1 THE ORPHAN
Italy, 1519–1533
In September 1533, fourteen-year-old Catherine de’ Medici boarded a galley headed from Porto Venere on the northern shore of Italy toward the port city of Villefranche on the southern coast of France, not far from Nice. The weather was fair for sailing; she expected to arrive within days. She brought with her a wealth of treasure packed in trunks and crates and jewel boxes. She carried with her, too, a wealth of memories—of suffering, fear, even terror, along with memories of laughing cousins, the scent of rose pomanders, the sticky taste of sweet buns smeared with jam. In Nice, she would meet the French king, now her sovereign, the man who would soon become her father-in-law. She would also meet his son, her future husband, Henry, Duke of Orléans. Not yet betrothed, she already thought like a bride. She still signed her name Caterina but would soon switch to Caterine. She’d already tried out that signature once or twice, gripping the quill firmly in her fingers as the ink flowed onto the page.
In a way, Catherine de’ Medici’s story begins not at her birth but rather on those waters, under those Mediterranean skies, the sails of her ship whipping against a late summer breeze. This was the moment of her crossing from Italy to France, from maiden to bride, from the Medici family to a royal French one, from girlhood to young womanhood. Already, she had assumed a new importance as those who observed the pendulum of Renaissance politics now took note of her, measuring her looks, her bearing, her potential to give birth; from this moment forward, the traces of Catherine will appear more prominently in the archives. At fourteen, she was barely in her teens, ignorant of what the coming years would bring. And yet, to the sixteenth-century world, this part of her story was nothing new. A wealthy girl leaves her homeland to marry a prince, neither for love nor looks but for the dowry and value she brings? This had been the path charted for Catherine’s mother, for countless girls of Catherine’s time and place. A path that, to a girl like Catherine, must have seemed as ancient and predictable as the rising sun.
She left behind neither mother nor father in Italy. Catherine had been an orphan almost since birth. Her father had been Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino and ruler of Florence. The scion of the Medici family’s senior branch, Lorenzo was the grandson and namesake of the great fifteenth-century Florentine banker and patron Lorenzo de’ Medici, known as Il Magnifico.
Her mother had been a teenaged French princess, Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne, Countess of Boulogne, a fact that her contemporaries, and many a historian since, would sometimes forget. Madeleine had been an orphan, too, by the time of her own wedding to the Italian Lorenzo, married on the orders of that same French sovereign, King Francis I. Even as a squalling infant in Florence, Catherine had commanded the attention of King Francis, who, from far-off France, began cogitating plans for the child, knowing she had the potential to bring new lands under French rule. Several years would pass before the king’s projects for Catherine could unfold as he hoped. And long before those plans came to fruition, Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne had died.
When she set sail on that galley in September 1533, Catherine de’ Medici was traveling to a land both unknown and strangely familiar, her mother’s kingdom.
She was finishing her mother’s story. And in a sense, Catherine was coming home.
* * *
Baptized Caterina Maria Romula in the Medici parish church of San Lorenzo, she was the great-granddaughter of Il Magnifico. Every important event in her childhood turned on this single fact. From her earliest years, Caterina was subject to the whims of princes and the ebb and flow of Italian and European politics. Even her conception had been political, her flesh and blood plotted by ambitious relatives who anticipated her birth with both delight and greed.
The marriage of her parents in 1518 was the pet project of the Medici pope, Leo X, and the young King Francis I of France. The scene of their wedding was Francis’s magnificent royal château at Amboise. The backdrop was a series of bloody conflicts known as the “Italian Wars” that had hounded French kings for generations.
