The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

XX DUKE COSIMO I

COSIMO HAD been born in Florence, in the large and gloomy Palazzo Salviati, the family home of his mother, Maria, daughter of Giacomo Salviati who had married Leo X’s sister, Lucrezia. Leo X had stood as his godfather and had suggested that the baby should be christened Cosimo, ‘to revive’, so he had said, ‘the memory of the wisest, the bravest and most prudent man yet born to the house of Medici’.

The mother had been fond of her uncle, the Pope, to whom she bore a strong resemblance. Her eyes were big and dark, her face pudsy and her skin unnaturally pale, the result of drastic cosmetic treatment she had undergone in order to render herself more attractive to her husband, whose unconcealed preference for other women at first distressed and finally embittered her. She had rarely seen him, for he had so often been away at the wars and his visits home to Florence had never been prolonged. On one of these brief visits, so a characteristic story of him went, he had come clattering down the Corso on his charger and, looking up to the windows of the Palazzo Salviati, had caught sight of his son in the arms of a nurse. ‘Throw him down!’ he had called out. The nurse had naturally been reluctant to obey. ‘Throw him down,’ Giovanni had shouted again. ‘Throw him down. I order you to do so.’ The nurse had held out her arms, shut her eyes and let go. Giovanni had caught the boy and kissed him, and, delighted by the calm, uncomplaining way in which Cosimo accepted both the fall and the embrace, had declared, ‘Aye, you’ll be a prince! It’s your destiny.’

Seeing little of his father, Cosimo seems never to have developed much affection for him. When he was told that Giovanni had been mortally wounded trying to prevent the Germans crossing the river near Mantua, he ‘did not weep much’, according to his tutor, but said merely, ‘In truth I had guessed it.’ He was seven years old then, a healthy, good-looking boy, tall for his age, with chestnut hair cut short as he was always to keep it. He was living in Venice, having left Florence in the uncertain times that had followed the arrival there of Alessandro and Ippolito as protégés of Clement VII. From Venice he went to Bologna, from Bologna to Giovanni’s villa of Il Trebbio, and from there back to Bologna where his grandfather, Jacopo Salviati, was to supervise his disrupted education. After a time he left Bologna for Genoa, from there went back to Florence once more, and then for a time to Naples.

This constant travelling was not good for him, so one of his tutors implied: it unsettled him, made it difficult for him to concentrate on his work, and led him to yearn to leave his books for the pleasures of the countryside and the excitement of the soldiers’ camp. It was his ambition, indeed, to become a soldier. At the age of fourteen, so Pope Clement was informed, he already ‘went about clad like a cavalier and seeming such in his actions’. He was also reported to be surrounded by officers formerly in his father’s service. Disturbed by these reports, the Pope sent orders for him to abandon his ‘foreign dress’ and to wear instead the ordinary Florentine lucco. He obeyed the command with a sulky ill grace.

Yet Cosimo was neither an uneducated nor an uncouth young man. Graceful in his movements, reserved in his manner, he was shrewd and silent If there were gaps in his knowledge, he was prepared to fill them; and once filled they were filled for ever, for his memory was astonishingly retentive. There were those who already noticed a certain secretiveness about him which was later to become notorious; there were those who were repelled by an undoubted coldness in his nature which was to leave him unmoved by cruelty; and there were those who had good cause to fear that he would make a stern, tyrannical ruler. The general opinion, however, as Benedetto Varchi put it, was that Cosimo,

with the twelve thousand ducats granted him as his private income, would devote himself to enjoyment and employ himself in hunting, fowling and fishing (sports wherein he greatly delighted) whilst Guicciardini and a few others would govern and, as the saying goes, suck the State dry. But it is no good reckoning without your host; and Cosimo, who had been considered slow witted, though of sober judgement, now showed himself so admirably endowed with understanding that people went about telling each other that as well as having the State bestowed upon him, he had also wisdom given to him by God.

Trusting no one, neither Cardinal Cibò nor Alessandro Vitelli nor Guicciardini, all of whom, he felt, wanted to make use of him for their own purposes, Cosimo was determined to be his own master. He listened to the advice of his gifted secretary, Francesco Campana, and to his mother who could tell him all he needed to know about the ruling families of Florence; yet he kept his feelings and opinions hidden even from them and made up his mind alone.

His opponents were far less resolute. With the support of the lower classes who had gained nothing from their masters in the days of the recent Republic, of those who would have rallied to the help of any son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, of the reconstituted militia and of several of Florence’s most patrician families, Cosimo gradually overwhelmed his enemies. First, with Spanish help, he rid himself of danger from the Fuorusciti, exiles from Florence plotting his overthrow, whose forces were routed at Montemurio near Prato in July 1537. Throughout the city after this battle were heard cries of Palle! Palle! Victory! Victory!’reported a Sienese observer. ‘There is great rejoicing, and from two windows on the ground floor of the Signor Cosimo’s palace much bread hath been thrown and is still being thrown, and from two wooden pipes they are continually pouring out streams of wine.’

The free entertainment was well advised, for the rejoicing was far less spontaneous than the Sienese supposed and far from universal. The exiles’ army had included young men from several of Florence’s most distinguished families and had been led by Piero Strozzi, son of the great Filippo. Piero had escaped but scores of others had been taken prisoner and, after being ignominiously paraded through the the streets of Florence, were savagely punished. Sixteen were condemned to death; many more died in prison; others were tracked down and assassinated in the foreign cities where they had sought refuge.

Having dealt with the exiles and executed their captured leaders, four of whom were beheaded each morning on four consecutive days in the Piazza della Signoria, Cosimo turned his attention to the Spaniards whose garrisons he now wished to remove from the Tuscan fortresses. At first the Emperor declined to comply with Cosimo’s requests. He was prepared to recognize Cosimo as Duke of Florence, but he insisted that the Duchy must be considered an Imperial fief. He would not order the withdrawal of Spanish troops; nor would he consent to Cosimo’s marriage with Alessandro’s young widow, Margaret, who was given instead to Ottavio Farnese, grandson of Pope Paul III, Clement VII’s successor, since the Emperor considered it more important to oblige the Papacy than Florence. Yet Cosimo did manage to obtain for himself a politically useful bride in Eleonora, daughter of Don Pedro de Toledo, the extremely rich Spanish Viceroy at Naples.¹ And not long after his marriage to Eleonora had taken place, the Emperor, who had fallen out with the Pope and had come to recognize that the Duke of Florence was in a position to render him important services, agreed to the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Tuscany.

Free from foreign occupation, Cosimo had also by now freed himself from interference in his government by any of his ministers. Although the Signoria and the office of Gonfaloniere were abolished by decree, there were still councils and magistracies in existence; but the Duke, as president of all of them, was easily able to ensure that they came to no decisions of which he disapproved; and as time went by he troubled himself less and less even to consult them. Guicciardini and Vettori were both ‘put aside’; so was Cardinal Cibò and, according to Luigi Alberto Ferrai, ‘in so dexterous a way that he was alienated and offended as little as possible’.

Cosimo was not, however, a tactful man by nature. On the contrary he was brusque to the point of asperity, often so ungracious as to appear gratuitously insulting; and in ridding himself of his opponents he displayed a harshness quite untempered by compunction or remorse. He had no qualms about throwing real or imagined enemies into the dreadful dungeons of Volterra, or about hiring assassins to dispose of troublesome dissidents and dangerous rivals. After surviving as an outlaw for ten years, during which he published his Apologia in celebration of tyrannicide as a selfless act of the greatest merit, Lorenzaccio was eventually caught in Venice, where he was stabbed to death with a poisoned dagger near the Ponte San Toma. Likewise, wishing to rid himself of the Dominicans of San Marco, Cosimo accused them of having made ‘public professions of dissent’, and had no hesitation in expelling them from their monastery. To their nervous protestations he curtly replied, ‘Tell me, my fathers, who built this monastery? Was it you?’

‘No.’

‘Who put you in this monastery then ?’

‘Our ancient Florentines and Cosimo the Elder of blessed memory.’

‘Right. Well, it’s the modem Florentines and Cosimo the Duke who are kicking you out.’

Master of Florence, Cosimo, after a long and cruel war, became master of Siena too. The war began in 1554, but it was not until 1557 that the cession of the city to Cosimo, to be held by him and his descendants as a Spanish fief, was at last ratified. By then the Sienese, whose population had been reduced from 14,000 to 6,000, had undergone unspeakable sufferings; and their surrounding territory had been ravaged without mercy. Their traditional dislike of the Florentines was fixed for generations to come, while Cosimo’s enemies at home were able to point with derision and disgust to the folly of expending so many lives and such huge sums of money on acquiring lordship over a devastated territory yielding less than 50,000 ducats a year.

Certainly Cosimo himself was far from satisfied with his new acquisition. He wanted much more than Siena. He wanted to be recognized as Grand Duke, a title for the assumption of which papal authority was required. So determined, indeed, was he to gratify this ambition that to achieve it he sought the necessary authority with a relentless persistence which on occasions seemed to assume the compulsion of a mania. And at last he had his way. Pope Pius V bestowed the title of Grand Duke upon him in 1569.

But when, in December that year, all the bells in Florence rang, bonfires raged and cannon roared in celebration of the Duke’s new title, there was, so an observer noticed, ‘little real joy to be discerned in the faces of the people’. Two years later, however, when once again the bells were tolled and celebratory fires were lit, when the Cathedral and churches of Florence rang with heartfelt Te Deums, the rejoicing was spontaneous and sincere; it was universally agreed that his Excellency, the Grand Duke, now addressed as Altezza and Serenissimo, had good reason this time to take upon himself some personal credit. For at the battle of Lepanto where the Turkish fleet was once and for all swept from the eastern Mediterranean, Florentine galleys had played an important part. And it was Cosimo who – intent upon protecting his shores from the raids of Turkish marauders and from Barbary pirates, as well as making himself and Tuscany appear more formidable in the eyes of Spain – had been responsible for the creation of Florence’s victorious navy.

‘A man is not powerful,’ he had said years before to the Venetian ambassador, ‘unless he is as powerful by sea as he is by land.’ And in pursuit of this power he had ordered galleys to be built, discussed designs with naval architects, superintended the enlistment of sailors and the purchase of foreign slaves, written out instructions for voyages, made lists of necessary armaments. He had created a new order of military knights, the Knights of Santo Stefano – admittedly in later years a less crusading than piratical order – in which were enrolled his two illegitimate sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo, and Duke Alessandro’s illegitimate son, Giulio. He had established a new naval base on the island of Elba, which had been ceded to him by the Duke of Piombino, and had fortified the capital to which he had given the name Cosmopolis.² ‘I have devoted all my attention to naval matters,’ he assured the Venetian ambassador without undue exaggeration. ‘I have galleys finished and others being built. And so I shall continue and keep all my ships fully equipped with everything that is needed.’

He was true to his word. The first two galleys to be launched, La Saetta and La Pisana, set out on their maiden voyages in 1550; the San Giovanni soon followed them. By 1565 there were several more galleys available for the expedition to relieve the besieged Knights of St John on Malta; and by 1571, the year of Lepanto, Pope Pius V had good reason to be grateful for the Grand Duke’s now considerable fleet and for the huge sum of 60,000 scudi which his treasury contributed to the great Christian enterprise.³

Cosimo, though prone to sea-sickness, took great pleasure in sailing with his fleet himself. He would set out from Lerici and to the ‘blowing of trumpets, the firing of guns and the shouts of the people’ he would be rowed up to Sestri or down the coast to Leghorn where he would disembark for a day’s fishing or fowling or hunting.

