The Villehardouin Granddaughters

The name of the young woman who posed for this 1310 fresco is unknown, but she stands in here for her contemporary, the younger Isabelle Villehardouin. The chronicler Muntaner who knew Isabelle said: "It was no wonder if he [Prince Ferdinand] was enamoured of her, for she was the most beautiful creature of fourteen one could see, the whitest and rosiest and the best. And she was the most learned damsel, for her age, of any in the world. What shall I tell you?"
What I shall tell you is that it was not a good thing to be a princess in the medieval Morea.

When William Villehardouin, Prince of Achaia died in 1278, he left two daughters, Isabelle, whose story was sketched here, and Marguerite, Lady of Akova. Each named a daughter for her sister. Isabelle's Marguerite has no story, only a long life in Flanders and a good marriage, but Isabelle's older daughter Maud had enough story for several.

There are a lot of names in this story.

First, Maud. Maud was married at the age of 12--she was legally an adult--to the young Duke of Athens, Guy II de la Roche, uniting the dynasties of Athens and the Morea, at least on parchment. Her mother Isabelle and step-father Philippe left the Morea in disgrace because of Philippe. Because of William Villehardouin's treaties, the Principality of Achaia now belonged to Charles II of Anjou, King of Naples who needed its wealth to finance his attempt to regain Sicily. He sent over his own governor and gave possession of the Principality to his brother, Philip of Taranto.

Philip appointed Guy as governor, but Guy and Maud made formal claim to the Principality in their own right, with the support of most of the feudal lords who wanted a Villehardouin. Guy died in 1308 after a long illness and Maud was a widow at the age of 15. Philip betrothed Maud to his son Charles who also died, and when she was 20, Philip married Maud off to Louis of Burgundy, an Angevin relative. Maud and Louis were jointly rulers of the Principality of Achaia but as he was a teenager and they mostly lived in Burgundy, Achaia was still under Angevin-Neopolitan control.

Meanwhile, Maud's aunt Marguerite had been widowed twice. She and her daughter Isabelle had their own lives, troubled because of Marguerite's step-son. But when Marguerite's sister and Maud's mother, Isabelle Villehardouin, died in 1312 or 1313, Marguerite began her own efforts to lay claim to the Principality of Achaia. She had considerable support in this from the feudal lords who still resented the Angevin-Neopolitan adminstrators and who still wanted Achaia back under a Villehardouin. The Villehardouins had been popular ever since the first one had landed more than a hundred years earlier.

Parallel with the lives of the Villehardouin granddaughters, and intersecting with them, were the adventures, lootings, slaughters, and conquests of the Catalan Company -- a narrative much too long and unpleasant to relate here which you can read in the terrific chronicle by one of its captains, Muntaner -- but its members had by 1311 managed to take over most of Thessaly, eastern Greece, Thebes, Athens, Attica, Megara, and Aigina. Frederick, the Spanish king of Sicily, and one of the Catalans' backers, sent his cousin, the Infante Ferdinand of Majorca, to Greece to take over. He didn't, but during the next two years he had terrific adventures and made a splendid reputation for himself.

[Just a reminder here: when the Sicilian Vespers overthrough Charles I of Anjou, King of Naples and Sicily, back in 1286, they invited in Peter III of Aragon to take over Sicily, though the right of inheritance of his wife, Constance of Hohenstaufen. Charles I had taken Naples and Sicily from the Hohenstaufens. So now the Spanish-Sicilian empire controled half of Greece, and the Angevin-Naples empire controlled the Morea. You can see what was bound to happen.]

When Marguerite began looking for support, it was the year the Infante Ferdinand was particularly heroic in battle against the Moslems of Spain. He was apparently as charming a swashbuckler as anyone ever met, but Marguerite did not know this when she proposed to Frederick of Sicily that her daughter Isabelle marry his Ferdinand, and that they be Prince and Princess of Achaia under Frederick.

The ladies were invited to Messina, and Ferdinand was absolutely smitten. Remember what Mutaner wrote:

It was no wonder . . . she was the most beautiful creature of fourteen one could see, the whitest and rosiest and the best. And she was the most learned damsel, for her age, of any in the world.

Isabelle came from a family of at least four generations of splendidly-educated, multi-lingual women. She was swept off her feet. Everyone was enchanted by the couple's delight with each other. Marguerite transferred all her rights to Ferdinand and her lands to Isabella. Of course the Neopolitan Angevins were furious and when Marguerite returned to the Morea, their agents imprisoned her in the castle of Chlemoutsi which her grandfather had built, and confiscated her lands.

