Catherine de Medici

Jean Heritier, Charlotte Haldane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000021820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1968 this book is an unforgettable portrait of an impoverished orphaned daughter of the Medici, pitchforked at the age of fourteen into her royal destiny and having to bear the rivalry of Diane de Poiters and the description 'the Florentine shopkeeper' who nevertheless became one of the most powerful characters in the shaping of sixteenth century Europe.

Part I
Youth and Humility

Chapter One
Naked as a New-Born Babe
(April 1519–November 1533)

Very little is known about the early childhood of Catherine de Medici, born on a Wednesday morning, April 13, 1519, of the marriage of Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino, and Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne. The young Duchess died of puerpural fever fifteen days after the birth of the baby girl who was predestined—although no one could then either have foreseen it or even had a presentiment of it—virtually to become, as the mother of the last of the Valois, ruler of France from 1559–89. Lorenzo died five days after Madeleine. The child, Florentine on her father’s side and of Auvergne on her mother’s, was orphaned in her cradle.

The cruelly premature death of Lorenzo de Medici finally put an end to French influence in Italy, which had already been more than threatened by the secret treaty, signed on January 17, 1519, between Leo X and Don Carlos, who was to become the Emperor Charles V, and which was to confirm that of 1512. Italy passed over to Spain and later to the Empire. The apparent Machiavellism of this change in papal politics was in fact a piece of Ghibelline trickery. Guicciardini, who was in the confidence of the second Medici Pope, Clement VII, successor to the most Ghibelline pontiff, Adrian VI, the former Provost of Utrecht, preceptor and later minister of Charles V, has revealed the illusions that prompted this rupture with France. It was intended to follow the precepts of Machiavelli. The plan was to make use of the Hispano-Germans to throw the Barbarians, who had arrived there from Gaul, out of Southern Italy, and then to make war, in the kingdom of Naples, on the Imperialists, and to defeat them.

The death of Lorenzo de Medici prepared the way for this return to the policy of Julius II. The sacking of Rome in 1527 was the factual result of this Ghibelline mistake, which had led to the loss of Pavia. In 1519 God alone knew that the weak and puling infant in the orphan’s cradle in the Medici palace would one day prove to be the link in the chain of French history between François I and Henri IV. Thus later on, after Richelieu, the Italian, Mazarin, was enabled to complete the great work of conquering the new German Holy Roman Empire, founded on the defeat of the Valois by the Hapsburgs, supporting and suffering the Medici Pope, whose orphaned great-niece, then still a tiny and insignificant babe, would one day make good this error by saving France from becoming a Spanish colony: a political policy based on the principle of princedom, which was to replace the spirit of Christianity. Charles V did not renounce this spirit of Christianity, but the force of circumstances was moving in the opposite direction. Instead of allying himself with the Emperor against the Sultan, François I did the contrary. The dice of iron and of destiny were cast down.

In an elegy Ariosto, who at the time of the deaths of Catherine’s parents had been sent to Florence by the Duke of Ferrara, reminded the city of the Red Lily that a few leaves can revive a lone branch. The Florentines remained torn between fear and hope, wondering whether the winter would destroy or leave her to them. For Catherine, so frail and threatened, was the last legitimate heiress of the Medici. Her grandmother, Alfonsina Orsini, widow of Pietro de Medici, died a few months later, on February 7, 1520.¹ The Cardinal Giuliano de Medici, bastard of Giuliano, the nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and cousin to the orphan, was appointed her tutor. Clarice, the sister of Lorenzo II and wife of Filippo Strozzi, was given charge of the child, who already, in October 1519, had been presented to Leo X. Marco Minio, the Venetian ambassador to Rome, had been impressed by the Pope’s emotion: ‘Recens fert aerumnas Danaum’, Leo X had said to him when he was informed of the arrival of Alfonsina Orsini.

1 For the reader’s convenience we give the dates in thousands according to the calendar in usage today. We know that prior to the edict of Charles IX in 1564, the year began on Holy Saturday and not on January 1st, which means that the contemporary documents referring to the months of January, February, March, and often the beginning and even the major part of April, bear a date in thousands which is one year behind our own. Until the year 1582 (October 5th to 15th) and the Gregorian reform, it is enough to advance every date by ten days, to bring it into line with our own calendar.