For none of these pleasures did he ever lose his taste. Whenever he could spare the time he would leave Florence for his villa of Il Trebbio, or for Poggio a Caiano, Castello or Cafaggiolo, or for one or other of his smaller country houses, Cerreto, Lecceto or Montelupo; and in red breeches, high boots of Spanish leather, doeskin jerkin and black velvet jewelled cap, he would ride out with his huntsmen, falconers, pages, courtiers and couriers into the surrounding woods and valleys. They chased wild boars and roebuck, they galloped after greyhounds, coursing hares; they took out falcons and setters; they bagged pheasants and partridges. And ‘in the little stream of the Sieve, which flows into the valley of the Mugello,’ recorded Cabriana,

the Duke would catch various fish, such as trout, and would divide his haul among his courtiers and watch them with great delight as they ate the fish which they had cooked in the neighbouring meadows, he himself lying on the grass.

For his courtiers the days did not always pass so pleasantly. The Duke was an exacting master, critical of the slightest fault, insistent upon uniformity in all matters of procedure and dress, requiring, for example, all his pages unfailingly to wear red caps in winter, purple caps in summer. He was also as exasperatingly secretive in his private life as he was in his dealings with his ministers. His attendants never knew how many days they would be away from home or where they would be taken. As one of them reported, voicing a typical complaint, ‘We have never known one day what there would be to do the next, his Excellency being more than ever secret in the matter of whither he is riding.’ Another of his courtiers found his penchant for practical jokes quite as irritating as his secretiveness. ‘This morning,’ he grumbled, ‘the Duke went to see the nets spread for the birds, and took several and made one of them peck me, which it did really painfully. It was my right hand too. The others say it was a great favour; but to me it is great pain.’

It would all have been more bearable had the Duke been less capriciously unpredictable; but his moodiness was, in fact, notorious. On occasion he seemed to welcome friendliness, even to tolerate familiarity; at other times he would rebuff the slightest hint of disrespect. Sometimes ‘he lays aside all authority and dignity and with the utmost intimacy makes jokes with everyone and appears to want everyone to use this freedom towards him’, a Venetian envoy recorded.

But once the time for amusement is past, he recognizes no one and it is as if he had never known them. If anyone is bold enough to make the least sign of familiarity, he at once withdraws into his accustomed severity, so much so that it is said of him in Florence that he doffs and dons the Duke whenever he pleases.

Similar complaints were made about his wife.

The Duchess, Eleonora da Toledo, was quite as exacting as her husband. The letters of her attendants are replete with anxious requests for the immediate dispatch of some commodity which has not arrived on time or for the replacement of some unsatisfactory article – to ‘forward instantly the salted fish from Spain such as the Duchess likes, the present consignment being all stale and broken’, to ‘send without delay his Excellency’s cloak and doublet’, to ‘have made for his Excellency two pair of leather hose, but not miserably short and tight like the others’.

Yet however demanding, capricious and arrogant her servants and attendants found her, Eleonora was a good wife to Cosimo, who loved her as much as it was in his nature to love anyone. Soon after their marriage they moved from the Medici Palace to the Palazzo Vecchio which was transformed into the ducal palace with apartments for the Duchess on the upper floors, for the Duke on the lower, and for his mother on the floor between. Neither the Duke nor the Duchess got on very well with his mother, who had never been easy to love and who became increasingly irritating and increasingly untidy as she grew older. On one occasion at least she and her son had a blazing row when he was ill in bed and her fussy interference exasperated him even more than his doctors’ incompetence. He lost his temper with her; she left the room in tears; and the next day they declined to speak to each other. With his wife, however, Cosimo seems always to have remained on excellent terms, allowing her without complaint to indulge her passion for gambling, and never showing irritation at her exasperating changes of mind. She, for her part, put up complaisantly with his secretiveness, his outbursts of ill temper and his long periods of gloomy silence. They seem to have had differences only over the upbringing of their children.

There were five sons – Francesco, the heir; Giovanni, who became a cardinal at seventeen and died of a ‘malignant fever’ two years later; Ferdinando, who also became a cardinal and later Grand Duke of Tuscany; Garzia, who died at the age of seventeen, a fortnight after Giovanni; and Pietro, who was born in 1554. There were also three girls, Maria, Isabella and Lucrezia. All the girls were brought up strictly in the Spanish way, being rarely allowed outside the palace except to go to Mass, seeing few men other than priests, doctors and tutors. Both Maria and Lucrezia died when young, Maria when she was seventeen, Lucrezia at sixteen, less than a year after her marriage to Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. Isabella, who was married to Paolo Giordano Orsini and went to live in the Medici Palace, survived only to be murdered by her husband. Cosimo did not live to hear of this tragedy; but on learning of the death of Maria, who succumbed to malaria while they were staying at the castle at Leghorn, he went out onto the bastion alone so that no one should see him give way to his grief. ‘Her constitution was like mine,’ he said forlornly. ‘She ought to have been allowed more fresh air.’ On his return to Florence he continued to mourn for her, and spent hours by himself in his room where her portrait hung on the wall.

But he was never, even in less distressing times, a man who seemed to take much pleasure in life, except in hunting. He was rarely seen to smile; he had a poor appetite, contenting himself with the plainest food and in his later years with one simple meal a day; he had no taste for wine; he usually wore a black velvet robe indoors and used to say he would have preferred to wear a plain Florentine lucco. His apartments in the Palazzo Vecchio were richly decorated, but he chose to sleep in a sombre room whose walls were hung with dark green and blue gold-stamped leather. He would have been just as satisfied, so it was felt, with rooms of monastic simplicity such as those used by his secretaries who had to make do with ‘three desks, two brass lamps, two benches and four large stone inkstands’.

These secretaries worked inordinately long hours, as he did himself. He was up and dressed at dawn, reading and answering the correspondence which he allowed no one else to see, marking documents, compiling reports, writing instructions for his secretaries to copy, impatient to be out-of-doors, complaining when heavy rain kept him at his desk, ‘I am sitting here like a falcon on its perch.’ His paperwork finished, he would go to Mass, usually in the Cathedral, sometimes in the church of the Santissima Annunziata; and afterwards he would play tennis or go out for a walk or a ride in the town, not for pleasure but for exercise. If on foot he always walked fast, wearing a coat of mail under his jerkin, a sword and a dagger hanging from his belt, and with ‘numerous small stiletti, with very sharp points, almost as fine as needles, stuck into the lining of his scabbard as into a needle-case’. He was invariably accompanied by a Swiss bodyguard.

Cosimo had good reason to fear assassination. Several attempts were made on his life; and the savage punishments inflicted on the would-be assassins did not deter others from trying to murder him. One Giuliano Buonnaccorsi, who had planned to shoot him from a window, was tortured with red-hot pincers, dragged round the streets by his ankles, disembowelled and tossed into the Arno. Yet soon afterwards Cosimo’s agents discovered another plot to kill him by submerging a chevaux de frise of swords and spikes beneath the waters of the Arno at the place where he used to dive in for a swim during the summer months.

Ever since 1546 Cosimo had been thinking of bringing all the scattered judicial and administrative offices of Florence, as well as the city’s major guilds, under one roof near the Palazzo Vecchio and hence under his own closer, more personal and efficient control. He appointed Giorgio Vasari his architect, and work on the huge new building, the Uffizi, began in 1559.⁴ A year later the Duke and his family moved from the Palazzo Vecchio across the Arno to the Palazzo Pitti, the vast palace which Luca Pitti had begun to build a hundred years before. The Duchess had bought the palace from the Pitti family for 9,000 florins in 1549, and instructions had been given to Bartolommeo Ammanati to enlarge and embellish it.⁵ Work was still being carried out on the great courtyard and on the new ‘kneeling windows’ on the ground floor of the façade when the family moved in, as the Duchess had refused to consider delaying her departure from the Palazzo Vecchio. She had been impatient to enjoy the more spacious splendour of the Pitti Palace, to be able to walk in lovely gardens with magnificent views instead of up and down the small enclosed terrace at the Palazzo Vecchio which was all the space she had there for her rare plants and flowers.

Behind the Pitti Palace, or the Ducal Palace as it was now officially known, were acres of land stretching south to the heights of San Giorgio and west almost as far as the Porta Romana. These had been bought from a variety of families including the Bogoli, and it was by a corrupt form of their name, Boboli, that the gardens laid out there were subsequently known. For ten years up to his death in 1550 the landscaping had been in the hands of Niccolò Pericoli Tribolo, who had designed the big amphitheatre and the pond behind it to be known as the Neptune Pond. Since then the work had been in the hands of Buontalenti, Giulio and Alfonso Parigi, and of Baccio Bandinelli, who had designed an elaborate rustic grotto at the Duchess’s suggestion.⁶

The Duchess’s impatience to move to the new palace was aggravated by her failing health. She was now ‘always indisposed’, the Venetian ambassador reported, suffering from a chronic cough and ‘every morning bringing up her food’. She feared she did not have long to live, and her fears were justified. Within less than two years of leaving the Palazzo Vecchio, a fortnight after the death of her favourite son, Garzia, she too died, ‘grieving and despairing, refusing to be guided by physicians as was her wont’. Cosimo was with her at the end, holding her in his arms. As when Maria died he refused to be comforted, shutting himself away from everyone to grieve alone, instructing his eldest son, Francesco, not to attempt to console him for that would only make his loss all the more unbearable. He never fully recovered from it, and in June 1564 he delegated most of his duties to his heir.

There were rumours that in his prolonged grief he sought distraction by ‘indulging in a thousand follies, little suited to his rank and still less to his years [43]… making love to many women, and especially to one of the leading ladies of Florence’. Certainly, he took as mistress a beautiful young woman, Eleonora degli Albizzi, whom it was believed he might marry, and by whom he had a son. One of the Duke’s favourite servants, Sforza Almeni, warned Francesco that his master was considering getting married again, which led first to a row between father and son and then to another between Cosimo and the servant. ‘Sforza,’ he said to him, ‘Get out of my sight. Get out now. And never count on me for anything whatsoever again.’

Supposing that the Duke would soon overcome his anger and forgive him, Almeni did not leave Florence. He even went so far as to return to the Pitti Palace where, at sight of him, Cosimo lost control of himself, and shouting, ‘Traditore! Traditore!’ lunged at him with a hunting spear which he drove clean through his body. Afterwards his one regret was that he had degraded himself by stooping so low as to kill a man ‘so mean’.

Yet Almeni was right. The Duke was to get married again – not to Eleonora degli Albizzi but to another young mistress, Camilla Martelli, who had also borne him a child. She was tall, grasping, selfish and ill-tempered, and she wore her husband out. To escape from her he took to shutting himself up with scholars who were required to read to him, or to spending his evenings with his daughter, Isabella Orsini, at the Medici Palace. It was here one evening that he was seized by an apoplectic fit; a second attack cost him the use of his arms and legs and eventually his voice. After this he spent most of his time dozing in a chair, sometimes mumbling incoherently. One evening after dinner he suddenly took it into his head to get into his coach and go to watch a calcio match. It was a cold day and it was raining. For two hours Cosimo sat at a window occasionally looking down at the players, but mostly in a kind of faint. For two months he lingered on, unconscious for days on end, until at last, on 21 April 1574, at the age of fifty-five, he died. His body was laid out in the great hall of the Pitti Palace in the full grand-ducal regalia, while the church bells tolled. The next day ‘all the shops were closed… and wherever one went, the palace was hung all over with black, and black hangings reached all the way across the Piazza dei Pitti’.

