THE WESTERN YIEDITERRAI\EAN KINGDOMS 1200-1500in setting Languedoc in order, Louis was, like his Valois
ancestor, something of a collector of royal titles in Majorca,
Sardinia and elsewhere; but his most lasting legacy as a pre-
tender was as would-be 'king of Jerusalem and Sicily'. In 1380
Joanna agreed to name him as her heir, in view of the fact
that, even after four husbands, she had no surviving heir.^11
No doubt Louis would have shown more enthusiasm had
his brother the king of France not died in September of that
year; this kept him in Paris, while Charles of Durazzo con-
quered the south of Italy, using an army well stocked with
Hungarian mercenaries. In a sense, the plans of Louis the
Great were now paying off, thirty years later, and with the
added benefit of papal support from Urban VI, who oblig-
ingly crowned Charles III king of Sicily in Rome in June
- Queen Joanna was carried off into imprisonment. By
the Summer of 1382 she had been smothered; her body was
displayed in the church of Santa Chiara as a token that,
after a reign of nearly forty years, her kingdom had now
passed to her nearest male relative, Charles of Durazzo, who
now had to face an invasion by his rival from France.
Louis I of Anjou did achieve some remarkable successes
in his south Italian campaign: by 1383 he had penetrated
far down the eastern side of the Regno; on 30 August he
publicly took the royal crown, and until his death in^1384
he managed to hold his position in Apulia with a certain
amount of French aid. His son Louis II took the crown in
his place, but failed to hold together his father's army, so
that Charles III could congratulate himself that he was safe
on the throne of Naples, even after the unpredictable Pope
Urban turned against him and called a crusade down upon
Charles. Charles ignored Urban, and prepared for an even
greater conquest, that of Hungary, which was also open to
claimants after the death in September 1382 of Louis the
Great without a male heir. Although he briefly established
himself as master of Croatia and of the Hungarian heartlands,
Charles made powerful enemies, with the result that he was
struck down in his palace at Buda in February 1386, dying - E.R. Labande, 'La politique mediterraneenne de Louis Ier d'Anjou
et le role qu'y joua Ia Sardaigne', Atti del VI Congresso internazionale di
studi sardi (Cagliari, 1957), pp. 3-23; repr. in E.R. Laban de, His loire
d!' /'Europe occidentale, Xle-X!Ve s. (London, 1973).