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Joanna Plantagenet: life of the week
00:53:45
Catherine Hanley uncovers the remarkable life of a princess and queen who proves that Richard the Lionheart wasn’t the only force to be reckoned with in the Angevin dynasty
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- [00:00]
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Emily Britt
Hello and welcome to Life of the Week from History Extra, where leading historians delve into the lives of history's most intriguing and significant figures. Richard the Lionheart may be well known for his travels to distant land to time on crusade and wrangling with international politics. But less well known is the fact that his sister, Joanna Plantagenets, otherwise known as Joan of England, Queen of Sicily, led a life of adventure and danger to rival that of her famous brother. In this Life of the Week episode, I spoke to author and historian Catherine Hanley to chart Joanna's extraordinary life.
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Catherine Hanley
We are going to be delving into the life of Joanna Plantagenet. Now, she comes from a very famous family, but relatively her life has gone unknown. But you've just written a book all about her lioness hearts. Can you briefly introduce us to Joanna Plantagenet?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Okay. Well, Joanna was the youngest but one child in the family of Henry ii, the King of England, and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. I think it's fair to say that over the years, the sons of Henry and Eleanor have tended to hog the limelight. They had four surviving sons and three daughters. You know, in a lot of history books, you're kind of quite lucky if the daughters even make it onto the family tree at the beginning, never mind being discussed fully in the text. And I just thought it was about time, you know, that we looked at these women more carefully and specifically Joanna, because she had a really exciting, action packed life, you know, was just as exciting as that of her brother, known as Richard the Lionheart, hence the title of the book. And I just thought it was about time we explored the life of this woman who was a princess and a queen and a prisoner and a pioneer and a crusader and a countess and a warrior and all of this stuff. So this book is the result of all that research.
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Catherine Hanley
Such an extraordinary life and a big sales pitch for her there. If we were to start at the beginning of her life, let's go right back to the beginning. What do we know about her birth, her childhood, upbringing, that kind of thing?
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McDonald's Advertiser
We know that she was born in October 1165, and that's actually quite unusual for a royal daughter, because chroniclers didn't tend to note the birth of daughters. Daughters only come to the four later on when they're about to get married. But one chronicler, quite in the middle of writing a passage about something else, just has this sort of throwaway mark. Oh. In the month of October this year, Queen Eleanor gave birth to a daughter called Joanna. So we can actually tie that down quite well. In the very, very early years of her life, she travelled with her mother. But when she was about four or five, we don't know the exact date, she and her younger brother John were both sent to Fontevre Abbey. Now, this doesn't mean that either Joanna or John were destined for a life in holy orders. It was just that, you know, convents, abbeys, they were centres of literacy and it was with parents who moved around so much. It was a good opportunity for small children to get more of a stable upbringing, a stable education.
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Catherine Hanley
What do we know about her relationship at this time with her siblings, with her parents? How did they go on to shape her life?
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McDonald's Advertiser
At this point in her life, really, the only significant relationship she had with a close family member was With John, who was with her. Henry II she probably didn't see very often. He notoriously never sat still in the same place for five minutes. And Eleanor, of course, had a lot on her plate as well. Now, the older children in the family, the three elder boys, Henry, Richard and Geoffrey, were all quite a lot older. And Joanna, unfortunately for her, also didn't have much of a relationship with her two sisters. She was only two years old when her eldest sister, Matilda, was sent to Germany to be married, and she was only four when her other sister, Eleanor, normally known as Leonor, was sent to Castile to be married. And she never saw either of them again. But this is how medieval royal families worked. Unfortunately, she didn't have a lot of personal interaction at this stage with the members of her birth family. But now and through the rest of her future life, she would still be expected to act as a member of that family, of course.
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Catherine Hanley
Joanna's then whisked away from Fontevo Abbey. What's the next stage in her life?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Well, she was taken away from Fontevre at the time when Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine were in conflict with each other, and Eleanor was taken from France back to England to be kept in captivity, and. And Henry decided to bring Joanna and John back to England as well. So for about 18 months, Joanna has the extreme privilege of actually living with her mother, which was a real privilege for a royal princess. But it all came to an end in 1176, when Joanna was still only 10, when she was told that she was to be married.
