The Medici PodcastDuke Alessandro de’ Medici enters a deadly contest with his cousin, Cardinal Ippolito. The real threat, however, may be closer to home.
So I hope you weren’t expecting for me to update you on French history up to the point of Catherine’s marriage in 1533. But for this episode I will give you a crash course on France’s monarchy, the institution that Catherine found herself literally wedded to, and what it meant to be a woman within it.
For our 50th episode, I give an overview of how the Medici went from being just one of several powerful banking families to joining the ranks of European royalty and high nobility.
Before I get started, I just wanted to say sincerely thank you for listening. I started this podcast around the time I was laid off from a job, I didn’t seem to have any real prospects, and I was living in an apartment I didn’t like but I could barely afford. Then during the time I kept on with the podcast I made the difficult decision to go back to school and try to start a new career, I finished my second Master’s degree in Library Science, and…well, things have gotten a lot better since, but I’m still working on the getting a day job I can be happy with or making something like this my job part. I never expected this podcast to become as successful as other history podcasts like the “History of Rome” podcast and…well, it’s not, but that said it’s certainly drawn more regular listeners than I ever expected. On top of the kind emails I often receive and the generous donations from my Patreon supporters, that fact alone helps me get through the bad times, like my recent car accident. It really does.
So thank you.
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.
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DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearlyLast 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.
Pope Clement VII sells his soul to Emperor Charles V to get back Florence. Part of the bargain includes Clement essentially signing off on the death warrant of the Republic of Florence.
When we last checked in on Florence’s old new or maybe new old republic, it was struggling. As the months piled up, the situation only got worse. Niccolo Capponi’s policy of reconciliation was a complete failure. Part of the problem is that wartime is a horrible time to build a new government. But I suspect even if Florence wasn’t caught up in an unpopular war there would still be problems. Democracies tend to run badly if most of the people don’t share some of the same basic premises. It wasn’t just a case of the pro-Medici and the anti-Medici. Instead among the anti-Medici factions you also had the radical republicans who were drunk on their own overidealized visions of the republics of ancient Greece and Rome and who despised the religious fanaticism of Savonarola and his followers as much as the pro-Medici camp did, the so-called Wailers who yearned to one day fulfill Savonarola’s plans for a democratic theocracy, the conservatives like Machiavelli who just wanted Florence to go back to the good old days of the Ordinances of Justice, and the moderate republicans, many of whom came from the ranks of the ottimati and wanted to make Florence more like a Venice-style oligarchy. United as they were by their rejection of the Medici regime, these were groups with such fundamentally divergent plans for the future of the city that there was no way they could be in the same room with each other, much less build stable coalitions.
Lorenzo the Magnificent’s granddaughter Clarice triggers a coup in Florence just by berating the man in charge. Meanwhile Pope Clement is driven to hide in a derelict palace in the mountains and receives an unwelcome visitor all the way from England.
When Emperor Charles V learned that his unpaid troops had torn apart Rome, he ordered his court to dress in black, as if mourning the death of a member of the imperial family. I have no doubt that Charles was sincere. After all, he was a devout Catholic, and he had put some effort into avoiding this very outcome. However, he was still a ruler, and he had practical reasons to lament this outcome as well. In modern terms, the Sack of Rome was a massive PR disaster for the imperial cause. It galvanized the League of Cognac. The imperial army looked like a pack of heretical barbarians. Even Henry VIII of England, who at this point was still loyal to the Pope, joined the alliance against the emperor.
Pope Clement tries once more to loosen Emperor Charles V’s grip on Italy, another revolution in Florence is narrowly avoided through one man’s incompetence, and the stage is set for one of modern history’s most notorious war-time atrocities.
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DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearlyThe Florentine Luigi Guicciardini, the brother of the more famous historian Francesco, was an eye witness to one of the darkest chapters in the history of the city of Rome. In his account of what happened to the city, he wrote, “All the sacraments of the modern Church were scorned and vilified as if the city had been captured by Turks or Moors or some other barbarous and infidel enemy.” Another eyewitness, Marino Sanuto, more succinctly wrote in his diary, “’Hell itself was a more beautiful sight to behold.” This was the Sack of Rome of 1527. It was certainly worse than the four times Rome was sacked in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, including the infamous pillaging of the city by Vandals in 410. In those times, the marauders still followed prevailing rules of warfare. Either that or Rome was so depopulated it was little more than a village or a small town. 1527 was something different, more akin to the atrocities we read about in the annals of the 20th century history. In fact, arguably it wasn’t just pillaging at all; it was an outburst of mass rage directed at a civilian population that was allowed to go on for not just days or weeks, but months.
