The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

During the pestilence Genoa also received a brief visit from the most notorious woman in Christendom, the willful, beautiful Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily. Joanna, a combination of Scarlett O’Hara and Lizzie Borden, was in trouble again. On a September evening three years earlier, her husband, eighteen-year-old Andreas of Hungary, was discovered in the Neapolitan moonlight, dangling from a balcony with a noose around his neck. The queen and her lover, Luigi of Taratino, a man of such extraordinary physical beauty that a contemporary called him as “beautiful as the day,” were suspected of plotting the murder. The queen’s visit to pestilential Genoa was occasioned by her angry Hungarian in-laws, who had just invaded Italy in pursuit of her and Luigi and anyone who had helped them kill the eighteen-year-old Andreas. In March 1348, while notary de Bracelli was at his desk making out wills, and bodies piled up along Genoa’s “fine circuit of walls,” the lovely Joanna, in the breathless tradition of the romance novel heroine, was boarding a fast ship in Genoa harbor. Soon Christendom’s most beautiful couple would reunite in Avignon, where the Neapolitan queen would participate in a trial so notorious, for a while it upstaged even the plague.