Catherine de' Medici was a Machiavellian politician, wife of Henry II of France, and later regent for her three feeble sons at the twilight of the Valois dynasty, who authorized the killing of French Protestants in the notorious Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572.
Background
Catherine was born on 13 April 1519, in Florence, Republic of Florence, the only child of Lorenzo de' Medici, duke of Urbino, and his wife, Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, the countess of Boulogne. The young couple had been married the year before at Amboise as part of the alliance between King Francis I of France and Lorenzo's uncle Pope Leo X against the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. According to a contemporary chronicler, when Catherine was born, her parents were "as pleased as if it had been a boy".
Her mother died within a few days from puerperal fever and her father succumbed to consumption a week later at the age of 27, leaving her an orphan after less than one month of life. Her father's relatives, among them popes Leo X and Clement VII, took over her care, and she grew up in the midst of the stormy Italian Wars in which they were central actors. When a German army of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sacked Rome in 1527, the citizens of Florence took advantage of this eclipse of Medici power to restore their republic, and took the eight-year-old Catherine hostage. Escaping from Rome and hiring a group of mercenaries to recapture Florence, her uncle Clement VII was able to rescue her from her refuge in a nunnery.
Education
Catherine was highly educated, trained, and disciplined by nuns in Florence and Rome.
Career
Catherine was married in 1533 by her uncle, Pope Clement VII, to Henry, duc d’Orléans, who inherited the French crown from his father, Francis I, in April 1547. In spite of Henry’s abiding attachment to his mistress Diane de Poitiers, Catherine’s marriage was not unsuccessful, and, after 10 anxious years, she bore him 10 children, of whom 4 boys and 3 girls survived. She supervised their education. Thus occupied, Catherine lived privately though she was appointed regent in 1552 during Henry’s absence at the siege of Metz. Her ability and eloquence were acclaimed after the Spanish victory of Saint-Quentin in Picardy in 1557, possibly the origin of her perpetual fear of Spain, which remained, through changing circumstances, the touchstone of her judgments. It is essential to understand this in order to discern the coherence of her career.
Catherine’s first great political crisis came in July 1559 upon the accidental death of Henry II, a traumatic bereavement from which it is doubtful that she ever recovered. Under her son, Francis II, power was retained by the Guise brothers. Thus began her lifelong struggle - explicit in her correspondence - with these extremists who, supported by Spain and the papacy, sought to dominate the crown and extinguish its independence in the commingled interests of European Catholicism and personal aggrandizement. It is also necessary to understand this political struggle of the Catholic crown with its own ultramontane extremists and to perceive its fluctuations in changing circumstances, in order to realize the fundamental consistency of Catherine’s career. Her essentially moderate influence was first perceptible during the Conspiracy of Amboise (March 1560), an instance of tumultuous petitioning by the Huguenot gentry, primarily against Guisard persecution in the name of the King. Her merciful Edict of Amboise (March 1560) was followed in May by that of Romorantin, which distinguished heresy from sedition, thereby detaching faith from allegiance.
Catherine’s second great political crisis came with the premature death on December 5, 1560, of Francis II, whose royal authority the Guises had monopolized. Catherine succeeded in obtaining the regency for Charles IX, with Antoine de Bourbon, king of Navarre and first prince of the blood, as lieutenant-general, to whom the Protestants vainly looked for leadership.
The 10 years from 1560 to 1570 were, politically, the most important of Catherine’s life. They witnessed the first three civil wars and her desperate struggle against the Catholic extremists for the independence of the crown, the maintenance of peace, and the enforcement of limited toleration. In 1561, with the support of the distinguished chancellor Michel de L’Hospital, she began by trying to propitiate the leaders of both religious factions, to effect reforms and economies by unassailably traditional methods, and to settle the religious conflict. Religious reconciliation was the conveners’ purpose of the Colloquy of Poissy (September–November 1561). Catherine appointed a mixed commission of moderates that devised two formulas of consummate ambiguity, by which they hoped to resolve the basic, Eucharist controversy. Possibly Catherine’s most concrete achievement was the Edict of January 1562, which followed the failure of reconciliation. This afforded the Calvinists licensed coexistence with specific safeguards. Unlike the proposals of Poissy, the edict was law, which the Protestants accepted and the Catholics rejected. This rejection was one basic element in the outbreak of civil war in 1562, in which - as she had predicted - Catherine fell, politically, into the clutches of the extremists, because the Catholic crown might protect its Protestant subjects in law but could not defend them in arms. Thenceforth the problem of religion was one of power, public order, and administration.
Catherine ended the first civil war in March 1563 by the Edict of Amboise, an attenuated version of the Edict of January. In August 1563 she declared the King of age in the Parlement of Rouen and, from April 1564 to January 1566, conducted him on a marathon itinerary around France. Its principal purpose was to execute the edict and, through a meeting at Bayonne in June 1565, to seek to strengthen peaceful relations between the crown and Spain and to negotiate for Charles’s marriage to Elizabeth of Austria. During the period 1564–68, Catherine was unable, for complex reasons, to withstand the cardinal Lorraine, statesman of the Guises, who largely provoked the second and third civil wars. She quickly terminated the second (September 1567–March 1568) with the Peace of Longjumeau, a renewal of Amboise. But she was unable to avert its revocation (August 1568), which heralded the third civil war. She was not primarily responsible for the more far-reaching Treaty of Saint-Germain (August 1570), but she succeeded in disgracing the Guises.
