Joan during the siege endured all the worst fatigues of war that any soldier has to bear.  She saw her faithful friends fall around her wasted by hunger or decimated by sickness.  When all food was exhausted, dead and decomposed bodies were thrown into the castle that they might pollute the air she breathed.  Otho with his troops was kept at Aversa; Louis of Anjou, the brother of the King of France whom she had named as her successor when she disinherited her nephew, never appeared to help her, and the Provencal ships from Clement VII were not due to arrive until all hope must be over.  Joan asked for a truce of five days, promising that, if Otho had not come to relieve her in that time, she would surrender the fortress.

On the fifth day Otho’s army appeared on the side of Piedigrotta.  The fight was sharp on both sides, and Joan from the top of a tower could follow with her eyes the cloud of dust raised by her husband’s horse in the thickest of the battle.  The victory was long uncertain:  at length the prince made so bold an onset upon the royal standard, in his eagerness to meet his enemy hand to hand, that he plunged into the very middle of the army, and found himself pressed on every side.  Covered with blood and sweat, his sword broken in his hand, he was forced to surrender.  An hour later Charles was writing to his uncle, the King of Hungary, that Joan had fallen into his power, and he only awaited His Majesty’s orders to decide her fate.

It was a fine May morning:  the queen was under guard in the castle of Aversa:  Otho had obtained his liberty on condition of his quitting Naples, and Louis of Anjou had at last got together an army of 50,000 men and was marching in hot haste to the conquest of the kingdom.  None of this news had reached the ears of Joan, who for some days had lived in complete isolation.  The spring lavished all her glory on these enchanted plains, which have earned the name of the blessed and happy country, campagna felite.  The orange trees were covered with sweet white blossoms, the cherries laden with ruby fruit, the olives with young emerald leaves, the pomegranate feathery with red bells; the wild mulberry, the evergreen laurel, all the strong budding vegetation, needing no help from man to flourish in this spot privileged by Nature, made one great garden, here and there interrupted by little hidden runlets.  It was a forgotten Eden in this corner of the world.  Joan at her window was breathing in the perfumes of spring, and her eyes misty with tears rested on a bed of flowery verdure; a light breeze, keen and balmy, blew upon her burning brow and offered a grateful coolness to her damp and fevered cheeks.  Distant melodious voices, refrains of well-known songs, were all that disturbed the silence of the poor little room, the solitary nest where a life was passing away in tears and repentance, a life the most brilliant and eventful of a century of splendour and unrest.