of the House of Saxony; and as she had no children, she adopted a relative, Charles of Duras....  This ungrateful prince revolted against Queen Joanna, his benefactress....  He captured Naples, and laid siege to the Castello Nuovo, where the Queen was.  She surrendered.  Charles of Duras had her taken to Muro, in the Basilicata, and had her put to death seven or eight months afterward.  She was then in her fifty-eighth year....  Some authors say that he caused her to be smothered, others that she was strangled; but the more probable view is that she was beheaded, in 1382, on the 5th of May.  It is said that a Provencal astrologer, doubtless a certain Anselme who lived at that time, and who is very famous in the history of Provence, being questioned as to the future husband of the young princess, replied, ‘Maritabitur cum ALIO.’  This word is composed of the initials of the names of her four husbands, Andrea, Louis, James, and Otto.  This princess, furthermore, was exceedingly clever, fond of the sciences and of men of learning, of whom she had a great many at her court, liberal and beautiful, prudent, wise, and not lacking in piety.  She it is that sold Avignon to the popes.  Boccaccio, Balde, and other scholars of her time speak of her with praise.”

In offering an explanation of the great popularity enjoyed by Joanna of Naples among the people of Provence, the poet does not hesitate to acknowledge that along with her beauty, her personal charm, her brilliant arrival on the gorgeous galley at the court of Clement VI, whither she came, eloquent and proud, to exculpate herself, her long reign and its vicissitudes, her generous efforts to reform abuses, must be counted also the grewsome procession of her four husbands; and this popularity, he says, is still alive, after five centuries.  The poet places her among such historic figures as Caius Marius, Ossian, King Arthur, Count Raymond of Toulouse, the good King Rene, Anne of Brittany, Roland, the Cid, to which the popular mind has attached heroic legends, race traditions, and mysterious monuments.  The people of Provence still look back upon the days of their independence when she reigned, a sort of good fairy, as the good old times of Queen Joanna.  Countless castles, bridges, churches, monuments, testify to her life among this enthusiastic people.  Roads and ruins, towers and aqueducts, bear her name.  Proverbs exist wherein it is preserved.  “For us,” says Mistral, “the fair Joanna is what Mary Stuart is for the Scotch,—­a mirage of retrospective love, a regret of youth, of nationality, of poetry passed away.  And analogies are not lacking in the lives of the two royal, tragic enchantresses.”  Petrarch, speaking of her and her young husband surrounded by Hungarians, refers to them as two lambs among wolves.  In a letter dated from Vancluse, August, 1346, he deplores the death of the King, but makes no allusion to the complicity of the Queen.

Boccaccio proclaims her the special pride of Italy, so gracious, gentle, and kindly, that she seemed rather the companion than the queen of her subjects.