Joanna I of Naples

Joanna I ruled Naples for thirty-nine years, was tried for her husband's murder by a pope, and was smothered on the orders of the cousin who took her throne. She succeeded her grandfather Robert the Wise in 1343 at sixteen, over the whole of southern Italy and the county of Provence, and was married to her cousin Andrew of Hungary, whom she disliked and whose Hungarian retinue the Neapolitan nobility loathed. Andrew was strangled and thrown from a window at Aversa in 1345 by a conspiracy of courtiers. Whether she knew is unresolved after six hundred years. His brother Louis of Hungary invaded to avenge him, and Joanna fled to Avignon, where she put herself before Clement VI, was formally tried and acquitted, and sold him the city of Avignon for eighty thousand florins - which the papacy then held until the Revolution. She returned when the Black Death emptied the Hungarian army and ruled with reasonable competence through three further marriages, an economy wrecked by plague and mercenary companies, and constant baronial revolt. She was a patron of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Her ruin came from the Great Schism: she backed the Avignon pope Clement VII, and the Roman pope Urban VI declared her deposed and gave the kingdom to her cousin Charles of Durazzo, whom she had raised herself. He took Naples in 1381 and imprisoned her. She was killed the following year at Muro Lucano, reportedly smothered between two featherbeds, and her body displayed to prove it. She had named Louis of Anjou her heir, which gave France a claim to Naples that produced war for the next century and a half.

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