Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany

gigatos | February 2, 2022

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Summary

Cosimo I de ”Medici (Florence, June 12, 1519) was the second and last Duke of the Florentine Republic, from 1537 to 1569, and, following the elevation of the Medici State to Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, from 1569 to his death in 1574.

Son of the condottiero Giovanni de” Medici, known as “delle Bande Nere”, he belonged on his father”s side to the cadet branch of the Medici family known as “dei Popolani”, descended from Lorenzo de” Medici known as “il Vecchio”, brother of Cosimo il Vecchio, the first de facto Lord of Florence, while he was descended on his mother”s side from the main branch of the family, as his mother was the daughter of Lucrezia de” Medici, in turn the daughter of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Lord of Florence.

In this way Cosimo I brought to power the cadet branch of the Popolani and gave life to the grand ducal line.

Youth and conquest of power

Son of the leader Giovanni delle Bande Nere and Maria Salviati, Cosimo rose to power in 1537, when he was only 17 years old, after the assassination of the Duke of Florence Alessandro de” Medici. The crime was plotted by Lorenzino de ”Medici, a distant cousin of Duke Alessandro, who, however, did not know how to take the opportunity to replace his relative and ended up fleeing from Florence. None of the most important families seemed to be able to take the place of the Medici when Cosimo, then almost unknown, appeared in the city, followed by a few servants.

He came from Mugello, where he had grown up after the death of his father, and managed to be appointed duke despite belonging to a secondary branch of the family. In fact, given his young age and his modest demeanor, many influential people of Florence at the time hoped to deal with a young weak, uninspired, attracted only by hunting and women: a person easy to influence. Cosimo was, therefore, appointed head of the government with the clause that power would be exercised by the Council of Forty-eight. But Cosimo had entirely inherited the fighting spirit of his father and his paternal grandmother Caterina Sforza.

In fact, as soon as he was invested with power and after having obtained a decree which excluded the Lorenzino branch from any right of succession, he deprived the councillors of their office and assumed absolute authority. He restored the power of the Medici so firmly that from that moment on they governed Florence and most of present-day Tuscany until the end of the dynasty, which occurred with the death without heirs of the last Medici Grand Duke, Gian Gastone, in 1737; the structure of government created by Cosimo lasted until the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy.

The authoritarian government of Cosimo induced some important citizens to voluntary exile. They gathered their forces and, with the support of France and the neighboring states of Florence, in an attempt to overthrow the Florentine government militarily, at the end of July 1537 marched on Florence under the leadership of Piero Strozzi.

When Cosimo knew that they were approaching, he sent his best troops, commanded by Alessandro Vitelli, to block the enemies. The clash took place near the fortress of Montemurlo on August 1, 1537 and, after having defeated the army of the exiles, Vitelli assaulted the castle, where Strozzi and his companions had taken refuge. The siege lasted only a few hours and ended with the fall of the besieged, giving Cosimo his first military victory.

The leaders of the revolt were first imprisoned and then beheaded in the palace of the Bargello. Throughout his life Cosimo acted ruthlessly against those who tried to oppose his plans. It should be noted that his despotism was aimed primarily at those who questioned his authority, and then not the people, but those noble and wealthy Florentine bourgeoisie who did not tolerate his supremacy and his power. In this absolutist ethic is to be included also the destruction, begun on October 20, 1561 by Cosimo I, of the valuable Cathedral of Arezzo, placed outside the city walls, at the Colle del Pionta, for having fortified there Piero Strozzi on July 20, 1554.

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Wedding

Initially Cosimo tried to marry Margaret of Austria, daughter of Emperor Charles V and widow of Duke Alexander. But he obtained only a flat refusal and the demand that the widow was paid a large part of the Medici fortune. Abandoned this project, he married in 1539 Eleonora of Toledo, daughter of Don Pedro Alvarez de Toledo, Marquis of Villafranca and Spanish viceroy of Naples. They met for the first time in the villa at Poggio a Caiano and married with great pomp in the church of San Lorenzo: he was 20 and she was 17. Thanks to this marriage Cosimo came into possession of his wife”s enormous wealth and secured the political friendship of the viceroy of Naples, one of the emperor”s most trusted lieutenants. Bronzino painted many portraits of Eleonora, the most famous of which is preserved in the Uffizi.

