Page:Book of the Riviera.djvu/171

Rh kingdom of Jerusalem. But Jerusalem itself had fallen into the hands of the Saracens in 1244. To return now to Jeanne de Naples. Joanna I. of Naples was born in 1327, and was the daughter of Charles, Duke of Calabria, and of Marie de Valois, his second wife. Charles was the only son of Robert the Good, King of Naples, who was the grandson of Charles of Anjou, brother of S. Louis, to whom had been given the Crown of Naples by Pope Urban IV., determined at any cost to destroy the Hohenstauffen dynasty. Charles, Duke of Calabria, died before his father, and Joanna succeeded to the throne at the age of sixteen. She had been badly brought up. Philippine Cabane, a washerwoman, wife of a fisherman, had been nurse to Charles, and she became later the nurse and confidante of Joanna. She was a very beautiful and a thoroughly unprincipled woman. On the death of her husband she married a young Saracen slave in the service of Raymond de Cabane, maître d’hôtel to the King. Raymond fell under the influence of this Saracen, and he introduced him to King Robert, who created him Grand Seneschal, to the indignation of the Sicilian nobility, and himself armed the Saracen knight. Soon after marrying this man, we find "a Cabanaise," as she was called, installed as lady of honour to Catherine of Austria, first wife of Charles of Calabria. Soon she induced Raymond to adopt her husband, and to give him his title and bequeath his fortune to him. Catherine of Austria died, and then Charles married Marie de Valois; and when