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Catherine Hanley
And this marriage was to William II of Sicily. William, what were the circumstances surrounding this?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Well, Sicily obviously was quite a long way from England, but it was politically linked to the Anglo Norman realm. The dynasty that ruled Sicily were originally Norman, and Sicily was a very sort of strategically important place with regard to crusades and pilgrimages to the Holy Land because of its geographical situation. So it suited both Henry II of England and William II of Sicily that this alliance should take place. William would be. He only had a quite a small kingdom, he would be allying himself with one of the great kings in Western Europe and Henry would be getting an ally and a base in the Mediterranean. Obviously, nobody asked Joanna what she thought about this.
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Catherine Hanley
Obviously, Joanna's still very young at this stage, and upon her marriage, she becomes Queen of Sicily. How does she navigate the politics of the Sicilian court at this young age? What kind of influence could she have?
- [08:15]
McDonald's Advertiser
More than you might think, actually. I mean, again, we have to emphasise her extreme youth here. You know, we hear a Lot about medieval girls being married at extremely young ages, but you almost get inured to it. But we need to clarify at this point that at the point that she became Queen of Sicily and a wife, if she'd lived in England, she would have been in her final year at primary school. So partly that might make you see her as a powerless pawn. She's a little girl, she's been sent from her father to her husband, she's been married to this husband, she's living in his palace. They're not obviously cohabiting as man and wife at this stage, but she has her apartment. But this links back to what I was just saying about her being expected to represent her birthday, family. She is not just Joanna, an 11 year old girl, she is Joanna, the daughter and representative of Henry ii, the King of England and the Duke of Normandy and all his other titles. So that status means that she'll always be protected, looked after, respected, because if you disrespect Joanna, you're disrespecting Henry ii, and that's not a very good idea. So what Joanna had to do was to make a success of her queenship and her relationship. And in this respect she did. We don't have personal diaries or things like that, but from all the evidence that we do have, we can say that William and Joanna had a close relationship, an affectionate relationship. He was 12 years older than her, which is, in terms of medieval, noble and royal marriages, probably wasn't as bad as it could have been. And to start with, you know, he looked after her, he made sure she got an education. He engaged a Latin tutor for her to teach her, and he and his mother, who was the Dowager Queen still residing with him, looked after Joanna. And then as she got older, she learned more, not just about her own education, but about the politics of the area and the governance of the realm and politics, how everything ran. A medieval queen was not just the wife of the King and the mother of his children, she was an able helpmeet who was expected to be very offic with what was going on, so she could intercede on behalf of petitioners, that kind of thing. And all the evidence we have is that Joanna did that in a very adequate manner.
- [10:57]
Catherine Hanley
This was one of the things I wanted to ask you, actually, whether she fit that mould of what was expected of a medieval queen, or whether there was any breaking of expectations. What can her life reveal about the nature of what it meant to have power as a medieval woman?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Her life actually really, really exemplifies very well, the ways in which, in some respects, medieval women, particularly the royal ones, had a great deal more power and influence than we might expect. But how, on the other hand, in other respects, they were completely powerless. We don't want to go too far and try and portray every single woman in history as this kind of, you know, kick ass girl boss, because we need to find that balance. So in some respects, she did have a lot of power, she had influence because she was this kind of bridge between Henry II and William ii. You know, we quite often read things about medieval girls about, oh, you know, she was married off at a young age to such and such, and so that's the end of the story. And it really isn't. Because, you know, what would be the point of this alliance if the parties involved weren't still communicating with each other? So in that respect, she had a lot of power, but in other respects she didn't. She'd had no choice about this marriage, she didn't even have the power of refusal. But she made the most of the situation that she was put in. And as we'll see later, there were other events in her life that happened where she was powerless and she basically had to sit around waiting to be rescued. But again, she would make the most of those. So it's a real balancing act to say, yes, on the one hand, women had more power than we think, but let's not go too far and say that they were ruling the world, because they certainly weren't.
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Catherine Hanley
To go back to Joanna's time in Sicily, well, Sicily was a very different sort of place to that she left behind, wasn't it?
- [12:51]
McDonald's Advertiser
Yes, it was really unusually for 12th century Europe, it was a very multicultural place. So Christians, Muslims and Jews all lived side by side in Sicily in peace. And you'd be hard put to find that in many other places in Europe, I think, in the late 12th century.