Just twenty years old when he ascended the French throne in 1515, Francis was a charismatic and athletic warrior prince, a slender version of the larger-than-life king he would become, as comfortable in battle armor as he was in silks. An English diplomat once called Francis “merry of cheere.”1 The king loved a good party, reveled in the hunt, and surrounded himself with beautiful and fawning ladies, but he was also ambitious, ready to lock horns with the other young kings of Europe. Both Henry VIII of England and Charles I of Spain had ascended their own thrones within a decade of Francis’s accession. Henry VIII inherited his kingdom in 1509 just before his nineteenth birthday; Charles I was only sixteen when he took up his Spanish crown in 1516. Descended from Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon on his mother’s side, and the Hapsburg dukes of Burgundy on his father’s, Charles joined most of the provinces of the Netherlands to the kingdom of Spain. By the time he was nineteen, Charles had added Hapsburg Austrian lands, along with several Italian territories, to his growing dominions. In 1519, their rivalry already heated, Charles successfully outbid Francis to become Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. From that moment on, everyone called Charles simply “the emperor.”
The contests among these young kings would define the age, each seeking to best the others both on the battlefield and at court. Francis, sleek and stylish, ushered the Renaissance into France, importing art, artists, and architecture from Italy into his palaces and gardens, and patronizing renowned scholars and writers. Charles V declared Spain the “empire on which the sun never sets,” and relentlessly pushed the boundaries of his kingdom farther into Europe, over the Mediterranean into Africa, and past the Atlantic into the New World. Insecure on his throne as only the second Tudor to reign in England, Henry VIII yearned for a son. In the meantime, he sent marauding English armies over the border into Scotland, desperate to expand his kingdom to cover the whole of Britain. Contemporary portraits of these kings could have been studies in boastful virility. Over the years, the beards on their faces grew thicker, their sleeves broader, codpieces larger, swords longer, stances wider as if to connote the swagger of their strides.
Francis hated that Henry VIII dared call himself “King of France,” which English sovereigns had done ever since the English conquered Calais in the fourteenth century. But Francis saw Charles V as his chief nemesis. Their battlefield was the boot of Italy. Since the late fifteenth century, the kings of France and Spain had vied for supremacy over several provinces in Italy; taking up the mantle soon after his accession, King Francis set his sights on Milan, Genoa, and Naples. During the early years of his Italian Wars against Charles V, Francis garnered some wins but suffered more setbacks, depleting his coffers and watering Italian fields with French blood. Dissatisfied with his progress on the battlefield, Francis looked for ways to win papal support for his Italian enterprises from Pope Leo X.
In September 1517, he wrote to the young Lorenzo II de’ Medici, scion of the Florentine banking clan and the pope’s nephew. “I hope … to marry you to some beautiful and great lady,” he ventured, “one who would be a relative of mine and of great lineage so that the love I bear you would grow and strengthen even more.” “I would have no greater desire,” replied a coy Lorenzo, “than to take this lady from Your Majesty’s hand.”*2
This was a quid pro quo. Pope Leo had the power to vest Francis with Milan. In exchange, the French king offered the Medici royal support and aristocratic prestige, which he knew the Medici had coveted for generations.
Despite their unfathomable wealth, the Medici were decidedly common-born. To be sure, no one could deny their importance. The family had learned to play a long game over hundreds of years as slowly, over generations, they’d made themselves the de facto rulers of Florence and power brokers across Europe. The family first tasted affluence in the thirteenth century, and civic influence by the fourteenth. In Florence, their common birth became an asset as the Medici transformed themselves into populist leaders in contrast to the noble-blooded families like the Orsini and Visconti, who governed Rome and Milan. Slowly, the Medici infiltrated Florentine corporations, building their wealth and power, penetrating the College of Cardinals, and aspiring to the papal throne itself. They chiseled the Medici palle—the family insignia, comprised of six balls shaped like pills or cupping glasses, said to harken back to their origins as doctors—onto monuments and churches, painted them into frescoes, stamped them onto book covers and into the hearts and minds of Florentines.