For the next two years, Catherine’s policy was one of peace and general reconciliation. This she envisaged in terms of the marriage of her daughter Marguerite to the young Protestant leader, Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV of France), an alliance with England through the marriage of her son Henry, duc d’Anjou, or, failing him, his younger brother François, duc d’Alençon, to Queen Elizabeth. The complexity of Catherine’s position during these years cannot be briefly explained. To some extent, she was eclipsed by Louis of Nassau and a group of Flemish exiles and youthful Protestants who surrounded the King and urged him to make war upon Spain in the Netherlands, which Catherine inevitably resisted.
The issue of war or peace in the Netherlands was closely linked with the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in Paris on August 23–24, 1572. Upon this occasion, following an abortive attempt against the life of the admiral Gaspard de Coligny, he and a number of his principal lieutenants, together with several thousand Huguenots, were killed. Catherine traditionally has been blamed for these events, which have therefore fashioned the interpretation not only of her subsequent but frequently also of her previous, career, resulting in the familiar myth of the wicked Italian queen. There are two principal reasons for this. First, after some hesitation and inconsistency, the King assumed the responsibility by a declaration of August 26 in the Parlement of Paris, and “the crown” has been taken to mean Catherine. The second reason for the traditional inculpation of Catherine is the work of the pamphleteers and the polemical nature of the historiography of the event. It is impossible to establish the origin of the assault upon Coligny, but, as a member of the court - the royal family and the council - Catherine was among those who appear to have authorized not the massacre itself but the death of the admiral and his principal followers. This and the subsequent royal declaration of August 26 are both explained by the danger of the situation - after the unsuccessful assault upon Coligny - in which the infuriated Huguenots allegedly threatened the court with extinction and the kingdom with war.
After the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, Catherine was more concerned with the election of Anjou to the throne of Poland (May 1573) than the prosecution of the fourth civil war. Upon the death of Charles IX a year later, she assumed the regency with the support of the Parlement until the return from Poland of Henry III in August. Catherine placed high hopes in her favourite, Henry, for the regeneration of France, for which she longed, but not without simultaneous misgivings, knowing his weakness of character and his previous subjection to the Catholics. For these reasons Catherine neither sought to dominate Henry nor to rule in his place but rather suffered him to exploit her and strove with unremitting pains to supply his deficiencies. Until the death of Alençon in 1584, much of her attention was devoted to restraining his dangerous ambitions, which again threatened to involve France in hostilities with Spain. After the Treaty of Joinville (December 1584) between the Guises and Spain, at Henry’s bidding, Catherine, though gravely ill, returned to this dual threat. But after three months of continuous effort, in order to avert a public breach between the crown and the Guises, she was obliged, by the Treaty of Nemours (July 1585), to commit the King to making war against the Huguenots. Having failed with the Guises, the crown turned to Navarre, the Protestant leader who, as heir presumptive, had an interest in the preservation of the throne. In July 1586 Catherine undertook the arduous journey to see him at Saint-Brice near Cognac. But there was nothing to which Navarre could safely commit himself. Thus, despite the heroic efforts of Catherine’s old age, France was sinking into chaos when she died at Blois eight months before the murder of Henry III. Nevertheless, her ultimate achievement was to have saved the kingdom just long enough to ensure the succession of the Bourbon Henry IV, by whom the royal authority was restored.
During the conflict that arose between the Catholics and the Huguenots, there were persecutions carried on towards the Huguenots. Catherine chose to take a moderate stance and expressed her displeasure on the ongoing persecutions even though sources say that she did not share in their beliefs.
Views
Quotations:
"The first lesson I ever learned was never to wait for a man's rescue."
"My dear, never give up a crown. To anybody."
"You are alive. You will survive this. I know this...because I survived. You know that, too. They tried to destroy you by taking your pride and your strength but these things cannot be taken. Not from you. Not ever!"
"I don't attempt to do anything. I DO it."
History is written by the survivors. And I am surely that."
"I don’t have much to live for these days, but I would still die for my children."
Personality
Catherine was an aesthetic full of energy woman who happened to be extroverted. She was defined by the amount of energy and steadfastness she displayed every time she set out to do something. Her sense of responsibility was well seen when she took the time to personally oversee the education of her children. She remained happy and discreet amid the overwhelming challenges she faced at times. When her husband was away taking care of the siege, she was courageous enough to manage the affairs of the state. Catherine was not one to show cowardice, she faced issues head on, and when her sons were reluctant to rule, she took it upon herself to continue executing her duties.
It is also believed that she was a peaceful and enduring person seeing that when her husband decided to recognize his mistress more than her, she never took offense. she otherwise concentrated on her children and kept peace with her husband's mistress.
Physical Characteristics:
Catherine has been described as a woman of small stature, who was slender with no delicate features. Her eyes though were protruding a trait that was similar to people of her Medici family.
Quotes from others about the person
The Venetian ambassador, Gerolamo Lipomanno, wrote: "She is an indefatigable princess, born to tame and govern a people as unruly as the French: they now recognize her merits, her concern for unity and are sorry not to have appreciated her sooner.
Interests
Art is probably the most conspicuous thing that Catherine showed particular interest in.
Connections
Catherine de' Medici married Henry, Duke of Orléans, the future Henry II of France, in Marseille on 28 October 1533. She gave birth to ten children, of whom four sons and three daughters survived into adulthood. Three of her sons became kings of France, while two of her daughters married kings and one married a duke. Catherine outlived all her children except Henry III, who died seven months after her, and Margaret, who inherited her robust health.