Download PDF | Samantha Kelly - The New Solomon_ Robert of Naples (1309-1343) and Fourteenth-Century Kingship-Brill Academic Publishers (2003).
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research and writing of this book were made possible by grants from several institutions: the American Academy in Rome, which hosted me through the Frances Barker Tracey fellowship in _postclassical humanistic studies in 1996-97; the Istituto italiano di studi storici in Naples, which granted me the Federico Chabod international fellowship in 1997-98; and the Ecole Francaise de Rome, which extended two one-month residential research grants in October 1997 and June 1999.
All have graciously opened their doors to me during subsequent summers, when I was lucky to enjoy the hospitality of colleagues and friends, especially Professor Catherine Brice. The final revision of the manuscript was made possible by a semester leave granted by Rutgers University. ‘Throughout, I have been aided by the staff of many libraries: the Biblioteca Angelica of Rome, the Biblioteche Nazionali of Naples and Florence, the Biblioteca Marciana of Venice, the Biblioteca Comunale of Assisi, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Cambridge University Library and that of Merton College, Oxford, and above all the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.
A number of scholars aided in the creation of this book in various ways. Special thanks are due to Professor Caroline Bruzelius, former director of the American Academy, without whose encouragement I may not have applied to the Istituto for my second wonderful year in Italy, nor participated in what became my first conference, in Angers, France. Etienne Anheim, Alessandro Barbero, Jean-Paul Boyer, and Serena Morelli allowed me to keep up with their work by sending articles that were most stimulating to my thinking about King Robert; Darleen Pryds and Gabor Klaniczay allowed me to read their recent books before publication; Jacqueline de Lagarde gave me access to her illuminating Ecole des Chartes thesis on Francois de Meyronnes, and David d’Avray most generously shared his private notes on some important sermon material.
Professors Klaniczay and Boyer, as well as Janis Elliott, Jean-Michel Matz, and Cordelia Warr allowed me to participate in specialized conference sessions that were as enlightening as they were enjoyable, and several participants in the recent conference on Angevin justice shared the texts of their talks so that I might cite their work before publication. Ronald Witt and Kenneth Pennington offered references and saved me from errors on legal and humanist issues; William Jordan sent along references to Louis IX of France I otherwise would have missed; and Karl Appuhn shared his perspective on early-modern Italian developments over many a Roman aperitivo.
At Rutgers, Rudolph Bell, Paul Clemens, and James Masschaele read and commented on the manuscript at an important middle stage. I surely would not have arrived at Rutgers at all without the support of my dissertation committee members, Edward Muir and Richard Kieckhefer, of David Nirenberg during my post-doctoral year at Rice, and of Paul Freedman.
If someone had asked me two years ago who my ideal editor would be, I would have named David Abulafia for his fearsome erudition in Angevin and southern-European history, not yet knowing his personal generosity and graciousness as well. Many thanks to him for including this book in his series and for his editorial comments, and to Marcella Mulder at Brill for making the publication process so smooth. Finally, I bear a gratitude that certainly goes beyond the making of this book to the extended, inimitable Kelly clan: Prescott and Pamela, Judith and Vincent, Austin, Monika, Matthew, and Andy.
I dedicate the book to Professor Robert E. Lerner, who despite my obstinacy and argumentativeness patiently labored to develop my skills and correct my faults, and whose unflagging encouragement and humor often kept me afloat. The concern he showed for my education was such that I suspect he knows the characteristic turns and blind spots of my historical mind as well as I know them myself, and though this book differs much from the dissertation he oversaw, and its flaws are wholly my own, I hope he will see in it all that I owe to him, true doktorvater, cherished friend.
INTRODUCTION
Robert of Anjou, King of Naples (1309-1343) had the mixed blessing of living in the age of two of Europe’s most famous literary figures, both of whom left enduring, but opposite, portraits of his rule. The first was Dante, who sketched Robert’s character in cantos eight and nine of his Paradiso. Dante’s mouthpiece was Charles Martel, Robert’s eldest brother, who would have succeeded to the throne of Naples had he not died prematurely in 1295. He now spoke to Dante from his circle of heaven about the brother who still occupied the throne. Unlike their father, King Charles H, Robert was avaricious—‘‘a mean [nature] descended from a generous”—and generally unfit for the royal task: “if nature meets with fortune unsuited to it...it has ill success.”
Indeed, the fortunes of Charles Martel’s two younger brothers had been reversed. The second son, Louis, was “born to gird on the sword,” but had become a religious instead, while Robert, suited only to the cloister, had become king. “You make a king of one that is fit for sermons, so that your track is off the road.”! What is more, Robert was deceitful. So Dante hinted in the following canto, where Charles Martel alluded to “the treacheries his seed was to suffer” as Robert usurped a throne rightfully belonging, if not to Louis, then to Charles Martel’s own young son.’ All told it was a grim portrait: miserly, unmartial, treacherous, and fit only for useless preaching, Robert was unkingly in every way.
