Murder of a Medici Princess by Caroline P. Murphy;

Author:Caroline P. Murphy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2008-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Cammilla

Return of Cosimo as Grand Duke

If Cosimo’s successful bid for grand dukedom had caused jealousy and anger in other heads of state, then his next act was to shock and horrify those much closer to home. He had been back in Florence for barely a week after his coronation when dispatches from the city reverberated with the following news: ‘On Wednesday, April 5, it was discovered and is now known universally by everybody, how His Most Serene Highness the Grand Duke has taken for his legitimate wife Cammilla, daughter of Antonio di Domenico di Baccio Martelli, known as Balencio.’1 The Martelli were an old Florentine family, and Cammilla’s grandfather Domenico was a particularly loyal supporter of Cosimo. All the same, the Grand Duke of Tuscany was marrying a commoner.

It seems that Cosimo decided not to make the mistake he had made with Eleonora degli Albizzi. He told no one of his plans, and married Cammilla quickly and in secret, only making the announcement after they were married. The explanation he provided to his son Francesco for the marriage was ‘God inspired me to do it.’2 Some have thought that, by fashioning himself as a model Counter-Reformation ruler, the marriage was part of Cosimo’s payment to the papacy for the grandducal crown. By marrying Cammilla, Cosimo was refusing to live in sin and so setting an example to others, thereby endorsing the stricter morals of the Counter-Reformation church. It was at this same time that the new grand duke, who had previously resisted the church’s attempts to persecute Jews, issued a proclamation that if Tuscany’s Jews wished to remain in the state, they must ‘live in the city of Florence in such streets and places, and in that way and with those conditions and obligations that will be declared’.3 The Medici grand duke established a ghetto in the city, which for the next centuries existed next to the Mercato Vecchio in the streets where second-hand clothes were sold, a key aspect of Jewish trade.

Still, if Cosimo’s attitude towards the Jewish population altered in response to the new debt he had to the Pope, his attitude to marriage had not really changed. At one time, Cosimo had been equally keen to marry Eleonora degli Albizzi, Cammilla’s predecessor as mistress, and perhaps all that can be said of his decision is that he was the marrying kind. But certainly the news came from out of the blue: Cammilla had been Cosimo’s mistress for a little over two years, yet she had not taken a prominent position at the Florentine court. Indeed, it seems that very few people, his children included, actually knew of their relationship.

At the time of the marriage, Cammilla was twenty-five years old, her new husband fifty. Although one courtier expressed the opinion ‘in my judgment, she has an unattractive face’, he also noted that she was ‘tall and well-proportioned’.4 When Cammilla’s daughter Virginia was grown up and about to marry the d’Este heir (she later became Duchess of Ferrara),

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