A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 1 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

Can it be that splendid princes find it more congenial to royal-minded tastes, and more convenient to royal-minded habits, to reign over alms-fed mendicants than over prosperous self-fed freemen? Then again, what says Mother Church? Is not almsgiving the broadest of all the roads to heaven? And how are the rich to, buy off their own sins in conformity with orthodox rule, if there are no beggars?

But among all the cares and occupations arising out of the twofold business of advancing her own splendour and alleviating the misery of her subjects, Catherine found time to think of yet another matter of still greater importance than either of these. Madama was now meditating a third marriage, and this time she seems to have returned to the plan of marrying from policy and ambition. Probably the increasing storminess of the political horizon, and the consequent precariousness of the position of all the smaller princes of Italy, made her deem it desirable to seek the support which a connexion with some important and powerful family would afford her. In truth, it was the eve of a period, during which it was hardly to be expected that any unaided female hand, however virile in its energy, would be able to retain its grasp of a sceptre; and considering the matter in this point of view, she could not, probably, have chosen more prudently than she did.

For the last year past, Giovanni de' Medici had been residing in Forlì as Ambassador from the Republic of Florence. He was great-grandson of that Giovanni who was the common ancestor of the two great branches of the family. That founder of the Medicean greatness had two sons, the elder of whom was Cosmo, "pater patriæ," from whom descended the elder branch, including among its scions Lorenzo the Magnificent, the two Popes Leo X. and Clement VII., and Catherine, the wife of Henry II. of France, and becoming extinct in the person of Alexander first Duke of Florence, murdered in 1537. Giovanni's second son, the younger brother of Cosmo, was Lorenzo, the grandfather of that Giovanni who now was the envoy in Forlì from the Republic of Florence.

GIOVANNI DE' MEDICI.

When, therefore, in the early part of the summer of 1497, Catherine gave her hand to Giovanni de' Medici, however much this, her third marriage, may have been a matter of calculated prudence and state policy, she at least had a sufficient knowledge of the man whom she was about to make her husband. Madama was now thirty-five years of age, while Giovanni was only thirty. He had not, and has never occupied any very conspicuous place in history; but what little we hear of him is favourable. He had fought with credit, in France, under Charles VIII., and had brought back with him to Florence, a French patent of nobility, and a pension of two thousand crowns a-year, the gifts of that monarch. He had also the credit of a wise and prudent negociator and statesman.

There is extant among the Florence archives a letter from Savonarola to Catherine, dated from the Convent of St. Mark, the 18th of June, 1477, of which a few copies have recently been printed by the Count Carlo Capponi at Florence. The contents are of little interest, being merely general exhortations to piety, to God-fearing conduct in the government of her states. But it is somewhat remarkable that this letter must have been written just about the time of her marriage with Giovanni de' Medici; which yet was, like the preceding union with Feo, and for the same reasons, kept perfectly secret. Yet, as there is no reason to think, that the reforming friar had any correspondence with Catherine, either previously or subsequently, it can hardly be doubted, that this letter of exhortation was motived by the occasion of the marriage; and that the friar, friar-like, knew all about it, however secret it may have been kept.

This wholly volunteered and unprefaced preachment from the friar to a foreign princess, is a trait worth noting of the social position arrogated to themselves by the spiritual teachers of that day.

Of this union, however, of the great houses of Sforza and Medici, the most, and indeed the only important result was the birth of a son baptised Ludovico, on the 6th of April, in the year 1498. The name Ludovico was, a few months later, changed to Giovanni; and this child became that celebrated Giovanni "Delle Bande Nere," who acquired an European reputation as the greatest captain of his day, and from whom descended the long line of Tuscan Grand-Dukes of the Medicean race. For Cosmo, his son and Catherine's grandson, succeeded to that dignity on the extinction of the elder branch of the family.

Through this Giovanni, moreover, Catherine's eighth child and seventh son, she is the ancestress of that Maria de' Medici who became the wife of Henry IV. of France, and by him the progenitress of all the Bourbons, who have sat on the thrones of France, Spain, Naples, Parma, and Lucca; and who, by her daughter Henrietta, the wife of Charles I., was the mother of an equally royal, and almost equally pernicious race.