Catherine de Medici

I've already written one post elsewhere about Catherine de Medici. I took French in high school and college, so when I did a college paper on her, I cited both English and French sources.

I'm not readily finding verification online of my recollection of some of the details of her life. The piece above suggests some things were probably lost in translation from French and Italian original sources.

The Internet is failing to spit back a convenient characterization of the de Medici family as a cutthroat political family, but that's how I remember them being characterized generally in my youth. I did find one source about Poisoning during the Renaissance: The Medicis and the Borgias, which makes me feel validated.

My recollection is Catherine was effectively smuggled out of Italy and married off to save her life shortly before most of her remaining relatives were massacred because of how ruthless they were.

Wikipedia does say both her parents died shortly after her birth and she was initially raised by a grandmother and -- after she died -- later by an aunt. It indicates she was held hostage for some years while still a child.

She married an unimportant French royal in October 1533. He was the spare heir, in case his older brother died, and that's probably a factor in securing her marriage.

In 1533, at the age of 14, she married Henry, the second son of King Francis I and Queen Claude of France, who would become Dauphin of France (heir to the throne) upon the death of his elder brother Francis in 1536.

Her marriage was arranged by Pope Clement VII. 

He was a relative of hers and promised a huge dowry to France for taking her.

That fits with this being a deal to secure her safety. The Pope paid them to accept her and promised to keep paying them.

And then he died less than a year later on 25 September 1534, after prolonged illness. Some sources characterize it as by assassination and others dismiss that as "they just claimed poisoning about everyone at that time and it seems unlikely."

Another de Medici, Ippolito de' Medici died 10 August 1535. So massacre or no massacre, some of her relatives died shortly after she was married off -- one was the Pope, the man guaranteeing her position in France -- and the new Pope refused to continue paying her promised dowry.

The next pope, Alessandro Farnese, was elected on 13 October and took the title Paul III. As a Farnese he felt no obligation to keep Clement's promises, broke the alliance with Francis and refused to continue paying her huge dowry. King Francis lamented, "The girl has come to me stark naked."

So she wasn't really wanted in France to begin with, the defacto bribe money to take her dried up in short order and then her husband's older brother dies in 1536, making him heir to the throne. And she had yet to conceive a child.

In 1538, her husband's mistress gives birth, proving the problem isn't him, it's her. Catherine is Catholic and her husband is Catholic, but people are actively encouraging him to leave her over her infertility.

She finally gives birth in 1544, a little more than three years before her husband is crowned king. Had he ended up king before she gave birth, it seems likely she would have been repudiated.

Having spent the first decade of her marriage barren and at risk of being set aside because of it, Catherine de Medici has ten children over the course of the next decade of her life. No one really knows how that happened, but she spent years making every effort to solve it and somehow did in spite of fairly primitive medical knowledge and technology.

Regardless of the details, she was clearly a woman in a very insecure position during a very war torn era and basically had a gun to her head to make this work or die trying. Which is most likely a substantial part of the explanation for accusations that she was ruthless.

Some historians have excused Catherine from blame for the worst decisions of the crown, but evidence for her ruthlessness can be found in her letters.

...her policies may be seen as desperate measures to keep the House of Valois on the throne at all costs and her patronage of the arts as an attempt to glorify a monarchy whose prestige was in steep decline. Without Catherine, it is unlikely that her sons would have remained in power. Catherine has been called "the most important woman in Europe" in the 16th century.

The other thing I recall saying in my paper was that the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre was a case of no good deed goes unpunished.

Her Wikipedia page says:

Many leading Roman Catholics were appalled by Catherine's attempts to appease the Huguenots. After the Edict of Beaulieu, they had started forming local leagues to protect their religion.

So she's initially trying to mollify the Huguenots and arrange marriages between important Catholic individuals and important Huguenot individuals and try to find a peaceful path forward. Then a whole lot of Huguenots converged on Paris, ostensibly to celebrate a wedding of a prominent couple.

Many of the wealthiest and most prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic Paris to attend the wedding.

My recollection is this was an excuse to bring significant Huguenot forces into the largely Catholic city during the French Wars of Religion. Wikipedia acknowledges this was a turning point in the war, giving the Catholics the upper hand.

So initially, she's mollifying and trying to keep the peace and the Catholics vilify her for that. Then she's blamed for a massacre that gives them the upper hand under circumstances where it seems likely she protected important Catholics from themselves being assassinated by an invading army showing up in force under the guise of "We are just here to attend this wedding!"

She is remembered in large part because three of her ten children were King of France at young ages, like starting at fifteen and ten, so she was essentially running the country for years in spite of nominally having no power and being a woman in an era when Queen typically meant "that woman giving birth to heirs for the King." Plus, once or twice she was defacto in charge in her own name briefly.

She got a lot of bad press during her lifetime and continues to get maligned with characterizations like ruthless and I never really see anything talking about the fact that even as queen, she was essentially nobody as a woman in a man's world and how that reality must have impacted the choices she made. 

Men don't typically have to deal with "Your life may be forfeit because you are failing to produce an heir" while their wife openly has affairs and openly favors her dish on the side over hubby.

And men are not typically responsible for running the country while not really in power themselves. They get named King and have power in their own name.

It aggravates me how she gets characterized. She is credited with more or less keeping France functional for a lot of years during very politically turbulent times while in a precarious position herself and somehow this adds up to "Let's mostly trash talk her!"