Yet Cosimo’s death was not generally regretted. He had been rather less unpopular of late, able to ride around the city, so the Venetian ambassador noticed, ‘alone in his coach with but a single lackey’. He was known to have been an active member of the fraternity of San Martino who were pledged to give anonymous help to the poor, and he was given some small credit for having encouraged and patronized the traditional popular entertainments of the Florentines, the pageants, the horse-races and the games of calcio, and for having added to their number by inaugurating chariot races in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella where posts still mark the limits of the course. He was given rather more credit for having released Florence from her former dependence on Spain, for having provided her with a small but efficient fleet, and for having extended so far the boundaries of the State. But although the government was stable, justice impartial if severe and finances sound, Cosimo was more widely blamed for having denied Florence her former freedom than he was praised for having given her stability. People were far more ready to point accusing fingers at his spies and prisons, his heavy taxes and unscrupulous use of monopolies in private trading than they were to give him credit for the improvements he instigated in the farming, draining and irrigation of Tuscany, for building canals and promoting olive plantations and silver mines, for the development of Pisa and Leghorn, or for having achieved some sort of political unity between these and other Tuscan towns. If someone mentioned his encouragement of Bartolommeo Ammanati who, after the devastating floods of 1557, built the lovely Ponte Santa Trinità⁷ and rebuilt the Ponte alla Carraia;⁸ or his patronage of Giorgio Vasari, who decorated so much of the Palazzo Vecchio, and of the Flemings known in Florence as Giovanni Rosso and Niccolò Fiamingo, who set up a tapestry factory in the city under his auspices; or his payments for portraits, murals and allegorical paintings by Agnolo Bronzino; or his patience with Benvenuto Cellini whose fine Perseus, commissioned by the Duke, was set up in the Loggia dei Lanzi in 1554;⁹ there was sure to be someone else to grumble about the cost of the alterations to the Pitti Palace, and of the private corridor between the Pitti and the Palazzo Vecchio (in the hasty construction of which five men were killed), the expensive adornment of the Boboli Gardens, the grandiose scheme for the huge baroque mausoleum at San Lorenzo where the later Medici were to be buried in such gloomy pomp,¹⁰ Pontormo’s decoration of the villa of Castello and Tribolo’s fountains in its ornate gardens,¹¹ the lavish expenditure on the park at Poggio a Caiano, and on the wall round the huge wood known as the Pineta. If an admirer were to speak approvingly of his promotion of Pisa University and the Studio Fiorentino, of his invitation to such gifted men as Benedetto Varchi to come back to live in Florence, of his encouragement of Italian music, of scientists and botanists and of Etruscan archaeology, of his improvement of Florence’s herb gardens, his foundation of Pisa’s School of Botany, and his introduction into Tuscany of medicinal plants from America and of farm crops from the Orient, of his connoisseurship of antiques, medals and Etruscan workmanship, a detractor would undoubtedly contrast the golden age of the Republic under Lorenzo il Magnifico with the dark times now sure to follow under the new Grand Duke Francesco.

XXI THE HEIRS OF COSIMO

FRANCESCO HAD neither his father’s taste for business nor his industry. Irresponsible, taciturn, wayward yet withdrawn, he was ‘of low stature’, the Venetian ambassador reported disapprovingly, ‘thin, dark complexioned and of a melancholy disposition’. ‘He shows little grace in his dress,’ another ambassador wrote, ‘and he is quite as graceless in his bearing.’ He was ‘a man of quiet thoughts’ who spoke with ‘care and circumspection’. ‘Much absorbed by the love of women’, he set ‘little store by virtue’.

His wife, the Archduchess Joanna of Austria, who was as pale, thin and charmless as Francesco, was miserably homesick living in Tuscany. Ill and unhappy, ignored by her husband, and condemned by the Florentines for her Austrian hauteur, she never felt at home in Florence. Her father-in-law was kind to her in his way. He had the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio specially decorated for her: the lunettes were painted with murals of Austrian towns by pupils of Vasari, and Verrocchio’s gay fountain of the little urchin with a spouting fish was brought down from the Careggi villa where it had been set up in the garden by Lorenzo il Magnifico.¹ But Joanna was not to be comforted. She died in 1578 at the age of thirty, a year after the birth of her one sickly son Filippo, who was also to die soon afterwards. Apparently unmoved by her death, Francesco resolved to marry his mistress, Bianca Capello.

Bianca was an attractive, well-educated Venetian noblewoman who, to the dismay of her family, had secretly married a clerk in a Florentine company. Obliged to leave Venice she had come with her husband to Florence where Francesco, catching sight of her one day as he rode beneath her window, had fallen in love with her. A meeting had been arranged; she had become his mistress; her husband had been placated with a lucrative appointment in Francesco’s household and had been given a palazzo conveniently situated near the Pitti Palace for the regular visits his master made to his wife.²Francesco also built a country villa for Bianca, the charming Villa Pratolino whose amazing garden so much impressed Montaigne, a guest there in 1581.³ As well as bronzes by Giambologna and fountains by Ammanati, there were grottoes with movable scenery by the ingenious Bernardo Buontalenti. There were organs, musical waterfalls and all manner of mechanical figures. There were promenades of ilex and cypress, mazes of box-hedges cut into fantastic shapes and arcades formed by jets of water which, rising above the head, fell into little streams on either side of the path. In one corner, passing an aviary and a labyrinth, the visitor came upon Vulcan and his family, standing in a grotto, the walls of which were covered with coral and shells and ‘copper and marble figures with the hunting of several beasts, moving by the force of water’. In another corner, near a lawn from whose surface water spouted from unseen sources, a shepherdess walked out of a niche in a wall to fill her bucket with water from a well to the accompaniment of a bagpipe played by a satyr.

The Florentines detested Francesco’s mistress, Bianca Capello, for whom this Villa Pratolino had been built, maintaining that she was a witch, that she possessed the evil eye, that she had poisoned the wretched Joanna of Austria. When – her husband having been disposed of – Francesco married her at a wedding which was alleged to have cost no less than 30,000 florins, the people’s indignation was unbounded.

Yet outraged as they were by Francesco’s behaviour, there were other members of his family whose shameful conduct disgusted them even more. The most iniquitous of all was his younger brother, Pietro, who at the time of Francesco’s succession was twenty years old. An emotionally unstable parasite and profligate, Pietro not merely neglected his wife, Eleonora, but openly insulted her. She consoled herself with various lovers, including Bernardino Antinori, who was first imprisoned in his palace for killing one of his rivals in a duel and then exiled to Elba after his mistress had been seen walking up and down the street beneath his windows in the hope of catching sight of him.⁴ He was later brought back to Florence to face trial and execution by strangulation in his cell in the Bargello. The distracted grief displayed by Eleonora on learning of her lover’s fate so infuriated Pietro that he summoned her to Cafaggiolo where he strangled her, with the evident approval of the Grand Duke.

It was not the only murder in Francesco’s family. His sister, Isabella, was quite as unhappy in her marriage as her brothers had been and took for a lover her husband’s cousin, Troilo Orsini. Her husband, Paolo Giordano Orsini, a violent, vindictive man, had himself fallen desperately in love with Vittoria, the young and passionate wife of Francesco Accoramboni. They had taken it into their unbalanced minds to rid themselves of both Isabella and Accoramboni and then to marry each other. First Vittoria had her husband killed by professional murderers at the Villa Negroni. Then Orsini, having paid other assassins to kill his cousin, Troilo, murdered his wife at their villa of Ceretto Guidi near Empoli.⁵ He did so in a peculiarly macabre way: having waited until they had finished dinner, he signalled for four accomplices in the room above to let down a rope through a hole in the ceiling. Pretending to kiss her, he strangled his wife with the rope which the accomplices then pulled back into the room above. Announcing that Isabella had died of a sudden apoplectic seizure, Orsini soon afterwards married Vittoria, ignoring a papal ban imposed upon the marriage by Gregory XIII, and took her off to his castle at Bracciano. The horrifying affair might there have ended had not Gregory XIII died and been succeeded by Sixtus V. The new Pope was not only a relentlessly severe pontiff, determined to repress the disorders and lawlessness which had become so scandalous in the times of his predecessor, but was also the murdered Francesco Accoramboni’s uncle. Rather than attempt to defend himself at Bracciano against the Pope’s troops, Orsini fled to Venice where he died. He left a will bequeathing his great wealth to Vittoria who was consequently stabbed to death in Padua by her husband’s aggrieved brother who had hoped to be his heir.

His reputation sinking ever lower in a sea of scandal, the Grand Duke Francesco retreated from the world into the isolated privacy of Pratolino where he fed his goldfish and his Swedish reindeer, planted the rare shrubs that were sent to him from India and talked of cosmography, chemistry and the secrets of nature. Whole days were spent in his garden house at Pratolino and in the laboratory which Vasari built for him at the Palazzo Vecchio where, towards the end of his life, he even held meetings with his Ministers, unwilling to leave the chemical and other scientific experiments which so absorbed him. He had other interests, too, which kept his mind from business: on the third floor of the Uffizi, which had been completed by Bernardo Buontalenti and Alfonso Parigi after Vasari’s death in 1574, he created an art gallery and established studios for young artists. In 1583, he also established the Accademia della Crusca (the Chaff), an academy for ridding the Tuscan language of its impurities, and, indeed, for maintaining the supremacy of Florence as the only worthy arbiter of Italian literary taste – a function the Accademia performed so vigorously that it had the playwright, Girolamo Gigli, expelled from the Duchy for the unpardonable affront of declaring that Saint Catherine of Siena was a better writer than that great Florentine of blessed memory, Giovanni Boccaccio.⁶ But it was chemistry and alchemy, smelting and glass-blowing, gem-setting and crystal-cutting that occupied most of Francesco’s time. He became, indeed, an acknowledged expert: he was adept at making vases from molten rock crystal and precious metals; he invented a new way of cutting rock crystal and a revolutionary method of making porcelain which enabled Tuscan potters to produce exquisite wares comparable to those imported from China.⁷ He also developed ingenious methods of manufacturing fireworks and imitation jewellery. Yet even his scientific experiments brought him vilification rather than credit: locked up there in that noisome laboratory he was manufacturing poison to be used by that witch, Bianca. The notion seemed only too credible when in October 1587 they both suddenly died – in fact, of malarial fever – on the same day.

Francesco’s brother and successor, Ferdinando I, who assured his people that the deaths had been due to natural causes, had spent most of his life in Rome. He had gone there in 1563 as a fifteen-year-old cardinal, and within ten years had become an influential member of the Sacred College. Though he had little taste for religious life he founded the missionary society of the Propaganda Fide and proved himself a capable administrator. He also found ample opportunity to indulge his enthusiasm for classical statues of which he assembled a large collection, mostly Roman copies of Greek originals, including the Venus de’ Medici. He bought a villa on the Pincio in which to display them,⁸ and on his brother’s death brought many of them back with him to Florence where six statues of Roman women, restored by Carradori, were placed inside the Loggia dei Lanzi.

Ferdinando was thirty-eight years old at the time of his accession, a far more genial man than his brother whom he had never liked. Though extravagant and ostentatious, he immediately displayed a sincere concern for the well-being of Florence, and showed himself determined to maintain her independent position – if necessary, by force – in contrast with Francesco’s policy which had been to avoid trouble at any price. Under Ferdinando’s relatively benign yet efficient rule the government became less corrupt, the finances more stable, while trade and farming flourished. Hospitals were built in Florence and a college for scholars was founded at Pisa. The fleet, originated by his father, became more powerful; and Leghorn – ‘the masterpiece of the Medicean dynasty’, as Montesquieu called it – was further developed and populated with new citizens from all over Europe who were drawn to it by the Grand Duke’s promise of religious toleration, a promise that attracted not only persecuted Protestants but so many Jews that there is still today a higher proportion of Jews in Leghorn than in any other Italian city. By numerous acts of kindness and magnanimity the Grand Duke Ferdinando endeared himself to the people. He inaugurated, for example, a new and enjoyable ceremony at San Lorenzo where every year he distributed dowries to poor girls who might otherwise have found it difficult to find suitable husbands; and in the winter of 1589, when the Arno in full flood caused havoc in Florence and the surrounding countryside, he personally distributed baskets of food to the victims of the disaster and then made a perilous journey in a small boat to promise help to stricken villages.

Although he preferred to hoard money rather than to invest it – and instructed Bernardo Buontalenti to make an impregnable safe for him at Forte di Belvedere, the forbidding fortress overlooking the city, which was built to Buontalenti’s designs on the heights of San Giorgio between 1590 and 1595⁹ – Ferdinando I did not hesitate to be lavish when the occasion seemed to demand it. He bought Petraia, a medieval castle, from the Salutati family and instructed Buontalenti to transform it into a magnificent villa with an appropriately splendid garden.¹⁰ He built an equally splendid hunting lodge at Artimino, the Villa Ferdinanda, which was also designed for him by Buontalenti.¹¹He continued to pour money into the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens; he enlarged the Uffizi gallery and built the Tribuna; he bought numerous rare manuscripts from Persia and Egypt for the Medici library. He spent a thousand ducats on a colossal and highly intricate gilded sphere, the most complicated construction of its kind ever made, to prove that Ptolemy was right in contending that the moon, sun and stars revolve in circles round the earth and that Copernicus had been wrong to deny it.¹² To Giambologna he gave the Palazzo Bellini,¹³ commissioning him to construct in a foundry there a gigantic equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Cosimo for the Piazza della Signoria.¹⁴ On the occasion of his marriage to Caterina de’ Medici’s agreeable granddaughter, Christine of Lorraine, he spent an enormous amount of money as though determined to demonstrate that the House of Medici had lost none of its grandeur, and that the reversal of his brother’s pro-Spanish policy was worthy of a celebration of unparalleled splendour.¹⁵

Christine entered the city through a series of magnificent triumphal arches dedicated to Florence, to the glorious history of the Medici and the House of Lorraine. For weeks past scores of architects, painters and sculptors had been working on the construction and decoration of these arches, while hundreds of other artists and craftsmen, cooks and carpenters, mechanics and ropemakers, musicians and singers, soldiers and actors, gardeners and pyrotechnists had been busy preparing as original and elaborate a sequence of parades, receptions, banquets, pageants, plays, musical entertainments and intermezzi as Florence, or indeed, Europe had ever seen. The highlight of these extraordinary wedding celebrations, which marked a vital stage in the development of theatrical production, of ballet and the new dramma per musica, was a musical performance at the Pitti Palace, during which all manner of ingenious scenic devices, from exploding volcanoes to fire-eating dragons, astonished the spectators, and at the climax of which the courtyard was flooded to a depth of five feet so that eighteen galleys manned by heroic Christians could storm a Turkish fort.

Entertainments such as this, the inspiration of many a fête performed at Versailles for the pleasure of Louis XIV, were Ferdinando’s speciality; and he lost no opportunity in using them to exalt the Medici and his own policies in the eyes of Florence and of the world. The finest of all his court festivals were those over which he presided on the occasion of the marriage of his niece, Maria, to Henry of Navarre, whose triumph over the Catholic League and accession to the French throne owed much to Medici money. As well as the familiar horse races and tournaments, processions and pageants, firework displays and water fêtes, there were marvellously inventive performances at the Uffizi of Giulio Caccini’s Il Rapimento di Cefalo with settings by Buontalenti and of L’Euridice by Jacopo Peri, whose now lost Daphne, which has been called the first opera, was also performed at the Uffizi under Ferdinando’s auspices. And on 5 October 1600, when Maria de’ Medici and King Henry IV of France were married by proxy in the Cathedral, a stupendous banquet was given in the Palazzo Vecchio where each extravagantly shaped and decorated dish formed part of a fantastic allegory upon the martial brilliance of the French King and the outstanding virtues of the House of Medici into which he had so wisely married.

After Ferdinando’s death in 1609, his nineteen-year-old son, Grand Duke Cosimo II, increased the family’s reputation for lavish entertainments. When he was married to the Emperor Ferdinand II’s sister, the Archduchess Maria Maddalena, there was so spectacular a display on the Arno that observers claimed nothing like it had ever before been seen. The stage was the whole stretch of river between the Ponte alla Carraia and the Ponte Santa Trinità, which was embellished with statues for the occasion. The audience, sitting in immense grandstands erected on the Lungarni, were treated to a performance of the Argonautica in which Jason, avoiding the hazards presented by gigantic dolphins, lobsters and fire-spitting hydra, sailed round an artificial island, captured the Golden Fleece and presented the Archduchess Maria Maddalena with six red apples symbolic of the Medicean palle.

Cosimo II also shared his father’s taste for building. He extended the Palazzo Pitti, and reconstructed yet another villa for his family, the villa of Poggio Imperiale near Arcetri.¹⁶ Here he set up a telescope which Galileo Galilei had brought with him to Florence and here Galileo himself was offered sanctuary.

Galileo was born at Pisa in 1564 the son of a poor descendant of a Florentine noble family. He had wanted to be a painter, but his father had discouraged him and he had studied medicine instead. Turning to mathematics and physics, he had exasperated his tutors at the University of Pisa by his constant questioning of their assertions, his maddening presumption and quick temper. He had been offered a chair, but his colleagues, unable to tolerate his sarcasm and independence, had made it clear to him that his resignation would be welcome. He had gone to the University of Padua where he had remained for eighteen years until Cosimo II, who had once been a pupil of his, invited him to come to Florence where he could continue his studies and experiments in peace, free from the interference of his detractors and the accusations of the Church. Galileo accepted the offer and spent the last years of his life under the protection of the Medici. The satellites of Jupiter, whose discovery he had made known to the world in a book published in 1610, he called Medicea Sidera.¹⁷ He long outlived his indolent patron, Cosimo II, who died at the early age of thirty, having achieved very little worthy of record; but when Galileo himself died in 1642 and the Church forbade any monument to be erected to his memory, Cosimo’s son, Ferdinando II, had him buried in the Novices’ Chapel at Santa Croce.¹⁸

XXII FERDINANDO II AND THE FRENCH PRINCESS

TEN YEARS old when his father died, Ferdinando II was an easygoing, agreeable boy who gave as little trouble to his tutors as grounds for hope that he would be much credit to them. At the age of seventeen he went abroad on a continental tour, leaving Florence in the care of his mother and grandmother, neither of whom, perpetually quarrelling with each other and their council, appears to have either regretted his absence or to have welcomed his return. The people of Florence, however, grew more kindly disposed towards him the better they got to know him. In 1630, when he was twenty, he and his brothers stayed in Florence throughout an outbreak of the plague, doing all they could to help the stricken people, while most others who could afford to do so fled from the city. He did not look like a hero: in his portraits by the court painter, Justus Sustermans, he is seen adopting a commanding patrician pose which contrasts almost absurdly with the bulbous nose, the fleshily jutting Habsburg mouth and the black moustache whose thick ends rise upwards, like arrow-heads, towards the soft and heavy-lidded eyes. He was rather fat and extremely good-natured, more attracted to handsome young men than to women, fond of hunting and fishing and of playing games like bowls, provided he was allowed to win – sometimes losing his temper when he did not win, a spectacle all the more disconcerting on account of his usual placidity and courtesy.

His style of life was entirely without ostentation – wicker-covered bottles hung over the gate of the Pitti Palace indicating that wine could be bought there in the same way as from other lesser palaces in the city – yet Ferdinando was never mean. He spent as much on pageants, masques and spectacles as any of his predecessors; and, encouraged by his brother Leopoldo, he was a generous patron of scientists and men of letters. In 1657 the justly celebrated academy, Del Cimento (the Test) – whose motto was ‘Provando e Riprovando’ and whose emblem was a furnace with three crucibles – began to meet at the Pitti Palace; and although it was to survive for only ten years, dissolving in a welter of recrimination, jealousy and discord, its publications made important contributions to scientific knowledge. Ferdinando and Leopoldo, both disciples of Galileo, took a real interest in its proceedings, composing its quarrels, signing its correspondence, following closely the work of Evangelista Torricelli da Modigliana, inventor of the barometer, experimenting themselves with telescopic lenses and all manner of scientific instruments, and commissioning those thermometers, astrolabes, quadrants, hygrometers, calorimeters and other ingenious mechanical devices which visitors to the Pitti Palace saw displayed in such profusion.

Fascinated as they were by these devices, their interests ranged over a much wider field. Leopoldo, indeed, was a true polymath. He spent four hours each day ‘up to his neck in books’. He read everything that came to hand, ‘books of criticism, gallantry, satire and curiosities… manuscript reports on the geography, customs, and inhabitants of countries… in every part of the world’. The secretary of the Cimento wrote to an agent commissioned to buy books for Leopoldo:

You may forward documents of natural history like that [description] of a fish I sent you, or that [account] of a strange pregnancy… or like that skeleton so similar to a human one that [was] found at Castel Gandolfo; information about medals, newly-discovered statues, cameos and other ancient relics, architectural designs, stories with a bit of spice – anything will do.

For ‘like a little boy with a piece of bread’, Leopoldo always kept ‘a book in his pocket to chew on whenever he [had] a moment to spare’.

Ferdinando was both more selective and more practical, his main interest, apart from the experiments conducted by the Cimento, being the development of the Florentine craft of creating mosaics in pietra dura. Scores of craftsmen were kept busily at work in this intricate manufacture, assembling ornaments and bas-reliefs and elaborately decorating furniture in marble, ivory, crystal, gold, brightly coloured minerals and semi-precious stones.¹ To contain these works, and the family’s ever increasing collection of paintings and sculpture, Ferdinando was obliged to make extensive alterations to the Pitti Palace and to provide it with suitable galleries which he had adorned with murals by some of the most accomplished artists of his time – Cirro Ferri, Francesco Furini, Pietro da Cortona who painted the fine Baroque murals in the Sala della Stufa, and Giovanni da San Giovanni who worked in the Museo degli Argenti sitting in a tub suspended from the ceiling, his gouty legs swathed in bandages.² In the galleries thus beautifully decorated, visitors were able to inspect the latest additions to the Grand Ducal collections.³

As a ruler, Ferdinando’s policies were largely governed by a desire to avoid all trouble and unpleasantness. He was drawn into a brief war with the Pope’s tiresome Barberini relatives, but otherwise contrived to face every threat to Florence’s peace and security with mollifying complaisance. Rather than offend the Pope he declined to advance his claim to Urbino on the death of Duke Francesco Maria II, allowing the Duchy to become a part of the Papal States. Similarly he gave way to the Pope by agreeing that the officials of the Board of Health should kneel in submissive apology for having obliged various monks and priests to abide by the laws of quarantine during an outbreak of plague. He adopted the same placatory attitude towards the highly censurable activities of various members of his unruly family. He had no trouble with the good-natured, accommodating Leopoldo, who, on the dissolution of the scientific academy, Del Cimento, left for Rome to become a cardinal. Nor did Ferdinando have any difficulty with his other brother, Mattias, who served with some credit as a general in the Thirty Years’ War during which he assembled that remarkable collection of ivory ornaments which is one of the minor marvels of the Pitti collection,⁴ and after which he formed an equally extraordinary collection of human deformities including a hideous dwarf with ‘thinly scattered tusks for teeth’ and an appetite so enormous that he could gobble up forty cucumbers, thirty figs and a water melon as hors d’ œuvres before a massive dinner. Ferdinando did, however, have trouble with his brother, Gian Carlo, a cardinal like Leopoldo, but a man of far less disciplined instincts.

Gian Carlo was not without taste. He invited Salvator Rosa, whom he had met in Rome, to come to Florence where he was paid an annual income to paint for the Court while remaining free to accept commissions from other patrons. Gian Carlo also provided funds for a company of actors to build a theatre in the Via della Pergola;⁵ and for another company he rented a palazzo in the Via del Cocomero for which Ferdinando Tacca was asked to design sets and scenery.⁶ But Gian Carlo’s true interests were not so much painting and the theatre as food, which he consumed in immense quantities, and women, whom he pursued with the insatiable lust of a satyr. Expelled from Rome for refusing to be accompanied by older and less libidinous cardinals on his visits to Queen Christina of Sweden, he returned to Florence still young, rich and good-looking, exquisitely dressed, his hair long and curly, determined to devote himself to pleasure. He moved into a beautiful villa built in the middle of an entrancing and exotic garden off the Via della Scala.⁷ Here he made love to a succession of mistresses – often, it was said, to several at once – and had at least one tiresome rival drowned in a carp pond. He once ordered the release of a notorious murderer, whose wife he had immediately taken to bed when she had come to him on her husband’s behalf, and threatened to cut off the Sheriff’s head if his order was not obeyed. The Sheriff appealed to the Grand Duke who stood in silence for a few moments before resignedly declaring, ‘Obey the Cardinal, since he is my brother.’ Everyone knew that Ferdinando was frightened of Gian Carlo, and when the news was brought that he had died of apoplexy, Ferdinando received it with evident relief, rather than sorrow.

The Grand Duke found his wife, Vittoria della Rovere, hardly less troublesome than Gian Carlo. She was a prim and interfering woman, plain and fat, who early on in her married life developed a double chin far more uncompromising than her husband’s. She found it extremely difficult to bear him an heir: her first child, a boy, survived for less than a day, her second for only a few minutes. It was not until 14 August 1642 that she finally gave birth to a baby strong enough to live. This was the future Cosimo III, but his advent did not improve the uneasy relationship between his parents. Soon after his birth his mother came upon her husband fondling a handsome page, and for weeks she declined to speak to him. When she decided to try to come to terms with him, he declined to be reconciled, and it was almost twenty years before their quarrel was properly made up. A second son, Francesco Maria, was born in 1660; yet the marriage remained an unhappy one.

One principal cause of disagreement was the upbringing of their son, Cosimo. The Grand Duke wanted him to be given a modern education with due attention paid to the scientific discoveries which he himself found so deeply interesting. But the Grand Duchess would have none of that. She insisted that their son be educated by priests in the old-fashioned way. And so he was. He was taught to suppose that the scientific experiments of the Cimento were not only impious but beneath a prince’s notice. He accepted the teaching and soon developed a priggish intolerance that was to mar his character for life. When he was sixteen he was already exhibiting ‘symptoms of a singular piety’, the Lucchese ambassador reported.

He is dominated by melancholy to an extraordinary degree, quite unlike his father. The Grand Duke is affable with everyone, as ready with a laugh as with a joke, whereas the Prince is never seen to smile. The people attribute this to an imperious and reserved disposition.

Cosimo did not like music, except church music; he did not like dancing; he preferred to go to Mass rather than to the theatre; he would rather talk to monks than to girls or courtiers; he went out shooting, but when a bird flew over his head he would murmur, ‘Poverino’ and lower his gun – though afterwards he would eat with relish the birds that others had shot. His father decided that the sooner he was married the better, and that the ideal bride for him would be Marguerite-Louise, daughter of Gaston d’Orléans, Louis XIV’s uncle. This was a match that was also favoured in Paris, where Cardinal Mazarin entertained hopes of becoming Pope and was anxious to obtain the support of the Medici. The prospect, however, of being married to a gloomy, plump Italian with thick lips and droopy eyes, the heir to an impoverished duchy, was not at all pleasing to Marguerite-Louise herself. She was a high-spirited girl, quick, energetic, playful and capricious. Besides, she was in love with her cousin, Prince Charles of Lorraine. She begged her other cousin, King Louis XIV, not to send her to Florence. She knelt before him at the Louvre, imploring him to spare her such a dreadful fate; but he helped her to her feet and told her that it was now too late to break her word. So she was married to Cosimo by proxy in Paris on 17 April 1661. She was fifteen years old. Cosimo, who was in bed with measles at the Pitti Palace, was eighteen.

The bride left for Florence, ‘crying aloud for everyone to hear’, delaying her departure from every town where they stopped for the night, reaching Marseilles in the pouring rain, pretending to be too ill to leave her cabin in the flower-bedecked galley in which she was rowed to Leghorn. The bridegroom was waiting to meet her at the Villa Ambrogiana, near Empoli.⁸ He displayed no pleasure when he saw her for the first time, declining to kiss her; while she, for her part, did not attempt to disguise her relief when her doctor said that, although she had already had measles and the Prince was no longer infectious, she ought not yet to share his bed.

When they did go to bed together, after a magnificent ceremony in the Cathedral, the Prince was not enthusiastic, and was soon asleep. He would be stronger, the bride was assured, when he had fully recovered from his recent illness; but Marguerite-Louise seemed not to care whether he ever got better or not. According to Princess Sophia of Hanover, he never really did recover properly. ‘He sleeps with his wife but once a week,’ she reported years later, ‘and then under supervision of a doctor who has him taken out of bed lest he should impair his health by staying there overlong.’ Marguerite-Louise thoroughly disliked him; even his politeness seemed to her a kind of insult.

On the second night of her marriage she asked him to give her the crown jewels. He replied that they were not his to give, whereupon she lost her temper with him, declaring that she would rather live in the most squalid hut in France than in a palace in Tuscany. The next day she helped herself to several of the jewels anyway and gave them to her French attendants from whom they were only recovered with difficulty. After that she rarely spoke to her husband. By the end of their first month together, so the Bishop of Béziers reported, the Prince had only ‘couched with her three times’. ‘Every time he does not go,’ the Bishop continued, ‘he sends a valet to tell her not to wait up for him. The French ladies… are much embarrassed because she is always sad… She finds the life here very strange.’

It was hoped that the splendid entertainments which were staged in Florence that summer would dispel her gloom. There were banquets in the Palazzo Vecchio, balls at the Pitti Palace, firework displays over the bridge of Santa Trinità, horse races in the Via Maggio, chariot races in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, processions through the carpeted streets. On St John the Baptist’s Day, the Festa degli Omaggi was held as usual in the Piazza della Signoria. A week later, before an audience of almost twenty thousand people in the amphitheatre in the Boboli gardens, a performance was given of I1 Mondo Festeggiante, a fantastic and spectacular combination of masque, tableaux vivants, costume parade, ballet on horseback, musical pageant and phantasmagoria in which Cosimo himself appeared in jewelled armour as Hercules. Ten days after this there was a presentation of Jacopo Melani’s Hercules in Thebes at the theatre in the Via della Pergola. Thereafter Marguerite-Louise was taken on a tour of the villas and gardens of the Medici, from Poggio Imperiale to Poggio a Caiano, from Artimino to Castello and Pratolino. Yet still the Princess only occasionally displayed traces of her former high spirits. Most of the time she was homesick, unhappy, bored and crotchety, finding fault with everything Tuscan because it was not French, rarely going out in public and then always masked. When someone asked her if she liked Florence, she grumpily replied that she would have liked it much better had it been near Paris. She was also extravagant, spending such sums of money on her clothes and her table that the frugal Grand Duke was horrified. Worse than this, she was indiscreet. When Prince Charles of Lorraine visited Florence she made no secret of her love for him, writing passionate letters to him after his departure. His replies were intercepted and there was another row. In August 1663 she gave birth to a son, Ferdinando, and afterwards fell ill with a tumour on her breast. During her convalescence she refused to see anyone other than her French attendants. Blaming them for her petulant behaviour, Cosimo replaced twenty-eight of them with Italians as a result of which Marguerite-Louise became more rebellious than ever.

‘She is deaf to protests,’ the Venetian ambassador wrote. ‘She attaches importance to no one. It is her usual conceit to say that she has married beneath her, into a family vastly inferior to her proper merit; and this pricks the family at the most delicate point of their sensibilities.’ She took the most extreme measures to avoid her husband, moving from room to room in the palace so as not to be near him, asking her father-in-law to allow her to live by herself in a country villa. The Grand Duke Ferdinando had been patient, understanding and tolerant for a long time, but eventually he was driven to firmness. He replied that he would have her sent not to a villa but to a convent if she went on behaving like this. Pertly she replied that he would be sorry if he did, for she would soon have all the nuns skipping about like monkeys. She took a malicious delight in piquing Cosimo, in spreading stories of his inadequacy, telling him in public that he would not even make a good groom, let alone a proper husband. The Grand Duke retaliated by having her moved to his brother Mattias’s villa of Lappeggi when the rest of the Court drove off to Artimino for the shooting, and by having her closely watched by attendants who were instructed to follow her wherever she went and to ensure that she received no unauthorized letters. She took her revenge by pretending that the Medici were trying to poison her, and that it was necessary for a steward to taste all her dishes which must be prepared by French cooks. She gave it out that the marriage had been forced upon her, and that she was not therefore legally married to Cosimo. She was living as a concubine; her husband was a fornicator. She would have to enter a convent now – a French convent, of course. When this solution to her problem was put to Louis XIV, he replied that if she returned to France at all it would certainly not be to a convent but to the Bastille, and he followed up this threat by sending an envoy to Tuscany with a letter of remonstrance sternly condemning her ‘capricious’ behaviour and her ‘invincible obstinacy’.

She refused to mend her ways. Hearing that she was ill, Cosimo went to see her at Poggio a Caiano, whither she had been taken from Lappeggi; but she picked up a bottle from her bedside table, threatening to break his head with it unless he left her alone. On her recovery she resumed her practice of walking very fast up the mountain paths behind the villa, taking pot shots at birds on the way and leaving her exhausted attendants trailing far behind her.

Suddenly in October 1665, bored with her monotonous, secluded country life, she presented herself at the Pitti Palace requesting the Grand Duke’s permission to return to Court. Ferdinando quickly assured her that he would like nothing better. Cosimo kissed her. Everyone seemed delighted to welcome her back since she was evidently quite prepared to behave more circumspectly. And, for a time, all went well: she was gracious; she was pretty; she danced; she laughed; she made love with Cosimo; and she became pregnant again. Then the troubles began once more. She refused to stop galloping about on her horse; she continued to walk as far and as fast as ever; she resumed her complaints that the Medici were robbing her of her freedom, holding her a prisoner. Despite her violent exercise and an attack of influenza, for which her physicians bled her profusely, she gave birth to a healthy daughter, Anna Maria Luisa, on 11 August 1667. But after that, the abscess on her breast broke out again and she contracted smallpox. As a cure, the doctors not only bled her drastically, but also cut off her hair. In her misery and pain, she railed against Cosimo more virulently than ever. The Grand Duke thought it advisable to send him abroad for a time, first to Germany and the Netherlands and then, since Marguerite-Louise remained unappeasable on his return, to Spain and England.