Virgil’s melancholy line was quoted in reference to the sad situation of the last legitimate descendant of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Alessandro, and his blood-brother Ippolito, the future Cardinal, grandson of the Magnifico by Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, who died in 1516, were bastards. In those days there was no prejudice against bastardy, which did, however, preclude the dynastic succession. The glorious line of the Magnifico was therefore centred in the orphan, the sole legitimate heir to the rulership. She alone barred the way to disruption. At the cradle in which so fragile a hope was in danger of disappearing, the Pope’s sadness was easily understandable. As we have seen, the defeat of his alliances had placed the Pope among the adversaries of François I although, according to the immutable tradition of pontifical and Italian diplomacy, which never showed its hand until the very last moment, he had not broken with him. Nevertheless the King of France was refused the orphan’s tutelage.

Even Reumont and Baschet, who minutely explored the archives of Florence, Venice, and Rome, are vague and confused regarding the orphan’s infancy. Alberi, who collated all the Florentine and Venetian texts, merely states that ‘an astrologer was called in to draw up little Catherine’s horoscope. It was said that he predicted for her a life full of sorrows, agitation, and storms, a life that was to be a perpetual sacrifice for the sake of French unity.’ In his otherwise very conscientious edition of the Letters of the mother of the last Valois, Hector de La Ferrière could not quote a single text. Nor is anything to be found in the Italian archives in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It appears that Catherine’s earliest years were passed in Rome. The records agree in placing the child’s return to Tuscany in June 1525; her tutor having since November 19, 1523 become Pope with the name of Clement VII. With her was also brought back her illegitimate step-brother, Alessandro, ‘who had been born to Lorenzo in 1512 by a beautiful and healthy peasant girl of Collavechio (a village in the Roman countryside) a subject or serf of Alfonsina Orsini’.¹

1 J. H. Mariéjol, Catherine de Médicis, p. 9.

We know as little about the years that followed their return to Florence, where the brother and sister lived in the Medici palace, only leaving it in the fine weather for the villa of Cajanus, in the environs of the Tuscan capital, as we do about the Roman years. A pastoral letter from Clement VII to François I and dated April 18, 1526, shows how her tutor watched over Catherine’s interests. He prevented the Duke of Albany from administering the possessions of Madeleine de la Tour to the detriment of the orphans. He charged the nuncio Roberto Acciaioli to obtain the pension promised her by the King of France. We know nothing else about the years during which the little girl grew up to the age of discretion under the surveillance of the Strozzi.

The Italian wars had recommenced. The defeat at Pavia revealed the Ghibelline mistake of his predecessors to Clement VII. Italy was becoming Imperial territory. On May 22, 1526, Clement VII joined the new Holy League, that of Cognac, the reverse of the Holy League of Julius II. Now they were banding together against the Empire, re-becoming Guelph. François I, emerging from the prisons of Charles V, Venice, Milan, and most of the small Italian principalities, were uniting with the Pope against the Emperor. The aim of the confederation was ‘to put an end to the wars that were desolating Christianity’.

François wanted nothing less than peace. His aim was to escape the treaty of Madrid. On that point Carl Brandi’s great book has furnished the proofs. If the King of France was driven by necessity, tradition and the rights of chivalry were on the side of the Emperor. The League appealed to Henry VIII who promised to protect it. Like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the Pope hoped that once freed from the Imperialists, Italy could also free herself from the ever-threatening hegemony of France. Charles V gave Clement VII the direct riposte. Troops, under the command of a Lutheran, George of Frundsberg, were provided for him by his brother, Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and King of Bohemia, from whom John Zapolya, an ally of the King of France, was trying to wrest the crown of Hungary. At the beginning of May 1527 Rome was assaulted and afterwards sacked. The Constable of Bourbon, who had passed into Charles V’s service, was killed there. Luther was destroying Babylon. And that was made possible by a Catholic king! Such are the bloody games and contradictions of politics.

