The advance of Louis d’Anjou upon the capital roused Ladislaus to action, and he hastily gathered together an undisciplined army, and set forth to withstand his rival to the throne. A decisive battle was fought at Rocca Secca, May 19, 1411, wherein Ladislaus’s troops were routed, but Louis failed to follow up his advantage, and Ladislaus retained his throne and continued his debauches. Early in 1412 Queen Margaret, mother of the King and of Giovanna, died somewhat suddenly. She and her entourage had taken refuge from a visitation of plague, which spared neither prince nor peasant, at her villa at Acquamela, six miles from Salerno. She was buried privately in the Cathedral of Salerno, in the crypt over against the marble sarcophagus which contained the ashes of St. Matthew. Whatever influence she may have exerted during the youth of her son and daughter for their good was speedily dissipated, and as soon as Ladislaus had obtained the crown he took steps to circumscribe the liberty of his mother. She appealed to her daughter Giovanna for sympathy, but found none, and the poor old Queen, who had survived her consort, Charles, for six-and-twenty years, was consigned to the Convent of the Annunciation, “so as to be out of the way of mischief,” as her daughter phrased it. The natural rôle of mother was entirely out of place in a palace or at a Court ruled by a libertine and a prostitute. Ladislaus died sadly and alone. His unnatural sister refused to be with him, and all his butterfly courtesans gave to themselves wing when sickness and death entered the royal palace. He died August 6, 1414, leaving no lawful offspring by his three wives, but a numerous family of natural children. No Salic Law governed the succession to the throne in the kingdom of Naples, consequently Giovanna became Queen. The widowed Queen Giovanna had not married again, although she counted lovers by the score; but within a few months of her accession she took steps to ally herself with a Prince who should be the handsomest and wittiest of the time. This determination of Giovanna was noised abroad all over the capitals and Courts of Europe, and forthwith a troop of eligible suitors passed through the ports of Marseilles and Genoa, each bent on taking the ribald Queen at her word. The romance reads like a fairy tale, for each princeling and prince was put through his paces to show his qualifications in person and in purse; for, desperately wicked as she was, the Queen had a commercial sense, and her exchequer stood sorely in need of replenishment. Taken for all in all, Juan d’Arragona, son of King Ferdinand, was the champion of physical beauty, knightly courtesy, and financial competence; but he was no more than a precocious lad of seventeen, whilst the Queen was forty-five. A matrimonial union was ruled to be impossible, and the pride of Aragon would not suffer a scion of her royal house to become the plaything of a lewd Queen.