Isabelle became pregnant almost immediately and that was a signal to Ferdinand to make his plans to conquer as necessary in the Morea. Marguerite died in captivity: we do not know why, but there were many reasons to die in a medieval prison without needing to suspect underhanded action. Isabelle's pregnancy was in the seventh month and Ferdinand, wanting to protect her, did not tell her the news. Mutaner, delighted with the pregnancy, presented Isabelle with two bales of carpets, assorted garments, worked leather, and jewels. Then he rode up to Messina to help Ferdinand prepare their soldiers to embark for the Morea.

Two weeks later, they received word that Isabelle had given birth to an Infante on the first Saturday of April 1315. Ferdinand came down for a grand ceremony and they baptized him Jaime. Then Isabelle contracted a fever and dysentery. Ferdinand had returned to Messenia to complete plans for conquest but he hurried back. She recovered briefly when she saw him, but then she died when Jaime was 32 days old. Mutaner was directed to take the Infante Jaime to his grandmother, but that is a story for another time.

Ferdinand continued with his plans -- what else was he to do?-- and sailed for the Morea in June, landing near Clarenza which he attacked. Clarenza and several fortresses surrendered easily, and it looked as if Ferdinand was gathering a great deal of support from Moreote fiefholders and cities, including those who had held Marguerite in prison. When the situation looked stable, he arranged a marriage with Isabelle of Ibelin, of Palestine, a cousin of the King of Cyprus.

Meanwhile, opposition was building to the north in Patras and south in Messenia, and Maud who had been with Louis in Burgundy arrived with troops which she led into battle. Ferdinand won. Then Louis arrived with French reinforcements. The great lords from the islands came to the north-western Morea in support of Ferdinand, while the Greeks at Mistra sent two thousand troops to Maud and Louis. Ferdinand was expecting reinforcements by ship from Sicily.

They met in battle at Manolada, in a field not far from the sea, beside a small church of the Virgin. [More on that here.] Maud and Louis rode with their troops. Ferdinand's reinforcements remained off-shore, whether from contrary winds -- and they do blow from the land out to sea at mid-day, or from fear. Ferdinand's forces were completely crushed and he was beheaded on the field.

Two months later Louis died.

A new king, Robert of Naples, decided Maud should marry his brother, John of Gravina. Maud had had it with arranged marriages and said that she had secretly married one of the Burgundian knights, Hugues de la Palisse.

Robert, to no one's surprise, announced that he had discovered that Hugues was plotting against him, and Hughes was executed. Maud was imprisoned in the Castello dell'Uovo at Naples for 14 years (for marrying without permission) and forgotten. She died there in 1331. Her mother's aunt Helena, had been imprisoned for years and had died in prison, after Charles I of Anjou defeated her husband in 1266.

It was not a good thing to be a princess in the medieval Morea.

Isabelle de Villehardouin, Princess of the Morea

A long entry, after two short ones.

Isabelle Villhardouin was a true princess and a lady, but as a princess in the 13th-century Morea, the realities of life did not allow her what a woman of her character and intelligence deserved.

When she was a child in the mid-1260s, her father, Guillaume II of Villehardouin was militarily insecure. To guarantee military backing, he, together with Baldwin II, ex-Emperor of Constantinople, ratified the Treaty of Viterbo with Charles I of Anjou. This meant that Anjou would inherit the Principality of the Morea after Guillaume died, sealed by the betrothal of Isabelle to Anjou's young son, Philippe; and that Anjou would inherit title to the Empire of Constantinople, sealed by the marriage of the Emperor's son Philippe to his very young daughter, Beatrice.

There were about a dozen of these children, young Angevins and their betrothed, all being raised together in the French-Italian court of Naples with a surround of troubadours, manuscripts, and warriors. Isabelle and Philippe were formally married when they were twelve, but the agreement had specified that she be protected from sexual relations until she was older--old enough for a reasonably safe childbirth.

Philippe died in 1277, probably before they got that far: he had always been unwell, and a great deal of the marriage had consisted of trips to healing shrines and hot springs. Isabelle's father died the next year, Charles of Anjou became Prince of the Morea [inherited from his son], and she was retained in Naple's Castel dell'Uovo. She must have felt uneasy there: her aunt Helena, widow of Manfred, had been imprisoned with her son in the Castel since Manfred's defeat and death in 1266, and Villehardouin surely knew something about that when he agreed to the treaty in the following year.