Together with Cosimo, Eleanor had eleven children, thus theoretically assuring the succession and the possibility to combine marriages with other important ruling houses, even though the only one who survived in a lasting way was Ferdinand I. Eleanor died in 1562 at the age of only forty years, together with her sons Giovanni and Garzia. The three were killed by malaria, contracted during a journey to Pisa, where they wanted to cure themselves from tuberculosis, a disease due to the unhealthy situation of the city, to escape from which Eleonora had bought the residence of Palazzo Pitti in Oltrarno.

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First years of government

As early as 1537, the unstoppable authoritarian rise of Cosimo I began. He sent the bishop of Forlì, Bernardo Antonio de Medici, to Charles V to inform him of what had happened at the death of Alessandro and of the succession by Cosimo himself, but above all to confirm his loyalty to him in order to obtain imperial confirmation. Starting from 1543, after having redeemed the last fortresses still in the hands of the emperor, Cosimo I, according to a systematic design commensurate with the particular conditions of the Tuscan State, exposed to the frequent passage of troops and threatened from within by banditry and Florentine outlaws, began an amazing military-building activity:

As the name indicates, Terra del Sole was not to be a simple fortified place, but even a small experiment of an ideal city. The short distance from Forlì (less than 10 km) indicates, on one hand, the strong penetration of Florence”s power in Romagna (the so-called “Tuscan Romagna”), on the other hand, it was an unbridgeable abyss, because the capital of Romagna never fell under the power of the Florentines and therefore marks the extreme limit of their expansion.

Another priority of Cosimo was the search for a position of greater independence with respect to European forces. He abandoned the traditional position of Florence, normally allied with the French, to work on the side of Emperor Charles V. The repeated financial aid that Cosimo guaranteed to the empire earned him the withdrawal of the imperial garrisons from Florence and Pisa and an increasing political independence.

The fear of new attacks on his person pushed him to create a small legion of personal bodyguards, composed of Swiss. In 1548 Cosimo succeeded in having Lorenzino de” Medici killed in Venice by Giovanni Francesco Lottini, who hired two killers from Volterra. For years he had chased him throughout Europe and with his death sunset any possible dynastic claim against him on the command of Tuscany. The following year mediò a clash between Siena and the empire, making accept the independence of the city in exchange for the presence of a Spanish garrison inside.

He preferred not to undertake the conquest of Lucca, stopped by the fear that the people of Lucca, jealous of their independence, would move elsewhere with their capital, ruining the commerce of the city (as had happened previously with the conquest of Pisa). On the other hand, Lucca, the only imperial city in Italy, enjoyed, also thanks to its wealth, important support from powerful European states and attempting its conquest could have had unpredictable effects on the international balance. His attempts to conquer Pontremoli and Corsica were unsuccessful. In order to escape from the Genoese dominion, he would have accepted the union with Tuscany, with which he had deeper cultural and linguistic ties.

Knowing that he was not much loved by the Florentines, he kept them out of the army, therefore unarmed, and enlisted only troops from his other dominions.

Conquest of Siena

In 1552 Siena rebelled against the empire, drove out the Spanish garrison and had the French occupy the city. In 1553 a military expedition, sent from the viceroy of Naples Don Pedro, had tried to reconquer the city but, accomplice also the death of the same viceroy, the enterprise had been a failure. In 1554 Cosimo obtained the support of the emperor to move war against Siena using its own army. After some battles in the countryside between the two cities and the defeat of the Sienese in Marciano, Siena was besieged by the Florentines. On April 17, 1555, after many months of siege, the city, exhausted, fell: the Sienese population had decreased from 40,000 to 6,000 inhabitants.

Siena remained under imperial protection until 1557, when the emperor”s son, Philip II of Spain, ceded it to Cosimo, keeping for himself the territories of Orbetello, Porto Ercole, Talamone, Monte Argentario and Porto Santo Stefano, which went to form the State of the Presidi. In 1559, following the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis at the end of the Franco-Spanish wars of Italy, Cosimo also obtained the remaining territories of the Republic of Siena repaired in Montalcino, the last garrison of the Sienese under French protection.

