Episode 49: Duke

We leave the Medici papacy behind and look at the life and times of Alessandro de’ Medici, the first Medici de facto ruler of Florence and (possibly) a Black head of state in Renaissance Europe.

Support the podcast on Patreon or by making a one-time donation below.

Transcript

Last time we said goodbye to Clement VII. But I want to talk a little more about the impact he and Leo X had on the papacy, for better and for worse. Like I mentioned last time, we shouldn’t blame them, especially Clement for too much. No matter what they did or didn’t do, it’s almost certain no matter what that the papacy would have gone from being a fairly major Italian power with the ability to interfere in broader European politics to an institution with mostly spiritual and moral authority. The Papal States were created when European feudalism was in its childhood, and it seems inevitable that, as feudal political structures gave way to the modern nation-state, the papacy would have to adapt and change too. It definitely didn’t help that over the years more Popes would follow the example of Sixtus IV and Alexander VI and keep pruning off papal lands to create independent fiefdoms for their relatives.

This isn’t to say the papacy became a completely symbolic force. As late as the 1960s, the Pope put a papal interdict on the Labour Party of Malta and declared voting for or promoting the party would be a mortal sin, something that may have cost the party an election. And even after Pope Clement’s catastrophic turn at the helm there would be more cases of the Pope excommunicating major political figures and, in the case of the Republic of Venice in 1606, issuing an interdict against an entire nation. But no Pope would ever again be able to corral enough political and military forces to resist foreign influence over Italy. Perhaps even more tellingly, as determined as even the powerful Emperor Charles V was to be crowned by a Pope, after him no Holy Roman Emperor would ever again even bother with the whole charade. Only Napoleon Bonaparte would feel the need to be crowned by a Pope, and that time he dragged the Pope all the way to Paris.

The reign of the Medici Popes was also the end of another era, that of the Renaissance papacy. Again, we should avoid exaggerating. After Clement there would be Popes who would be great patrons of philosophy, the arts, and the sciences. And likewise, even at the height of the Renaissance, there were humanist intellectuals subjected to censorship, like Pico della Mirandola, and during and before the Renaissance campaigns of intolerance and anti-Semitism that were at least allowed to fester by the papacy. Unfortunately, nuance like that is rather hard to take since the history of the Catholic Church has really been caught up in today’s political debates and culture wars. Depending on your politics, you might see the Catholic Church as a misunderstood and maligned institution that actually promoted the sciences, or you view the Catholic Church as a force purely for oppression and ignorance. Hopefully there’s no need to explain that the actual history is more nuanced, as we’ll see when we get to Galileo and the Medici duke who supported him. And Clement himself showed a concern for the rights of the conversos, recent Muslim and Jewish converts to Christianity in Spain and Portugal who were still discriminated against, issuing a papal bull in their defense.  But at the same time I do believe it’s fair to say that Clement’s reign and its failures marked a turning point. Under the thumb of the ultra-Catholic Charles V and facing the crisis of the Protestant Reformation, the papacy became a less open institution that would arguably confront the great intellectual movements of the future, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, with more hostility than it did humanism. Likewise in the decades after Clement’s papacy there would be more papal bulls limiting the freedoms of Jews in the Papal States, most notoriously of all establishing the ghetto of Rome where Jews would be required to live in an overpopulated slum subjected to regular flooding from the Tiber River. The Popes would also expand on the papacy’s earlier condemnations of certain books, establishing a formal system of censorship with the Index of Forbidden Books.

As a side note, I should mention there were two more far less famous Medici Popes. Pius IV and Leo XI. However, they were both only distantly related to the people we think of as the Medici family, and neither had really much of an impact on papal or Italian history. In fact, Leo XI would only live 26 days after his election.

Back to the subject at hand, whatever one makes of Clement’s impact on the papacy, one thing is obvious: the Medici dynasty was entering a new era, one perhaps even Lorenzo the Magnificent didn’t envision. The family of one-time bankers had entered the ranks of European royalty.