By the early fifteenth century, the Medici served as the titular heads of the Florentine republic. By midcentury, they were underwriting kings and princes across Europe. Lorenzo I de’ Medici, Il Magnifico, oversaw Florence’s golden age. “Peace reigned in Florence,” waxed the historian Guicciardini, a fervent Medici supporter. “The people revelled daily in spectacles, festivals, and new marvels.” No one went hungry; art and learning flourished. “The city breathed health … elite and cultivated minds lived in prosperity.”3
The Medici had faltered somewhat in the sixteenth century, their starry ascendance hampered by political rivals in Florence, weak leadership among the descendants of Il Magnifico, and the bald fact that the senior branch of the Medici was dying out. The family pinned its hopes on young Lorenzo, the only legitimate male heir of Il Magnifico. Pope Leo tried to fashion Lorenzo, a notorious profligate, into an aristocrat. In 1517, shortly before Francis I sent his marriage proposal, Leo named his nephew the Duke of Urbino. But as Francis well knew, the Medici were parvenus in a world that put more stake in bloodlines than wealth. The Medici were still commoners, not a single drop of blue blood coursing through their veins. That would change if Lorenzo de’ Medici married the French noblewoman Francis offered, and if she bore a child. The Valois dynasty of France and the Medici of Florence would be united. The alliance would secure Medici control over Florence and put the force of the French crown behind Medici enterprises in Europe. The children of the marriage would be French aristocrats, the Medici now a hair’s breadth from royalty.
Francis made good on his promise. The bride he chose was his distant cousin, Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne, a fantastically wealthy and pedigreed orphan. She was sixteen; Lorenzo de’ Medici was twenty-six. The French king kept up his wooing of the pope, hosting the wedding the following spring, on April 28, 1518, at his favorite château of Amboise. Francis escorted the bride to the altar himself and arranged for ten days of candlelit ballets and balls, jousts and feasts. Soon after Lorenzo brought Madeleine back to Florence that summer, he wrote to both Pope Leo and King Francis announcing her pregnancy.4 And on April 13, 1519, at precisely 11 o’clock in the morning, Madeleine gave birth to Caterina.5
Then Madeleine died two weeks after the baby’s birth. The cause was likely puerperal fever, her womb having failed “to purge itself fully,” as the doctors explained to the grieving household. The Medici’s distress only mounted when Lorenzo followed his wife to the grave just days later, on May 4.6 Shaking with his own fever, he had taken to his sickbed weeks earlier, suffering from an affliction (likely syphilis) that had plagued him since before his wedding. With Lorenzo’s death, the French–Medici alliance lay in ruins. King Francis was unable to recuperate the good understanding he’d shared with the pope. By 1521, Leo X had abandoned Francis and agreed to a new treaty with Charles V, Francis’s bitter enemy. Having decided that Spanish domination of Italy was inevitable, Leo X preferred to bet on the winner.
Leo X wept upon hearing of Lorenzo’s death, then raced to shore up the Medici inheritance. He claimed the duchy of Urbino for the infant Caterina, and sent his cousin, Giulio de’ Medici, to guarantee Medici stewardship of Florence. There remained the problem of what to do with the baby girl herself. King Francis had offered to raise Caterina at the French court, but Leo politely refused, unwilling to give the French control over his bargaining chip. Instead, the pope sent the baby to live with her Medici aunt Clarice, who lived with her Strozzi husband and growing clutch of Strozzi children in Rome.
Caterina would remain in Clarice Strozzi’s household for the next several years. This was a waiting game. Pope Leo had hoped Madeleine would give birth to a boy—a son who could inherit his father’s titles and properties, and push Medici good fortune into France and beyond. Instead, the Medici got a girl. Certainly, she could prove useful one day as a bride to seal other worthy political alliances. If, that is, she lived—and it was a big if, given that sixteenth-century parents half-expected their children to die before the age of seven, no matter how wealthy the family or how tenderly their babies were loved. In fact, at the age of three months, the infant Caterina fell so deathly ill that Pope Leo feared another imminent Medici tragedy.7 The baby pulled through, yet everyone knew the next childhood illness was just around the corner.
