The Strangled Queen (25 page)

12. Jeanne of Burgundy (the
Halt), sister of Marguerite of
Burgundy (therefore of the ducal branch) and wife of, Philippe of Valois, must not be confused with the other Jeanne of Burgundy, wife of Philippe of Poitiers. These two Jeannes, moreover, were both to become, separated by only, ten years, Queens of France, one as the wife of Philippe V, and the other as the wife of Philippe VI.
It is to be remarked that, during this period, nearly all the women
at the Court of France were called either Jeanne or Marguerite and the men Philippe, Charles or Louis, which does not make the historian's task any the easier and has frequently given rise to confusion.

13. The fighting between the Guelfs, partisans of the Pope, and the Ghibellines, partisans of the Emperor, bathed a whole section of medieval Italy, and particularly Tuscany, in blood.
Dante and the father of Petrarch, both Ghibellines, were exiled from Florence by Charles of Valois.

14. The importance accorded to relics was one of the most marked exterior signs of religion in the Middle Ages. Belief in the virtue of sacred relics degenerated into universal and widespread superstition, everyone wishing to possess a large relic for their homes, and small ones to take with' them on journeys attached to their necks. People had relics in proportion to their wealth. The trade in relics was most prosperous during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even during the fourteenth. Everyone bought and sold these holy remains; abbots, in order,
to
augment the
revenues of their monasteries or acquire the favour of great personages, yielded up the fragments of the sainted bodies in their charge; crusaders returning from Palestine could make a fortune for themselves with, the pious detritus collected on their expedition. The Jews had a huge international organisation for the sale of relics. The goldsmiths encouraged the trade, because they received orders for shrines and reliquaries which were among the finest objects of the period and
reflected' the vanity as much
as the piety of their possessors.

The most celebrated and most. prized relics of the period were naturally pieces of the True Cr
oss, fragments: of the, wood of
the manger, the arrows of St. Sebastian, and many stones as well, those from Calvary, the Holy Sepulchre, and the Mount of Olives. In France, for obvious reasons, the most prized were the relics of King Saint Louis,
but they never left the circle
of the royal family.

15. Roberto Oder
isi was the most celebrated of
the Giottesque, Neapolitan painters, and was the one with the greatest local reputation of his time. His most celebrated works are the Crucifixion in the Church of St. Francis of Assisi at Eboli, and particularly the frescoes of the lncoronata at Naples which until recently were attributed to Giotto himself.
Having; first come under the influence of Giotto, whose apprentice he was, he then came under the influence of Simone de Martin and finally became head of the Neapolitan school of the fourteenth century. In 1315 Giotto was wholly employed in painting the frescoes of the life of St. Francis on the walls of the Santa Croce at Florence.

16. It was not yet the Palace of the Popes that we know. This was built in the following century.

17.
This Eudeline, natural daughter
of Louis X, and a nun in the Convent of the Clarisses of the Faubourg Saint-Marcel of Paris, was
authorised by
a Bull of Pope John XXIII, of l0th August 1330, to
become Abb
ess of Saint-Marcel, or of any
other convent of the Clarisses, in spite of her illegitimate birth.