Summary

Poisoner, besotted mother, despot, necromancer, engineer of a massacre: the stain on the name of Catherine de Medici is centuries old. In this critically hailed biography, Leonie Frieda reclaims the story of this unjustly maligned queen of France to reveal a skilled ruler battling against extraordinary political and personal odds. Orphaned in infancy, imprisoned in childhood, heiress to an ancient name and vast fortune, Catherine de Medici was brought up in Florence, a city dominated by her ruling family. At age fourteen, the Italian-born young woman became a French princess in a magnificent alliance arranged by her uncle the pope to Henry, son of King Francis I of France. She suffered cruelly as her new husband became bewitched by the superbly elegant Diane de Poitiers. Henry's influential and lifelong mistress wisely sent her lover to sleep with Catherine, and after an agonizingly childless decade when she saw popular resentment build against her, she conceived the first of ten children. Slowly Catherine made the court her own: she transformed the cultural life of France, importing much of what we now think of as typically French -- cuisine, art, music, fashion -- from Italy, cradle of the Renaissance. In a freak jousting accident in 1559, a wooden splinter fatally pierced Henry's eye. Hitherto sidelined, Catherine found herself suddenly thrust into the maelstrom of French power politics, for which she soon discovered she had inherited a natural gift. A contemporary and sometime ally of Elizabeth I of England, Catherine learned to become both a superb strategist and ruthless conspirator. During the rise of Protestantism, her attempts at religious tolerance were constantly foiled, and France was riven by endemic civil wars. Although history has always laid the blame for the infamous St. Bartholomew's Day massacre by a Catholic mob of thousands of French Protestants at Catherine's door, Leonie Frieda presents a powerful case for Catherine's defense. This courageous queen's fatal flaw was a blind devotion to her sickly and corrupt children, three of whom would become kings of France. Despite their weaknesses, Catherine's indomitable fight to protect the throne and their birthright ensured the survival of the French monarchy for a further two hundred years after her death, until it was swept away by the French Revolution. Leonie Frieda has returned to original sources and reread the thousands of letters left by Catherine, and she has reinvested this protean figure with humanity. The first biography of Catherine in decades, it reveals her to be one of the most influential women ever to wear a crown.

Author Biography

Swedish by birth and educated in Britain, Germany, and France, Leonie Frieda speaks five languages. Her research on Catherine de Medici has taken her to Paris, Florence, and Rome, as well as the chateaux of the Loire

Illustrations

Maps, Family Trees

Principal Characters

xvi

Introduction and Acknowledgements

xix

Author's Note

xxiv

Prologue: Death of a King 1559

(12)

PART ONE

Orphan of Florence 1519--33

(19)

`The Greatest Match in the World' 1515--34

(17)

A Barren Wife 1533--47

(21)

The Eclipsed Consort 1547--49

(23)

Catherine's Growing Importance 1548--59

(28)

PART TWO

An Uneasy Partnership 1559--60

121

(23)

`Gouvernante de France' 1560--62

144

(19)

The First Religious War 1562--64

163

(18)

The Grand Tour 1564--66

181

(17)

Conciliator No Longer 1566--70

198

(26)

Margot's Marriage Is Arranged 1570--72

224

(24)

The Massacre 1572

248

(25)

The Last Years of Charles IX 1572--74

273

(29)

Henri III, King of France 1574--76

302

(31)

Alencon's Treachery 1576--84

333

(19)

Hope Dies 1584--88

352

(29)

So Perish the Race of the Valois 1589--1615

381

(8)

Conclusion

389

(4)

Source Notes

393

(13)

Bibliography

406

(5)

Index

411

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

Catherine de Medici
Renaissance Queen of France

Chapter One

Orphan of Florence

She comes bearing the
calamities of the Greeks

1519-33

Caterina Maria Romula de Medici was born at around eleven o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 13 April 1519. Her father, Lorenzo II de Medici, Duke of Urbino, scion of the ruling House of Florence, had married her mother, Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, the previous year. This royal-blooded French countess and great heiress made a brilliant catch for the Medici, who were considered by many in France to be merely nouveaux riches merchants. Since their magnificent wedding, hosted by the bride's kinsman, King Francis I of France, and the couple's glorious return to Florence, there had been little cause for celebration. Madeleine's pregnancy, which had been announced in June, progressed well but the young duke, whose health had been poor for some time, had fallen ill in the autumn of 1518. Intermittent high fevers and fears over his condition led to him leaving Florence where the newlyweds had been living in princely state. The duke, probably suffering from syphilis and possibly tuberculosis, moved to the cleaner air of the surrounding countryside to await the birth of his child. By the time he returned to the city for his wife's confinement, he was dying.