Almost at the same moment tumult had broken out in Florence against the Medici. The passage of the troops of the Constable of Bourbon through the south of the Arno valley coincided—a normal synchronization—with the beginning of the Florentine uprising. On April 26th, Silvio Passerini, Cardinal of Cortona, to whom Clement VII had entrusted the government of the Republic, and whose unpopularity was equalled by his incapacity, was forced to leave the city. Alessandro and Ippolito de Medici left with him. Little Catherine was now a duchess without a duchy. The Florentines wasted no time. They assaulted the palace, which was defended by those citizens who remained loyal to the Medici. The child of eight years was caught up in revolution. As Louis XIV remembered Paris during the Fronde, so Catherine was always to remember Florence in revolt. She spent a few more years in the midst of these disturbances, until the end of September 1530. The years from eight until eleven are those during which a little girl’s intelligence develops a great deal. Those were the years of Catherine de Medici’s apprenticeship to politics and war.

Henceforward we have numerous, precise and excellent sources on Catherine de Medici and her initiation into the experimental politics of civil wars, wars that she did not learn about in books but lived through. Her school was life, in the midst of sedition, when the horrifying acts committed by a furious populace were unleashed simultaneously with the disgraceful behaviour of the powerful, who sold themselves to the foreigner and fooled the little man, living by bloody treachery. For, as Lucan so magnificently said in his Pharsalus, civil wars, with their useless sacrifices, are the worst of all: ‘Bella geri placuit nullos habitura triumphos….’

In order to safeguard her against the epidemics that had been ravaging Florence for several years, the French ambassador, Monsieur de Velly, obtained the new Council’s permission to take Catherine away. ‘On the evening of December 7, 1527, he conducted her, heavily veiled, to the convent of the Santissima Annunziata delle Murate, where she was to stay for the time being. The name of this convent, the Murate, was aptly suited to a residence where the young Medici was as closely supervised as a captive.’¹ But her captivity was greatly softened by the affection immediately shown towards her by the nuns of the Order of St Benedict. This is proven by the Chronicle of the Murate, by one of the nuns, Sister Justine Niccolini. The warmest sympathies were aroused by the unhappy child’s affability, charm and sweetness. Yet the various factions continued to tear Florence to pieces. The Medici always had their partisans. Capponi’s Ottimati fought violently against the Arrabiati, i.e. the Madmen, of Francisco Carducci, who in the spring of 1529 were victorious. The worst kinds of violence, including vandalism, customary in such times of disorder, when nothing any longer impedes the destroying fanatics, fell on the city of the Red Lily. Escutcheons, coats-of-arms and statues were smashed, churches sacked, tombs desecrated. The child in her cloister, to which only the echoes of such furious deeds penetrated, could not have foreknown that the last thirty years of her life would have the same horrible setting; a setting, this time, no longer of an Italian city, but of an entire kingdom, the kingdom of France, whose lilies were to become red with the blood of the citizens as they killed one another by thousands. And that took place because some insisted that others should be forced to go either to mass or to the preacher, according to whether they belonged to the Papist and Roman, or to the Protestant and Genevan confessions.

1 Reumont and Baschet, La Jeunesse de Catherine de Médicis, p. 96–97.

In few famous lives has there been at their beginning so clear a prefiguration of their maturity and old age as in that of Catherine de Medici. Not to take into account the powerful influence of childhood memories on Catherine, after she had become the queen-mother, with the only aim of saving the nation from civil war, would be to deny the most fundamental laws of psychology. For the horrors of civil war were engraved on her memory at the most impressionable age, that of the last years of her childhood. A monstrous war, Montaigne was to call it. And his adjective is the only exact one.

On these Florentine horrors we are very well documented. By the Treaty of Barcelona, June 29, 1529, Clement VII was reconciled with Charles V. The Emperor promised his natural daughter, Marguerite, born in 1522 at Audenarde of his transient affair with Jeanne van der Gheinst, in marriage to Alessandro, Catherine’s natural brother. Bastards were the most convenient matrimonial currency used by those realistic politicians admired by Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Marguerite of Austria was to become Duchess of Parma, Governor of the Low Countries under Philip II, and mother of Alessandro Farnese. Born three years after Catherine, and dying three years before her, Marguerite was to occupy on the tragic scene of the sixteenth century a place that would give her opportunities to reveal the full measure of her genius, comparable in many ways to that of the sister of Alessandro de Medici.