We’ve been introduced to him before, but let’s take time to get to know the first Medici to rule Florence on an actual throne. Alessandro de’ Medici was born on July 22, 1510, when the Medici were still exiled from Florence. Alessandro’s parentage is actually something of a mystery, one that unfortunately doesn’t have many clues. Neither his contemporaries nor modern historians could agree on who Alessandro’s father was. On paper, his father was Lorenzo the Younger, which would also make Alessandro Catherine de’ Medici’s half-brother. This was certainly what most of his contemporaries believed. However, even at the time, some suspected his actual biological father was no one other than Giulio de’ Medici, Pope Clement VII himself. Many modern historians, including Alessandro’s biographer Catherine Fletcher take it for granted that Alessandro was actually Clement’s son. But honestly there isn’t enough proof one way or the other, and barring some miraculous discovery in the archives we’ll never know for absolutely sure. But if Alessandro was Clement’s son it’s certainly well within the realm of possibility that the family would spread a white lie about Alessandro’s true parentage. Someone like Rodrigo Borgia may have openly acknowledged his illegitimate children, but that was still scandalous for someone in the upper echelons of the church.

Bizarrely, there’s even some question surrounding the identity of Alessandro’s mother. What evidence we do have suggests that his mother was Simonetta da Collevecchio, who was either a servant or a slave. Italian administrative documents at the time tended to use the same term for both, so it’s impossible to know for sure which she was. Either way, she had worked in the household of Alfonsina Orsini, the wife of Piero the Unfortunate. Eventually she was released from service and given enough money to buy some land near Rome, apparently just in time for her lands to get looted during the imperial invasion of the Papal States. During this time, she married and had at least two other children. In 1528 or 1529, a letter survives in which she pleads with her son for support, although this letter was not included in the original archival collection of Alessandro’s papers and only appeared in the nineteenth century. Since the letter is now lost and cannot be verified, it is not unreasonable to assume it might be a fake. And it has been proposed that Alessandro’s mother might have been a peasant from the Romagna instead. Regardless, the other bits of proof do suggest Simonetta was Alessandro’s mother and this sketch of her life may be accurate. Even so, nothing is straightforward about Alessandro’s birth, and there probably are many details that have been deliberately forgotten.

The one detail about Simonetta that most fascinates historians is that she herself or her parents were Black Africans. Catherine Fletcher certainly thinks it’s more than possible. While slaves were rare in Renaissance Italy and slaves from West Africa more so, Naples’ ties to Spain and its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade did mean there were a large number of black slaves there. Simonetta could very well have been one such slave or the daughter of a freed slave. Yet again, though, we have to rely on speculation. Certainly, though, paintings of Alessandro from his own lifetime are at least suggestive.

While we’re on the subject of Alessandro’s birth, it is worth bringing up the question of race. It’s not just a matter of curiosity; obviously the fact that there may have been a political leader in Renaissance Italy who was a black man says a great deal about the history of racial attitudes. Now the history of race is a massive topic that I’m definitely not going to try to tame here, and there is a lot of still ongoing debate about race and racism in history and how they are connected to modern racial concepts . But I will say I do think it’s telling that one of the reasons we do have to rely on Alessandro’s portraits to investigate the question of his skin color is that his contemporaries didn’t find it worth discussing at length, aside of course from the fact that in life he was called “the Moor.” There are suggestions that his appearance was commented on, but as far as we can tell there was no suggestion that he shouldn’t have been allowed to hold kind of important office, much less be the ruler of Florence, because of his appearance and skin color. This isn’t to say that Alessandro wasn’t attacked or mocked for his appearance; he certainly was. Rather, the ideas surrounding race in the modern Western world weren’t in place or at most had some roots in the sixteenth century. The concept behind modern racism, namely that certain groups based on their ancestry are inferior or superior to others and such groups can be easily identified from their physical characteristics was mostly if not entirely unknown. Instead, the dominant notion about race at that time was basically that differences between peoples came from geographical and cultural circumstances instead of inborn traits. At the time, people thought more in terms of differences and there wasn’t really an idea of a “superior race.” The Mamluks, the Islamic empire literally run by slave soldiers who rose through the ranks, preferred to recruit their soldiers from slaves taken from the Black Sea region of Circassia, simply because the men from there were supposed to be exceptionally attractive and good warriors. Another case that I think illustrates how intellectuals and people in power thought about race was when King James I of England and VI of Scotland objected in a letter to John Rolfe marrying Pocahontas. It wasn’t for the reasons we might expect today or that he was a John Smith stan. Rather, James’ concern was it was inappropriate for a commoner like John Rolfe to marry Pocahontas, the daughter of a king. I should mention historians have argued that modern racism was beginning to take shape in Spain, where people with Jewish and Muslim ancestry were forbidden from migrating to the colonies. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies themselves, such laws would eventually give rise to a strict and complex caste system that discriminated against people with indigenous or Black ancestry. Even so, the environment Alessandro grew up in was one where his appearance likely drew ridicule, but not what we’d today consider complete marginalization.

