Highlights from the Mediceo del Principato

Giving like a Medici
Lisa Kaborycha
December 11, 2008

The Medici sent gifts to friends, agents, diplomats and rulers all over Europe, and the objects they sent were highly coveted. Sometimes too highly coveted. In a letter thanking his Medici employers for gifts to his wife, an Italian engineer temporarily working at the German court writes: My wife thanks you very humbly for the lovely presents that you deigned to send her, though Her Highness the Electress of Saxony found them so much to her liking that she took a large number of them...

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Have breasts, will travel
Lisa Kaborycha
November 13, 2008

There were the Grand Duke and Duchess with all their children, the youngest at his wet nurse's breast, happily suckling away.

A courtier, describing a ballet held at the Medici court to the Duchess of Mantua. February 12, 1619
When Cosimo II and Maria Magdalena went to this performance, they brought the whole family: Ferdinando II, Giancarlo, Francesco, Mattias, Margherita, Anna, Maria Cristina, and baby Leopoldo. Visibly present with them-and, as this note describes, hard at work-was the wet nurse.

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Florentine football under siege
Stefano Dall'Aglio
October 30, 2008

In the very last day of the year 1544, Bernardo de' Medici, Medicean ambassador to France, wrote a letter to Duke Cosimo I de' Medici about a very special football match played at the French court in Fontainebleau: Yesterday, the most illustrious Dauphin, with thirty Frenchmen played football match against the Duke of Orléans [Charles II de Valois] and thirty Italians.

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Family matters
Elena Brizio
October 16, 2008

...Count Nicola of Pitigliano [Orsini] had sexually assaulted his own daughter-in-law, wife of the Count's son, Alessandro ... and the family of the woman were planning to go to Pitigliano and take her back home. Moreover, Count Nicola just had a son, after three daughters, by his Jewish lover and has made a great feast of it, which was a big blow to Alessandro and his mother ... (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 1872 - February 1560)

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