The Maid and the Queen (5 page)

The administration of so large a territory was a daunting task, and one for which John, who was frequently ill—it has been hypothesized that he suffered from a form of epilepsy—was particularly unsuited. To compensate for the king’s deficiencies, his wife inserted herself aggressively into the governing process. In 1388, when John impatiently threatened to disband a particularly fractious meeting of the general assembly, Queen Yolande stepped in and provided the diplomatic initiatives necessary to effect compromise between the crown and its regional representatives. The queen also participated in all the royal councils and accompanied the king on his official visits throughout the realm. “She was very interested in the affairs of state and she wanted always to be at his [the king’s] side, using to her advantage the talents of a woman who knew herself to be beloved by her husband,” wrote Spanish scholar Rafael Tasis I Marca. Yolande of Bar’s activist role, which antagonized many of the functionaries of her husband’s court, strongly influenced
her daughter’s perceptions of the responsibilities associated with government.

But of course the principal civic duty of any medieval princess, particularly one who hailed from so prestigious a realm as Aragon, was to attract the marital attentions of a similarly illustrious suitor, and thereby produce a match that would bring honor, wealth, and territory, or at least some combination of the three, to the kingdom. This obligation Yolande of Aragon managed to fulfill while still a child. For no sooner had her father succeeded to the throne in 1387 than two high-ranking ambassadors, representing the king of Sicily, appeared at the royal court to formally request the princess’s hand. The king of Sicily being only ten years old at the time, the ambassadors were actually sent by his mother, the formidable Marie of Blois. If the councillors to the court of Aragon thought Yolande of Bar an ambitious woman who meddled too much in affairs of state, in Marie of Blois they were about to get an education as to what a resolute and indefatigable female could achieve in the political arena when she set her mind to it.

M
ARIE OF
B
LOIS
was the widow of Louis I, duke of Anjou, count of Provence, and (even though he was French to his core) king of Sicily. Louis I was another of Charles V’s many siblings, which meant he was also the brother of the duchess of Bar.
^*
In the complicated mess that was the genealogy of the French royal family, this made him the queen of Aragon’s uncle, so Marie of Blois was Yolande of Bar’s aunt.

Until the last years of his life, the kingdom of Sicily, which in the fourteenth century encompassed most of Italy south of Rome, was little more to Louis I than a drawing on a map. But in 1381, his distant cousin Joanna I, queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily, had been threatened with invasion and, desperate for allies, had offered to make Louis her heir if he came to her aid. This proposition was too tempting to be refused, and so the following year Louis, adding the prestigious denomination “King of Sicily” to his title, had raised a tremendous army and crossed into Italy. Large armies move slowly, however, and by the time he made it down to Naples, Joanna I was dead and the kingdom held by a rival militia. Louis attempted to take
his legacy by force, but his troops had been decimated by sickness and starvation on the long march south and he was unable to secure a military victory. Refusing to surrender the inheritance he had risked everything to claim, he retreated to the eastern coast of Italy and sent to France for reinforcements. Louis’s persistence was admirable but his luck rather less felicitous, and he died soon thereafter of a chill contracted at a drafty castle, before the requested supplementary regiments had time to arrive.

By any reasonable standard, Louis I’s dream of sovereignty should have died when he did. The French ruling family had no political experience in southern Italy, no knowledge of local customs or the serpentine nature of the various family and baronial alliances necessary to maintain power. They were hazy even on the geography of the place. But none of this stopped Louis’s widow, Marie of Blois, from relentlessly pursuing what she considered to be her family’s lawful inheritance. She was an intensely practical middle-aged woman and must have known that her chances of succeeding at so ambitious a quest were low. But she had two sons, the eldest of whom, Louis II, was just seven when his father died, and opportunities to claim large, prestigious kingdoms didn’t materialize every day. Marie had no intention of letting this one slip by without a fight.

The first step was to get little Louis II officially recognized as count of Provence. This was itself a difficult task, as most of the towns in the county, hearing of the death of Louis I, were in revolt. To achieve her goal, Marie would have to force the rebellious Provençal barons, grown men all, to go down on one knee and do homage to her son.