That Alessandro’s birth was the subject of a family cover-up seems to have been something Alessandro himself knew. When several people mocked him for his lowly birth, Alessandro was said to have joked that he wished they would tell him what they knew about the circumstances of his birth since they obviously knew more about the subject than he did. While I definitely do believe discussion of Alessandro’s race has historical value, especially as an example of how attitudes toward race changed over time, at the same time I think such discussions overshadow the real tragedy of Alessandro’s life, that he was separated from his mother, possibly as soon as he was born, and she was left behind to live in poverty.

At first, Alessandro was educated for a life in church. In fact, if Alessandro’s alleged father Lorenzo the Younger and his great-uncle Giuliano had lived and produced more legitimate heirs, Alessandro would have almost certainly ended up like Pope Clement or Cosimo de’ Medici’s own illegitimate son Carlo, given a position as a member of the clergy. But after Lorenzo the Younger and Giuliano’s deaths, the only legitimate Medici left who wasn’t already part of the church hierarchy was a girl: the future Queen Catherine. This left Alessandro and Giuliano’s own illegitimate son Ippolito as the last hope for the future of the senior line of the Medici family. So, under Pope Leo X, at an early age Alessandro was legitimized and the future Pope Clement purchased a noble title for him from the kingdom of Naples, the duke of Penne.

Alessandro and Ippolito both grew into extremely well-educated, good-looking, and athletic young men. They also developed into the sort of people we might call frat boys today, with Alessandro enjoying shouting insulting things at passerby from his horse. If you’ve ever walked or jogged near a college campus, you might be having a flashback right about now. Anyway, Alessandro was especially talented at hunting and jousting, while also having a famously sharp wit. Ippolito was considered exceptionally polite, but he also developed a reputation for being unreliable and hot-headed. During negotiations and the imperial coronation at Bologna, Ippolito and his friends got into a street fight with some Spanish men, causing three deaths. 

Incidents like that might have been why Clement made a decision that historians still debate over today. On January of 1529, Clement VII took to his bed with a fever so severe his doctors thought he might die. Previously he made plans for Ippolito to marry a daughter of the Gonzagas, the ruling family of Mantua. On what he thought was his deathbed, Clement dramatically changed course. Since he couldn’t risk losing the Medici foothold on the church, especially because they were still exiled, he made Ippolito a cardinal of the church. Possibly it was purely because Alessandro might have been Clement’s son, but there are hints that things like the gang fight in Bologna made Clement bet on Alessandro instead of Ippolito. Backing this is a letter from a Venetian ambassador to the papacy, which reads, “It seems to me that His Holiness is more content with Alessandro’s cleverness and manners than those of the Cardinal.” Unfortunately, with his usual lack of flair for diplomacy, Pope Clement unwittingly planted the seeds for an intense rivalry between the two cousins, which would one day prove to be fatal.

After the Siege of Florence, when Alessandro was made duke as we covered last time, he took to the role with a genuine Medici flair. Like some of his ancestors, he was an obsessive collector of art and a patron. His go-to artist was Giorgio Vasari, whose book “The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects” has been used as a source for this very podcast. For Alessandro, Vasari painted The Entombment of Christ and decorated a room in the Palazzo Medici with scenes from the life of Julius Caesar, which would turn out to be an ironic choice of subject. Alessandro became somewhat notorious for outbidding and outmaneuvering other art collectors. For example, he and his agents were able to snag Baccio Bandinelli’s reproduction of the ancient statue Laocoon and His Sons away from no one less than King Francois of France.

