41. The Assassination of Queen Joanna of Naples, Muro Lucano, Italy 1382

Maybe you loved her, maybe you hated her, but everybody agreed that Joanna of Naples was quite lovely. In this fresco she is being both lovely and pious. And well she might be; the fresco, by  Niccolò di Tommaso, is in the Carthusisan monastery of San Giacomo — and she had donated the land for it.

Joanna of Naples had a hell of a life.  There were unhappy marriages, there were murders, there were invasions, there was the Black Death, there was the Papal Schism, and there was a tangled ball of plots and tussles over the inheritance of the Neapolitan throne.  At the end of it all, she was murdered and thrown into a well.  And then she enjoyed hundreds of years of a Very Bad Reputation.  But recently, scholarship has turned the tide! She was an excellent leader, who was beleaguered by a whole lot of men across Europe, though mostly in her bedchamber, who thought that really, women shouldn’t be rulers!  Michelle gets quite passionate about this.  And manages to convince Anne as well, though for Anne the jury is still out on whether or not she was in on the plot to throw her first husband through a window.

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