Neapolitan queen and the Swedish saint as contentious and even hostile, expressing puzzlement that Birgitta, given her criticism of Johanna, never disavowed her friendship. Drawing primarily on Margareta Clausdotter’s chronicle and the final textual redaction of Birgitta’s Revelations, modern biographers have constructed a fraught relationship between the saint—pious, abstemious, chaste (since her widowhood), and inflexibly moral—and Naples’s infamous, dissolute queen. 

According to this narrative, Birgitta disapproved of Johanna’s lifestyle and condemned her excessive sensuality, leading her to rebuke the queen severely. Common among historians’ claims regarding their relationship is the charge that Birgitta did not “agree with [Johanna] on political matters, especially with regard to the papacy,” whose continued residency in Avignon many erroneously assume Johanna encouraged. Based solely on the evidence in her Revelations, Birgitta considered Johanna an inadequate ruler. She was horrified when she first traveled in the Regno by the disrepair into which its holy sites had fallen and scandalized by its subjects’ lax morals and shameless habits (Rev. VII.4:9; Rev. VII.28). Her Revelations reveal Birgitta’s disgust with Neapolitan dress and customs, as with the city’s sexual permissiveness and the consequent frequency of abortions (Rev. VII.27: 18–23, 26–27). She likewise objected to the practice of keeping Muslim slaves who were not made to convert to Christianity and often forced into prostitution, and she deplored superstitious tendencies that led Neapolitans to employ witches and fortunetellers (Rev. VII.28:9, 12–13, 18–22).

As the Regno’s sovereign, Johanna was implicated in its sins, and Birgitta urged her to reform herself and her people. She criticized her directly as well. Even before Birgitta met Johanna, she critiqued the Angevin dynasty for its irregular marriages, which, she learned in a vision, detracted from the worth of its religious bequests, regardless of whether such marriages received papal approbation (Rev. VII.4:15–16). Birgitta directed her criticism as much toward the papacy as toward Johanna, but Johanna’s marriage to Louis of Taranto exemplified such irregularity, earning Birgitta’s censure. Birgitta also received two revelations (probably on behalf of Lapa Buondelmonte) regarding Niccolò Acciaiuoli’s suffering in purgatory, where he endured torment for his role in arranging Johanna and Louis’s consanguineous union. A harsh critic of her times and contemporaries, Birgitta reserved some of her harshest criticism for Johanna. 

Chapter eleven of book VII of her Revelations details visions Birgitta received in Naples around the time of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Given to Johanna at Birgitta’s request by the archbishop of Naples, it contains biting castigation of the queen. Birgitta chastises her for sexual immorality, claiming that God has told her that Johanna “lived all her life like a wanton woman, rather than a queen” and enjoining her to truthfully confess and atone for her sins. She directs her to seek better counselors and distance herself from flattery, as well as to strive to honor God by living with greater contrition, charity, modesty, and humility. Birgitta goes on to predict that Johanna will die childless (“non habebit prolem de utero suo”) and advises her to work to safeguard her kingdom from chaos after her death and to be more mindful of justice (and less of wealth) during the time remaining to her.

She offers guidance on the Regno’s administration as well, particularly regarding its finances, counseling Johanna to lighten existing taxes and not impose new ones, to serve her poor subjects and alleviate their poverty, and to establish peace and concord among them (Rev. VII.11:10, 13, 14). The revelation continues with dire commentary on the state of Johanna’s soul. Birgitta describes a vision that exposes Johanna’s true character and predicts calamity if she should continue on her present course: . . . . A lady was seen standing in a shift spattered with semen and mud. And a voice was heard: “This lady is a monkey smelling its own reeking backside, which has poison in its heart, is noxious to itself, and rushes into traps that make it fall.”  Likewise, she was seen to have a crown made of twigs spattered with human feces and mud from the streets and to sit naked on a wobbling beam. And immediately a most beautiful virgin was seen, who said: “This is that impudent and bold woman reputed by men to be a lady of the world, but she has been cast out from before God’s eyes, as you discern.” 

And the virgin added: “Oh, woman, think of your beginning and attend to your end, and open the eyes of your heart and see that your counselors are such men as hate your soul!” Likewise, about a certain queen. A woman was seen to sit upon a throne of gold, with two Ethiopians standing before her, one, as it were, to her right and the other to her left. And the one to the right cried out, saying, “Oh, leonine woman, I bear blood. Receive it and pour it out, because it is fitting for the lioness to thirst after blood.” And truly, the one to the left said, “Oh woman, I bring you fire in a dish. Receive it, because you are of a fiery nature, and pour it into the waters, so that your memory might be in the waters as on the land.”  And after this, there appeared a virgin of wondrous splendor, at the sight of whom the Ethiopians fled. She said, “This woman is dangerous. If she succeeds in her will, many will be in tribulation. Yet truly, if she herself is troubled, it will be of use to her toward eternal life; but she does not wish to abandon her will or to experience tribulation in accordance with God’s will. Therefore, if she is abandoned to her own will, she will be no consolation either to herself or to others.”

Despite this unflattering portrait, the revelation ends with the hope that Johanna—whose pious works, Christ tells Birgitta, have won divine favor—will mend her ways, escaping the opprobrium of both God and humanity (Rev. VII.11:32). Her sinfulness, though extraordinary, is not absolute; the revelation functions as a jeremiad, exhorting Johanna to repentance and reformation. Given the virulence of Birgitta’s description of Johanna, the continued friendship between the two women throughout what remained of Birgitta’s life, not to mention Johanna’s efforts to secure her canonization, has perplexed many scholars. Johannes Jørgensen, the author of a colorful biography of Birgitta, characterizes Johanna as licentious and destructively willful, commenting bemusedly that, “in spite of everything [Birgitta] never broke off the connection with [Johanna]. Bridget Morris notes that while the Regno was once great, “Neapolitan prosperity and culture started to disintegrate” under Johanna’s rule, while her court was “notoriously full of corruption.”