François I and Charles V, meanwhile, were negotiating the second Peace of Cambrai, also known as the Paix des Dames, on account of the preponderating roles played in concluding it by Madame Louise de Savoie, the King’s mother, and the glorious daughter of Maximilian of Austria and Marie de Bourgogne, widow of Philibert le Beau, aunt of Charles V, the admirable Marguerite,¹ who was buried in that marvel of flamboyant Gothic, the church of Brou-en-Bresse. The Paix des Dames, signed on August 3, 1529, signified the renunciation by François I of French hegemony beyond the Alps. The barbarous Gauls departed and made room, not for the realization of the dream of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, but for the harsh reality of Imperial conquest. François I handed over his Italian allies to Charles V. In Naples and Milan the keys to the peninsula were in the hands of the Hapsburgs. The princes and republics of Italy had only one desire—to flee their threatened embrace. Francisco Sforza saved his Milanese. Venice came to an understanding with the Emperor. Pontifical diplomacy succeeded in excluding Florence from the Paix des Dames. Clement VII had his plan, which was to retake the rebellious city, and the Treaty of Bologna was to enable him to do so. He would crown Charles V Emperor and King of Lombardy, thus recognizing the new Charlemagne. The recapture of Florence was worth the price. In August 1529 Charles V came to an agreement with the Pope; the Prince of Orange was to mete out punishment to the Florentines. On his arrival at Genoa they sent four ambassadors to him, but in vain. The Arrabiati knew that thenceforward they could expect no quarter. As they had been told to surrender unconditionally they prepared for battle. It was to be Florentine democracy against the Pope and the Emperor. The laws of history prove that this type of struggle is always of exceptional fury. The enraged city of Florence in the summer of 1529 was one of the most terrible examples of it.

1 There are two important works on this first Marguerite of Austria, duchess of Savoy, later also Governor of the Netherlands from 1507–30: Max Bruchet, Marguerite d’Autriche duchesse de Savoie, and Comte Carton de Wiart, Marguerite d’Autriche.

The irresponsible nuns in whose convent Catherine had been placed wished to reinstate in their place of honour the six heraldic balls of her family coat-of-arms, which according to tradition represented symbolically the six pills of the medical profession practised by her ancestors. The little girl thereupon almost vanished in the Florentine tumult. At the beginning of the siege Leonardo Bartolini had suggested putting her in a brothel, for the Pope would not then be able to give in princely marriage a relative who had associated with prostitutes. Battisto Cei had an even better idea: to chain her, naked, to the city walls. And Bernado Castiglioni went still further, proposing that she be raped by the soldiery.

Those who were less savage finally prevailed over these fanatics by pointing out that Catherine was a hostage of too great a price not to be well guarded. In order to prevent her attempted escape, which they had learned was being prepared by Clement VII and François I. Sylvestro Aldobrandini, chancellor and secretary of the Council, was instructed by the Council of Ten for Liberty to transfer Catherine from the Murate to the cloister of Santa Lucia. Savonarola’s Christian democracy still maintained its prestige amongst many Dominicans. Those of San Marco, of which Santa Lucia was a dependency, were of this number. In the midst of threats, cries, groans and tears, this child of eleven years showed noticeable coolness and presence of mind. Her head had been shaven and she wore a nun’s habit. She stated categorically to the commissaries that she was vowed to the cloister and refused to leave her venerable mothers of Murate. But on July 20th, she was obliged to obey and to go to Santa Lucia. On August 3, 1530 the defenders of the city of the Red Lily lost the battle of Gavinana, at which the Prince of Orange was killed, as well as Francisco Ferruccio, commanding the troops that had been sent to help the Florentines. The Prince of Orange, Philibert, successor to Bourbon as the head of the Emperor’s armies, and to Moncada, as Viceroy of Naples, aspired, it was said, to Catherine’s hand in order to become sovereign of Florence. Clement VII was alleged to have promised it to him, with a dowry of 80,000 and a tribute of 150,000 gold ecus, to be raised from the conquered city.

The value of the pontifical promises was dubious. Clement VII was too attached to Florence. Nevertheless the Duchessina was already an important personage on the political chessboard. And that undoubtedly saved her life by causing the more intelligent of the Arrabiati to reject the proposals to send her to a brothel, chain her naked on the ramparts, or cause her to be raped, put forward by the more enraged members of Florentine democracy.

On August 12th, they capitulated, giving the Emperor all freedom to establish the new regime on condition that he would r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Preliminary Note
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PART I. YOUTH AND HUMILITY
• PART II. THE ACCESSION
• PART III. THE ROYAL TRAGEDY
• PART IV. THE SOLITUDE OF EVENING
• Index