- [13:12]
Catherine Hanley
So Joanna could have been perfectly happy and peaceful there for the rest of her life then. But it all went wrong. Didn't.
- [13:22]
McDonald's Advertiser
Did. Sadly for her, it went wrong in two very important respects. First of all, she and William did not have any children, which was basically seen as a failing in a medieval queen. Although, of course, you know, she's not in control of her fertility. It was not her own fault. This is one of the signs, actually, about how strong her relationship with William was because the marriage survived the lack of any children, which other medieval royal marriages didn't. So that's one of the reasons we can say that he really cared for her, which is why? It was even more. More of a disaster when he died in 1189, and he was only in his mid-30s at the time, and Joanna only in her 20s. And this was a tragedy. She was a widow. She'd lost the man she'd been married to for more than half of her life and she had no children, so the next king was not going to be her son. And this caused chaos and disaster for her.
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Catherine Hanley
Obviously, this had such a huge impact on her status, on her security. What then happened next?
- [14:36]
McDonald's Advertiser
Okay, we can sum it up as there was a lot of violence. So William II had a very small family. His only relative, legitimate relative, was his aunt, who was called Constance. And although she was his aunt, she was actually younger than him and he had named her as his heir. Now, this was not terribly popular all round, not particularly because the people there objected to the idea of a female ruler per se, but it was because she was married to Henry of Hohenstaufen, who was the heir to the empire, what we would later call the Holy Roman Empire. And people were worried that once he inherited the empire, that Sicily would just get swallowed up in the empire. So there were other candidates available. And the chap who seized the initiative was Tancred. He was a member of the royal family, but he was illegitimate. He was a very well known military commander. He took this opportunity to declare his own claim to the throne. Now, this was dangerous for Joanna because Joanna, although not commanding army, she did have a lot of what we might call soft power. And she announced her support for Constance, which meant that when Tancred came barrelling into Palermo and took over and had himself crowned king, and several men who had stood against him were summarily executed. You know, this was not good for Joanna. Obviously he couldn't execute her, but he did imprison her. And if she'd been anyone else, if she'd come from any other family in Europe, that might have been the end of the story. You know, she was imprisoned for the rest of her life is a sentence that's been written more than once about medieval women. And this is one of the points in her life at which she was powerless. She couldn't escape on her own. The other nobles of Sicily just decided to go with the flow and accept Tancred. And she was very isolated, but all these years she had done her duty, being the bridge between her birth family and her marriage family. And the payoff of this is that she's still a member of that birth family and they're still responsible for her and her safety and her honour. And so a rescue was mounted and.
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Catherine Hanley
This is when Richard, her brother, swoops in to her rescue. How was she saved from captivity?
- [17:15]
McDonald's Advertiser
Just to backtrack a little bit. By this stage, Joanna's father, Henry ii, has died and the King of England is the eldest of the then surviving brothers, Richard. Now, as it happens, he didn't arrive on Sicily specifically to rescue his sister. He arrived there because he was on his way to the Crusade. So he landed on Sicily. He sent a message to Tancred saying, release my sister or else. Tancred thought about that for about five seconds and then released her. But Richard then also made quite a lot of financial demands and Tancred stalled on these, which is when the situation on Sicily really got slightly out of hand. Now, Joanna wasn't actually involved in this, but it was to her detriment. When she had married William ii, he had bestowed on her something called a dower, which is lands and incomes that were to support her financially if he died first. And so she was meant to be receiving the incomes and having these lands, but Tancred had confiscated those. Richard said, okay, you give me back my sister, but now I want all my sister's stuff as well. And this is what Tancred was stalling on. Richard then let his army loose on the city of Messina and the innocent citizens there were subject to horrific violence, at which point Tancred realised he was just no match in a military sense for Richard. But he didn't want to give away lands, so he suggested to Richard that they change this dower to a very large sum in cash instead, which Richard, on Joanna's behalf, accepted and then pocketed the lot. So now Joanna, she's gone from being imprisoned by Tancred to being virtually her brother's prisoner, because what could she do? It's all very well being a widowed queen, but there's a difference between a widowed queen with an ample dower and a widowed queen who is penniless. So she just basically becomes a member of Richard's entourage and for the foreseeable future, she's going to go where he's going to go. And eventually, once Richard was satisfied with everything on Sicily, they got in different ships and this is important, and they sailed away from Sicily with the rest of Richard's crusading fleet.
