Those Pesky Extra de Medici

Cosimo III had some odd ideas about establishing cadet lines of the house of Medici (albeit, then, it was on its way out). I mean, take the plainest princess in Europe (Violante Beatrix of Bavaria), the second gayest prince in Europe (Gian Gastone) and a crazy horse-whispering duchess (Anne Marie Franziska of Saxe-Lauenburg) and I don't really think there was much hope for it - either in Lorraine in the Treaty of Nijmegen or in Bohemia twenty years later.

However, the Medici (as in Cosimo I's descendants) left at least three OTL opportunities for cadet branches that could've outlasted the main line:

1) Pietro de Medici, youngest son of Cosimo I, best known for murdering his first wife and cousin, Eleonora de Toledo. Pietro was a bit of a black sheep, always in debt (which his brothers didn't like paying, understandably). He married as his second wife, Brites de Lara in 1578, and had a son named Pietro (1592-1654) with her (not to mention his bastard son, Cosimino (1577-1603)), as well as three daughters - Giovanna, Caterina and Maria Vittoria, the last of whom took holy orders at the Convent of Santissima Annunziata.

2) Giovanni de Medici, legitimized son of Cosimo I by Eleonora degli Albizzi. Another black sheep, originally destined for the church and ended up in armour designing the Belvedere Fortress in Florence instead. A military man, he acquired some wealth, was a patron of the arts and sciences (and apparently, friendly with some Jews), and married the Genoese lady, Livia de Vernazza. By Livia he had two children, but since the Medici weren't keen on the whole child-support thing, they disinherited the kids (by pointing out that Livia's first husband was not really dead when she married Giovanni (or some such)), a boy, Giovanni Francesco (1619-1689) and a girl, Maria Maddalena (1621-1621) and seized Giovanni's wealth when he died.

3) Staying with disinheriting kids by previously married ladies, Francesco I married his mistress, Bianca Cappello shortly after his wife, Johanna of Austria, died. She had given him a son, and Grand Duke Ferdinando, on Francesco and Bianca's deaths, disinherited the boy, Antonio (1576-1621) by claiming that he was a changeling. That done, he pushed Antonio into the Order of Malta to prevent him having kids. Fat lot of good that did, Antonio kept a mistress, a Lucchese lady named Artemisia Tozzi, and sired five kids by her: Maria, Maddalena (1610-), Paolo (1616-1656); Giulio (1617-1670); and Antonio Francesco (1618-1659). Of these, Antonio Francesco married a girl named Maria Francesca Angietti, but there's no record of children being born; whilst Maria and Maddalena both ended up alongside their cousin as nuns at the Santissima Annunziata Convent.

I can understand the disinheritance of these kids, and, given the day and age in which they lived, I suppose poison would've been an easier method of ridding the world of them. But what if these side branches of the Medici were to form a sort of princes du sang in Florence, much like the Vendomes, the Maines and the Toulouses did at Versailles. That way, if the main branch looks like it's dying out, marry one of them (or their son) to the nearest main-line princess and do what Cosimo III wanted to do, and establish semi-salic succession. After all, it was written when the Austrians took over, that: "the Tuscans would give two thirds of what they possessed to have the Medici back, and the remaining third to be rid of the Lorrainers".

Are cadet lines possible? Could we perhaps see the Medici survive longer than to 1743? Is it possible Tuscany can recover to the extent it did under the Lorraines?
 
Are cadet lines possible? Could we perhaps see the Medici survive longer than to 1743? Is it possible Tuscany can recover to the extent it did under the Lorraines?

Very easily possible - you can have Francesco de'Medici (another black sheep), the son of Cosimo II not die from plague at 19 and found a line.

Also, Ferdinando I had several sons who died young and/or unmarried. Just butterfly one away and you have a cadet branch.
 
There were, in fact, cadet lines of the Medici, although substantially more distant than the ones hitherto proposed. However, this would not make them ineligible for the Grand Duchy of Tuscany - after all, Grand Duke Cosimo I inherited the Duchy of Florence from Alessandro il Moro, who was from a completely different branch of the Medici. So we don't necessarily even need any of these guys to have kids or be legitimated: all we need is for their succession rights to be acknowledged.

The closest male-line relatives to the Grand Ducal line in c.1700 would be the Castellina line, descended from the great-grandfather of Giovanni di Bicci. Source: http://genealogy.euweb.cz/italy/medici9.html - however, this site does have a lot of errors, so take it with a pinch of salt. I found a really badly-designed website in Italian about a month ago with a much more complete genealogy of the junior lines, but I can't find it.

