Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  Isabella replied to the letter on the seventeenth of the month, pleading ill health and assuring him that she was scoping out an architect for renovations he planned for his properties. “. . . I desire nothing more than to serve you, so order from me the things you want.”

  Francesco then began to close in on Troilo, arresting two of his servants on suspicion of their involvement in another murder. As city officials had rarely intervened in the rash of homicides that had taken place in Florence since Cosimo’s death, Troilo correctly sensed that his turn was coming. He bade farewell to Isabella and spurred his horse for Bologna. Eventually he would find sanctuary in Paris, having always been a favorite of Catherine de Medici.

  Troilo had a good reason for not going south to Rome and the bosom of his Orsini family. Sleeping with the wife of their most powerful family member for nearly a dozen years would not have made him terribly popular there.

  On September 22, a warrant for Troilo’s arrest was posted in the Florentine piazzas. He and his servants were accused of harboring murderers and for killing Torello de’ Nobili da Fermo. In February 1576, a notice was issued stating that Troilo and his accomplices were condemned to banishment and all of their property was to be confiscated; this would include any of his love letters to Isabella. The crimes for which Troilo Orsini was condemned, apart from the stabbing of a nobody, were ordinarily considered misdemeanors. The real reason Francesco wanted Troilo arrested was because the man was his sister’s lover. Now he was an outlaw. If Troilo returned to Florence, and Isabella’s arms, he faced execution.

  In May of 1576, Isabella quietly retreated to the Medici property at Cafaggiolo, a renovated fourteenth-century villa with castellated crenellations fifteen miles north of Florence. Ercole Cortile, the Ferrarese ambassador, speculated in his report of May 13 that “Lady Isabella has been these past five days staying at Cafaggiolo, and there are some saying that a previous time when she went, it was to let her body swell, and that it will be like that other time, when she was healthy again after nine months.”

  Cortile’s speculation may have been merely the regurgitation of a rumor. Or not. Isabella and Troilo probably did enjoy a passionate final encounter, knowing they would likely never see each other again. However, there is no firm proof that Isabella was concealing a pregnancy, and if so, how far along she might have been. Troilo had fled Florence in September. She had not seen Paolo since the end of October and, pleading genuine sickness at the time, probably would have kicked her husband out of her bed.

  He arrived in Florence during the first week of July 1576. Cortile reported, “Signor Paolo Giordano Orsini . . . is coming to take the Lady Isabella back to Bracciano, if he can. But it is believed that he’s not going to be able to, because the aforesaid lady does not want to leave here for anything.” Isabella’s horror of losing her freedom and leaving her beloved home for her husband’s gloomy castle and overbearing companionship was now a matter of national curiosity.

  Paolo fetched his wife from Florence, but he did not take her all the way to Bracciano. Instead, he brought her to the isolated Medici villa at Cerreto Guidi. On July 16, 1576, Isabella died under suspicious circumstances. She was thirty-four.

  Paolo offered a number of explanations for his wife’s death. His story changed a few times: that she suffered an epileptic fit (although Isabella was not an epileptic), or had a sudden heart attack during a planned hunting expedition, or that she had struck her head on a basin while she was washing her hair. In his letter to Francesco informing him of Isabella’s demise, Paolo used the word “repentantly,” intimating that Isabella might have had time to receive last rites, but Francesco’s public statements, issued after he learned of the sad event, indicated that she had been found dead and all attempts to revive her had been unsuccessful.

  Yet rumors quickly spread that Isabella’s husband had killed her because of her adulterous affair with his cousin. It wasn’t too long before those stories reached Philip II’s court in Spain.

  On the day of Isabella’s murder, Francesco sent Paolo Orsini a letter. He did not even deign to console his brother-in-law himself. The coldhearted note, which evinced no shock at Isabella’s demise, was penned by his secretary.

  With so much sorrow I have heard in your letter about the death of the Lady Isabella, your wife and my sister. You can judge it so, because this lady remained the last of this house, and was loved by me so tenderly. I believe you did not lack any diligence or remedy in attempting to save her from the accident which took her life, and if Your Excellency has any need of anything at this time, I will send whatever I have in store. . . . You can have her brought tomorrow morning or the next in a box to outside the Porta San Frediano, where the monastery of Monticello or of Monte Olivero will take care of all the formalities for taking her to bury her in San Lorenzo with the honours that merit such a lady. . . .