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Catherine Hanley
But it wasn't all plain sailing, was it?
- [20:01]
McDonald's Advertiser
Literally not. It wasn't long after they left Sicily when a very severe storm blew up in the Mediterranean and there were 200 odd ships in this fleet. And they got completely scattered all over the Mediterranean. Now, when Joanna's ship finally got out of this storm, she found that she was with only three other ships in sight of land. Now, none of these ships was the one that Richard was on. Joanna was on a ship with Princess Berengaria of Navarre, who was at this time betrothed to Richard, but not married. So Joanna, as a widowed queen, was chaperoning her. Now, as she watched, these three other ships were wrecked on the shore of Cyprus, possibly deliberately, and they were looted, everything was stolen, and any survivors from the wreck were taken away and imprisoned on Cyprus. So this is a very, very dangerous point. So Joanna, who is in charge of her, she's not sailing the ship, obviously, but she's the senior person on it, ordered that her ship should stay out to sea so that the same thing didn't happen to them. And now she's in a bind. What's she going to do? She's got no idea whether Richard's alive or dead, or if he is alive, where he is, he might be hundreds of miles away. And she's in a very dangerous situation. She needs to stop her ship being wrecked or attacked, and herself and Berengari are being taken captive. And so she employs this sort of soft power that queens had, negotiating power. The ruler of the island was a chap called Isaac Komnenos, and he sent sort of envoys out to the ship and he tried to soft soap them. Oh, do, do come on to land and I'll look after you and I'll accommodate you in my palace. And she wasn't having any of it, but it was a very fine line that she had to walk. On the one hand, she definitely doesn't want to go and land on Cyprus, but on the other hand, she doesn't want to antagonize Isaac to the point where he attacks them, because they are one ship and they're not going to be able to stand out very long. So she had to just keep going, really. And she actually, she held him off for two weeks, until finally, and no doubt to her immense joy, a line of ships came over the horizon, of which one was the ship containing Richard the Lionheart. So, you know, it's kind of a little bit damsel in distress, you know, her brother has come to rescue her, but she wouldn't have been there to be rescued if she hadn't taken the initiative in those negotiations. So Richard arrived, he's quite cross at his ships being wrecked and his people being taken prisoner. He tells Isaac to let them go. Isaac doesn't really comply. Richard leads landing party. They succeed in freeing the men, and then Richard decides that actually he's going to conquer the whole of Cyprus just while he's there, which is actually unjustifiable because it was a Christian land. And the way in which he made Isaac surrender, I would just like to note here because it's another important thing in women's history. Isaac had a daughter, a little girl who was probably about 10 at this point. And Isaac was fighting against Richard with his forces when Richard captured this little girl. And Isaac immediately surrendered. Now, none of the chronicles we have who incidentally were all people who were in Richard's party, they don't spell it out too much, but there's not really many ways you can interpret. He heard that Richard had his daughter and he knew he had to surrender immediate. And it shows that Richard was not above threatening a little girl. Fortunately for this little girl, once Isaac did surrender, Richard actually handed her over to Joanna and Berengaria because he said, I'm going to take the girl with me as a hostage, and you'll notice that I'm calling her the little girl. And this little girl had an incredibly exciting life. She'd already spent time as a hostage in Antioch. Now she was being a hostage for her father's good behavior with Richard. She went to the Holy Land. She later went back to Europe. She married a couple of times. She went back to the east to try and claim her rights. And in all that time, not one single chronicler thought to mention what her name was. But it's incredible the way women were just sort of invisible. They were there, they were involved in these events. It's just the chroniclers didn't bother to write it down. So anyway, after this, finally, they leave Cyprus again. They sail for the Holy Land, where Joanna will spend the next 16 months of her life.
