The House Of Medici

by Christopher Hibbert

  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 years 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

  ‘Florence is much sunk from what it was’

  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.