  Given his calculated reply to Paolo, Francesco already knew more about his sister’s untimely demise than he was willing to reveal in a letter written on his behalf by an employee.

  Paolo’s lies weren’t believed for long. Isabella’s servants had been present, and soon the truth about her death was revealed. Ercole Cortile described her final moments in lurid detail to his patron, the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso II d’Este.

  The Lady Isabella was strangled, having been called by Lord Paolo when she, the poor woman, was in bed. She arose immediately, and as she was in a nightgown, drew a robe about her, and went to his room, passing through a room in which the priest known as Elicona was with several other servants; they say that her face and the set of her shoulders told that she may have known what was in store for her. Morgante [her dwarf] and his wife were in his chamber, and Lord Paolo hunted them out and bolted the door with great fury. Hidden under the bed was a Roman Knight of Malta, Massimo, who helped to kill the lady. He did not remain more than a quarter of an hour locked in the room before Paolo called for a woman, Donna Lucrezia Frescobaldi, telling her to bring vinegar because the lady had fainted. Once she had entered, followed immediately by Morgante, she saw the poor lady on the ground and propped against the bed, and overcome by her love for her, said, “Oh, you have killed her! What need have you of vinegar or anything else?” Lord Paolo threatened her and [urged her to] hold her tongue or he would kill her. . . . [T]he lady was placed in a coffin already prepared for this purpose, and this was taken at night to Florence and placed in the Church of the Carmine and was forced open for anyone who wished to see. And it was said that there was never seen a more ugly monster. Her head was swollen beyond measure, the lips thickened and black like two sausages, the eyes open [and] bulging like two wounds, the breasts swollen and one completely split, it is said because of the weight [of] Lord Paolo who threw himself on her to kill her as quickly as possible. And the stench was so great that no one could go close. She was black from the middle up and completely white below, according to what Niccolò of Ferrara told me, who had lifted the covers, as others had done to see her. She was buried the following night in San Lorenzo.

  So much for Francesco honoring his sister’s corpse. What really happened is that he left it out to stink and become putrid, a tacit warning to other wayward wives. The diarist Agostino Lapini wrote of the once beautiful Isabella, “She appeared to those who saw her like a monster, so black and ugly.”

  Yet rather than be horrified by the brutality of Isabella’s death and the stunning revelation that it was her husband who had been complicit in her murder, it was the Medici princess who suffered the blame for tarnishing the family honor. Isabella’s brother Francesco, who became the head of the family after their father died, had long accused her of sullying the Medici name, even as he had hypocritically enjoyed the favors of a mistress for years. He had already attempted to eliminate Isabella’s lover Troilo Orsini. It was not a big leap for the unscrupulous Francesco to be complicit in the death of his own sister if he thought she was causing trouble for the family. And he was
so powerful—and ruthless—that he may even have ordered it. Her husband, however, was the executioner.

  The tension between Isabella and Paolo was known to some insiders. Their living apart demeaned Paolo’s masculinity, which was so much a part of his Italian character. Ercole Cortile described Isabella as Paolo’s “moglie tanto odiato”—his “wife so hated.”

  But the public knowledge of their dirty linen had been too much for him to bear. Paolo no longer needed Isabella after she’d given him a healthy heir, Virginio, four years earlier, in 1572. And with her powerful father dead and buried and her dour, misanthropic, vegetarian brother Francesco now Grand Duke, Isabella no longer had an ally and protector in the family. If Francesco asked Paolo to squash Isabella like a bug, he would do just that—literally, by restraining her with his massive bulk, crushing her to death as he choked her.

  On September 1, 1576, Cortile reported to the Duke of Ferrara that Isabella had died intestate, meaning without a will, and that in order to pay off her debts, all of her possessions were being sold—at least those items that were not being appropriated instead by Francesco’s greedy longtime mistress Bianca Cappello. According to Cortile, “They have given the Lady Duchess [Francesco’s wife Johanna] guardianship of the children of the Lady Isabella. It has been said that Signor Paolo does not want them, claiming that they are not his children, although I have not had confirmation of this.”