- [25:05]
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- [26:45]
Catherine Hanley
On very nicely to the next chapter in Joanna's story and that is the Third Crusade. Now obviously when I think many of our listeners think of the Third Crusade, they do think of Richard the Lionheart valiantly fighting on crusade. But of course Joanna's very much part of this story as well. What was her experience during the Third Crusade?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Okay, so they arrived at the port of Acre, which at this point is being held by the Muslims and the Christians, or the Franks as they're sometimes called. The Crusaders have been besieging it for nearly two years already. So she takes up residence in the Crusaders siege camp. You know, we're talking about something the size of a small town and it's fortified, it's got its own walls and it's got its own gates. And so it's, it's quite claustrophobic really because she's got to stay in there. She can't go wandering around outside the camp to look at the local countryside because there's the enemy army inside Acre. But also Saladin's army is on the other side of the camp, Crusaders outside. So they're sort of trapped between these two forces. It is important to note there were quite a few women in that camp. And this is because a crusade was not just a military undertaking, it was a spiritual one as well. It was a pilgrimage. Now it's not entirely clear to what extent these women were involved in the actual military manoeuvres, but they were certainly engaged in what we might call military adjacent activities. And it wasn't all that Long. It was In July of 1191 that acre fell. This was a great success for the Crusaders. But after that there was stalemate, really. They couldn't get really get much further. They couldn't get anywhere near Jerusalem. And Richard was starting to get messages from home going, we need you in England. And so he decided that he would enter into negotiations with Saladin.
- [28:54]
Catherine Hanley
And this is where Joanna comes into the story most evidently. How did Richard attempt to break this stalemate?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Well, he and Saladin never met face to face, but they had negotiating parties. And he did meet with Saladin's brother and most able deputy, who's called Al Adil and he's sometimes known as Safadin in some of the English texts. And Richard's splendid idea was that he would offer Joanna as a bride for Aladdiel and he would hand over to the newly married couple the bits of the Holy Land that he controlled. Saladin would hand over to the newly married couple the bits of the Holy Land that he controlled. And, you know, the war would end, everybody would go away and Al Adil and Joanna would rule over this area.
- [29:41]
Catherine Hanley
Okay, what was Joanna's take on this potential marriage?
- [29:46]
McDonald's Advertiser
Well, to start with, he didn't actually tell her about it. Now, Al Adil was a very sensible man and he realised that on the one hand, this was a great opportunity for him, but on the other hand, it looked very suspiciously like he would be engaging in a power grab from his brother and that wasn't going to go down well. So he very carefully stepped back and sent a party to Saladin to make it clear that any decision on this was Saladin's. Now, Saladin, quite a clever chap, he saw through this. Straight away, he realised it was a hoax because this was never going to happen. And he called Richard's bluff by saying, great, let's hold the wedding now. So at this point, Richard actually had to go and tell Joanna that this is what he'd arranged and she was not impressed. And we actually know quite a lot about her reaction, because one of the accounts, the written accounts that we have was actually written by somebody who was a member of the negotiating party. And, you know, she was absolutely adamant that she was not going to do this. Now, stepping back slightly, we have to look at this sort of through a 12th century lens. You know, to reject the possibility of a marriage simply because the other person is of a different religion had a very different meaning in the 12th century. Joanna had been brought up as a very strict Christian. You know, the idea of being married To a Muslim, you know, the enemy in these crusading endeavours was completely unacceptable. She would be excommunicated from the Church. She would never be able to see any of her family again, again, because she would be what's called an apostate. And the penalty for even talking to an apostate was excommunication. Plus there was the fact that Al Adil also had at least one wife and several concubines, if not several wives. He had at least 20 children. And this is not a great situation either personally, politically or religiously for Joanna. But what's important is that she did stand up for herself. You know, we've been having this ongoing discussion about when women had power and when they didn't have power. And she's just stood up to the man who is the head of her family and the King of England and told him no.
- [32:20]
Catherine Hanley
Why did Saladin think this marriage proposal was a hoax?
- [32:24]
McDonald's Advertiser
So my reasoning for thinking that this was a bit of a hoax is firstly, Richard talked about it to Al Adil and the reason we know about it is from the accounts that were written by the Muslim chroniclers, the Christian chroniclers who were in Richard's army don't seem to know about it, which means that he probably didn't tell many people about it. It's not going to go down well with the churchmen in his army or, you know, any devout thing. But he's basically got to the point where he needs to get out of this crusade with his honor intact. So he's trying to save face, really, instead of just going, well, I'm not going to take Jerusalem and I'll just go home, which is going to look like failure. He might be able to say, you know, I've negotiated something, but he must have known that it absolutely wasn't going to wash. And to me it's just more of a stalling tactic. Because when Saladin said, yeah, let's have the wedding now, Richard came up with the ridiculous excuse that only the Pope could give permission for a widowed queen to get married again and that therefore they'd have to wait until he could send somebody to Rome and then get the answer back again. I mean, this is ludicrous. Nobody else has ever said this. Widowed queens get remarried all the time. And then when Joanna refused, he instead offered his seven year old niece, Eleanor of Brittany, as a substitute. His niece, who is the daughter of a duke, is not the same as being offered a woman who is the daughter, sister and widow of queens. So the whole thing is to just very, very messy.