As it turned out, death came for the pope first. Leo X expired suddenly on December 1, 1521, just weeks after endorsing Charles V’s claim to Milan. The new pope, Hadrian VI, was a Dutchman with no interest in Medici affairs or their infant children. Slipping the Ring of the Fisherman on his finger, Hadrian left Catherine nestled in the bosom of the Strozzi household. For a brief but blissful few years, she was mostly forgotten.
* * *
From the time the infant Caterina disappeared into the Strozzi villa in Rome until her appearance at the gates of the Le Murate convent in 1527 when she was eight, there is hardly a trace of her in the archives. Clarice Strozzi was a kind and attentive foster mother, but she left no letter describing her young niece, no portrait of the girl, or at least none survives. We are left to imagine and wonder. These were formative years for Caterina, who, growing up among her cousins, developed lifelong attachments to her Strozzi kin. It was in Clarice’s home that the tiny orphan enjoyed something of a family, and there that she learned what it meant to be a Medici.
The Strozzi household was a bustling place. Caterina lived surrounded by women and children, bound by the rules of the nursery, governed by the daily rhythms of eating, playing, sleeping, and, in a Catholic Europe still barely touched by Protestantism, praying in a Catholic way, a Latin way—the only way, as far as the Medici and the Strozzi were concerned. She learned to walk and run along sunbaked terraces and among the sculptures and chestnut trees inspired by fashionable Medici gardens, lush designs that Clarice had brought to Rome. Sweets and smells and color from a Renaissance garden formed her senses, teaching her the flavor of melon, the scent of rosemary, the perfume of roses, the touch of billowy hydrangea. Medici and Strozzi tastes began to train her child’s eye. She learned about beauty yet didn’t even realize it was happening.8
Scampering with her cousins, she romped through games of blindman’s bluff and hide-and-seek and rolled polished stones on tiles like marbles. As the Strozzi boys rode hobby horses to learn what noblemen do, she played to learn, too, with bambole or dolls, dressing them in lace and satiny skirts. At Lent she played with tops; trinkets and knickknacks filled other days. She felt the bumps and scrapes of childhood, the bruised ego of bickering, the lightness of laughter.
She was too young for schooling and too young for the wafer and wine of Holy Communion. Both would come after she turned seven or eight, when children reached the age of reason according to the Catholic Church, and when adults became more confident a child might live. But a little girl like Caterina could begin to learn to stitch and to speak well, to chant her ABCs and to sing. Above all, she learned to pray: the Ave Maria, the Credo, the Pater Noster.9 In the backdrop of her childhood, she saw rosaries swinging from girdles and heard the chorus of church bells. She learned the Hours of the Virgin, her place in Clarice’s home, and her place before God.
Was it in Clarice’s home, too, that she first learned something of her mother’s family? The Medici were too starved for blue blood not to have relished Madeleine’s vaunted ancestry, their link to the French royal family. Through her own mother, Madeleine sprang from a branch of the Bourbons. The second family in the kingdom of France, the Bourbons descended from the sainted crusading king, Louis IX. Known as the “princes of the blood,” the Bourbons were poised to inherit the French throne if ever the current Valois dynasty died out. King Francis I and his fertile wife Claude had already produced enough sons to ensure a Valois king in the next generation, but the Bourbons were nonetheless powerful and beloved by French subjects, revered for their ancient bloodlines. King Francis had kept his promise to the Medici indeed when he delivered Madeleine, a Bourbon, to the altar at Amboise in 1518.10
When did the child Caterina learn of this exalted inheritance? What did she ask about her mother? An Italian diplomat once gushed that Madeleine was “beautiful and wise … gracious and very worthy,” words that extol and yet say very little.11 No doubt the young Caterina learned of Madeleine’s wealth, of her vast, rolling estates in Auvergne. Perhaps she saw a portrait. As with so much of Madeleine’s life, we can’t be sure of what she looked like. One painting now hanging in the Uffizi is sometimes said to be of Madeleine. A slim girl, straight and stylish in her dark velvet bodice and opulent red sleeves, looks out from under a French hood. Her hair is auburn and her cheeks round. Her eyes are blue.
