Isabella de'Medici by Caroline P. Murphy

Author:Caroline P. Murphy [Caroline P. Murphy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571266050
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

It transpired that Sforza had informed Francesco of his father’s nuptial plans, ‘it is believed with the intention of acquiring the prince’s favour’ – evidently mindful of the time when the son would succeed his father. Francesco, appalled at the idea of such a marriage, immediately ‘expressed his disgust to his father’. Cosimo, realizing the source of the leak, was incandescent with rage. Sforza soon heard of Cosimo’s fury and apparently tried to petition both Francesco and Isabella to intervene on his behalf, neither of whom felt inclined to do so. Still believing in Cosimo’s affection for him, Sforza rather rashly attempted to mollify the duke in person. However, he did not realize the extent of Cosimo’s ire, whose reaction on being confronted by his servant was to run his sword through him, crying, ‘Traitor! Traitor!’ Reflecting later upon the incident, Cosimo was said only to be sorry about the fact that he had done Sforza ‘too much honour’ in killing him with his own hand.5

Isabella had no more desire than Francesco to see Eleonora marry their father. Still, as mother to a new half-sister she was worthy of attention. When, a few months later, Eleonora fell sick, Isabella went along with Cosimo and a court doctor to visit her. ‘I arrived at ten at night,’ she reported to Francesco, out at Poggio a Caiano, ‘and found Donna Leonora, who was not very well with fever and with discharge … but the baby is feeding well …’ The issue of the child’s well-being seems to have been of as great, if not greater, concern for Isabella, because she added in a postscript: ‘Now we have been here twelve hours she still seems very poorly to me, but with all that the breast-feeding is going well.’6 However, while Eleonora recovered, ‘la putta’, the little girl, whose name we do not know, died soon after.

Cosimo did not marry Eleonora degli Albizzi, the incident with Sforza Almeni apparently causing her to lose her lustre in his eyes. The following year, 1567, she gave birth to a son, but Cosimo had already made plans for Eleonora’s dismissal. He arranged for her to marry Carlo Panciatichi, whose family were among the most loyal to the Medici in Florence. Cosimo arranged for some murder charges against Carlo to be dropped in exchange for his agreeing to marry Eleonora, who would come with a 10,000 scudi dowry. The couple married shortly after the birth of her son, and Eleonora would bear Carlo a further three before he shut her up in a convent in 1578, on the grounds of her suspected adultery. The boy Eleonora had with Cosimo did remain with the Medici family. He was christened Giovanni, clearly in memory of the departed favoured son, but Isabella, at any rate, preferred to call him Nanni.

Other babies arrived in the Medici family during the second half of the 1560s. Giovanna quickly proved those who declared her too scrawny to bear children wrong. By September 1566, she was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.