XXIII COSIMO III AND THE GRAND PRINCE FERDINANDO

COSIMO, AT twenty-six, was just as gloomy as ever but far more self-confident than at the time of his wedding. An inveterate trencherman, he was now excessively fat; but he had a certain charm of manner, and though he was unduly fond of pious interjections, his conversation was wide-ranging and not uninteresting. In England, where he was well received in academic circles owing to his family’s protection of Galileo, he was seen coming out of the Queen’s Chapel by Pepys who described him as a ‘comely, black, fat man, in a morning suit… a very jolly and good comely man’. At the French Court he created a similarly favourable impression. The King wrote to Marguerite-Louise, ‘Consideration for you alone would have obliged me to give my cousin all the favourable treatment he has received from me. But from what I perceived of his personal qualities, I could not have refused them to his peculiar merit.’ In the less reliable words of Mademoiselle, ‘He spoke admirably on every topic. His physique was rather plump for a man of his age. He had a fine head, black and curly hair, a large red mouth, good teeth, a healthy ruddy complexion, abundance of wit, and was agreeable in conversation.’

Cosimo returned to Florence much taken with the countries of the north. ‘I hope for nothing in this world so ardently as once again to see [that] paradise called England,’ he said soon after his return. ‘I long to embrace again all my old friends there.’ He was equally enthusiastic about France, and evidently prepared to make more allowances for the wayward behaviour of his French wife who, he was pleased to note when he got home, was now on good terms both with his mother and his father. His father, however, was failing fast with dropsy and apoplexy, and suffering agonies from the treatment of his doctors; towards the end, not content with bleeding him, they placed a cauterizing iron on his head and forced polvere capitale up his nose; they also applied to his forehead four live pigeons whose stomachs had been ripped open for the purpose. The Grand Duke Ferdinando II died on 27 May 1670 and was buried with his father and grandfather in the great baroque mausoleum at San Lorenzo.

Cosimo III entered upon his inheritance with the deepest apprehension. In spite of his father’s personal economy and his rigid and extensive system of taxation, there had been no recent improvement in the finances of Tuscany whose trade was rapidly declining and whose population was being constantly decreased by malaria, plague and food shortages due to a backward agriculture. At first, Cosimo endeavoured to deal effectively with the problems that beset him; but soon, recognizing that they were utterly beyond his ability to control, he withdrew more and more into the soothing darkness of his chapel, leaving his mother and her friends to deal with most affairs of state and even deputing his brother, who was not yet twelve, to receive foreign ambassadors. This pleased his bossy mother well enough, but it certainly did not please his wife who angrily complained about a mere della Rovere presuming to take precedence over a daughter of the royal house of France.

In the summer of 1671, after Marguerite-Louise had given birth to a second son, christened Gian Gastone after his grandfather, Gaston d’Orléans, relations between Cosimo and his wife deteriorated rapidly. Believing that she had cancer of the breast she asked Louis XIV to send her a French doctor. Louis agreed to do so; but when the doctor arrived, he discovered that the little bump on her bosom was ‘nowise malignant’. However, sympathizing with her urgent desire to return to France, he did suggest to the Grand Duke that her general health might be improved by taking the medicinal waters at Sainte-Reine in Burgundy. Cosimo took leave to disagree, and naturally his objections led to heated protests from his wife. There were further quarrels over the quality of various jewels he gave her, over her extravagance, over her servants, and particularly over a male cook with whom she behaved outrageously in order to punish Cosimo for having dismissed two German grooms and a French dancing-master. ‘Now this cook,’ so it was recorded,

either dreaded, or pretended to dread, being tickled, and the Duchess, aware of his weakness, delighted in tickling him… He defended himself, shouting and running from one side of the room to the other, which made her laugh excessively.

When tired of this she would beat the cook over the head with a pillow, and the cook would take shelter under her bed where she went on beating him until, tired out with her exertions, she sank into a chair. As she did so her band of musicians started once more to play the tune they had abandoned when the romp had begun. One night the cook, being very drunk, made so much noise while the Grand Duchess was belabouring him with her pillow that he aroused the Grand Duke who, coming down to see what was happening, ‘instantly condemned the cook to the galleys’ – though he later reprieved him. Eventually the Grand Duchess decided to settle the matter once and for all. She wrote to inform Cosimo that she could bear her situation not a moment longer:

So I have made a resolution which will not surprise you when you reflect on your base usage of me for nearly twelve years… I am the source of your unhappiness, as you are of mine. I beg you to consent to a separation to set my conscience and yours at rest. I shall send my confessor to discuss it with you.

The Grand Duke replied,

I do not know if your unhappiness could have exceeded mine. Although everybody else has done justice to the many signs of respect, consideration and love which I have never tired of showing you for nearly twelve years, you have regarded them with the utmost indifference… I await the father confessor you are sending to learn what he has to say on your behalf… Meanwhile I am giving orders that besides proper attendants and conveniences Your Highness will receive [at Poggio a Caiano] all the respect which is your due.

Hearing that the marriage had reached this sad pass, Louis XIV sent yet another envoy to Tuscany, this time the Bishop of Marseilles. The Bishop found the Grand Duchess established at Poggio a Caiano with an extremely large household numbering over a hundred and fifty servants and attendants. Her conduct and movements were closely regulated – she was followed everywhere and nobody could visit her without the Grand Duke’s express permission – but, as the Bishop discovered, although full of complaints about her husband, she was far from downcast. Indeed, she was ‘lively and brilliant, bold and enterprising… playful and merry’. It seemed not at all surprising to the Bishop that the Grand Duke, so ‘melancholy and sombre’ himself, should be so continually at variance with her. Yet the Bishop hoped that some sort of reconciliation could nevertheless be patched up. Between the dancing and the dinners, the music and comedies with which the tireless Grand Duchess regaled him, he managed to find out what her principal grievances were. But when the Grand Duke promised to redress them, she was still not satisfied. ‘Having tried in vain for twelve long years to change her feelings, she could not alter them now.’ Besides, she could not continue to live with him ‘without offending God’ for she had been married to him under duress so was not really his wife at all. At length the Bishop was forced to conclude that his mission was hopeless, and in May 1673 he returned to France to report to the King.

Louis and Cosimo both thought that, if a formal separation had to be approved, Marguerite-Louise ought to remain in Tuscany for the sake of appearances. But the Grand Duchess was determined to go home to France, and on 26 December 1674 permission was at last given her to do so. She was to retire to the convent at Montmartre. She saw to it that she did not go empty-handed. As well as a generous pension and lavish expenses for her journey, she was to be allowed to take hangings and beds as well as 10,000 crowns’ worth of silver. In fact, she took a great deal more. She removed several valuable articles from Poggio a Caiano, and gave away so much money before she left that she had to ask for more in case she found herself ‘penniless on the highway’.

As might be expected, she did not remain long in seclusion at Montmartre. At first she behaved with due piety and resignation, but soon she was off to Versailles, with Louis XIV’s permission. Letters from her demanding more money arrived in Florence by regular posts. She took to gambling, to wearing double layers of patches, thick rouge and a yellow wig. She was as talkative and restless as ever. She was rumoured to be having an affair with the Comte de Louvigny, with an adjutant in the Maréchal de Luxembourg’s guards, as well as with a guardsman in the same regiment. Later she took a fancy to her groom who cracked nuts for her with his teeth, was allowed to win money from her at cards and who helped her to take a bath. She got deeper and deeper in debt, demanding another 20,000 crowns from Cosimo, who exasperated her by the inordinately long time he took in replying to her urgent letters. She created uproar at Montmartre by furiously chasing a young, newly appointed abbess through the convent for having dared to criticize her conduct, brandishing a hatchet in one hand and a pistol in the other. After this escapade she obtained permission to leave Montmartre for the smaller community of Saint-Mandé where she soon took another lover, this time a renegade monk.

But she was now forty-seven and beginning to show signs of becoming less unruly. She professed herself shocked by the goings-on at Saint-Mandé where the nuns climbed over the walls at night and the Mother Superior, dressed as a man, disappeared for months on end. Impressed by her reformist zeal, the Archbishop appointed her Mother Superior in place of the absconding transvestite. Four years later she inherited a handsome fortune from her sister, and so had no further need to bother Cosimo for money. She lived to the age of seventy-six, endlessly talking about her past, yet protesting that she never regretted having left Tuscany. ‘Ah!’ she would say. ‘I care little about that so long as I never have to set eyes on the Grand Duke again.’

The Grand Duke, for his part, had marked the departure of his tiresome wife by loading his tables with the most exotic foods and his guests with the most splendid presents as if anxious to show that he was far from being as mean as the Grand Duchess’s supporters had suggested, and that he was still as rich as the Medici had always been supposed to be, though in fact no longer were. His banquets were supervised by foreign servants in their national costumes; his capons, weighed in front of him, were sent back to the kitchen if they did not turn the scales at twenty pounds; his pastries and jellies were presented to him in the form of castles and heraldic beasts; his wines were cooled in snow. He himself consumed gargantuan platefuls of the richest delicacies, becoming fatter than ever with a complexion not so much ruddy as inflamed.

In other ways he was less indulgent. His Christianity became more and more narrow. Sexual intercourse between Jews and Christians was strictly forbidden, and any Christian prostitute who leased her body to a Jew was whipped before being sent to prison, while the Jew who hired her was heavily fined. Fines were also imposed on Christians who worked as servants or shop assistants for Jewish masters. If they could not pay the fine they were stretched on the rack when fit enough to bear the torture or, when not, imprisoned. In obedience to the wishes of the Inquisition, scientists and philosophers were no longer afforded the protection they had been accustomed to receive from the Medici. The staff at the University of Pisa were expressly forbidden by the Grand Duke’s personal command’ to read or teach, in public or in private, by writing or lecturing the philosophy of Democritus’, expounder of the atomic theory of the universe. And, for fear lest they should be contaminated by contact with such theories at other universities, Tuscan students were not permitted to attend any academic institutions beyond the borders of the Grand Duchy.

In his determination to stamp out immorality as well as heresies, Cosimo banned the May Day festival of the Calendimaggio on account of its supposedly pagan origins. Girls who persisted in singing the songs of May in the streets were liable to be whipped. At the same time an edict was issued forbidding young men and girls to dally at doors and windows by night, a practice condemned as ‘a great incentive to rapes, abortions and infanticides’. Men could be, and were, tortured on the rack for making love to girls with whom they were officially forbidden to consort, and beheading was the punishment for sodomy as well as for all manner of crimes against property. Public executions became so common, in fact, that in one year well over two thousand were carried out in the city. Murderers were not merely executed but afterwards quartered, and Cosimo would have have had one particular murderer tortured with red-hot pincers had not the magistrate advised him against it ‘because of the disgust that it would give the city’.