She reflects, It is of interest, therefore, why Birgitta should apparently have become such good friends with the queen, and why the queen should have taken her part in the canonisation process. In spite of Birgitta’s harsh words about the queen . . . [Johanna] appears to have paid heed to Birgitta, and there seems to have been a strong bond of respect and friendship between the two women. According to most biographers, including Jørgensen and Morris, the inspiration for Birgitta’s scathing depiction of Johanna was an adulterous affair between Johanna and Karl Ulfsson, the saint’s eldest son. Both Jørgensen and Tore Nyberg accept as fact that Karl “had a liaison with the queen of Naples,” while Albert Ryle Kezel argues that Johanna’s “worst offense was her questionable relationship with Birgitta’s dying son [Karl] in the winter of 1371–1372.” Thus the common conclusion is that maternal outrage and anxiety shaped Birgitta’s treatment of Johanna. 

The affair is said to have occurred when Karl accompanied his mother, sister, and brother to Naples. Karl—conventionally treated as the most worldly of Birgitta’s eight children—had left his wife behind in Sweden with the intention of returning after fulfilling his pilgrimage vow. When he met Johanna, the story goes, their mutual attraction proved so overwhelming that he determined to abandon his wife and pilgrimage to remain with her, imperiling both of their souls and thoroughly scandalizing his mother. According to Jørgensen, Karl “became [Johanna’s] lover. For both of them it was a late summer’s idyll” that lasted until Karl’s death. Birgitta, however, could not allow her son to live in such sin; through prayer, she brought about his death. 

Morris, who questions the story but incorporates it into her biography nonetheless, sees “Birgitta’s stern judgment in preferring the death of her favourite son to the ignominy of his adulterous relationship with the queen of Naples” as an expression of Birgitta’s moral inflexibility, sharply contrasted by Johanna’s irresponsible sensuality. The story originates with Margareta Clausdotter. Writing a full century after Birgitta’s death, she described Karl as “a very lascivious and lustful man” and offered his dalliance with Johanna as an illustration of his character. For Margareta, Karl was Birgitta’s burden, and his salvation was her pressing task. Karl’s relationship to Birgitta fit within what Barbara Newman has called the “maternal martyr paradigm,” a common late medieval trope in the vitae of saints who were also mothers. 

The trope was already well established in the Birgittine tradition, which often describes Birgitta’s suffering on account and on behalf of her children. According to Margareta, Birgitta instructed her children in the etiquette of the court before presenting them to the queen. In typical fashion, Karl only half heeded his mother’s instructions: “When Karl came before the queen, he [first] did obeisance to her as he should according to her rank, and then he kissed her on the mouth.” Margareta relates that Johanna—now in her midforties—was instantly smitten with Karl, who was some years older: As a result of [Karl’s behavior], the queen conceived a great love for him, because he dared to do this, and she did not want to let him depart, but said rather that she wanted to keep him with her and have him for her husband. Saint Birgitta said that must not be, because his wife lived and was at home in Sweden, but the queen said that she did not care about that and that things should be as she wished.

Birgitta, deeply distraught, prayed for divine aid and was quickly answered by Karl’s sudden illness and death. In so doing, she conformed to the type of the maternal martyr, whom Newman describes as willing, in “extreme cases,” to “consent to [her children’s] deaths,” emulating the Virgin Mary’s acceptance of Christ’s death. While Johanna mourned her dead lover—burying him “with as great expense as if he had been her husband”—Birgitta remained stoic and continued on to Jerusalem. Scholars have read Birgitta’s Revelations against Margareta’s tale of Karl’s doomed affair with Johanna. After the onset of the schism, her Urbanist opponents (whose part Birgitta’s followers took) resurrected Johanna’s reputation for sexual misconduct (see chapter 5); Margareta, like Birgitta’s modern biographers, would likely have known far more about Johanna’s identity as a “harlot queen” than about her fame for piety.

Mindful of Johanna’s reputation for immorality and previous adultery and ignoring the fact that Margareta’s story serves more to exemplify the tension between Karl and Birgitta than to vilify Johanna, Birgitta’s biographers have interpreted the harshness of her visionary treatment of Johanna in light of Margareta’s tale. That Birgitta’s invective against Johanna was rooted in maternal indignation is seemingly supported by another revelation (Rev. VII.13), which Birgitta received regarding the fate of Karl’s soul soon after his death. She experienced a vision that continued intermittently for several days in which the Virgin Mary assured her that she had intervened on Karl’s behalf before the divine tribunal convened to examine his soul. The demon sent to prosecute Karl miraculously forgets his sins, and the Virgin, speaking for the defense, convinces Christ—Karl’s judge—that Birgitta’s years of tears on Karl’s behalf, his lifelong devotion to Mary, and his determination to travel to Jerusalem as a pilgrim should wipe clean his moral slate. 

If one accepts Margareta’s tale of Karl’s romance with Johanna, Birgitta’s apparent anxiety regarding Karl’s salvation can be read as confirmation of the perilous moral state in which he found himself immediately before his death. Following this line of reasoning, Birgitta, comforted by the knowledge that Karl’s soul was saved, was willing to see Johanna again and even remain in Naples for many months as her guest. When she departed from Naples, she was angry enough to send Johanna the revelation cited above, but her rage had calmed enough after her pilgrimage to allow her to maintain her relationship with Johanna and hope for her repentance.”

- Elizabeth Casteen, “An “Especially Good Friend” to Saints: Friendship, Politics, and the Performance of Sovereignty.” in From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples