On the night of the 10th of July 1576, in a Medici villa far from the Florentine court, the youngest son of the Grand Duke of Tuscany took a dog leash in his hands and strangled his wife to death. Pietro de’ Medici was twenty-two years old. His wife, Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo, was twenty-three. They had been raised in the same household, side by side since childhood, as if they were brother and sister.
The next morning, Pietro sat down and wrote to his elder brother, Francesco I, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. “Last night at 6 hours,” he said, “an accident occurred to my wife, and she died. Therefore, your highness be at peace and write to me what I should do and if I should come back or not. ” It sounded innocent enough.
It was a lie. Grand Duke Francesco knew precisely what had happened. And he would never bring his brother to justice. Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo was born in March 1553 in Florence, in the very palace where she would later die.
She was of Spanish blood, the daughter of García Álvarez de Toledo y Osorio, a senior Spanish nobleman who held the titles of Marquess of Francavilla and Duke of Fernandina. Her mother was Vittoria d’Ascanio Colonna, a member of one of the most powerful Italian noble families in the peninsula, the same family from which Pope Martin V had hailed in the early fifteenth century. Eleonora was thus born into both the Spanish and Italian aristocracy at once. Yet she was not raised by her parents.
Her mother died when she was very young, and her father was often absent, dispatched by King Philip II of Spain to govern the territories that the Spanish crown controlled across Italy. For much of the 1560s, he served as governor of Spanish Sicily, and he later played a senior role in the Battle of Lepanto, the largest naval battle in history, where hundreds of Spanish, Venetian, and papal ships clashed against the enormous Turkish fleet of the Ottoman Empire. Left behind in Florence, Eleonora was raised by her cousins, the Medici family who ruled the city. She was often referred to as “Eleonora” by her relatives to distinguish her from her aunt, another Eleonora of Toledo, who had married Cosimo I, Duke of Florence, back in 1539.
In the Spanish tradition, Eleonora was a manina, an aristocratic child fostered out to another family to cultivate stronger ties between the two houses. Her aunt Eleonora of Toledo became her surrogate mother until her death in 1562, when the girl was just nine years old. Even after that loss, she was raised with affection at the Florentine court. Her uncle-in-law, Duke Cosimo, was enamored of her energetic charm and raised her as his own daughter, even after the death of his wife.
The same could not be said of all his own children. The family that raised Eleonora was a powerful one, though it had very nearly been destroyed as a political force only half a century before her birth. The Medici had originally come from the Tuscan countryside, where, as the name suggests, a family member had probably been a doctor or medic back in the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth century, they relocated to Florence, where they became a powerful banking family, loaning money as far away as London and Bruges.
On the back of their financial success, they became the unofficial rulers of the Florentine Republic in the fifteenth century, and they oversaw the patronage of the Renaissance, sponsoring artists like Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. In her youth, Eleonora would have walked past paintings by these Italian master painters hanging on the walls of the family’s palazzos in the city center. Yet, despite their contribution to the artistic heritage of the city, in 1494, at the start of the Italian Wars between France and Spain, the Medici were removed from power and fled into exile. It was only in the 1510s that they resumed control over Florence and began cementing their hold.
Finally, in 1532, they became the hereditary dukes of Florence. Thus Eleonora’s adoptive father, Cosimo, was only the second Medici Duke of Florence, and he became the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, a loftier title, in 1569. She grew up entrenched within one of the most powerful ruling families among the dozens of independent Italian duchies, republics, and states, spending her early life among the leading political figures and artists who came and went from the Medici court. Duke Cosimo was acutely conscious of the need to maintain the line of succession.
He himself had only come to power in 1537 because his cousin Alessandro de’ Medici, the first Duke of Florence, had died prematurely and without any legitimate children to succeed him. Cosimo was determined that this would not happen to his branch of the family. In 1562, his wife Eleonora of Toledo, the woman who had raised young Eleonora as her own, died of malaria. Into the void stepped Isabella de’ Medici, Cosimo’s brilliant daughter, who became the first lady of Florence and likely took Eleonora under her wing.
By then, the duchess had given Cosimo eleven children, and the Medici succession seemed secure. Yet Cosimo remained vigilant in arranging advantageous marriages for both his own children and those under his protection. Before long, young Eleonora became part of those dynastic plans. Then Cosimo made a fateful decision.
Eleonora would be married into the very family that had raised her. Her husband was chosen to be her first cousin, Pietro, the youngest son of Duke Cosimo I and Eleonora of Toledo, and just one year her junior. First-cousin marriages were nothing too unusual among the great dynasties of Europe at this time. But what set this one apart was far more unsettling.
Eleonora and Pietro did not merely share blood. They had shared their childhood, growing up side by side in the same household. For all the world, they were brother and sister in every way but name. Being the youngest son, Pietro was not in line to succeed to the dukedom, but in an age of high infant mortality, he or his children might become rulers of Florence one day.
Therefore, it was important that he marry young and have children. Eleonora and Pietro were betrothed to one another in 1568, when she was just fifteen and he was fourteen. The marriage did not take place until April 1571. Eleonora’s father, who at the time was preparing to lead large parts of the Christian armada against the Turks at Lepanto, provided a dowry of forty thousand gold ducats to the Duke, a sum equivalent to around twenty million dollars in today’s money.
