3. The Fieschi family.
And the particular family from which she sprang, and the period of its history at which she appeared, each helped to bring right into her blood and immediate surroundings the more general conditions of her race and time.
The Fieschi had indeed a long past story, securely traceable through a good two centuries and a half before Catherine’s birth. They sprang from the little seaside town of Lavagna, twenty English miles east of Genoa, where shipbuilding is still carried on. Here it was that Sinibaldo de’ Fieschi, the first of the two Popes of the family, Innocent IV (1243-1254), was born, whose whole Pontificate was one long vehement struggle with his former friend, the masterful and sceptical Emperor Frederic II of Germany. His nephew was Pope, under the title of Hadrian V, for but a few months (1276). It was from Pope Innocent’s brother Robert that St. Catherine was descended.
The Fieschi were the greatest of the great Guelph families of Genoa, such as the Grimaldi, Guarchi, and Montaldi. The great Doria family, with the Spinola, Fregosi, and Adorni was as strongly Ghibelline. And the endless, fierce conflict between these two factions, in Genoa itself and along both Rivieras, led to the calling in, and to the temporary supremacy over Genoa, of the Dukes of Milan, the Counts of Montferrat, and of the Kings of Naples and of France. The Revolution of 1339, which put an end to the exclusive rule of the Nobles, and introduced elective Doges or Dukes as life-long heads of the Republic, really altered little or nothing of all this.
Indeed the Fieschi had, just now at Catherine’s birth, reached the full height of their power and worldly splendour. For the two Popes of the family had already reigned two centuries before, and Cardinal Luca Fieschi lay buried in the Cathedral for over a hundred years; but the Fieschi now possessed numerous fiefs in Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy, and even in the Kingdom of Naples; Nicolò Fieschi, a cousin of the Saint, was, in Catherine’s time, a prominent member of the College of Cardinals; and her own father was Viceroy of Naples to King René of Anjou. There was indeed exactly a century yet to run, up to the beginning of the downward course of the family,—the disastrous conspiracy of the Fieschi against the Dorias (1547), which forms the subject of Schiller’s well-known play.
Catherine’s father had been Viceroy of Naples to that René Duc of Anjou, Count of Provence, Duke of Lorraine, and titular King of Naples, whose adventurous career and immensely popular character still stand out so vividly in history. The “roi débonnaire,” the friend of the Troubadours and father of Margaret of Anjou, Consort to King Henry VI of England, figures life-like in Scott’s Anne of Geierstein; and his strikingly bourgeois profile may still be seen, as part of the vivid portraiture of his kneeling figure which faces the corresponding one of his Queen, upon the great contemporary triptyche picture, representing in its central division the Madonna and Child in the branches of a tree (in allusion to the Burning Bush and the Rod of Jesse), which hangs in the choir of the cathedral of Aix, King René’s old wind-swept and now sleepy Provençal capital. Since Charles I of Anjou (1265-1285), the Angevine Kings had made Naples the capital of their Kingdom; Duke René was the last of the Angevines to hold or seriously to claim it. He lost it in 1442 to the Spaniards; but still in 1459 he attempted, by means of a Genoese fleet, to repossess himself of his old kingdom, so that Catherine’s father could, even up to the time of his death in 1462, retain the title of Vice-Roy of Naples. Her mother, Francesca di Negro, also belonged to an ancient and noble Genoese family.
IV. Catherine’s Life, up to the Preliminaries of her Conversion: Autumn 1447-Mid-March 1474.
1. The house where she was born; her brothers and sister.
Catherine was born in one of the many palaces of the Fieschi, in the one which stood in the Vico Filo, close to the dark grey limestone façade of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo. The palace was hemmed in, on its two sides and at its back, by the houses of Urbano and Sebastiano di Negri, and was demolished when the then Piazza dei Fieschi was enlarged and became the present Piazza di San Lorenzo. The house now facing the Cathedral doorway occupies approximately the site of that old palace.
She was the youngest of five children. There were three sons: Giacomo, named after his father; and Lorenzo and Giovanni, no doubt named respectively after the great Roman deacon, the titular saint of the Cathedral, and who already appeared upon his gridiron, on the quaint Mediaeval relief over its portal; and after the Baptist, whose reputed relics lay there, in the great Chapel, rebuilt for them soon after this time (1451-1496). Last came the two daughters: Limbania, named after a beatified virgin and contemplative, a Genoese Augustinian Nun of the thirteenth century, and Catherine, christened and in all the legal documents always called by this diminutive, presumably after St. Catherine of Alexandria, who had an altar in the Cathedral. And the Cathedral was their Parish Church.