- [33:56]
Catherine Hanley
And so the potential marriage falls through. How does the rest of the crusade play out for Joanna?
- [34:04]
McDonald's Advertiser
She does find herself in danger a couple more times. She and Berengaria get moved, and I literally mean that move like chattels. Richard just moves them from Acre to Jaffa, but then Jaffa was attacked while they were there and he'd gone back to Acre and he had to come back again. But eventually a truce was agreed between Richard and Saladin, at which point Joanna was told that, you know, they would all be going back to Europe. And she was probably quite relieved about that because she's been a widow for several years now, so she can't have an independent existence unless she can get some money, which she's not going to get out of Richard while he's still on crusade. So her only options are remaining the penniless widow sister who gets dragged around everywhere, or getting married again. There's not really much point in her marrying any of the Frankish leaders in the Holy Land, so her best chance of really being able to get on with her life is going back to Europe. So they set off again from the Holy Land, again in separate ships, and again, disaster happened. I mean, never, ever get on a ship with Joanna Plantagenet. Seriously, she and her ship, which again has Berengaria and the damsel of Cyprus in it, does arrive in Apulia, which is in the heel part of Italy, safely, and they wait there because Richard is supposed to be turning up any day and he doesn't. And this part of Italy, of course, is actually part of the kingdom of Sicily, Joanna's friend Tancred being the king, so she doesn't want to stay there. And again, it's quite clear in the evidence that it is she who takes the initiative and takes the action and decides that her party will make their way to Rome, because in Rome and the Papal States, as returning Crusaders, they will be under the direct protection of the Pope. So she gets them to Rome and they stay in Rome over the winter and the early spring of 1193. And while they're there, the news comes to them that Richard has been captured and is imprisoned by the Duke of Austria and the Emperor, which we won't go into because this is Joanna's story and not Richard's. But as far as Joanna is concerned, you know, this captivity might well be permanent. So she's got to get her party back to Western Europe, back to where they're safe, and she has still got one person that she can rely on in her life. It's her mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. So Joanna, with Berengaria and the damsel and a cardinal whom the Pope sort of lends them for the journey to look after them. They travel, thank God, overland. She didn't get on a ship from Rome to go back. They travel overland, sort of up through Italy and along the south coast until they finally reach France. They reach Poitou, which is under Eleanor of Aquitaine and is therefore safe. And it's Joanna that's organized that and done that. And what a relief it must have been to her. She was last in Poitou when she was 10 years old. It must have really felt like coming home.
- [37:24]
Catherine Hanley
It's such a long road home. It's extraordinary. Now, the next chapter that we must come on to is her next marriage. She's had some potential offers over the course of the last few years. She now actually gets married to Raymond VI of Toulouse. What leads up to this?