As a grown woman, Caterina would prize her French roots. She would hang a portrait of her mother, now lost, in her private gallery at Soissons; she would commission books, penned by the famous calligrapher Geoffroy Tory, tracing the history of her ancestors, the counts of Auvergne, and keep them carefully in her library.12 She likely heard stories—of her parents’ wedding reception in Florence, perhaps, where her Medici grandmother propped up a portrait of Leo X at the head table and ordered so much silk for the occasion that merchants in Florence ran out.13 (Couriers galloped to nearby Lucca and Venice to fetch more.) But if stories and portraits gave Caterina a vague sense of her mother’s origins, the reality of her French connections would shortly be driven home by the arrival in Rome of a Scottish-French soldier prince.
His name was John Stewart, Duke of Albany. He was Caterina’s maternal uncle. Sent by King Francis to Rome, he arrived at the Strozzi villa sometime in 1525, when Caterina was just about six years old.
King Francis hadn’t lost sight of the Medici orphan; through the years, he was kept apprised of her whereabouts and her health. Under the Dutch Pope Hadrian VI, the Medici lost some of their political leverage in the European theater. The setback proved short-lived. After Hadrian died in September 1523, the papal conclave elected Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici as the new pope. Giulio took the name Clement VII. Whereas Hadrian had paid little mind to Caterina’s existence, Clement took a renewed interest in the girl, and began to call himself her uncle (though he was in fact her second cousin once removed). Clement’s accession also breathed new life into King Francis’s hopes for a Medici alliance. Once again, the French king looked to the papacy as an ally in his never-ending conflict with Charles V.
By 1525, the Italian Wars had brought King Francis to new lows. In February of that year, Charles V’s Imperial troops pummeled French battalions in the disastrous battle at Pavia, slaughtering the flower of French nobility and sending Francis himself into Spanish captivity. Although the exact timing remains unclear, it was likely from his Spanish prison that Francis wrote to his trusted counselor and general, John Stewart, Duke of Albany, urging him to visit the new pope. While in Rome, suggested Francis, Albany might make a little side trip to the Strozzi villa.
Tall and square-shouldered, John Stewart, Duke of Albany, was a Scotsman who was also a Frenchman. Born in France to a French duchess and a royal Scottish prince, Albany was a grandson of King James II of Scotland. He was also a cousin to Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne and her older sister Anne. Albany had been raised with them, spending a happy childhood hunting and hawking in the wooded hills of Auvergne. Although his birth placed him in line to the Scottish throne, Albany spent much of his adulthood in the service of King Francis, to whom he demonstrated an irreproachable fidelity. If Albany’s title belonged to Scotland, his heart belonged to France. French was his first language, and for his entire life, he always preferred to sign his name the French way: Jehan Stuart instead of John Stewart.
Albany had married his cousin, Anne de La Tour d’Auvergne, and taken the younger Madeleine in as a ward after the death of her parents. Close to both cousins, Albany had loved Anne deeply, an unusual attachment in this age of arranged marriages. They had no surviving children, all three of their babies having died in early childhood. When Anne died in 1524, five years after Madeleine, she bequeathed her landholdings to her niece Caterina, making her the sole heir of the Auvergne fortune.14 Albany hadn’t met Caterina before he appeared at the Strozzi villa in 1525. Did he detect any traces of his beloved wife or her sister in the young girl’s face?*
If love for his deceased wife bolstered Albany’s attention to Caterina, his primary mission in Rome was to promote King Francis’s political interests. Though Caterina was still young, Francis already saw her as the key to future Italian conquests. Dutifully, Albany would keep watch over his niece from afar during the coming years.
Copyright © 2023 by Leah Redmond Chang