Isabelle's mother, Anna, and Helena, were daughters of Theodora of Arta and Michael Komnenos Doukas. Theodora was later recognized as a saint, and while her vita does not mention these daughters, they were clearly raised with character and with good educations. Theodora's focused intelligence comes through Anna to Isabella and her sister, Marguerite: we have no idea if they were able to keep in touch with their mother after their marriages. They also had their father's focused energy. So much focus brought them frusration and disappointment, again and again.

Guillaume II, Prince of the Morea, died in 1278, and Anjou sent out governors, These were considered harsh and extortionate, but the best we can tell is that they were trying to rationalize taxation and administration in the Morea the way that Anjou's brother, Louis XI, had done in France, to similar objections. Nevertheless, the Morea and Anjou were under great strain for a number of years. Anjou had the Sicilian Vespers, war with the Aragonese. When he died in 1285, his heir, Charles II, was a prisoner of that war.

In 1289 Isabelle married Florent of Hainaut, who was related to the family of the ex-emperor and to the Avesnes family of the conquest of Greece. Whether this was an arranged marriage -- Charles II, though somewhat older, had escorted her to her marriage with his brother, and he might have actually been fond of her -- or whether it was an arranged marriage that suited her admirably, it turned out to be a good marriage. Charles II granted them the titles of Prince and Princess of the Morea on their wedding day, and sent them off to straighten things out in Greece. Which they mostly did, Florent in the north and west out of Andravida, and Isabelle in the south near Kalamata. They had a daughter, Mahaut or Maud, and then in 1297, Florent died unexpectedly. Isabelle continued in Greece.

Then like so many unwillingly single women of her age--she was 40, Isabelle decided to travel. She went to Rome for the Jubilee of 1300, the one about which Dante said, "I had not thought Death had undone so many." In Rome, she met a certain Philip of Savoy. She was far from being the only woman d'un certain âge to be smitten by a younger man: he sent her little presents, he took her on moonlit walks by the Tiber, he admired her sophistication, so unlike the silliness of younger women. Or maybe he didn't. But she was quite overwhelmed by him and they were married.

The bill for the wedding feast of 12 February 1301 still survives. The meats included 2 cows, 12 sheep, 9 pigs, 72 small birds, 8 goats, 24 pheasants, 50 ducks, capons, fowls, doves and egs. That took care of the protein. The bill goes on to list vinegar, rosewater, farina, salt, raisins, bread, fruit, 4 kinds of wine, 200 pounds of almonds, 27 pounds of sugar, 8 pound of pepper, 6 pounds of ginger, 3 pounds of cinnamon, charcoal, firewood, wax and torches,10 men to make sauces, transportation of the food, 31 horses, reeds and herbs for the banquet hall, planks and supports for the tables, payment for three master cooks, and beds for the servants for the nights before and after the banquet.

The romance lasted just about as long as the banquet. Charles II reluctantly sent them to the Morea to continue the Angevin-Villehardouin rule. Philippe took along his friends. Altogether they brought with them a whole new frat-boy layer of arrogance and violence, and the chronicles that admire Florent list Philippe's brutalities in detail. The Andravida branch of the Peruzzi bank of Florence was involved. Philippe also ignored Charles' directions. The Moreote peers rebelled and wrote Charles. The Greek archons were on the verge of rebellion, and this was more serious. Charles recalled Isabelle and Philippe on the technical grounds that she had lost her right to rule for marrying without permission.

Before this happened, in 1305, Isabelle arranged the betrothal of her twelve-year old daughter Mahaut to Guy II de la Roche, Duke of Athens, clearly with an eye on the possibility of the original Frankish families regaining their position. Mahaut was taken to Athens to live with Guy's mother until she was of age for marriage. Trying to go out with heads high, Isabelle and Philippe held a tournament at Corrinth 1307, one attended by 1000 knights and barons from all over Greece and the island, and seven professional jousters from the West who took on all challengers. Guy of Athens performed spectacularly.She left Philippe as soon as she arrived in Italy, ignoring Charles' offers of property and money, taking with her their daughter Marguerite to live in Hainaut on the lands Mahaut had inherited from her father.

Other than always keeping the loyalty of the Moreote Greeks, both for herself and for her family's loyalty to them, that was about it. Isabelle died in 1311, at the age of fifty. Marguerite married a knight of no particular status and died without children.