For his part, Duke Cosimo bestowed extensive estates and properties on his son so that the newlyweds could live in comfort. On the surface, the marriage started well. In 1573, a son was born, whom they named Cosimino, a potential heir to the Duke one day as Cosimo’s grandson. But behind the scenes, all was not well.
While Duke Cosimo may have been very fond of his niece-in-law, he did Eleonora no favors by marrying her to Pietro. His youngest son was a disturbed young man whose psychological state had been known to be fragile from his early years. He was frequently violent and maintained a number of mistresses. Rumor around the Florentine court at the time claimed that he had been forced to consummate the marriage on his wedding night in 1571 and was reluctant to enter the marriage, despite the financial and political benefits it brought for both families.
Things went from bad to worse in the years that followed. Both Pietro and Eleonora kept lovers, but Pietro was said to physically mistreat his wife as well. Duke Cosimo did have some degree of control over his behavior and managed to keep him in check, but he eventually died on the 21st of April 1574. He was succeeded by his elder son, Francesco, who was a lot less successful in controlling his disturbed younger brother.
Then, just two years later, on the 11th of July 1576, Grand Duke Francesco received that shocking letter from his younger brother. Pietro wrote that his wife had died in an accident the previous night at six hours, and asked what he should do, whether he should come back or not. The following day, the Grand Duke wrote to his other brother, Ferdinando, next in line to the dukedom. “Last night around 5:00,” he said, “a really terrible accident happened to Donna Eleonora.
She was found in bed suffocated and Don Pietro and the others were not in time to revive her. ” Soon the story began to spread that it might have been a heart attack, an unlikely scenario for a healthy twenty-three-year-old woman. In reality, Pietro had strangled his own wife to death using a dog leash. This occurred while they were away from court, staying at a Medici villa.
Francesco knew of this, and yet he did not try to bring his own brother to justice for murdering his wife in such a cold-hearted manner. In fact, further nefarious events followed. Another member of the extended Medici family, Isabella, was killed six days later. Like Eleonora, with whom she was close friends, Isabella was trapped in a loveless marriage and had also taken a lover.
One of the men Eleonora had been involved with romantically, Bernardino Antinori, a courtier, knight, and poet, had even been murdered six days before Eleonora herself. This was seemingly on the Grand Duke’s orders. The wave of murders of Eleonora, Isabella, and Antinori seems to have occurred in an effort to crack down on the adultery that the leading male members of the Medici family were facing during the new reign. It was all highly controversial.
After all, Eleonora was the daughter of a leading Spanish noble and one of the most important officials in Italy. Antinori was also a hero of the Battle of Lepanto. Letters were sent from the Florentine court to Rome and Naples in the days that followed, putting forward the story that Eleonora had died in a freak accident. Few were fooled.
Francesco, who had sanctioned the murder of Antinori, was probably deeply annoyed with his brother for murdering his wife in such a callous way. Yet he would never seek to have him prosecuted. Eleonora’s father died in Naples a year later, having been unable to seek retribution in any way. In any event, his relationship with his absent daughter had always been a distant one.
The Spanish court was, of course, scandalized by the news, and with mounting pressure, Francesco had no choice but to confess the truth to King Philip II of Spain. He stated: “Although in the letter I had told you of Donna Eleonora’s accident, I have nevertheless to say to his Catholic majesty that Lord Pietro, our brother, had taken her life himself because of the treason she had committed through behavior unbecoming to a lady. We wish that his majesty should know the truth, and at the first opportunity, he’ll be sent the proceedings through which she should have known with what just reasons Lord Pietro acted. ”
Eleonora’s murder was recounted by a prominent local priest and musician in Florence, Agostino Lapini, who kept a valuable diary recording events in the city over several decades.
He stated of the incident that Eleonora was “21 years of age, beautiful, gracious, gentle, becoming, charming, affable, and above all had two eyes in her head, which were like two stars in their beauty. Everyone said that she was murdered. She was buried with rites in San Lorenzo. ” Thus, despite efforts by the Medici family to cover up what had happened, it had become widely known around the city that Eleonora had been murdered, though perhaps the full details of the brutal manner of her slaying by her husband were not fully known.
Eleonora’s legacy has been very mixed over the centuries. For starters, her sole child, Cosimino, only outlived her by a month and died from some illness contracted during infancy, a very common occurrence in the sixteenth century. This meant that the possibility of a succession from her short and violent marriage to Pietro was ruled out. Pietro did not have any further legitimate children, though he had many children out of wedlock.
Instead, he spent the rest of his life until 1604 as a constant burden on his family. He was a spendthrift, unstable, and spent much of his time exiled at the Spanish court, often trying to acquire money from creditors to fund his lavish lifestyle. His brother, Grand Duke Francesco, tried his best to keep him away from Florence, although Pietro occasionally showed up to seek money from the family coffers to relieve his debts. Unsurprisingly, the Medici family did their best to cover up what had happened to Eleonora, something that reflected very poorly on them, even by the standards of Renaissance Italy, a very violent time and place.
It is only over the last couple of decades that her story has been fully rediscovered, thanks to studies by a number of historians of the Medici women. A possible portrait of her by the Italian painter Alessandro Allori is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna today, though it might also be of one of Duke Cosimo’s daughters.
