Review: The Black Prince of Florence by Catherine Fletcher

If Renaissance history is a crowded field, then the Medici are probably among its most popular biographical subjects. In spite of this, Catherine Fletcher has delivered a highly original perspective on a hitherto overlooked member of this dynasty. Alessandro de’ Medici’s life was short, but not short enough to see him become the first Duke of Florence, thus solidifying executive Medici rule over the city for centuries. Alessandro’s immediate legacy was far from positive, however, with chroniclers referring to his tyranny and illegitimate birth to dethrone him from a high place in history, hence Fletcher remarks that he had the misfortune to be assassinated twice: “first with a sword, then with a pen”. The Black Prince of Florence is an attempt to restore a more balanced view of this intriguing figure. Its subtitle, “The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici”, gives the book an ambitious double purpose, not only telling Alessandro’s life story but giving the reader a taster of courtly life and the unceasing appetite for vendetta in Florence. More than this, Fletcher contributes to the historical and historiographical issue of Alessandro’s race, citing previous studies of his life which have been undermined by scientific racism. Revisiting his life therefore raises questions not only of Florentine history, but of the historiographical assumptions behind past works across the discipline.

Alessandro’s father was Lorenzo De’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, but the identity of his mother has been the cause of much speculation. Fletcher asserts along with academic consensus since the 1880s that his mother was likely the servant or slave to Lorenzo’s mother, Alfonsina, who later penned a letter to Alessandro begging for assistance, signed “Simunetta”. In sixteenth-century Italy the slave population was still multi-ethnic - the Atlantic trade had not yet reached its peak - but Alfonsina had married into the Orsini family of Naples, where black Africans made up the majority of slaves around the time of Alessandro’s birth in 1511/12. Thus we cannot rule out the possibility that Simunetta was an African slave in Alfonsina’s household, but nor can we rule out that she could have hailed from other territories such as the Ottoman Empire or the Middle East. To make matters more complicated, at the time it was common for slaves to be freed after a certain period of service, so Simunetta could also have been the daughter of a free African. In any case, Alessandro’s enemies would frequently use his low birth to delegitimise his authority, and Fletcher points out that such criticism was done more in terms of social status than race in itself, although the two were obviously linked to some extent.

This brings us to the intense family rivalry that makes up the main drama of the book. Alessandro’s cousin, Ippolito, was also illegitimate, only his mother was a noblewoman from Urbino, which, along with his slight seniority, made him a more palatable candidate for becoming head of the dynasty. The power at stake here was the de facto government of Florence, where since their return from exile in 1512 the Medici had enjoyed something between tyrannical and oligarchical rule, but this power was becoming precarious as Holy Roman Emperors and French monarchs were vying for control over much of Italy, while Lorenzo’s death in 1519 made the Medici lose the Duchy of Urbino to its former rulers, the Della Rovere clan. Alessandro’s life coincided with a period of great change in the fortunes of Florence and Italy as a whole, then. In 1525 Ippolito was proclaimed figurehead of the family in Florence, while Alessandro moved to a villa at Poggio a Caiano just outside Florence along with his half-sister Catherine. The family’s struggle to hold the Tuscan capital reached its nadir with the Sack of Rome in 1527, as a result of which the Medici faction was once again expelled from the city. The ensuing two years saw a reversal in the fortunes of our two illegitimate protagonists, however, when Medici Pope Clement VII made Ippolito a cardinal just at the point that Alessandro seemed to be winning favour with the soon-to-be Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Crucially, Charles and Clement had signed the Treaty of Barcelona to mark a new-found alliance between Papacy and Empire, and Alessandro had been betrothed to Charles’ illegitimate daughter, Margaret of Austria. At this point we may remark on the preponderance of bastards in the story - Michelangelo once quipped that the Medici holdings should be referred to as the “Piazza dei Muli” (“mulo” meant “bastard” and Clement himself was also illegitimate).