- [37:45]
McDonald's Advertiser
Okay, there's a very complicated political dispute behind this, which I will summarise very, very quickly, which is that a hundred years ago, there was a dispute over who should be count of Toulouse. And the current Count of Toulouse, Raymond vi, is descended from one claimant and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Richard and Joanna are descended from the other claimant. Whenever any of Eleanor of Aquitaine's family has had the time and the leisure, amid all their other concerns, they've made sporadic claims to Toulouse. Now, Richard, who by this stage has been ransomed and released and is free again, has got quite a lot on his plate. He really hasn't got time to be dealing with a claim to Toulouse as well. But on the other hand, he doesn't want to give it up, so he needs to make an alliance with Toulouse. And, of course, what's the best way to make an alliance, a marriage alliance? Now, what's really interesting about this one is that Joanna not only didn't object, but seems to have been quite enthusiastic about it. Now, I could come up with political and personal reasons for this. We can't tell. There's no way we can possibly know. But there are some plausible reasons. Firstly is that now she's back in France, she might want to stay there and not get married off to a king of, you know, Denmark or Hungary or somewhere much further away where she'd never see her family again. And it's also possible that Raymond VI was a bit of a charmer. He had actually accompanied them on the last month or so of their trek back from Rome. As they were crossing, they had to cross the county of Toulouse to get to Aquitaine, and they'd spent some time, you know, in each other's company. So it is just possible that not only was she accepting of the idea of marrying Raymond, that she might even have put the idea in Richard's head to start with. Again, we can't tell. That is supposition on my part, but it's not implausible, the fact that she sort of embraced this idea so enthusiastically, because Raymond himself, neither he nor his father, had a. A great reputation when it came to treating the women in the family. Raymond's about 10 years older than Johanna, which at her stage of life, she's about 30 now, isn't kind of too bad. He's already been married twice, the second wife having been repudiated and all. They'd split up in some quite dubious circumstances, and the second wife is still alive and in a convent. So, you know, there would have to be some pretty strong reason for Joanna to want to do this. And so whether it was personal to do with Raymond or. Or to do with remaining in France or just that, she just wanted to get on with her life, because, like I said, her life is not going to proceed until she's married again. So they get married in late 1196, and to start with, everything is sunshine and roses. She gives birth to a son and heir to Raymond, which he didn't have before from either of his marriages, exactly nine months after the wedding.
- [40:38]
Catherine Hanley
So this all sounds somewhat dubiously but pretty promising for Joanna. Was this marriage a prosperous one?
- [40:47]
McDonald's Advertiser
Well, in some ways it was very good for her reputation, because she'd always had this sort of slight reputation of being a barren queen, in that she'd been married to William II of Sicily and never given him any children. And so this certainly put paid to any rumours that that had been her fault or her problem. And then actually she did it again within another year after the birth of the son and heir. She had a daughter as well. She was in a good position in this marriage because although she's the Countess of Toulouse, once you're crowned, you keep that status for the rest of your life. So she's still known as Queen Joanna even in this marriage. And actually, Raymond makes the most of this. You know, there's all this, my wife, Queen Joanna, in some of his charters. But it didn't take long before it all started to go very, very wrong indeed.
- [41:40]
Catherine Hanley
So what challenges did they face? What exactly went wrong?
- [41:45]
McDonald's Advertiser
Well, there are various aspects to this, both personal and political ones. On a personal basis, Joanna was starting to encounter the slightly less pleasant side of Raymond's personality. In the same year that their daughter was born, another woman gave birth to Raymond's illegitimate son. And they seem to have been arguing about other things. He actually, at one point stopped all her financial support. And then there was a political and religious dimension. Now, I'm sure most listeners have heard of the Cathar heresy, which later turned into the Albigensian Crusade. Joanna, as we already know, was a faithful daughter of the Church, the Western Latin Church, and so she would not have been in any way sympathetic to the Cathars who were in the region in which she now lived, in Toulouse. Raymond was never accused of being a Cathar himself, but he was accused of being far too sympathetic to them. And this no doubt caused more conflict between the couple, who were already having personal problems. And when, during all this, Joanna found that she was pregnant for a third time within only three years of the marriage, and I guess, you know, she looked at what her future was going to be if she stayed where she was. She made an absolutely astonishing decision in the context of the time, which was that she was going to leave her husband. Now, this just didn't happen. You know, there were plenty of bad marriages around, but the wife in the case was expected to shut up and put up with it. And it is only really because Joanna had these very powerful connections that she was able to consider doing this. If you imagine where Toulouse is in the south, the bottom right hand corner in France, Raymond was away, but he was away in Provence when a rebellion happened at a castle towards the Aquitaine side of Toulouse. Now, when a rebellion happens, the count is expected to put it down, but if the count is away, the countess is expected to put it down. Now, this rebellion was linked to the Cathars, and unfortunately, when she got there, it turned out that some of the troops that she'd brought with her were rather more sympathetic to the Cathars than she'd thought they were. And they betrayed her. And she actually only just escaped, really. And at that point, you know, you've got to think that's the final straw, isn't it? It's just not working. And she's not far from the border with Aquitaine and she went to Aquitaine to find her brother and her mother. So Eleanor of Aquitaine by now has sort of semi retired, and Richard is known to be in Poitou at the moment rather than in England because he's putting down some rebellions there. So the timing couldn't really have been better.
- [44:47]
Catherine Hanley
And in a phrase that We've used much before in this episode, it all went a bit wrong, didn't it?