Robert’s second famous portraitist was Petrarch, who first met the king during a month-long visit to Naples in 1341. The purpose of the trip was a three-day “examination” in which Robert judged Petrarch’s worthiness for the poet’s laurel, and then sent him off for the coronation itself in Rome. Thereafter, Petrarch described Robert in his many letters in consistently superlative terms. “He was wise, he was kind, he was high-minded and gentle, he was the king of kings,” Petrarch wrote to a government minister in Naples after Robert’s death, and urged the current king of the realm to imitate Robert’s example.’ He was “that eminent king and philosopher, Robert, as famous for his culture as for his rule, and the only king of our age who was at once the friend of knowledge and of virtue;” “the star of Italy and great honor of our century,” or again, “the king of Sicily, or rather, if you consider true excellence, king of kings.”*
Personal allegiance doubtless colored their different impressions of the king. Dante was a supporter of one of Robert’s great rivals, Emperor Henry VII, and had been exiled from his beloved Florence by a faction allied with the Angevins. Petrarch, by contrast, had reason to be grateful to the monarch for affirming his worthiness for the poetic laureation. But other well-known contemporaries seconded their judgments. The poets Niccold Rosso of ‘Treviso, Pietro Faytinelli, and the author of the Ballad of Montecatini sided with Dante in criticizing Robert’s avarice, cowardice, and useless preaching; the preacher Remigio de’ Girolami, the chronicler Giovanni Villani, and the Parmesan author Gabrio de’ Zamorei, among others, instead lauded his wisdom, peacemaking, and generally ideal rule.” Further, their divergent portraits were essentially different interpretations of the same characteristics.
Should a king be gentle, as Petrarch lauded Robert, or “born to gird the sword”? Did erudition make the monarch a “king of kings,” or, in Dante’s scornful phrase, a “re da sermone,” fit only for preaching? Their opposite views suggest a general uncertainty about what constituted good and proper rule in the fourteenth century.
Given the dramatic and largely calamitous changes for which the century is known, such uncertainty may not be surprising. The steady increase in food supply, population, trade, and government organization that had characterized the twelfth and thirteenth centuries seemed to reach its limit in the years around 1300. Following in its wake were common food shortages, the weakening and collapse of international banking houses, the constriction of long-distance trade. Long and seemingly insoluble wars erupted between England and France, and among the multiple regional powers in Germany and in northern Italy; peasant rebellions flared in Flanders, the Basque region, France, and England; revolutions briefly overturned the political order in Rome in 1347 and in Florence in 1378, while kings of England and Castile were deposed and murdered in 1327, 1369, and 1399.
The most dramatic calamity of the century was the Black Death that struck the continent from 1347 to 1351, and took with it some third to half of Europe’s population. Among the swells and troughs with which historians often map the history of Europe, the fourteenth century appears as perhaps that history’s nadir, the prototypical “age of adversity.”°
The broad question this study aims to explore is what it meant to be king in such an age: how rulership adapted (or didn’t adapt) to an altered social, economic, and political context, whether it betrayed certain tendencies characteristic of the century, and how it might compare to European rulership in an earlier and a later period. It must be said that even the basic terms of such an exploration remain open to debate. The influential template proposed by Joseph R. Strayer cast the “long fourteenth century” as a period of stagnation and regression in kingship as in other aspects of society. The age’s crises “discouraged the normal development of the apparatus of the state,” such that polities throughout Latin Christendom “were less effective political instruments in 1450 than they had been in 1300.”’
For Bernard Guenée, too, this period constitutes a distinct age in European history, though its characteristics are to him something still to be demonstrated. “Is there not reason to place this period, too often marginal, resolutely at the center—to treat the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the evolution of the Occidental states as a stage as autonomous and as distinctive as the ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’?”® More recent scholarship, however, has tended to call into question not only the notion of fourteenth-century governmental decline, but the periodization itself. Some have ventured that the challenges of the fourteenth century inspired innovation, not regression.
They cite the creation of a centrally-controlled army, new forms of and emphasis on royal ceremony and display, and the articulation of a scripted “court etiquette” magnifying the prince’s majesty as some of the practices inaugurated by fourteenth-century rulers that would be perpetuated by subsequent “Renaissance” monarchs.” Others have stressed less the modernity of the fourteenth century than the unmodern qualities still persisting in a later age. Such “modern” features as the autonomy and professionalization of the government bureaucracy and the princely emphasis on majestic distance from subjects cannot, in their view, be considered prevalent even in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.'°
Perhaps telling of this new atmosphere is Glenn Richardson’s recent study of Renaissance Monarchy, which pointedly avoids any claims of novelty that would distinguish Renaissance rule from earlier patterns.'' Without denying that change certainly occurred over several centuries, such works call attention to the halting and uneven nature of that change. Some aspects of rulership altered more rapidly than others, some witnessed as much return to traditional modes as innovation, and in different regions, certainly, at different times. If anything, therefore, there is more need to look closely at particular ruling practices and their contexts through- out the long period between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, with an eye to the larger chronological and geographical picture.
Robert’s reign is a rich and largely untapped source for examining questions of rulership in the early phase of this contested period, for his career intersected with many of the fourteenth century’s great political, religious, and cultural developments. He was, first of all, a figure of considerable influence on the European stage, thanks to the congeries of territories he had inherited from his predecessors. His grandfather, Charles I, had single-handedly amassed the lands and titles that would pass to Robert. Born a Capetian prince and invested early with the county of Anjou that would later lend its name to his dynasty (though the county itself left their hands in 1290), Charles acquired the county of Provence by marrying its heiress, Beatrice, in 1246. He then extended his dominion into neighboring Piedmont, establishing a foothold that his successors would build upon and style the “county of Piedmont” in the early fourteenth century.
His greatest success, however, was in acquiring a royal crown to match that of his brother, Louis [IX of France. At the pope’s request, Charles I launched a campaign to oust the heirs of Frederick II from the Kingdom of Sicily. His victory was assured by 1266, when he defeated Frederick’s son Manfred at Benevento, and in reward for his services Charles received the kingdom in fief from the papacy, much as the Norman and Staufen kings of the realm had done before. Not content with these lands, Charles bought the Kingdom of Jerusalem from its heiress, Marie of Antioch, in 1277, and arranged marriage alliances that would lay the ground for further conquest in the eastern Mediterranean, including an alliance with the Arpad dynasty of Hungary that wed his heir, Charles Il, to the princess Maria.
The borders of this “Angevin empire” had shifted by the time of Robert’s succession. The kingdom of Jerusalem was finally lost to western hands with the fall of Acre in 1291, though Robert retained its prestigious title. Charles [’s planned campaign to conquer the eastern empire came to nothing, but his son Charles II did establish a foothold in Albania and Greece, lands that were entrusted to Robert’s brothers and that Robert oversaw as suzerain. Most calamitous was the loss of Sicily in 1282, in the uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers. ‘
The islanders placed themselves thereafter under the rule of a reigning king or younger son of the House of Aragon, and never returned to Angevin dominion. Historians refer to the post-vespers realm as the Kingdom of Naples (or simply the Regno) in recognition of this territorial loss, but the Angevins themselves continued to style themselves Kings of Sicily, and never accepted the irreversibility of its loss.
The considerable territories remaining to the Angevins by Robert’s time—which included the Kingdom of Naples and the counties of Provence and Piedmont, as well as the duchy of Durazzo (Albania) and the principality of Achaia entrusted to Robert’s brothers—were as affected by the crises of the fourteenth century as were any in Europe. Indeed, it has been argued that the “age of adversity” began early in southern Italy, with that loss of Sicily that caused not only fiscal problems for the rump kingdom deprived of island wealth, but a long and intractable war for its recovery that is comparable to the Hundred Years War between England and France.'?
Food shortages struck southern Italy with regularity during Robert’s reign, in 1317, 1322, 1328-30, and 1339-40; the crown also had close ties with the Italian banking houses whose collapse weakened both trade and royal finances in much of Europe.” All these problems would intensify dramatically in the reign of Robert’s successor, but the fragility generated by rebellion and war, uncertain agricultural production and fiscal pressure, was already the background of Robert’s thirty-four years of rule.
Secondly, Robert’s complex inheritance enmeshed him in some of the signal shifts in fourteenth-century polity, and in the physical and ideological battles that they involved. He was, for one, drawn into the last great struggles between papacy and empire for control of Italy and for primacy in Christendom as a whole. Robert, like his predecessors, was the pope’s vassal in the Regno and his principal ally in central and northern Italy, where pro-papal Guelfs fought with pro-imperial Ghibellines in virtually every town and region. His role as papal and Guelf champion made him variously senator of Rome (1313), lord of Florence (1313-1319), lord of Genoa (1318-34), papal vicar in Romagna (1310-1318) and even, on the pope’s authority, vicar general of all “imperial” Italy vacante umperio, a title Robert theoretically held from 1317 until his death.
He was also, therefore, a major rival of the Holy Roman emperors, who considered not only northern Italy but the kingdom too as part of their domain. At the start of Robert’s reign and again in the later 1320s, imperial candidates launched campaigns in Italy that menaced Robert’s influence in the north, threatened invasion of the kingdom itself, and culminated in the Robert’s deposition as a rebel vassal. On a third occasion, in the early 1330s, the would-be emperor John of Bohemia launched a plan that would deprive Robert of his territories in both northern Italy and Provence.
Meanwhile, the conception of polity on which these papal-imperial struggles were based was itself under attack in the fourteenth century, as the notion of a single Christian commonwealth headed by pope or emperor gave way before a new model of multiple, mutually independent national monarchies. Rulers were increasingly intent on denying the overlordship of any universal authority, proclaiming themselves “emperors in their own realms” and “kings who are beneath no one,” and simultaneously working to consolidate their borders and attract the first allegiance of subjects within them. ‘
The growing currency of this model had multiple consequences for Robert’s status as king. His vassalage to the papacy became a more urgent issue, for in the eyes of critics it made him less than fully king, but as the basis of his legitimate possession of the Regno it was a status difficult to reject. The mosaic nature of his dominion became more problematic, especially as neighbors cast on them a covetous eye: divided by geography, language, and custom, they were not easily consolidated, and less susceptible to the rhetoric of national identity often used to bind subjects to realm and ruler. Angevin policy in Italy, too, became a subject of debate, for while some contemporaries urged him to persist in the Angevins’ traditional role as partisan Guelf leader, others called for a united Italian monarchy, with Robert at its head.
Robert’s final political challenge was the kind of fragile legitimacy that periodically befell European rulers, and that was particularly troubling in an age known for its social turbulence. It was not only that the Angevins were a relatively new “usurper” dynasty, and that the Sicilian rebellion offered a model to other potentially discontented subjects. Robert’s own headship of the dynasty was in doubt, as Dante’s comments hinted. In fact, as the third son of King Charles II, he had not been expected to inherit at all. Charles Martel, his eldest brother, was the heir apparent to Naples; thanks to that marriage alliance with the Arpad house he was, by 1292, king as well of Hungary, inherited through his mother.
As for the younger sons, in a byproduct of the ongoing war with Sicily they spent seven years in captivity in Catalonia, political hostages for their father who had been humiliatingly captured in a naval battle in 1284. In 1295, however, Robert’s fortunes dramatically changed. Charles Martel died, probably of malaria, in the fall of 1295. By a strict interpretation of primogeniture his son Carobert should have become heir apparent in his place. But as a young child and heir already to Hungary, Carobert was, in the eyes of both King Charles II and Pope Boniface VII, an unacceptable successor.
‘Thus attention turned to Charles II’s second son, Louis—but Louis, having undergone a religious conversion, emerged from captivity in late 1295 to announce his surrender of all earthly power and his intention to become a Franciscan friar, a decision from which neither his father nor the pope could dissuade him. Through these unusual circumstances Robert became heir apparent and eventually king of Naples. But those circumstances, and the existence of the rival claimant Carobert, cast doubt on Robert’s legitimate right to the kingdom for the rest of his life.
As if multiple imperial attacks, Robert’s ambiguous role in northern Italy, the war with Sicily, the difficulties of ruling his dispersed territories, and his questionable status as king were not enough to keep him occupied, he was simultaneously involved in some of the major religious and cultural developments of his half-century. He became personally involved in the greatest theological controversy of his time, which debated whether Christ and the apostles should be considered to have possessed nothing. Apostolic poverty was a founding ideal of the Franciscan Order; to deny its orthodoxy would, and did, cast many members of this most beloved religious order into heresy. ‘The debate, which raged from 1322 to 1324, riveted the attention not only of Europe’s ecclesiastical community, but of secular rulers as well.
Robert was one of those observers who participated actively in the debate, composing and submitting to the pope a theological treatise of his own; in later years he was suspected of harboring Franciscan heretics in his kingdom and even in his royal court. The issue had clear political implications, for protection of heretics was tantamount to defiance of Robert’s papal overlord, and by the later 1320s those same heretics were allied with the pope’s great rival, Ludwig of Bavaria. From a more strictly cultural vantage, Robert’s evident interest in theological matters and his sus-pected support for a thirteenth-century ideal now under attack suggest his association with a traditional, even backward-looking brand of scholastic theology.
At the same time, however, Robert became associated with some of the greatest figures of Trecento humanism and art, for as scholars have often noted, Boccaccio spent many years of his youth in Naples, Giotto painted several works for the king, and Petrarch, as we have seen, made a famous visit Robert’s court in 1341. If the fourteenth century was an age marked by contestation between Scholastic theology and burgeoning humanism as between rival conceptions of European polity, Robert was at the crossroads of both.
In short, Robert’s reign emerges as a kind of mirror of his age, in which the responses of rulership to a shifting political and cultural context can be glimpsed. Yet his rule has been surprisingly little studied, and rarely figures in general or comparative studies of the period. In part this neglect stems from a general perception of the stagnation and insignificance of the fourteenth-century kingdom. A brief survey of fourteenth-century Europe concludes that southern Italy in this period “was sinking into the poverty and lawlessness that have characterized in modern times.”'* Alan Ryder’s study of fifteenth-century rulership in the kingdom paints a similar picture.
