page_title: Joan, Countess of Flanders
section_title: Cultural legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Joan, Countess of Flanders / Cultural legacy
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Portrait de Jeanne de Constantinople par Arnould de Vuez (détail) au musée de l'Hospice Comtesse de Lille.
context_page_description: Joan, often called Joan of Constantinople, ruled as Countess of Flanders and Hainaut from 1205 until her death. She was the elder daughter of Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders and Hainaut, and Marie of Champagne.
  Orphaned during the Fourth Crusade, Joan was raised in Paris under the tutelage of King Philip II of France. He arranged her marriage to Infante Ferdinand of Portugal in 1212. Ferdinand quickly turned against Philip, starting a war that ended with the defeat of Bouvines and his imprisonment. Joan then ruled her counties alone from the young age of 14. She faced the rivalry of her younger sister, Margaret, as well as the revolt of her domains – guided by a man who claimed to be her father. After the end of the war, Ferdinand was released but died soon after. Joan then married Thomas of Savoy. She died in 1244 at the Abbey of Marquette near Lille, having survived her only child, a daughter by Ferdinand.
  Joan's policies favored economic development in her counties; in fact, she granted several charters to the Flemish cities. She played an important role in the development of the Mendicant orders, the Beguines, the Victorines and hospital communities in her domains.
context_section_description: Later medieval chroniclers, such as Matthew Paris, are generally hostile to her; almost all consider that the hermit was indeed the true Baldwin IX of Flanders and by killing him, she committed parricide. In the middle of the 15th century, the book Baudouin, Count of Flanders, presents Joan as the illegitimate child of the Count with a Saracen possessed by a demon, who commits patricide after a tortuous romantic plot.
  In 1823 Sismondi repeats this thesis of parricide in his Histoire des Français,  like the playwrights Fontan and Victor Herbin in their play Jeanne de Flandre in 1835. In response, Emile Gachet began a process to rehabilitate the Countess in the recently founded Revue du Nord. Finally, in 1840 Jules de Saint-Genois, father of the Belgian historical novel, wrote A false Baudouin, then the following year, Edward le Glay published his Histoire de Jeanne de Constantinople, comtesse de Flandre et de Hainaut, who for a long time was an authority on the subject and helps to rehabilitate the Countess.
  The Museum of the Hospice Comtesse has two tapestries of Guillaume Werniers, after drawings of Arnould de Vuez representing Countess Joan. One, made of wool and silk, showed Joan sat between her two successive husbands, Ferrand of Portugal and Thomas of Savoy, identified by their faces; it is marked "Joan of Constantinople, Countess of Flanders / founder of this house in 1233", which shows that the tapestry was made to the Hospice Comtesse. The other shows Count Baldwin IX, with his wife and two daughters, the future Countesses Joan and Margaret. In the same museum, an anonymous painting of 1632, called "Foundation of the Notre-Dame Hospital", shows Countesses Joan and Margaret, surrounded by the Virgin, St. Augustine and St. Elizabeth of Hungary, as well as monks and nuns of the Hospice Comtesse.
  There are statues of Joan in the béguinage of Kortrijk and the Old Saint Elisabeth in Ghent. The mother-child hospital in the Regional University Hospital of Lille bears her name. The city of Wattrelos has created Géants du Nord for Joan and her two husbands. This is also the case of the city of Marquette-lez-Lille, where the Countess was buried.
  In the autumn of 2009, an exhibition entitled Joan of Constantinople, Countess of Flanders and Hainaut, was devoted to her. It was the opportunity of an artistic creation dedicated to both Countesses Joan and Margaret by photographer Laura Henno.
caption: Detail of a portrait of Joan by Arnould de Vuez
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