  Paolo had washed his murderous hands of his wife. Citing his vast debts, he wrote to Francesco trying to beg off paying for her tomb. But he had just derailed his gravy train of his own accord. His wife wasn’t around anymore to keep sending him money.

  Isabella’s twenty-first-century biographer Caroline P. Murphy cogently notes that, metaphorically speaking, while it was an Orsini sword that slew Isabella, it was a Medici hand on the hilt, meaning that Paolo would not have acted so rashly without Francesco’s approval. And while Paolo was immediately ready to disavow everything about Isabella, including their children, insisting for the first time after her murder that his only son and heir (as well as their daughter) were not his kids, it was Francesco who was prepared to pursue his vengeance even further before her corpse grew cold. Blaming her even in death for dishonoring the House of Medici, he targeted those in her circle of acquaintances, confidants, and servants, rounding them up, detaining them, and in some cases ordering their executions. More than a year after his sister’s demise, the duke was still hunting down his quarry.

  Through a third party, he hired Ambrogio Tremazzi, a contract killer, to track down Troilo, who had been living in Paris. After bargaining the price up from two hundred scudi to three hundred because of the duration and complexity of the job, Tremazzi had to forfeit his twelve-year-old son as a hostage; the boy would be returned safely to him upon the successful completion of his mission.

  After stalking Troilo’s movements for several weeks, on November 30, 1577, Tremazzi finally got a clear enough bead on him to accomplish the purpose of his errand. According to the detailed account written by the assassin himself, “I took my harquebus from my side, and fired it with as much force as I could.” The bullet hit its target, knocking Troilo from his horse. As he fell to the ground, “he uttered nothing other than oh, oh.”

  The formidable Queen Mother of France, Catherine de Medici, expressed her fury at Troilo’s assassination, an emotion that remained unabated four years after the fact. In 1581, when Francesco continued to be unmoved by her anger, Catherine declared, “The Grand Duke does not take account of me, as to the displeasure of myself and the king [her son Henri III], and in front of our very eyes he had Signor Troilo Orsini and others killed.”

  Francesco’s reply, which resulted in an utter breakdown of diplomatic relations between Florence and France, was, “Even if the lives of Signor Troilo and others were taken in your kingdom, what they had done meant they did not deserve life.”

  Five years after Isabella’s murder, Paolo d’Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, took a mistress, the very married Vittoria Accoramboni. Vittoria’s husband, Francesco Peretti, had initially turned a blind eye to her adulterous affair with Paolo, because it gained him entrée into the powerful Orsini circle. But when the duke decided he wanted to marry Vittoria, Peretti became an inconvenience, and so Paolo had him murdered. This little shenanigan mightily displeased the Medici family, who were looking forward to a long and spectacular career for their only legitimate heir, Virginio—Paolo’s son by the late Isabella. The last thing the Medici wanted was for Paolo to remarry and father more bambini by a non-Medici wife. Well connected with Pope Gregory XIII, the Medici were able to have His Holiness prohibit the new Orsini marriage.

  Nevertheless, Paolo recklessly went ahead with it, wedding Vittoria on April 20, 1585, ten days after the death of Gregory XIII. But the pope’s successor was even worse news for Paolo: Pope Sixtus V Peretti was the uncle of Vittoria’s murdered husband, Francesco.

  The newlyweds fled, splitting up—Vittoria to Padua, and Paolo to Venice, then to Albano, and Salò, where he died on November 13. Vittoria was stabbed to death in December 1585 in Padua by Prince Lodovico Orsini, who had been sent there to settle her affairs under the terms of Paolo’s will. John Addington Symonds, in his Renaissance in Italy: The Catholic Reaction, explains that Vittoria’s murder arose out of a dispute over the distribution of property. Additionally, Lodovico believed that his kinsman had married beneath him and couldn’t accept the idea of Paolo’s low-class widow receiving his worldly goods. Yet another source claims that Lodovico was a member of the Monterotondo branch of the Orsini family, as was Isabella de Medici’s lover Troilo, and had killed Vittoria in a vendetta because Paolo had been responsible for Lodovico’s brother’s death, as the result of a family feud in which Paolo had somehow been involved.

  But Lodovico was not able to take the money and run. He was imprisoned for murder and strangled while incarcerated. Having eaten their own, the House of Orsini’s power and authority was entirely debased by the scandal, ending its dominance over Roman affairs.

  John Webster’s highly fictionalized 1612 revenge tragedy The White Devil was loosely based on the death of Vittoria Accoramboni and the ensuing vendettas. In the nineteenth century, the lurid events of her demise and the sordid behavior within one of Renaissance Italy’s most notorious families would inspire both Stendhal and Dumas père to take up their pens, the former with his novel Vittoria Accoramboni as well as his three Italian Chronicles, and the latter with Les Médicis.

  Paolo’s lands and dukedom were inherited by his son, Virginio. In the late autumn of 1600, Virginio arrived in England for an extended stay at the court of Elizabeth I, and soon became very popular there. On January 6, 1601, the queen’s players aptly performed William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which had been composed as the entertainment for the Epiphany feast. A principal character, the love-struck Duke Orsino, who yearns to be surfeited with music, if it be the food of love, was most likely named in honor of Her Majesty’s Florentine guest.

  Isabella and Paolo’s daughter, Nora, became an accomplished composer. Wed to her cousin Alessandro Sforza for two decades, she did not enjoy a happy marriage and eventually retired to a convent she had founded.

  The death of the faithless Isabella at the hands of her equally philandering husband, and the murder of her lover at the behest of her brother Francesco, immediately entered the realm of legend. The eighteenth-century curate Mark Noble deemed Isabella “one of the most profligate princesses that ever disgraced the Christian profession.”

  And then she disappeared for centuries, her genuine accomplishments obscured or obliterated entirely by a code of silence known as a damnatio memoriae, condemning the display of any memories of her. Thus, Isabella’s achievements with regard to music, and the furtherance of the Tuscan language and scholarship, went unheralded because she had soiled the family honor with her adultery. Her love poetry and celebrated musical compositions, including the madrigal
s, have disappeared without a trace. Even the miniature portraits of her, which would have been included in a set painted of the entire Medici family, are gone, as if they had been willfully removed.

  While little is known about Isabella’s life compared to many of the other women profiled in this volume, even less is known about her first cousin and sister-in-law, Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo. She enjoyed a brief resurgence as a sentimental tragic heroine in the nineteenth century, but then disappeared under the waves again. No major English-language biography has been written about her. Her story is inextricably linked to Isabella Romola de Medici’s, and mirrors it almost completely.

  Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo was named for her father’s sister, Isabella’s mother. The junior Eleonora, nicknamed both “Leonora” and “Dianora,” was half Spanish and half Italian. Her father was a Spanish grandee, or nobleman, García Álvarez de Toledo y Osorio, the 4th Marquis of Villafranca del Bierzo as well as Duke of Fernandina. Her mother was Vittoria d’Ascanio Colonna. Eleven years younger than Isabella, Leonora had been born at the Florentine court because her father had been assigned to oversee the castles of Valdichiana. On behalf of Philip II, king of Spain, García Álvarez subsequently became Viceroy of Catalonia, and later Viceroy of Sicily. In October 1571, García would distinguish himself as Philip’s commander at the Battle of Lepanto, a major maritime conflict off the coast of Greece that pitted a fleet of the Holy League (a coalition of Catholic allies, all of which were southern European maritime states) against the navy of the Ottoman Empire.

  Leonora was left in the care of her aunt Eleonora and uncle Cosimo to be raised in the Medici court as a menina, a girl groomed to be a professional courtier in the Spanish tradition of courtly fostering, similar to the outplacing enjoyed by Lady Jane Grey and English girls of her social status. But Eleonora’s death on December 17, 1562, left Leonora motherless again, and the independent-minded Isabella took her young cousin under her wing.