The agreement between Charles and Clement helped the Medici retake Florence in 1531, but erstwhile favourite Ippolito felt trapped in a church career for which he had little enthusiasm, and was falling out of favour with Clement. Meanwhile, Alessandro was touring Germany with Charles V and his standing was ever increasing. He returned to Florence later that year, and although he would not hold the city’s ducal title for a year yet, he became the city’s de facto ruler, developing a highly cultured and lavish court in keeping with his status. Fletcher breaks the political narrative with some lively reconstructions of what this would have been like, from the shocking quantities of food and wine consumed to the grand paintings and arrases commissioned by the Duke for the Palazzo Medici. Needless to say, Ippolito became ever more bitter toward his favoured, fortuned cousin, and began to ingratiate himself with enemies of the Medici regime, including those factions which had taken control following the Sack of Rome. Meanwhile, to secure his power, Alessandro oversaw a system of exile or confino for political opponents, by which dissidents were not only banished but were forbidden from gathering together in major towns and cities. As time wore on this legislation became even more draconian. We read of an attempted uprising in 1534, in which the conspirators were decapitated, their heads displayed on spikes to put off other schemers. Such stories are countered with reports of Alessandro’s generosity: one chronicler, Ceccherelli, claimed that Alessandro would provide dowries for poor families, for example. Here was a careful public image campaign at work. 

This uneasy mixture of largesse towards citizens and punitive laws on dissent was not enough to stop the conspiratorial fever of Alessandro’s opponents. They were divided into the radical republican popolari exiles, and Ippolito and his circle of ottimati, powerful families with axes to grind with the Medici. A botched assassination attempt led these groups to fuse together in 1535, but their plans were scuppered further when Ippolito himself fell victim to poisoning. Confessions obtained by torture implicated the new Pope Paul III, an ally of Alessandro, but the whole debacle was covered up. One major threat remained, however, in the shape of Lorenzino de’ Medici, a member of a distant branch of the family that had long felt shut out of power. This was the so-called “cadet” branch, and they had been snubbed by Clement VII who sided against them in an internal money dispute concerning the will of Lorenzo the Magnificent from the previous century. It is easy to imagine the jealousy of multiple generations reaching its apogee with Lorenzino, who would have been angry at a bastard from the other side of the family holding all the power. Not only this, but Lorenzino was unpopular compared with Cosimo, the favourite of the cadet branch, which must have made him even angrier. Lorenzino had joined Alessandro’s court, but the Duke dismissed warnings from friends of his duplicity, and paid the price when this distant cousin had him murdered in January 1537. What Lorenzino had failed to realise was that the ducal title would simply pass on to Cosimo, and the murder led to his being exiled for the next ten years. Thus Alessandro’s murder did not cause a coup, but consolidated the security of the new dukedom of Florence, established in Alessandro’s brief reign.

Fletcher accompanies the unfolding of this labyrinthine plot with digressions which explain the “treacherous world” inhabited by the conspirators. This leads, at times, to rather potted histories of some key Medici stories like the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, but this is testament to the fact that the book is never led away from its focus. More surprising is the fact that space is allowed for lengthy passages from letters and accounts of the time, while major historical context like the Medici exile is often condensed into a single paragraph. Having said this, these quotations from the time are highly judicious. One especially fascinating source was the pasquinate, the poems pinned to the Pasquino statue in Rome which became the centrepiece of public satire. Fletcher debunks some long-held myths from the period, too. For example, we learn that there is no evidence that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V spoke “Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and Italian to my horse” as he is purported to have said, renowned though he was for his multilingualism. This richness in anecdotes, asides and drama is entirely appropriate in The Black Prince of Florence because the emphasis is on conveying Alessandro’s “treacherous world” as well as his life story. Perhaps more patently, the scarcity of source material and the sheer partiality of that which is extant makes writing a full monograph of Alessandro extremely challenging. Fletcher has risen highly successfully to this challenge. Her depiction of Renaissance Florence is vivid and spellbinding, and her afterword makes a convincing case that Alessandro’s racial heritage has hindered him from being seen as a major historical figure. This is not just a marvellous biography, then, but an important corrective towards a prejudiced historiography that must be addressed.