catherine de' medici – The Medici Podcast

Episode 52: The Little Duchess

From the start of her life, the orphaned Catherine’s life was marred by politics. First, she was destined to be a figurehead for her great-uncle’s territorial ambitions. Then she was a hostage blamed for the crimes of her family, and next a pawn on the royal marriage market. No one could have guessed that the future had grander things in store for her than just a marriage to some prince…

Claude Corneille de Lyon’s portrait of Catherine de’ Medici as a young woman, circa 1540. Source: Polesden Lacey, Surrey.

The piazza of the church and convent of Santa Maria Annunziata, where Catherine spent perhaps the happiest years of her childhood. Source: Museo Galileo, Erik Franchi.

Transcript

If anyone in history was ever actually cursed from birth, it may have been Catherine de’ Medici. After giving birth to her, her mother Madeliene de La Tour d’Auvergne died less than a week after her birth from complications.

Episode 42: The Orphan

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.

A portrait possibly of Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne, the mother of Catherine de’ Medici and wife of Lorenzo “the Younger.” Date unknown. Source: Uffizi Gallery.

Transcript

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.