Already in the early fourteenth century, “the stresses that were to bring political and social anarchy in the following hundred years lay close to the surface;” only with the arrival in 1442 of Alfonso the Magnanimous, first Aragonese ruler of southern Italy, did the region revitalize through “a thorough reformation of the state.”'? Thus if Alfonso’s Naples was “one of the first, perhaps the first, of European states to exhibit many of those characteristics that historians have labeled ‘modern,’” it was in marked and conscious contrast to the preceding Angevin rulers who “were driven, either in consequence or in fear of baronial rebellion, to emasculate the royal administration.”'® A review of Ryder’s monograph stated the point more succinctly: “It had better be admitted that after the great days of the Emperor Frederick II [d. 1250] nobody, whether in Italy or elsewhere, looked to Naples for inspiration in politics or administration.” '’
A more concrete reason for this neglect, at least since the Second World War, is the paucity of surviving documentation. The entire government archive of the Angevin dynasty’s administration was destroyed during the German retreat from Naples in 1943. A team of researchers has been working since 1948 to reconstruct the contents of these archives from the published references and private notes of prewar scholars, but the task is arduous and slow: to date the project has reached the year 1293, sixteen years before Robert’s accession, and it may well be a generation or two before they reach, and cover, the thirty-four years of his reign.'*
These circumstances go far in explaining the slow progress of scholarship on Robert. No substantial overview of his reign has appeared in English since the late nineteenth century.'? Even in foreign languages there exists but a single monograph devoted to his reign: Romolo Caggese’s Roberto d’Angio e 1 suot tem, published in two volumes of 1922 and 1930 respectively.2° Postwar surveys, such as Emile Léonard’s four-generation study of Les Angevins de Naples and the chapters on the Angevins published in the series Storia di Napoli, have perforce relied heavily on prewar research, and have tended to rehearse the general interpretive outlines set by earlier scholars.”!
Those interpretations have generally ranged from ambivalent to negative, and reinforce the general disinterest in further exploration of the reign. ‘To Romolo Caggese, Robert’s politics were “often con- tradictory and always uncertain,” lacking any coherent policy either for his eastern Mediterranean lands or for Italy itself. Nor was his internal governance of the realm much better: “the actions of the crown were weak, uncertain, and inequitable....the State was a man not equal to the task and a set of incapable or corrupt functionaries.””* As for the king’s cultural involvements, his own talents “never rose above the limits of mediocrity,” while his patronage of scholars was as haphazard as his politics: “contradictory” and “superficially eclectic” are the conclusions of two cultural historians of his reign.”
To a surprising degree, these conclusions echo the interpretive categories of Robert’s own contemporaries. Did Robert hew to the traditional Angevin role as champion of the Church and its Guelf supporters in Italy against imperial-Ghibelline enemies, or did he aspire to dominate the whole peninsula and forge a united national monarchy along the lines of an England or a France? Robert’s contemporaries generally expected him to follow one or the other policy, and modern historians, too, have tended to see these as his only political options.
Some stress his longtime alliance with the papacy and loyal Guelf partisanship; others place emphasis on his aspirations to rule a united Italy.” Similarly, the critiques of Dante and others, who deemed Robert’s preaching idle and indeed harmful to his practical ruling responsibilities, have lived on in scholarly tendencies to dismiss the king’s culture as mediocre and irrelevant to the substantive issues of his reign. The distinction between “medieval” and “Renaissance” culture owes less to fourteenth-century categories than to those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but it too still divides students of Robert’s patronage and cultural milieu. Whatever flaws have emerged in these various categorizations have rarely unseated them. Instead, the onus is often transposed onto Robert himself, whose political and cultural choices are deemed contradictory and patternless.
If we set aside these interpretive categories, however, different perspectives and conclusions emerge. Historians have focused on Robert’s partisan Guelf and pan-Italian roles, and been discomfited by the inconsistencies in each, but perhaps his changeability was precisely the point? The impulse to categorize his culture as heretical or humanist has tended to obscure the basic significance of his patronage itself: its quantity, its prominence in his ruling style, its function as an engine of royal propaganda. As for Robert’s conspicuous display of personal erudition, surely insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that learning and wisdom were the qualities with which his courtiers and outside observers most regularly identified him, the very leitmotif of his ruling style, and therefore a potentially important index of what some people, at least, considered essential to right rulership.
These possibilities can be explored by approaching the king from a fresh vantage: not as an isolated actor, that is, but in the context of his court, paying serious attention to the individuals who attended, advised, and served the king, to their careers and opinions, and to the texts and works of art they produced in Angevin service. Their witness is crucial to assessing Robert’s religious and cultural strategies, for it was largely through his patronage of particular men that the king made his own preferences known. Further, the careers and writings of these men offer considerable insight into Angevin political strategy.
Some were virtual co-architects of policy; others drafted the legal theory on which Angevin dominion rested, or composed political tracts that explained (or explained away) royal actions. ‘Taken together, such texts indicate the dominant ideas circulating at court. Finally, these courtiers were the main authors of that royal propaganda that shaped and disseminated Robert’s royal image—an image that is crucial for apprehending their concept of ideal kingship, and that affected contemporary observers’ reception as much as did the king’s actions themselves. The principal vehicles for propagating that image were sermons, painting, and sculpture, but contributing as well were academic disputations and polemical treatises that defended Robert’s dominion, attacked his enemies, and exalted the special virtues of his rule. The line between theory and propaganda was still blurry in the fourteenth century, and many of these works hovered on the border.”
One of the prime architects of royal strategy and image was, of course, Robert himself. His concrete actions in administration, justice, war, and diplomacy are basic to any study of his reign, and despite the loss of his government archives much information can be gleaned from the works of prewar scholars. Camillo MuinieriRiccio’s lengthy “Genealogy of Charles I,” serialized in two volumes of a prominent southern Italian journal in the 1880s, is actually a month-by-month chronicle of Robert’s reign based entirely on the royal archives; Caggese’s monograph, for all its tendentious arguments, offers a wealth of detail culled from these registers.