- [44:55]
McDonald's Advertiser
Yes, it did. First of all, Joanna arrived in Poitou only to find that Richard was dead. He'd been besieging a castle, hit by a crossbow bolt and died from the infection. But the political circumstances were in turmoil because Richard had died without leaving any legitimate children. There was an immediate scramble over the question not only of the English throne, but the Duchy of Normandy and the county of Anjou, and all of those between Richard's brother John and their nephew Arthur of Brittany, which Eleanor of Aquitaine became involved in coming down on John's side. But Joanna didn't, because the strain of all this, because, don't forget, she's pregnant and travelling in the late 12th century, you know, it's not a terribly smooth experience. And she's either had to ride on horseback or in a jolting wagon or horse litter. And added to all the stress that she'd been under with her marriage breaking up and so on, she was really, really not well. So she and Eleanor travelled to Rouen in Normandy, where they met with John and he agreed to make her a financial settlement in lieu of what had been her dower money on Cicely that Richard had taken and never repaid. But what's really interesting when you look at the charter in which he did this, is that they must have known at the time how ill she was, because it doesn't say, I'm giving you this money and you can do what you like. It's, I'm giving this money to my sister so she can make what bequests she likes. And we're coming rapidly towards quite a sad end to the story, I'm afraid. Joanna did show her independence just in one final fling. She absolutely was so determined to not go back to Raymond of Toulouse that while she was in Rouen, she spoke to the Archbishop of Canterbury and she requested to be admitted to Fontevrault Abbey as a nun. So for a woman who is both married and pregnant, you know, this is very, very unusual. But he agreed. And so this meant that the marriage between her and Raymond would be automatically dissolved, so he could never get to her again. It did mean she would never see her children again because they were his property and they were still in Toulouse. But she was sort of so desperate by this stage, desperate to go home. If you think of all the moving around she's done in her whole life, where is home, you know? And Fontevo Abbey might have been the only place that she remembered as being peaceful and stable, but she actually, she never got there. She was too near her confinement and too ill to move. And she went into labour in Rouen and she died. And there was some hope that the baby might live long enough just to be, even if it was only to be baptized. So actually they performed a post mortem Caesarean section on her. So that is a sad and powerless end, because if there's anything that shows the lack of power of medieval royal women, it's dying in childbirth. But she did make one last demonstration of her own will, which is that she left a very detailed will about who was to have her money, bequests to her maids of honour and many to Fontevre Abbey, and they were all carried out exactly as she wished. And Raymond was left nothing. He was not even mentioned in her will. But she did leave a sum of money so that masses and prayers would be said for herself and the King of Sicily.
- [48:53]
Catherine Hanley
And with that, we've come to the end of Joanna's really quite short life.
- [48:58]
McDonald's Advertiser
She was not quite 34 at the time of her death, which is an age that seems younger and younger to me with every passing year.
- [49:07]
Catherine Hanley
As a final question, tell us, how do you think we should be thinking about Joanna Plantagenet today? What's her real legacy to us?
- [49:18]
McDonald's Advertiser
I think really it's to show that the lives of medieval women could be just as interesting and action packed as the lives of medieval men. It's just that it's much more difficult to find out about them. And I know I banged on about power a lot, but she's just a brilliant example of the contradictions in the lives of medieval royal women, that in some cases they had a lot more power and a lot more influence on events than they've ever been given credit for. But that on the other hand, there were occasions when they were entirely powerless. And I think one of Joanna's great strengths was that she picked her battles. She recognized when she could influence events, she recognised when she couldn't influence events, and she recognized which of those situations was which and played her cards accordingly. And I couldn't really give her a better epitaph than that.
- [50:27]
Emily Britt
That was Catherine Hanley speaking to me. Emily Britt. Catherine is a historian and the author of Lioness the Life and Times of Joanna Plantagenet, as well as upcoming books Nemesis, Medieval England's Greatest Enemy and Women in Medieval Families. Catherine has also previously been on the podcast to discuss 1217, a year that almost changed English history irrevocably. And on another episode, she looks at how royal personalities forge the fate of the two intertwined kingdoms of medieval England and France. You can find them wherever you listen to your podcasts. Just search for 1217, the year that almost changed English history, or royal medieval England and France's term pastorous relationship.