Yet Cosimo constantly did disgust the city by his burdensome taxes and other financial exactions. Scarcely a month passed without the imposition of some new tax, while the existing rates were perpetually being increased. The clergy were largely exempt, just as they usually escaped punishment for criminal offences, except in the case of particularly notorious crimes like those of the priest who persuaded numerous young women of his congregation that, with his help, they might give birth to the Holy Spirit whose appearance in human shape was imminent. But if little money was exacted from the clergy, prostitutes were a lucrative source of revenue. They were compelled to buy licences to perambulate the streets at night, and they were fined if they did so without a lighted torch. They had to pay six crowns a year for immunity from arbitrary arrest by agents of the Office of Public Decency who might otherwise pounce on them for some such trivial breach of the regulations governing their conduct as not wearing the prescribed yellow ribbon in their hat or hair. Women thus caught were then marched off to prison from which the public executioner would whip them to the old market place with a placard reading ‘For Whoredom’ hung over their breasts.

Cosimo also raised large sums of money by selling merchants the exclusive right to deal in certain essential commodities such as flour or salt – and then, for a fee, issuing tradesmen with special licences enabling them to evade the monopoly. Savage punishments were devised for those who attempted to side-step the regulations: bakers caught trying to avoid the flour monopoly were threatened with the galleys; and extracting salt from fish brine was declared a capital offence. Occasionally the money raised by taxation and the sale of monopolies was used for some worthwhile purpose, the purchase of books for the Grand Ducal library or miniatures to add to the collection formed by Cardinal Leopoldo. More often it would be lavished on expensive gifts of gloves or scent, on cases of Chianti to some person Cosimo had met in England, on holy relics of dubious provenance, or on some new extravagance at Court.

No member of that Court was more extravagant than the Grand Duke’s younger brother, Francesco Maria, the latest cardinal in the family. Cheerful, carefree and immensely fat, Francesco Maria had moved to Lappeggi on his uncle Mattias’s death, but the villa was not nearly grand enough for his taste. He asked the architect, Antonio Ferri, to make various suggestions for its embellishment. Of the designs submitted he unerringly picked the most imposing and asked what it would cost. Ferri named a sum which was more than the Cardinal had at his disposal. ‘And if I spend no more than thirty thousand crowns, but still have the work carried out to this design, how long would it last?’ Ferri reckoned he could guarantee it would stand for eighteen years. ‘In that case carry on,’ the Cardinal instructed him. ‘Eighteen years is enough; it will serve out my time.’¹

The work was soon finished. The gardens were laid out to rival those at Pratolino, and Francesco Maria settled down to indulge himself for his appointed span. He had an infinite capacity for self-indulgence. He loved scent, and so one of the rooms at Lappeggi was turned into a perfumery. He loved the company of young men, so he filled the villa with them, inviting them to gamble at his expense and to wait on him at table, dressed as girls. He had a passion for eating, so dosed himself with emetics to make room for a second dinner after his first. He enjoyed practical jokes, so he lavished money on those who could devise amusing ones and help him perpetrate them. He lavished money, too on his servants and would throw packets of coins from the villa windows onto the lawn where they wrestled for them both with each other and with the peasants of the neighbourhood. His servants cheated him at every opportunity, but he affected not to care and even to encourage them in their pilfering. At Easter he would have them brought before him to confess, and would then give them absolution, announcing that he willingly presented them with all they had taken. In constant need of more money he pursued new benefices and stipends with unremitting assiduity, and, if he obtained them, handed over the work involved to a secretary.

It naturally distressed Cosimo deeply that this lazy, insanely extravagant brother of his should have so much influence over his heir, the Grand Prince Ferdinando. Ferdinando had grown into a good looking young man, sprightly and amusing, intelligent, artistic and independent, with far more in common with his French mother than with his lugubrious father. By the age of fifteen he had already mastered the difficult art of ivory-turning and produced pieces of which any collector would have been proud. He was also a gifted musician, an excellent performer on the harpsichord and a singer of unusual skill and charm. In later yean he had a theatre built on the third floor of the Villa Pratolino and – unlike his uncle Francesco Maria who instructed the actors at Lappeggi to gabble through their parts in case he went to sleep in the middle of the performance – Ferdinando was responsible for the production at Pratolino of some remarkable works, including five operas by Alessandro Scarlatti with whom he conducted a long correspondence. He also corresponded with Jacopo Peri, Bernardo Pasquini and Handel, all of whom were invited to Florence to collaborate with him and his designers on various productions which gained high credit in musical circles all over Europe. Ferdinando was also a master impresario of pageants and was responsible for that memorable joust in the Piazza Santa Croce on Shrove Tuesday 1689 when a huge audience in wooden stands erected all round the square were regaled with a tournament between magnificently apparelled teams of European and Asian knights. Above all, as a patron and collector, he was both discriminating and eclectic, as good a judge of ceramics as of painting. He bought pictures by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto; he purchased Parmigianino’s unfinished Madonna dal Collo Lungo; he employed Sebastiano Ricci and Giuseppe Maria Crespi at the Pitti Palace when they were both almost unknown; he saved altarpieces from neglect in Florentine churches – amongst others, Raphael’s Madonna del Baldacchino and Fra Bartolommeo’s San Marco – and paid for copies to replace them. On St Luke’s Day 1701, in the cloister of Santissima Annunziata he organized the first formal exhibition of paintings to be held in Florence, lent several pictures from his own collection and prepared the catalogue.

Yet, for all his talents and panache, Ferdinando was a disappointment to his father. Apart from anything else, there was his unfortunate passion for handsome singers, first for one Petrillo, who was found one day by the Prince’s tutor hugging and kissing him; and subsequently for a conceited Venetian castrato, Cecchino, who, having insinuated himself into his household, was to wield great influence over him. The Grand Duke decided that the sooner Ferdinando was married the better. He needed a wife to remove him from the bad influence of Cecchino and Cardinal Francesco Maria. The dynasty also needed an heir. Moreover, the obligations of marriage might awaken Ferdinando to the responsibilities of government for which at present he showed so little aptitude. Unfortunately the bride selected for him was scarcely likely to interest Ferdinando in the least.

Princess Violante Beatrice of Bavaria was a plain young woman, timid and impressionable. She adored her husband from the first moment she saw him, but he made no secret of the fact that he was marrying her only because his father had told him to. The marriage took place on a day so cold that two soldiers on guard at the Porta San Gallo froze to death, and the sixteen-year-old bride buried her face in her muff on the way from the Cathedral to the Pitti Palace. She had never been so cold, she said miserably. But she rarely complained again. She bored her husband and was sensible enough to realize that grumbling would merely turn boredom into dislike. He virtually ignored her. And anyway, she turned out to be barren. One day he left for Venice, where he contracted syphilis from a lady of noble family. And then, to the horror of the domineering Cecchino and to his patient wife’s distress, he added insult to injury by returning to Florence with a young mistress.

XXIV THE LAST OF THE MEDICI

SINCE NO heir could be expected from Ferdinando, the Grand Duke Cosimo turned his attention to his second son, Gian Gastone. Previously he had not given much thought to him, and Gian Gastone was certainly not a young man who commanded much attention. Introspective, lonely, unhappy, he spent most of his time by himself, shunning the noisy, extravagant circles in which his brother and uncle lived, preferring to spend his time in botanical or antiquarian studies or in learning foreign languages, including English. He was a pleasant-looking man, gentle and considerate, but he had no close friends of either sex and evidently no ambitions. He certainly had no ambition to be a husband, and he contemplated the prospect of marriage to the bride selected for him with the deepest apprehension. The apprehension turned to horror when he saw her, for Anna Maria Francesca, daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Lauenberg and widow of the Count Palantine, Philip of Neuberg, was a woman of truly exceptional ugliness. She was also stupid and quarrelsome, ‘of enormous weight, immense self-will and no personal attractions’. She had few interests other than the more strenuous outdoor sports, and seemed quite content to spend the rest of her life in her dank, ugly castle in the gloomy, dispiriting village of Reichstadt near Prague to which she took her reluctant husband after their marriage in the chapel of the Elector’s palace in July 1697. Both the place and the woman disgusted him. Of stronger homosexual tendencies than his brother, he comforted himself with a sly but pretty groom, Giuliano Dami, and thought of little but escape from the slough of hovels and sedgebeds that was his prison.

In the spring of the next year he went unaccompanied and incognito to Paris, to the fury of his father who upbraided him for demeaning the Medici by a visit conducted in such poor style. Soon after his return he left for Prague, taking his paramour, the groom, with him. There, he tried to forget the misery of his life at Reichstadt by gambling, making love with impoverished students and street-boys, and getting drunk in low taverns where he ‘grew accustomed to wallow and debauch, smoking tobacco and chewing long peppers with bread and cummin-seed in order to drink more heavily in the German fashion’. After a time he braced himself to return to his wife at Reichstadt where he was more miserable than ever. He spent hours on end alone in his room, gazing out of the window at the doleful view, bursting into tears, rarely able to bring himself to answer letters or even to sign documents written for him by his secretary. Occasionally he roused himself from his torpor, drinking to excess and gambling with his Italian attendants – to whom he lost so much money that he was driven to pawn his wife’s jewels for less than half their value. He begged his wife, who spent most of the day ‘holding conversations in the stables’, to come with him to Florence where they could be miserable in less depressing surroundings. She refused, however, to leave Reichstadt for which she had an unaccountable attachment. In any case, so her confessor warned her, she would undoubtedly be murdered in Florence, a fate that sooner or later overtook all wives of the Medici.

In Florence, Cosimo grew old in worry and disappointment. Years of over-eating and lack of exercise had led to a breakdown in his health, an ‘overflow of bile’ which he had been advised to counteract by ‘a severe Pythagorean regimen’, a plain diet of fruit and vegetables, and vigorous hunting and riding. He had followed the advice, but an improvement in his health had not been matched by any elevation of his spirits. He had been much disheartened by the difficulties he had encountered in finding a husband for his favourite child, his daughter, Anna Maria, a tall, dark-haired, rather gauche girl with a masculine voice and a loud laugh. She had been turned down not only by Spain and Portugal, but also by the Duke of Savoy and the Dauphin. Eventually she was accepted by William, the Elector Palatine, who married her at Innsbruck and soon afterwards infected her with a venereal disease which was held responsible for the miscarriages that marred her early life.

Despairing of ever seeing an heir produced by any of his children, Cosimo turned to his brother, Francesco Maria. The Cardinal was horrified. He had never felt the need of a wife, and he certainly did not want one now. To marry would entail foregoing most of the pleasures of Lappeggi; it would also mean giving up his cardinal’s hat. He was forty-eight, set in his ways, and he had not been feeling very well lately. In the end, though, he had to give way. But the bride that was found for him, the twenty-year-old Princess Eleonora, daughter of the Duke of Guastalla and Sabbioneta, was as reluctant to marry him as he was to marry her. She was reminded of the great honour which was being bestowed upon her family, but she was not so much concerned with honour as with the prospect of having to go to bed with a gouty, fat, blotchy-faced man who was known to prefer pretty boys. For the first few weeks of the marriage, indeed, she could not be persuaded to go to bed with him at all; and when she did, induced at last by her husband’s kindness and patience, she was unable to hide her distaste. Francesco Maria seems to have found the experience painful as well as debilitating. It was, in fact, altogether too much for him, and within two years he was dead.

His nephew, Ferdinando, whose marriage to Princess Violante had been quite as disastrous, did not long survive him. Ferdinando had never been properly cured of the disease he had contracted in Venice. At the time of Francesco Maria’s marriage his memory had gone, and he spent most of the day in a kind of stupor broken by epileptic fits. He died at the end of October 1713. Less than three years later his brother-in-law, the Elector Palatine, also died; and the Elector Palatine’s widow, Anna Maria, prepared to go home to Florence.