Just as crucial, and until recently almost completely overlooked, is the evidence offered by Robert’s preaching. The hundreds of sermons Robert composed make his preaching one of the most remarkable aspects of his rule, and make the king himself as much an architect of the royal image as any of his learned supporters. Recent analyses of Robert’s preaching by Jean-Paul Boyer and Darleen Pryds have indicated what a rich historical source these sermons are, and with less than a dozen of them edited, the extant manuscripts offer much further material to be mined.*° When Robert’s documented actions are set beside the commentary that both he and his supporters produced, a much fuller picture of the details and overall direction of royal policy emerges.
While the evidence of king and court together brings into focus the strategies and imagery promoted in his reign, the evidence of observers outside the court allows some evaluation of those strategies’ diffusion and effect. The “symbology of power” is a rich and much-tilled field of historical research, and that symbolism is itself a significant feature of Europe’s intellectual history, but only the reception of that symbolism, as scholars increasingly stress, can gauge its concrete influence as an instrument of rule. “The language and tone of many discussions of royal imagery,” Sydney Anglo has observed, “assume the very things that ought to be proved” regarding audiences’ acceptance of princely ideology, and hence overlook the possibility, surely of equal historical significance, of such imagery’s limitations and failures.?’ Alain Boureau, similarly, has cautioned against assuming “a very naive reception” and “immediate credulity” on the part of audiences of royal ceremony.” Indeed, contemporary observers are not only an important witness to the reception of different royal strategies and propagandistic themes.
They were also, if indirectly, shapers of those strategies and themes. Governance did and does take place in the context of prevailing expectations of leadership and of the support that influential groups offer or withhold: that context is one side of a dialogue whose other is the royal court. We may term that context “public opinion” if we accept that the public who counted, in an age before general enfranchisement, was largely limited to a feudal and urban aristocracy, foreign potentates, and the literate men who served and informed them. With regard to norms and ideals of rulership, that wider opinion represents another key arena in which to chart processes of continuity and change. The opinions of even this more limited group of contemporaries are often elusive, but taken together, scattered sources can help to gauge the wider reception of Robert’s policies and propaganda. A chief source is chronicles, of which Italy produced several in the early fourteenth century.
Useful too are popular ballads, the correspondence of foreign diplomats, the occasional letters of learned men. On occasion Robert’s own supporters remarked upon popular criticisms of the king in their attempt to refute them, thus providing unwitting insight on opinions outside the court. “Silent” evidence is sometimes eloquent as well. The degree to which dynastic saints were embraced or ignored by subjects can be a telling index of the popularity of the saints’ royal promoters, for instance, as Katherine Jansen has demonstrated.*? Where the royal court tried and abandoned various strategies, or where it proved reticent regarding a royal virtue the king himself sought to promote, we can find subtle indices of a strategy’s limited success. In short, the larger audience surrounding the nucleus of king and court was an active element in the dynamic and often experimental process of constructing royal policy and image.
All told, the absence of complete archival documentation, while a great loss, has had the compensating benefit of encouraging greater appreciation of alternative source materials, and of the different methodological approaches and fresh perspectives they offer. Highlighting the interrelations between abstract intellectual constructs and concrete political circumstance, and between king, court, and wider audience, they offer an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to the venerable and still indispensable study of rulership. A number of Angevin studies in the last decade or so have explored these possibilities, resulting in important apercus regarding the composition of Robert’s chapel and wider entourage, the political implications of certain texts and works of art, and the response of contemporaries to Angevin rulership.*” The present study proceeds down these paths, assembling the literary, artistic, diplomatic and, where recoverable, archival sources on Robert’s reign to hazard a larger reinterpretation of its basic character, and of what it may reveal about the nature of rulership in a transitional and still elusive age.
Indeed, if we return to the opinions of Dante and Petrarch it is possible to detect some transition even within the half-century when Robert ruled. The criticism of Dante and other hostile commentators pools largely in the 1310s and 1320s. The last years of Robert’s reign and the years following his death witnessed, instead, the effusive praise of Petrarch—the most famous of Robert’s admirers but one joined by a number of equally idealized comments on his rule. Even accounting for the influence of reflexive nostalgia, it would appear that those unusual aspects of Robert’s ruling style that had perplexed early observers came to be accepted as proper to effective and admirable rule. With them we may be witnessing, even before the midcentury watershed of the Black Death, a significant shift in both the strategies of rulership and the wider Weltansschauung that welcomed them.
In keeping with the Angevin historiographical tradition that clusters around certain issues, and reflecting the image-making so central to Robert’s and his court’s activity, the following chapters treat different aspects of the reign under the headings of Robert’s various vaunted virtues. Chapter Two, “Patronage,” opens the main body of this study with an analysis of Robert’s court and culture. It assembles the evidence for Robert’s patronage of artists and learned men, supplementing it with information on his royal library to provide a fuller sense of the king’s cultural interests. It then traces the connections between royal patronage and the royal court. Some clients had little or no connection to the royal entourage; others were fully integrated into the royal administration and household.