When it came to the actual business of government, Alessandro held regular audiences at the Palazzo Medici where even the city’s poor and laborers were encouraged to come to him with their petitions and complaints. Alessandro would also stop by shops and guild offices unannounced to discuss any concerns and problems. Perhaps Alessandro to his credit never forgot that he was the son of a slave or a servant and that shaped his approach to ruling. If Alessandro was popular among the populo minuto, and several surviving street ballads suggest he was, he was absolutely despised by the city’s ruling class, the ottimati. While much of the anti-republican steps Alessandro took seem to have been the result of pressure from Emperor Charles V rather than stemming from his own ideas, he was resented for the construction of the imposing Basso Fortress and the transformation of the one-time government building the Palazzo della Signoria into a ducal residence, the Palazzo Vecchio, the “Old Fortress”. Even more importantly, Alessandro remembered who was responsible for the last expulsion of the Medici. The ottimati were appointed to few high-ranking government positions. Instead the spoils were handed out to men from other regions of Italy, who were completely dependent on the duke’s good will. This, more than anything else, seems to have inspired the whispers that Alessandro was a tyrant.

As much of a sincere populist as he might have been, Alessandro was paranoid, although in a way that calls to mind the saying “it’s not really paranoia if they’re out to get you.” No doubt Alessandro had grown up with stories of the Pazzi conspiracy that claimed the life of his maybe grandfather. After his death it was found that he had numerous suits of padded armor and chain mail that he wore under his clothing. One time, two men in a Tuscan village were arrested for wishing the Medici line would just get wiped out. It was idle chatter, but the two men were still beheaded. Of course, as you might remember from earlier episodes, even when Florence was more of a bona fide republic free speech was never a norm. Still, the brutality of their punishment and the fact that they were just average people from a rural village seemed to justify what the most disgruntled of the ottimati were saying about Duke Alessandro.

At the same time, there was a change in the air. The disaster of the Siege of Florence, the rise of Duke Alessandro bringing an end to the wars, and the fact that the last true republic quickly turned into a busybody authoritarian regime had thoroughly discredited the anti-Medici cause. The Florentine coinage ditched the old republican symbols, like the lily and the image of John the Baptist, the city’s saint, and replaced them with the head of Alessandro on one side and the Medici family saints Damian and Cosmas on the other. The shift even manifested in fashion. Florentine upper-class men began growing beards instead of being clean-shaven like old Roman patricians and started dressing in the colorful, ostentatious clothing of French and Spanish nobles. While Jacopo da Portono’s portrait of Duke Alessandro shows him dressed like a Florentine patriarch, he was also painted in armor, showing off his noble status.

Fully behind Alessandro’s regime was Emperor Charles V. Pope Clement had arranged for the betrothal of Alessandro to Margaret, the daughter of Charles and his Dutch mistress Johanna Maria van der Gheynst. Of course, given the morals of the time, Charles V had no problem with Alessandro’s reputation for seducing women. Nor was he apparently bothered by the fact that he had an upper-class mistress, Taddea Malaspina, who gave birth to two of Alessandro’s children, Giulio in 1533 and Giulia in 1535. By the way, I consider the fact that Alessandro named both of his children after Pope Clement to be a compelling if inconclusive bit of evidence that Clement was his father after all. In fact, Charles seemed to personally like Alessandro, and the two hunted together on several occasions when Charles happened to be in Tuscany.

Meanwhile, Ippolito still none too secretly harbored dreams of replacing Alessandro as duke or at least the head of a new Florentine republic. He begged Clement to release him from his vows and allow him to enter secular life. No doubt Ippolito was inspired by the example of Cesare Borgia, who was allowed to give up his life as a cardinal and went on to become a formidable prince in his own right. Clement always refused, however. Instead he berated Ippolito for how much money he wasted. One ongoing expense was Ippolito’s bizarre collection. Apparently he was fascinated by the athletic prowess of other peoples and spent lavishly collecting like objects Tartar archers, Ethiopian wrestlers, and Indian swimmers and divers and had Turkish bodyguards. To quote Catherine Fletcher, “It is hard to escape the impression that this was something of a human zoo to entertain Ippolito and his friends.” Certainly such an expensive hobby did not seem to cause Clement to develop much confidence in his cousin. Instead, in the spring of 1532, Clement sent Ippolito to serve as papal legate to Charles V while he was on campaign against the Turks in Hungary. It seems to have been a way to get Ippolito out of the way more than anything.

As bad as Clement was at taming Ippolito’s ambitions and making peace between Alessandro and Ippolito, his death removed an important check on their feud. The gloves were off and the knives were now out.