And so at the age of forty Marie pawned her valuables, everything she owned right down to the gold and silver dinner service, and bought herself an army. It wasn’t a large army—only “400 lances,” which translated into about fifteen hundred men—but Marie counted on its being just formidable enough to give the opposition pause. Then, with her son by her side, and her remaining money from this transaction conveniently stashed in silver coins in her saddlebags, she led her force into Provence.

She stopped in village after village, introducing Louis II to the local officials and noblemen, graciously listening to their grievances and, more important, dispensing privileges and largesse. With her gifts of silver and her ever-present soldiers hovering ominously by her side, Marie proved herself a master of the art of carrot and stick. Her reputation swelled as town after town, baron after baron, came over to her side and paid homage to her son. “And for certain this
lady was very astute in her ability to determine who could serve and help her… and for magnanimity and courage of heart she exceeded many of the princes of her time and for this reason was greatly feared, prized, and esteemed,” observed Jehan de Bourdigné. The rebellion fizzled in the face of Marie’s steely-eyed determination, personal charm, and large cache of cash. By the fall of 1387, Louis II’s authority was firmly established and at the age of ten he was able to enter the capital city of Aix, where he was accorded all of the rights, dignities, and income due to the official count of Provence.

Having secured her son’s inheritance, Marie looked to similarly settle his future. No sooner was Louis II formally invested with his title than his mother made her first overture to the court of Aragon, sending two high-ranking Provençal knights to King John to ask for the hand of the princess Yolande in marriage. John was interested enough to send an envoy to Provence to discuss the details, and even seems to have committed himself, in a general way, to the alliance.

Having come this far, Marie continued to lobby aggressively for her son’s advancement, and especially for his legitimate installation as king of Sicily. By this time, Charles V was dead, and his son, Charles VI, had ascended to the throne of France. Charles VI was very fond of his young cousin and lent authority to Marie’s cause, first by knighting Louis II at a grand celebration held in Saint-Denis, and then by agreeing to attend a coronation for the boy in Avignon, seat of the papal court.

At last, on All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1389, in a solemn ceremony witnessed by an august assembly including the king of France and his retinue, the pope crowned twelve-year-old Louis II king of Sicily, Naples, and Jerusalem.
^*
With the public support of the French crown came aid of a more tangible nature, and the following August, Marie had the satisfaction of watching her son, accompanied by a papal legate, sail out of Marseille at the head of a fleet of warships bound for Naples, with the intention of conquering his kingdom.

She would not see him again for nine years.

N
EGOTIATIONS BETWEEN
Marie of Blois and the court of Aragon for a marriage between her son and Princess Yolande had continued throughout
the period preceding Louis II’s embarkation for Italy. An alliance with King John was critical to the success of Marie’s plans. The crown of Aragon controlled much of the Mediterranean, including the island of Sicily itself. Marie could not take the risk that powerful Aragon would try to thwart her son’s title to his adopted kingdom by sending an army to fight against him. A way had to be found to neutralize Aragonese ambitions in southern Italy. To unite both parties’ interests by arranging a marriage between Louis II and Yolande of Aragon seemed the perfect solution.

But while such a union was certainly to be desired by Marie of Blois and her family, the advantages to Aragon were less obvious, particularly as Louis II’s uncles, the dukes of Berry and Burgundy, demanded a dowry of at least 200,000 francs. This seemed a large sum to pay for a thirteen-year-old king who had yet to secure his realm. Yolande was an only child, and a very pretty one at that, and her parents were convinced that their daughter’s royal lineage, powerful connections, and considerable personal charms merited a brilliant match. The marriage negotiations with Provence ground to a halt. To extricate the crown of Aragon from whatever legal difficulties might arise from the verbal assurances given in the past, when she was eleven years old, Yolande signed a document disavowing any promise made by her or her ambassadors on the grounds that these had been wrung from her before she reached thirteen, the age of consent.