A significant number, linked less formally to the king’s entourage, testify to the fluid boundaries of the court and its functioning within a larger network of studia and ecclesiastical positions within the realm. As a cultural haven sought after by learned men seeking patronage, Robert’s court was more than a coterie of high-ranking noble officers, but not yet a distinct social entity, and its patterns may serve as a case study in the development of that elusive and much-debated institution, the princely court. In terms of Robert’s reign itself, the evidence compiled here permits a reevaluation of the theory that Robert’s court milieu transformed mid-reign toward a more humanistic and secular-national orientation. Finally, the chapter frames these topics within the larger context of Robert’s royal image, assessing how patronage contributed directly and indirectly to burnishing his reputation.
Chapter Three, “Piety,” investigates the king’s religious affiliations and the image of piety and sacrality he sought to purvey. Religious issues have assumed a particular importance in assessments of Robert’s reign due to a widespread assumption of his sympathy for the heretical wing of the Franciscan Order. By reevaluating the evidence of such sympathies, and situating it in the context of his patronage of religious men generally, the chapter demonstrates the essentially orthodox nature of Robert’s religious affiliations. Far from radical reli-gious idealism, Robert’s piety was geared to classic royal ends: consolidating relations with various religious orders and institutions, and building support for himself and his dynasty through a reputation for piety and holiness. Robert’s vassalage to the papacy became one source of this sacral mage. ‘Though derided by some contemporaries as an abject status incommensurate with true monarchy, vassalage was cast by Robert’s supporters as a sign of his superiority, indicating his greater proximity to the ultimate authority of God. Meanwhile, the court stressed as well a second source of sacrality independent of papal lordship: the saintly lmeage that confirmed the inherent holiness of his blood. These strategies existed in tension with each other, and reflected the ambivalent relations between king and pope, but in their separate ways they contributed to his image as a ruler legitimated by God. Judging by the evidence of saints’ cults, the notion of this new dynasty’s preeminent holiness was accepted by southern-Italian barons, Provengal subjects, and even central-Italian allies, though the general populace of the kingdom proved slower in embracing it. The strategy was also popular with other European dynasties, where the notion of deata stirps flourished, in part through Angevin influence, ever more profusely as the fourteenth century wore on. Here, in short, was a traditional ruling strategy, though one creatively adapted to Robert’s particular circumstances and reflective of a subtle permutation evident in the fourteenth-century dynastic legitimation as a whole.
Chapter Four analyzes a second classic virtue through which Robert sought to attract subjects’ reverence and allegiance: justice. In keeping with the broad medieval conception of this virtue, the chapter analyzes various features of Robert’s internal governance of his realm (judicial, administrative, economic) in light of the crown’s all-important relations with the nobility and towns. Scholarly opinion on his governance is much divided, and colored by historians’ interest in determining when, and why, a kingdom once among the most powerful and innovative of Europe eventually fell so low. ‘To some Robert was too dependent on the landed nobility, to some not dependent enough; his economic initiatives have been both praised and condemned, and the effectiveness of his reform measures much debated. On balance, however, the evidence points to the state’s conscientious efforts to effect just rule and to counteract some of the more deleterious developments of the fourteenth century—especially regarding the famed unruliness of southern-Italian barons—in order to preserve royal authority. That social and economic tensions were simmering in the kingdom is evident, but through constant vigilance, a negotiatory rather than high-handed manner, and a careful balancing between different social groups, Robert succeeded in containing centrifugal energies and in attracting a considerable degree of allegiance from various influential groups. His own sermons on justice or related themes confirm this characterization of his internal policy, and were themselves part of his persuasive and negotiatory approach. Contemporary opinion about his justice, however, appears ambivalent. Subjects were, on the whole, quite loyal to the crown, but they did not single out the king’s justice as a prominent ruling virtue. Indeed, commentators often embraced the king’s son and vicar as the symbol of royal justice, while reserving to Robert a more mixed image, miserly but merciful. All told, this reception suggests not rejection of Robert’s rule, but some uncertainty about his manner, and about the particular ways with which he responded to an age itself uncertain and troubling. When compared with the policies of his successor and their disastrous results, however, the skillfulness and overall effectiveness of Robert’s approach emerge in high relief, as indeed they did to contemporaries who lived long enough to experience a later reign.