Organization of the state

Although Cosimo exercised power in a despotic manner, under his administration Tuscany was a state in step with the times. He discharged most of the important Florentine families from all offices, even formal ones, not trusting their members. He chose rather officials of humble origins. Once he obtained the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany from Pope Pius V in 1569, he maintained the legal and administrative division between the Duchy of Florence (the so-called “Old State”) and the Duchy of Siena (the so-called “New State”), thus keeping the two areas wisely separated and with their own magistracies. He renewed the administration of justice, issuing a new criminal code. He made the magistrates and the police efficient. His prisons were among the most feared in Italy. Similar to the courts of Europe at that time, the prince created the complex structure of a family, rich in professional and cultural figures new to the history of the city and its personal experience. Until the 40”s and 60”s there was not a general fund of the Grand Duchy that gave a precise account of public expenses and, unlike the Estense and Savoy courts, there were no conspicuous and serial historical sources, as well as elaborate court ceremonials, with rites, languages, actors and expressive codes of sovereign power, facts that made the Medici history of that period more similar to that of a local family than to a princely court.

He moved his residence from Palazzo Medici (now Palazzo Medici Riccardi) to Palazzo Vecchio, so that every Florentine would know that power was all in his hands. Years later he moved to the Pitti Palace.

He introduced and financed the manufacture of tapestries. It constructed roads, works of drainage, ports. He provided many Tuscan cities with forts. He strengthened the army, instituted in 1561 the maritime Order of Santo Stefano, with seat in Pisa in the Vasarian Palace of the Knights, and improved the Tuscan fleet, participating in the battle of Lepanto. With the Law of the Union of 1549 and with further assignments between 1559 and 1564, it modified the function of the ancient Order of Parte Guelfa, taking away its military functions and giving it full competence in the management of the grand-ducal territory, from the regulation of waters to the maintenance of rural and wooded areas. He promoted the economic activities, both recovering ancient works (such as marble extraction in Seravezza) and creating new ones. The continuous increases in taxes, although counterbalanced by an increase in trade, laid the seed of a popular discontent that will become more and more acute with his successors. Despite the economic difficulties, was very prodigal as a patron.

He also continued his studies of alchemy and esoteric sciences, whose passion he had inherited from his grandmother Caterina Sforza.

In the last ten years of his reign he renounced the conduct of the internal affairs of the state in favor of his son Francis.

Grand Duke

Cosimo strove to receive a royal title that would free him from the condition of simple feudatory of the emperor and that would give him greater political independence. Not finding any support from the imperial side, he turned to the Papacy. Already with Paul IV had tried to obtain the title of king or archduke, but in vain. Finally, in 1569, after having stipulated an agreement with the Pope according to which he would have put his fleet at the service of the Holy League that was being formed to oppose the Ottoman advance, Pius V issued a bull creating him Grand Duke of Tuscany. In January of the following year he was crowned by the pope himself in Rome. In reality this right would have been due to the emperor, and for this reason Spain and Austria refused to recognize the new title, threatening to abandon the League, while France and England immediately considered it valid and, over time, all European states ended up recognizing it. Some historians hypothesize that the rapprochement between Pius V and the consequent concession of the coveted grand-ducal title took place with the treacherous delivery of the heretic Pietro Carnesecchi, who had taken refuge in Florence trusting in the protection of the Duke himself.

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Last years and death

The death of his wife in 1562 and two of his children suffering from malaria had deeply marked him. In 1564 he abdicated in favor of his son Francesco, retiring to the villa of Castello near Florence. Looking at the human profile, it is to be believed that life in the now empty rooms of Palazzo Pitti, already occupied by his beloved wife and numerous children who had not survived him, depressed him greatly.

After dating Eleonora degli Albizi, by whom he had two natural children, in 1570 Cosimo took in second marriage Camilla Martelli as his morganatic wife, who gave him a daughter, later legitimized and integrated in the succession. The worsening of his stormy character and the continuous clashes with his sons (Francesco had a completely different vision of the State from his father), because of his new wife, made his last years turbulent. He died on April 21, 1574, at the age of fifty-five, already severely handicapped by a stroke that had limited his mobility and taken away his speech.

