remorse which brought her while yet young to the tomb.
Joan was married in turn to James of Aragon, son of the King of Majorca,
and to Otho of Brunswick, of the imperial family of Saxony. We will pass
rapidly over these years, and come to the denouement of this history of
crime and expiation. James, parted from his wife, continued his stormy
career, after a long contest in Spain with Peter the Cruel, who had
usurped his kingdom: about the end of the year 1375 he died near
Navarre. Otho also could not escape the Divine vengeance which hung over
the court of Naples, but to the end he valiantly shared the queen’s
fortunes. Joan, since she had no lawful heir, adopted her nephew,
Charles de la Paix (so called after the peace of Trevisa). He was the
son of Louis Duras, who after rebelling against Louis of Tarentum, had
died miserably in the castle of Ovo. The child would have shared his
father’s fate had not Joan interceded to spare his life, loaded him with
kindness, and married him to Margaret, the daughter of her sister Marie
and her cousin Charles, who was put to death by the King of Hungary.
Serious differences arose between the queen and one of her former
subjects, Bartolommeo Prigiani, who had become pope under the name of
Urban VI. Annoyed by the queen’s opposition, the pope one day angrily
said he would shut her up in a convent. Joan, to avenge the insult,
openly favoured Clement VII, the anti-pope, and offered him a home in
her own castle, when, pursued by Pope Urban’s army, he had taken refuge
at Fondi. But the people rebelled against Clement, and killed the
Archbishop of Naples, who had helped to elect him: they broke the cross
that was carried in procession before the anti-pope, and hardly allowed
him time to make his escape on shipboard to Provence. Urban declared
that Joan was now dethroned, and released her subjects from their oath
of fidelity to her, bestowing the crown of Sicily and Jerusalem upon
Charles de la Paix, who marched on Naples with 8000 Hungarians. Joan,
who could not believe in such base ingratitude, sent out his wife
Margaret to meet her adopted son, though she might have kept her as a
hostage, and his two children, Ladislaus and Joan, who became later the
second queen of that name. But the victorious army soon arrived at the
gates of Naples, and Charles blockaded the queen in her castle,
forgetting in his ingratitude that she had saved his life and loved him
like a mother.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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