Delegation of internal governance was one of the traits that appears to have met with subjects’ diffidence, and it is true that much of the king’s attention was devoted to those peninsular politics north of the Regno’s borders that were vital to the safety and wellbeing of his own directly-ruled lands. Chapter Five, “Prudence,” Robert’s political strategies in Italy, with respect both to the Holy Roman Empire and to individual Italian city-states. Neither staunch Guelf champion nor aspiring national monarch, Robert was consistent only in the flexibility of his policy. Exploiting the benefits of vigorous anti-imperial rhetoric, he also explored the possibilities of collaboration with the empire; while reaping the rewards of his Guelf role in Romagna, Piedmont, and Tuscany, he was as likely to abandon Guelf allies to protect his own interests. Such behavior outraged contemporaries, and has perplexed some modern observers too. It was his very divergence from expected categories, however, that constitutes the logic and the novelty of his political approach. Unfettered by ideological loyalties, more parsimonious than munificent, and ever preferring diplomacy and patient watchfulness over military engagement, Robert exemplified the kind of malleable, self-interested pragmatism most associated with the age of Machiavelli. Indeed, while he adopted various personae to present his recent actions in the most favorable light, his one governing principle, as expressed to his court and to some foreign audiences as well, was prudence: a judicious reflectiveness, based on realistic assessment of circumstance, that would come to be championed by theoreticians and princes of the early-modern period. Perhaps his greatest novelty lay in his consistent embrace of this policy, which even his own courtiers seemed to find difficult to grasp.
Patronage, sacral piety, justice, and prudence all contributed in varying degrees to Robert’s royal image, but the quality with which Robert was most frequently and closely associated was wisdom. Chapter Six focuses on the development of this crowning element of his royal persona, investigating the ways wisdom was invoked in text and image, the meanings attached to it, and its relation both to Robert’s other proclaimed virtues and to the concrete actions understood to exemplify it. Founded on centuries of tradition, yet with a particular formulation and emphasis that had developed only in the decades immediately preceding Robert’s reign, royal wisdom emerges as an apt virtue to sum up Robert’s rule, one that reflected the balance of tradition and innovation in his ruling style as a whole.
Further, contemporaries’ reactions to it suggest a subtle change in general opinions regarding proper and effective governance. ‘To Dante and others, such pious intellectualism was unsuitable in a king: Robert was passive, effeminate, fit only for the cloister, detached from the practical issues with which a ruler should be concerned. Such criticism reflects a certain novelty in Robert’s ruling image and invites speculation on his reasons for adopting it, one of which may have been the legitimacy it promised in the face of a rival claimant to his throne. Such criticism, however, was matched and eventually drowned out by a chorus of praise for Robert’s wisdom: if the justice or prudence of his rule remained somewhat baffling to contemporaries, the wisdom that summed up his rule as a whole was, in the end, an image that contemporaries could embrace as comprehensible, acceptable, and ultimately ideal.
Furthermore, as the conclusion proposes, learned wisdom may represent a defining characteristic of European rulership more generally in the fourteenth century. Certainly it became an ever more prominent ruling ideal as the century wore on. It is most conspicuous in the reign of Charles V of France, whose ruling style and image bear such close resemblance to Robert’s. It is prominent as well in the royal persona of Charles IV of Bohemia, Robert’s slightly younger contemporary and uncle of Charles V. And echoes of it are perceptible in the ruling image and strategies of Richard II of England, though here on the threshold of the fifteenth century wisdom’s sacral and theological qualities were already giving way to the more practical orientation of prudence. Meanwhile the memory of Robert himself, lauded by several northern-Italian humanists as a model for their own princely patrons, was undergoing a similar transformation at the turn of the fifteenth century, as his sacral wisdom was gradually replaced by an image of him as mighty, pragmatic, and a patron of more profane forms of learning. ‘The legacy of Robert’s ruling image provides eloquent testimony to the changing ideals and expectations of rulership from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century.
The southern Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce observed a century ago that historians’ neglect of southern Italy had much to do with the region’s failure to become a modern nation state.*'! The growing importance of super- and subnational forces over the last hundred years has situated us well to overcome this blind spot. As another historian of the region has observed, the ultimate fate of a polity is no reliable measure of its ruler’s historical importance, much less a sure yardstick of his influence in his own age.’ Nor should the undeniable travails of the kingdom under Robert’s successor be read back onto his reign.
If anything, the later misfortunes of the kingdom illustrate precisely what was significant about Robert’s rule. In the context of the fourteenth century, in the face of destructive forces, natural and manmade, that would undo his successor, Robert implemented an approach to rulership that not only preserved his realm and glorified his memory but that in many ways appears emblematic of the age. That approach was informed by a marked tendency to negotiation, persuasion, and flexibility in the face of volatile subjects and foreign groups, and placed a heavy emphasis on image-making that may well relate to the difficulties of undertaking decisive and prestigious military action. Indeed, one of the remarkable facts about Robert is that his rule lacked any classic “great deeds” of crusade, conquest, or even major internal reform, and yet he was hailed by many contemporaries and later admirers as an ideal king. The symbol and shorthand of his ideal rule was wisdom, a ruling virtue that, like the fourteenth century itself, encompassed opposed tendencies, but that vested them with an aspect of harmony.
Like Thomas Aquinas’ analogous synthesis of grace and nature, that harmony was short-lived. But for a roughly century-long span when the relations between earthly and divine knowledge and between secular and spiritual power were contested, when the crucible of famine, plague, and war affected virtually every area of life and the future of European polity was anything but certain, wisdom appeared to many as the age’s best hope of right rulership and peace. How that ruling style and image were constructed—by whom, under what pressures, against which criticisms and with what materials—is the story of the following pages.
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