In this way was the ground laid for the appearance of a rival suitor, and in due course he presented himself. In 1395, when Yolande was fourteen, emissaries from the recently widowed Richard II, king of England, arrived at her parents’ favorite castle at Zaragoza to solicit the princess’s hand. A nuptial agreement with the twenty-eight-year-old Richard, who actually ruled his kingdom, and had the sort of financial, diplomatic, and military resources that might prove useful to Aragon in the future, was much more in keeping with her parents’ views of their daughter’s station in life, and they entered into negotiations enthusiastically.

This marriage, with its implied expectation of an alliance at the highest levels between France’s perpetual enemy, England, and the powerful kingdom of Aragon, was sufficiently disquieting to provoke an energetic response from the French king. Charles VI hastily offered the hand of his own daughter, Isabelle, supplemented by a massive dowry of 500,000 francs to Richard. Despite the French princess’s extreme youth—she was six years old—Charles VI’s proposal was accepted by the English, and Isabelle and a down
payment of 200,000 francs were conducted to London, there to await the bride’s reaching the venerable age of thirteen or fourteen, at which point it would be legally permissible for her patient middle-aged husband to consummate the marriage, the trigger at which the remaining 300,000 francs of the dowry would be paid.
^*

Any hopes for the appearance of a third royal suitor were dashed the following year when King John, out riding in yet another hunt—perhaps not the happiest choice of sport for a man with epilepsy—was thrown, or more likely fell, from his horse and died. Yolande of Bar did everything she could to retain ownership of both her crown and the royal castle at Zaragoza, even going so far as to claim that she was pregnant with the king’s posthumous male heir. But after a few months this ruse was inevitably discovered, and the queen was forced to give way to the new king of Aragon, John’s younger brother, Martin.

The responsibility for choosing Princess Yolande’s future husband now fell to her uncle, and the issue was revisited almost immediately when yet another ambassador, this one representing the French court, appeared in Zaragoza. The indefatigable Marie of Blois had prevailed upon the French king to help her bring about the union of her house with that of Aragon, and to please her Charles VI sent one of his most trusted knights to lobby for the marriage of Yolande to Louis II. The new king of Aragon, with an unmarried sixteen-year-old girl on his hands, was receptive to the idea, but negotiations again foundered, this time because the bride herself opposed the match. Her objection to Louis II did not seem to be personal—after all, she’d never met the man—but rather political. Yolande, having been raised in Aragon, identified with her native kingdom. Louis II’s interests in Sicily clashed with those of her homeland. If she married him, she knew she would be expected to support French ambitions in Italy over those of Aragon, and this she did not wish to do.

Yolande’s willingness to set herself in opposition to this marriage, and so attempt to exert some control over her future, demonstrated both considerable spirit and a sophisticated understanding of the political situation. But against a veteran campaigner like Marie of Blois she was outmatched. With the return of the now twenty-two, still unmarried Louis II to Provence in
July 1399—remarkably, his forces had managed to hold the capital city of Naples for nine years until he was ousted by an adept rival—Marie sent her ambassadors again to Aragon on her son’s behalf, and this time succeeded. With his niece rapidly approaching an age when she would no longer be considered quite as desirable as a bride, King Martin came to terms with the Provençal envoys. His relief in having the matter settled may be inferred from the alacrity with which he agreed to pay the 200, 000-franc dowry. Princess Yolande was forced to publicly retract her objection to the marriage.

The wedding, to be held in Arles, was planned for the following December. The bride, accompanied by a splendid retinue, left Zaragoza in the fall of 1400 and began the long journey to Provence. King Martin, with more pressing business to attend to, declined to leave Aragon for the ceremony, and delegated one of his cousins as his surrogate.

Yolande of Aragon’s reputation for handsomeness preceded her. The Monk of Saint-Denis, writing of her at the time of her marriage in the monastery’s official chronicle, rhapsodized, “This princess captivated all eyes with her exceptional beauty, the charms of her face and the dignity that emanated from her whole person. In a word, she was a genuine treasure of graces. The wise said that Nature had enjoyed creating her and bestowed on her every possible perfection; she lacked only immortality. I will not attempt to describe her beauty; suffice to say that she was beyond compare.” She was “one of the most beautiful creatures that one could see,” agreed the chronicler Jean Juvenal des Ursins, who knew her.