Joan’s subsequent matrimonial career, although full of variety (she had in all four husbands), was unproductive of issue; and her presumptive heir, Charles, Duke of Durazzo, offended at her last venture in matrimony, took forcible possession of Naples, and, to preclude all opposition to his newly acquired sovereignty, the deposed Joan was by his orders removed from his path by assassination. Avignon was ancient and illustrious before the Popes descended upon it and added a fresh and brilliant page to its already voluminous history. Far back in pre-Roman times, and even before the coming of the adventurous Phoceans, it is probable that some prehistoric Celts had built a city on these same rocky foundations beside the silvery Rhone. The Phoceans from Marseilles saw its possibilities, for under them it became one of the richest cities in the Narbonne, and when, at their invitation, the Romans overran the valley and drove out the barbarians who threatened it and every other fertile spot in Europe, they added further to the fame of Avignon. Very few vestiges of the ancient Roman town remain to-day. Successive ages quarried amongst the massive Roman constructions for material to rebuild their town according to their altering needs. In the Rue des Grottes, a narrow little street, two blocks away from the west front of the Papal Palace, the cellars of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century houses are formed by the arcades of what must have been a vast Roman building; and minute investigators of the town have fancied they could trace the foundations of a theatre near to the Place St. Pierre. But coins and fragments of marble mosaics, Greek and Latin inscriptions, have been found in plenty all through the city, and are now housed and guarded in the Calvet Museum, one of the chief attractions of the town. That Avignon should be lacking in more important Roman monuments such as are the pride of the neighbouring towns of Arles, Nîmes, Orange, and others is quite easily accounted for. When one reads of the numerous invasions and sieges which the city suffered at the hands of vast barbarian hordes, who swept over the land like a devastating tornado during the fourth century of our era, and of the perpetual internecine strife that during the dark ages took place between Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, and Saracens, one no longer feels astonished at the absence of Roman remains of any magnitude. The true history of the Avignon of to-day starts in the twelfth century, when, under circumstances of which the details are now obscured by the mists of time, it became a republic with its own laws and privileges, endowments and revenues, only restricted by the overlordship of its Bishop.