Clement VII brings back the artistic glories of Renaissance Rome, but disaster for himself, his family, and for Rome looms overhead.
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DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearlyAt first Giulio wanted to just use a version of his own name as a papal title, which would have made him Pope Julius III. It also would have kept with the tradition of Renaissance Popes adopting names that invoked the great heroes of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine history, like Alexander, Hadrian, and Leo. However, Clement was instead convinced by his advisors to choose a different papal name. I couldn’t find a source explaining exactly why Pope Clement chose the name that he did. One theory is that he did so to signal that he would be merciful to his enemies like Cardinal Soderini. In fact, despite Soderini’s involvement in the Cardinal Plot against Leo X, Clement did in 1521 allow Soderini to return to Rome, although perhaps it was at least in part a practical decision to stop him from getting up to too much mischief in Florence. Another, more likely theory is that Clement chose the name because at one point in his career climbing up the church hierarchy he was once the priest at the Church of Saint Clement in Rome. Personally I wonder if it might have been meant at least a little to be a sly if elaborate shot at Emperor Charles V, since Pope Clement I was according to legend imprisoned under the orders of the first century Roman Emperor Trajan. Even if it wasn’t intentional, later events would prove the connection to be ironic.
After Leo X’s sudden death, the Medici are briefly out of power in the papacy. In the meantime, Emperor Charles V changes the landscape of European politics by getting elected as Holy Roman Emperor, and the fate of the Medici family is put in the hands of an orphaned, illegitimate son.
Since I didn’t want to risk adding more to the overstuffed narrative, I did just slide over what I think was one of the most important political events of the sixteenth century: the election of King Charles of Spain as Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. It might just seem like icing on the cake from Charles’ point of view. What, being Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy, and king of Castile and Aragon wasn’t enough, you had to be Holy Roman Emperor too? But to be fair Charles himself believed that if didn’t gain the imperial title, it would have been a risky situation. After all, the Holy Roman Emperor had historic claims on many of Charles’ titles in the Netherlands, and having an unfriendly emperor would even threaten the Hapsburg ownership of their own heartland, Austria. That definitely would have been the outcome if that emperor also happened to be the king of France. With the encouragement of the Elector of Brandenburg and the Elector of Saxony, King Francois threw his own crown in the ring. France wasn’t part of the Holy Roman Empire, but in the past foreign princes had run for the office and had come very close to claiming it, like the English prince Richard of Cornwall who was elected King of the Germans, but was never actually crowned emperor, in the thirteenth century.
While Pope Leo works with the artist Raphael toward the preservation of Roman antiquities and tries to steer Italy between the deadly rocks of France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, a little problem crops up to demand his attention. And that little problem had a name: Martin Luther.
So with that, let’s go back to the year 1505, on a July afternoon…
A university student was returning home after visiting his parents. He found himself caught in the middle of a sudden thunderstorm. Lightning struck the ground near him. On the spot, Luther prayed to Saint Anne, vowing he would give up his studies in law and become a monk if he survived the thunderstorm. The young student did indeed survive and joined an Augustinian monastery. And that university student was Martin Luther.
A new Medici is born amidst tragedy, Pope Leo struggles with the threats posed by France, Spain, and the Holy Roman and Ottoman empires and a deadly conspiracy close to home, and an obscure monk and university lecturer in Germany starts to inspire a bit of controversy.
The last we saw Pope Leo X he had just betrayed his mentor and predecessor, Pope Julius, by ousting Julius’ nephew Francesco Maria from the duchy of Urbino and giving the duchy instead to Leo’s own nephew Lorenzo. But a few modern historians and Leo’s contemporaries agreed that he had also betrayed Julius by not doing enough to, as Julius would say, drive the barbarians out of Italy. But honestly while taking Urbino from its rightful duke was an undisputable blunder, I don’t think Leo can really be blamed for the rest of his foreign policy. He was stuck between a French rock and an imperial hard place, especially now that Spain and the Holy Roman Empire was practically ruled by the same family.
The Medici Podcast 