In 1857, during a first reconnaissance of the Medici”s remains, this is how his body was found:

Cosimo was able to exploit the political role of art, promoting numerous construction sites that changed, for the better, the face of Florence, in order to bring forward an image of his government as wise and enlightened, bringing economic and cultural prestige to the city.

Among the various works he carried out, it is worth mentioning the creation of the factory that was to house the Magistrature, that is, the administrative offices of the State, which became the Uffizi Gallery under the Grand Duke Francesco I de” Medici and is now one of the most important and visited museums in the world. He enlarged the majestic building of Palazzo Pitti, which became the official residence of the grand dukes; he completed the Boboli Gardens, the park of his residence. He connected his new residence with Palazzo Vecchio through the Vasari Corridor.

His court was coveted by artists of great value, including Giorgio Vasari, Agnolo Bronzino, Bartolomeo Ammannati, Benvenuto Cellini. And it was on the advice of the architect Giorgio Vasari from Arezzo that he founded, on January 13, 1563, the Accademia e Compagnia dell”Arte del Disegno, whose role and prestige, certainly not confined to the narrow political and economic limits of the Tuscan principality, grew between the 16th and 17th centuries thanks to the extraordinary contribution of academics such as Michelangelo Buonarroti, Francesco da Sangallo, Benvenuto Cellini, Bartolomeo Ammannati, Giambologna, Galileo Galilei, etc.

While the Compagnia was a sort of corporation to which all the artists working in Tuscany had to adhere, the Accademia, made up only of the most eminent cultural personalities of Cosimo”s court, had the purpose of protecting and supervising the entire artistic production of the Medici principality. Passionate about archeology, he undertook extensive research of Etruscan artifacts in Chiusi, Arezzo and other cities, bringing to light numerous objects and statues.

Cosimo I, like the entire branch of the Medici family that descended from him, was strongly passionate about natural sciences: in 1549, to amaze his subjects and foreigners, as well as to demonstrate his interest in the wonders of nature, he exhibited a sperm whale found near Livorno directly in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Piazza della Signoria in Florence.

Under his reign were founded the botanical gardens of Pisa (1544) and Florence (1545). He was the author of cosmographic studies and had the monk Egnazio Danti (1536-1586) draw up maps of all the lands known at the time. The collection of scientific wonders (with a strong presence of mathematical instruments) started by Cosimo constitutes the oldest nucleus of the collections of mathematical instruments preserved today at the Museo Galileo of Florence.

The descendants of Cosimo and Eleonora, although numerous, were certainly not touched by fortune, due to tuberculosis in Florence, which often required stays in coastal areas, where malaria was present. In fact died of malarial fever her children Maria (other three (Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, died very young of tuberculosis (although the enemies of her husband, Alfonso II d”Este, insinuated that she had been poisoned by the latter, in order to marry the Archduchess Barbara of Austria, politically more prestigious marriage); Francesco I died mysteriously together with his second wife Bianca Cappello (for many centuries it was hypothesized that they were poisoned by Ferdinand I, but the latest scientific analysis deny this hypothesis); Isabella, that for many years was hypothesized to have died at the hands of her husband with the accusation of adultery, died for a biliary obstruction; Ferdinand I was the only one of the legitimate children to approach old age and was for many years the third Grand Duke of Tuscany, dying at 59 years old.

Cosimo I also had some stories out of wedlock and four illegitimate children: from a woman, whose name is not mentioned, he had his first daughter, Bia, who, however, died when she was only 5 years old; from Eleonora degli Albizzi he had a stillborn daughter and Giovanni, who was a military man and an architect and died when he was 54 years old; from his lover Camilla Martelli, then a morganatic wife, he had Virginia, who will be legitimized as a result of the marriage of her parents in 1570 and who will die at the age of 47, long suffering from insanity.

With Eleanor of Toledo he had eleven children:

With Camilla Martelli, his morganatic wife, he had a daughter:

As already written, Cosimo had numerous extra-marital relationships: from a woman remained unknown he had, before his marriage with Eleonora di Toledo, a daughter:

From Eleonora degli Albizi he had a son:

Foreign honors

Sources