Immediately after her birth, attendants carried the baby to her bedridden father for inspection. The news that her mother had by now also become very ill was kept from the duke for fear of hastening his decline. The fact that she had borne him a daughter cannot have cheered him much since there would clearly be no further issue from this illustrious couple. In an attempt to brighten the gloomy reality of the baby's sex, a contemporary chronicler applied a sycophantic gloss to the ducal disappointment: he declared that the couple 'have both been as pleased as if it had been a boy'. Due to the illness of both parents, the child's hurriedly organised baptism took place on Saturday, 16 April at the family church of San Lorenzo. With four senior clerics and two noble relations in attendance, the baby received the names Caterina, a Medici family name, Maria, since it was the day of the Holy Virgin, and Romula, after the founder of Fiesole -- although I shall henceforth refer to her throughout as Catherine. On 28 April the duchess breathed her last followed by the duke only six days later on 4 May. The entombment of the couple in the splendid family vault at the church where their baby had so recently been baptised provided a dismal conclusion to their brief marriage.

On the day the duke died his friend the poet Ariosto had arrived to condole with him over the death of the duchess. When he discovered that only an orphan child remained of the marriage that had promised a revival of the Medici fortunes he wrote a short ode: 'Verdeggia un solo ramo', dedicating it to the last hope of this pre-eminent merchant dynasty:

A single branch, buds and lo,
I am distraught with hope and fear,
Whether winter will let it blow,
Or blight it on the growing bier.

Catherine owed her existence to the obsessive Italian territorial ambitions of Francis I of France. Between the fall of the western Roman Empire and its late-nineteenth-century unification, Italy was a patchwork of principalities, duchies, and city-states. Most of these showed a precocious vigour in the arts, technology and trade, making them tempting acquisitions for outsiders. Unlike Florence, they were usually ruled by families descended from famous warriors (known as condottieri); names like the Sforza of Milan and the Gonzaga of Mantua evoke the mercenary soldiers who carved their fortunes from battle. While a small number of states such as Venice, Genoa and Florence were -- for a time at least independent, by the mid-sixteenth century the majority were ruled either directly or indirectly by Spain. From 1490 until 1559, when Spanish supremacy was established, Italy became the bloody arena where the two Continental superpowers played out their bitter struggle to dominate Europe.

Francis I, descended through his great-grandmother from the Visconti of Milan, required a sturdy ally in the peninsula to press his claim for the duchy. Accordingly, he forged an affiance with Pope Leo X, Giovanni de Medici. Unlike popes today, His Holiness was not only Christ's representative on earth, but he also exercised the temporal powers of a monarch as ruler of the Papal States, most of which were in central Italy. The papal tiara was a triple crown that placed the popes above kings and emperors; not only did the papacy hold claim to a huge amount of property throughout the Catholic world (in pre-Reformation England one fifth of the land was held by Rome) but the pope also had the right to legal jurisdiction in Catholic countries and many types of legal cases were referred to the Ecclesiastical Court. To strengthen his agreement with the Medici Pope, Francis decided to arrange the marriage of an orphaned Bourbon heiress, Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, to Leo's nephew, Lorenzo de Medici. At Leo's instigation Lorenzo had recently snatched the duchy of Urbino from the della Rovere family.* For this enterprise the Pope had provided prodigious financial support with monies gained from the creation of thirty new cardinals. In private, Francis felt snobbishly sceptical about Lorenzo's ability to keep the newly acquired fief of Urbino, commenting that he was after all 'only a tradesman' ...

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