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DOCUMENT CITATION: TRANSLATION: TRANSCRIPTION: HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Cosimo I was born on 15 June 1519 to a beleaguered cadet branch of the Medici family. Against every seeming odd, he survived the brutal Florentine political struggles of his childhood and was named Head (Capo) of the Florentine Republic on 9 January 1537 at the precocious age of seventeen-and-a-half. In the years that followed, through a combination of political skill, good luck and—above all—relentlessly hard work, Cosimo established himself as the hereditary sovereign of a princely state, as Duke of Florence (later in 1537), then Duke of Florence and Siena (1557) and ultimately Grand Duke of Tuscany (1570). He died on 21 April 1574 at the age of 54, after 37 years of public life. The Medici Granducal Archive allows us to follow Cosimo’s activity on a day-to-day basis, giving us an intense portrait of a man who was not only energetic and resourceful but also an inveterate workaholic. He traveled constantly throughout his realm, monitored the flow of information on a sometimes astonishingly minute level and reserved virtually all decision-making authority for himself, even on points of detail. In 1564, at the age of 44, Cosimo ostensibly passed the reins of government to his eldest son Francesco (1541-87) who served as Prince Regent. The concrete meaning of this gesture remains to be determined since the archives demonstrate that the father maintained an essential ceremonial role and was still much involved in matters of state, at least during the early years of the regency. By his late 40s, however, Cosimo’s health was seriously compromised and he manifest symptoms of advanced uricaemia and arteriosclerosis. Whether Cosimo’s premature decline was due to genetics, overwork or sexual overindulgence was a topic of much discussion, both in his own day and among later scholars. In 1539, Cosimo married Eleonora de Toledo (1522-62), daughter of the Spanish Viceroy of Naples. During the 23 years of their marriage, they produced 11 children. Apart from Eleonora, there were at least three other women in Cosimo’s life. In his teens, he had a relationship with an unidentified female, resulting in the birth of a daughter in 1537 (Bia, died 1542). In 1565, several years after the death of his consort Eleonora de Toledo, Cosimo began an affair with Eleonora degli Albizzi (c.1544-1634), which culminated in the production of an illegitimate son, (Don Giovanni de’ Medici, 1567-1621). Then came Cosimo’s controversial union with Cammilla Martelli (1545-1590).
Cammilla’s relationship with Cosimo had certainly begun by 1567, since she gave birth to their daughter Virginia (d. 1615) on 29 May 1568. Liaisons of this sort, between a ruling prince and a younger woman of relatively modest origin, were unremarkable in the period context—until Cosimo took the astonishing step of marrying her on 29 March 1570. The timing of this act could not have been more shocking for observers throughout the courts of Europe. For some years, Cosimo had been waging a concerted diplomatic campaign to obtain the title of Grand Duke for himself and his heirs. On 9 February 1570, this exceptional honor was duly confirmed at the papal court and Cosimo was crowned with full ceremonial panoply by Pius V Ghislieri. Then, immediately after his return to Florence, Cosimo married his mistress Cammilla Martelli, who was anything but a Grand Duchess in the eyes of the world. On 18 May 1570, Emperor Maximilian II in Prague wrote to his sister Johanna (1548-1578; known in Italy as Giovanna d’Austria), "I cannot adequately express my astonishment at what the Duke might have been thinking when he contracted so ugly and shameful a family alliance, which is ridiculed by everyone. One imagines that the good Duke was not himself." (Cited by G.E. Saltini, Tragedie Medicee, p.356.) The Holy Roman Emperor had good cause for amazement and alarm, since his sister was married to Prince Francesco (later Francesco I; 1547-1587), Cosimo’s eldest son and designated heir. By any reasonable standard, Giovanna d’Austria was First Lady at the court of her widowed father-in-law, since her husband was both Crown Prince and Regent. Then suddenly the dubious and unpresentable Cammilla Martelli emerged from the shadows of concubinage to figure as Grand Duke Cosimo’s legitimate wife. In fact, Cosimo never committed the ultimate folly of crowning Cammilla Martelli as Grand Duchess of Tuscany and Giovanna herself became the first to bear that title after Francesco’s succession to the throne in 1574. It also appears that Cammilla maintained a generally low profile at court, at least in terms of ceremony and public life. We see her above all as Cosimo’s nurse and the much put-upon companion of his declining years. Always forceful and decisive, the founder of the Medici principate deteriorated into a cranky invalid who insisted on getting his own way at every turn. This resulted in a struggle between the ailing if still willful Grand Duke who wanted Cammilla constantly by his side and the inner circle of courtiers who did everything possible to separate them, as the present letter describes in the most unsubtle terms. ILLUSTRATIONS:
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 © 2002 by The Medici Archive Project |
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Cammilla
Martelli is a difficult figure to excavate from the depths of history,
since she was generally loathed in her own time and the surviving
accounts are anything but even-handed. Cammilla came from two good
though apparently impoverished Florentine families, the Martelli and
the Soderini, and was also the cousin of her predecessor in Cosimo’s
favor, Eleonora degli Albizzi. More often than not, her critics described
her as beautiful in appearance but mediocre in intelligence and coarse
in manner.