Christopher - The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

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.

Some years before he had made a pilgrimage to Rome where he had fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition by being appointed a canon of St John in Lateran which accorded him the right to touch the Volto Santo , the handkerchief that Christ had used on his way to Calvary; and ever since that day when he had held in his hands this sanctified cloth he had become, so it was said, more pious than ever. Having presented the Pope with a painting of the Annunciation worth 200,000 crowns, he had returned to Florence with boxes full of relics, a sacred collection to which he soon afterwards added a piece of St Francis Xavier’s intestines. He would show these relics to privileged visitors with the utmost reverence, and would humbly fall on his knees before them. An English tourist was assured that he

had a machine in his own apartment whereon were fix’d little images in silver of every saint in the calendar. The machine was made to turn so as to present in front the saint of the day, before which he continually perform’d his offices… He visited five or six churches every day.

His zeal for gaining converts to the Catholic faith was boundless. He spent hours on end teaching the Christian doctrine with infinite patience to three cheeky little Cossack boys who had been presented to him by the Bishop of Cracow, and he provided handsome pensions to foreign Protestants who abandoned their faith for his own. He was equally zealous in ridding Florence of works of art which he thought might give rise to lascivious thoughts. He had Baccio Bandinelli’s marble statue of Adam and Eve removed from the Cathedral, and he even considered having the nude statues on display in the Uffizi hidden from view when told by priests that some people found them disturbingly erotic. His own life was ascetic in its self-restraint: he ate only the plainest food, and nearly always alone; he drank nothing but water; he went to bed very early and rose soon after dawn; he never went near a fire. He had outgrown most of his faults, except bigotry; yet few people had ever learned to love him. Now that he was over eighty he was treated with a kind of wary respect. No longer did the mob gather threateningly beneath his windows, shouting for bread, plastering insulting placards onto the palace walls. But on those rare occasions when he left the palace in a slow-moving, two-horse carriage, surrounded by Swiss guards with halberds, footmen and pages, though men bowed to him, there was no cheering. And when at last he died, on 31 October 1723, there was little grief.