Her brother, Gian Gastone, was already there. Leaving his wife in her grim valley, Gian Gastone had returned to Florence in 1708, at the age of thirty-seven. Since then he had been living in seclusion, talking to few people other than Giuliano Dami, frequently so drunk that he was unable to keep a seat on his horse, spending every evening in an alcoholic daze, suffering from asthma, so apathetic that he declined to open any letters to avoid having to answer them. ‘Some fear that he will predecease his father which would not be surprising,’ wrote a French visitor to Florence, ‘because the Grand Duke has a robust constitution and takes great care of his health, whereas his son seems merely to accelerate his death.’

Cosimo had long since dismissed Gian Gastone from his affections, and in the problem of the Tuscan succession had been anxious only to protect the interests of his daughter, Anna Maria. At one time he had been inclined to follow the advice of his Council and decree that the sovereignty of the State should revert to its citizens as in the days of the early Republic. But then he had decided that if Anna Maria survived her brothers, she ought to be Grand Duchess before the Republic was revived. This led to a diplomatic squabble which went on for years: the Emperor, Charles VI, put in a claim to the succession; the House of Este also came forward as claimants; so did Philip V of Spain and Elizabeth Farnese. Worried and harassed by the apparently intractable problem, Cosimo endeavoured to escape from it into the comfort of his religion.

Some years before he had made a pilgrimage to Rome where he had fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition by being appointed a canon of St John in Lateran which accorded him the right to touch the Volto Santo, the handkerchief that Christ had used on his way to Calvary; and ever since that day when he had held in his hands this sanctified cloth he had become, so it was said, more pious than ever. Having presented the Pope with a painting of the Annunciation worth 200,000 crowns, he had returned to Florence with boxes full of relics, a sacred collection to which he soon afterwards added a piece of St Francis Xavier’s intestines. He would show these relics to privileged visitors with the utmost reverence, and would humbly fall on his knees before them. An English tourist was assured that he

had a machine in his own apartment whereon were fix’d little images in silver of every saint in the calendar. The machine was made to turn so as to present in front the saint of the day, before which he continually perform’d his offices… He visited five or six churches every day.

His zeal for gaining converts to the Catholic faith was boundless. He spent hours on end teaching the Christian doctrine with infinite patience to three cheeky little Cossack boys who had been presented to him by the Bishop of Cracow, and he provided handsome pensions to foreign Protestants who abandoned their faith for his own. He was equally zealous in ridding Florence of works of art which he thought might give rise to lascivious thoughts. He had Baccio Bandinelli’s marble statue of Adam and Eve removed from the Cathedral, and he even considered having the nude statues on display in the Uffizi hidden from view when told by priests that some people found them disturbingly erotic. His own life was ascetic in its self-restraint: he ate only the plainest food, and nearly always alone; he drank nothing but water; he went to bed very early and rose soon after dawn; he never went near a fire. He had outgrown most of his faults, except bigotry; yet few people had ever learned to love him. Now that he was over eighty he was treated with a kind of wary respect. No longer did the mob gather threateningly beneath his windows, shouting for bread, plastering insulting placards onto the palace walls. But on those rare occasions when he left the palace in a slow-moving, two-horse carriage, surrounded by Swiss guards with halberds, footmen and pages, though men bowed to him, there was no cheering. And when at last he died, on 31 October 1723, there was little grief.

Florence had other causes for sorrow. The city was a sad place now, poor, gloomy and disconsolate. Tourists reported it as being full of beggars, vagabonds and monks, passing in dreary procession beneath dark buildings with windows of torn oiled paper. A generation before, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, lamented the pitiable condition into which it had fallen.’ Florence is much sunk from what it was,’ he wrote, ‘for they do not reckon there are above fifty thousand souls in it… As one goes over Tuscany, it appears so dispeopled that one cannot but wonder to find a country that hath been a scene of so much action now so forsaken and so poor.’ Subsequent travellers were similarly dismayed. ‘The declining state of this city is very visible,’ reported one of them,

a great deal of the ground within the walls being unbuilt, and many of the houses ill-inhabited, so that it is not very populous; nor are the inhabitants useful, the clergy making up the bulk of the people… I counted above four thousand monks and friars in one procession.

Despite the burdensome taxation imposed upon the people by Cosimo who had authorized a new form of income-tax on his deathbed, the State was almost bankrupt. So were many of the noble families whose ancestors had been so rich and so hospitable. Now guests were rarely invited to anything more exciting than a card party or a conversazione, at which nothing except lemonade, coffee or tea would be served with an occasional ice-cream – the nobles finding it difficult enough to pay for their own food, which was often brought in from some nearby cook-shop, let alone for the numerous servants who hung about their gateways in the hope of better times.

Better times could hardly be expected under Cosimo’s successor, Gian Gastone, who at fifty-two was not expected to overcome his indolence, his alcoholism or his taste for slovenly lubricity. He began his rule well enough, displaying a genuine concern for the welfare of the people and disdaining to spend money in the flamboyant manner of most of his relations. He reduced the intolerable level of taxation and lowered the price of corn; he discontinued public executions and provided the city’s beggars with a decent workhouse; he freed the government from the stranglehold of the Church which under Cosimo III had gripped it so tightly; he restored to scientists and scholars the freedom that had lately been denied them; and he rescinded the laws which had been passed against the Jews. But soon his constitutional sloth overcame him and he took to spending most of his time in bed; the crafty Giuliano Dami kept unwanted visitors at bay, and dealt with the craftsmen and antiquaries who relied on the Grand Duke’s lazy good nature to sell him objects that no discriminating collector would ever wish to possess.

Giuliano Dami also provided Gian Gastone with that motley troupe of young companions, male and female, but mostly rowdy boys, who were collectively known as Ruspanti after the coins – the ruspi – with which they were paid for their services. These Ruspanti, often handsome youths from the poorest Florentine families, were required to entertain the Grand Duke by rollicking about in his room, shouting insults and obscenities, and, when his fancy ran that way, drawing him into their hone-play. Sometimes he would give a splendid dinner, calling them by the names of his ministers or other leading citizens of Florence, proposing toasts to these suddenly transmogrified celebrities. Then, after the meal was over, he would persuade them for his pleasure to make love to each other. Every month the number of Ruspanti grew until by the end of 1731 there were nearly four hundred of them. As they grew in numbers, so also they grew more troublesome and violent, raising riots in the Boboli gardens, and raiding the cookshops and the stalls in the market when their wages were in arrears.

Gian Gastone’s sister-in-law, Violante, who had chosen to remain in Italy after the death of Prince Ferdinando, tried to interest the Grand Duke in less degrading pleasures than the Ruspanti afforded him. She organized banquets to which she invited the most amusing and accomplished people to entertain him. He merely got incapably drunk, swearing and belching as he ate his food, making occasional comments of indescribable lewdness. At one peculiarly embarrassing dinner, after vomiting into his napkin, he took off his wig and wiped his mouth with it.

Most of his meals, however, were eaten in bed; dinner at five o’clock in the afternoon, supper at two in the morning. Before dinner he would receive those few official visitors to whom he accorded admittance. Propped against pillows, surrounded by freshly picked roses to give sweetness to the fusty air of the bedroom, he wore a shirt covered with snuff, a long cravat and a nightcap. Rarely did he emerge from the room and then only to disprove rumours that he was dead. Thus, he appeared on St John the Baptist’s Day in 1729. Having got drunk beforehand to make the ordeal more tolerable, he lolled about in his carriage, poking his head from the window from time to time in order to be sick into the street. At the Porta al Prato he stumbled out to watch the horse races during which he shouted obscenities at his pages and the ladies around him; then, having fallen asleep, he was conveyed back to the Pitti Palace in a litter. Thereafter he scarcely ever left it. Once he was carried in a sedan-chair to the notorious baths at San Sperandino; and once, wearing a straw hat and a dressing-gown, he was taken in a litter to the villa of Poggio Imperiale. But most of his days he spent in bed where, in June 1737, he was found dying by the Prince de Craon, representative of Maria Theresa’s husband Francis, Duke of Lorraine, who the European powers – without bothering to consult Gian Gastone – had decided should be his heir. ‘The Grand Duke is in a pitiable condition,’ the Prince de Craon reported to the Duke of Lorraine.’ He could not get out of bed; he had a long beard; his sheets were very dirty, his eyesight weak, his voice low and muffled. Altogether he had the air of a man who had not a month to live.’ The Prince was right. The Grand Duke Gian Gastone died on 9 July 1737 at the age of sixty-five.

The six thousand Austrian troops of the new regime had already crossed the frontier, and all important appointments in the government had been assigned to foreigners. Tuscany was to become a mere appendage of the Austrian empire, while the Medici’s last representative, Anna Maria, the Electress Palatine, was permitted to live out her days in her apartments at the Pitti Palace.

A tall, dignified, rather haughty and stiff-backed old lady, she had strongly disapproved of her younger brother’s conduct and had, after many painful interviews and insulting dismissals, prevailed upon him to accept the ministrations of the Church before he died. She was profoundly religious herself, and on the rare occasions when she drove out of the Palace courtyard, ‘with guards and eight horses to her coach’, observers could be fairly sure that she was either going to Mass, to donate money to one of her favourite charities, or to inspect progress on the family mausoleum at San Lorenzo, work on which had been abandoned but was now resumed again at her expense. She received few visitors, and when she did so, as the poet Thomas Gray discovered, she remained standing and unsmiling beneath a black canopy in a comfortless room full of silver furniture. She was always very conscious of the fact that she was the last of the Medici.

So were the people of Florence. Resentful and humiliated to be once again ruled by foreigners whose cannon in the city’s fortresses were turned against them, they looked back to the great days of the Medici with pride and a sense of loss. They watched with deep regret as the Medici balls were taken down from public buildings and replaced with shields emblazoned with fleurs-de-lis, an eagle and the cross of Lorraine. They were outraged when they heard that the celebrations of the birthday of Cosimo Pater Patriae, of the elevation of Pope Clement VII, of the election of Duke Cosimo I, and all the public holidays connected with the Medici were to be abolished. They would have given two-thirds of all they possessed to have the Medici back, the French scholar Charles de Brosses decided, after a visit to Tuscany at this time; ‘and they would give the other third to get rid of the Lorrainers… They hate them.’ When Anna Maria died in February 1743, at the age of seventy-five, all the town was in tears for the loss of her, the British envoy’s assistant reported:

The common people are convinced she went off in a hurricane of wind; a most violent one began this morning and lasted for about two hours, and now the sun shines as bright as ever – this is proof. Besides, for a stronger, just the same thing happened when John Gaston went off. Nothing can destroy this opinion which people think they have been eye-witnesses to… On the Monday morning her Confessor by a stratagem was carried to her, for she would not have him sent for and… he was bid to tell her she must soon die, to which she answered by asking him with some emotion,’ Who told you so?’ He replied: ‘Her physicians.’

‘Very well, then let us do what there is to be done; and do it quickly.’ So they brought her the Communion… She was sensible to the last, but she did not speak for about an hour and a half before she died… She has lain in state in the great hall of the palace since Thursday morning, and is to be buried tonight… [So] the poor remains of the Medici is soon to join her ancestors.

The family mausoleum at San Lorenzo is not, however, her true memorial. In her will she bequeathed to die new Grand Duke and his successors all the property of the Medici, their palaces and villas, their pictures and statues, their jewels and furniture, their books and manuscripts – all the vast store of works of art assembled by her ancestors, generation after generation. She made one condition: nothing should ever be removed from Florence where the treasures of the Medici should always be available for the pleasure and benefit of the people of the whole world.¹