Perhaps if Anna Maria Luisa (1667 - 1743) had been married off to Marchese Francesco Maria, that would have brought them in genealogically. The thing is, a lot of other, more powerful, people wanted Tuscany for their own cadet lines - not least the Habsburgs. Also, the closest agnatic-cognatic heir was Elisabetta Farnese, and having a load of legal bastards at the bottom of the line of succession, as OP is suggesting, isn't going to change the fact that the Spaniards and the Emperor both favour themselves as the heir. These guys have a lot more power and legitimacy than the potential grandchildren of a knight of Malta. By 1717, the powers weren't even interested in a neutral Tuscany, as the Duke of Modena was dismissed out of hand as a successor.

In short, the Medici did survive after 1743, but the devil is in the details of how the hell they will succeed in the mid-1700s, with the Stately Quadrille going on. A good starting point would be Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici marrying a junior branch in or before 1691 - maybe one of those bastards, or the junior line - and Cosimo III mentioning his plans for the succession at the end of the War of the Spanish succession and getting all the major powers to agree to it. The future success of Tuscany depends entirely upon the characters of the new heirs, given the autocratic government of the time, so I will refrain from speculating on that.

The butterflies that really make my head spin are the ones springing from the War of the Polish Succession, when August III of Poland-Saxony, Stanislaw Leszczynski, the estate of Gian Gastone de' Medici and Francois Joseph of Lorraine all swapped territories between each other. Without Tuscany as a bargaining chip, that whole line of dominoes falls down like a stack of cards. Check-mate.

EDIT: I found the badly designed website: http://associazione-legittimista-it...12/06/i-de-medici-ottajano-quando-essere.html

This complicates the matter of succession in the event that the cadet lines proposed by JonasResende and jb3 don't survive. The Castellino line now appears to survive to the present day, but its founder was apparently the youngest son of his father. Now, the guy who would marry Anna Maria Luisa under my scheme would be Andrea or Ottaviano de' Medici, Principe di Ottajano.
 
Last edited:
I think Antonio definitely got the short end of the stick, betrayed not once but several times by his family. First the Spanish king had promised to recognize him as heir to Tuscany, but then when his uncle pulled a Richard III, Felipe did nothing. Then Ferdinando had promised Felipe to settle on the boy what were his dues as a legitimate member of the family, only to again backstab him by having him declared an illegitimate changeling, and forcing him then into the Order of Malta. Then when Antonio was dying, he commended his children to Madama [Christine de Lorraine] who promised to look after them and care for them. The girls she sent into a convent the second the breath left his body, and the boys were mopped up by sending them into the clergy. And then, the insolence of the mainline Medici didn't stop there, they seized Antonio's property which he had bequeathed to those same children he had entrusted to Madama (which was valued at over a million gold scudi) and incorporated it into the Medici coffers.

Some family
 
Then there's Giovanni, who, as cited in Edward Goldberg's Jews and Magic in Medici Florence:

The event [the birth Giovanni's child] was greeted with jubilation in a small corner of the Florentine Ghetto, but at the Medici Court the prevailing reaction was shock and horror. The granducal family had been praying that the rumours were true – that this daughter of a Genoese mattress maker was merely faking her illustrious pregnancy. In hope of confirmation, Niccolò Sacchetti, the Tuscan Ambassador in Venice had tried and failed to infiltrate D. Giovanni’s palace with spies.
In early August D. Giovanni’s old friend D. Garzia de Montalvo was dispatched to Venice to block a feared marriage attempt, since the only thing worse than a Vernazza bastard was a legitimate offspring. Montalvo returned to Florence convinced of his success, and D. Giovanni reinforced this belief in a personal letter to his nephew Grand Duke Cosimo II. Then, only a few hours before the birth of Giovanni Francesco Maria dei Medici, D. Giovanni and D. Livia were secretly married at the local convent.

The question to my mind is, everyone knew Giovanni was a bastard, what did it matter if he had legitimate kids? Yes, Alessandro il Moro had been a bastard, but he'd been plucked out of a possibility of three candidates - two bastards and a girl. Giovanni would've known he had no claim to the throne of Tuscany (unless by some miracle the snobbish Medici decided to include him in the line of succession, which would've meant then that they would have to include Antonio too), so what were the Medici so scared of?
 
A cool match for one of these ladies would be the daughter of that famed English explorer (who but for the grand duke's untimely death would've led the first Italian foray into colonialism by staking out parts of Guiana and Brazil for Tuscany), Robert Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, Earl of Warwick. As I understand it, he was resident in Florence, something of a favorite with Grand Duchess Maria Magdalena (who got Imperial recognition for his titles), and a Catholic.
 
Wow, thanks for the info, Kellan, I knew the Medici were assholes, but that they could be so rapacious. Makes one wonder what they used that money for, since none of the Ferdinandine line seems to have had any financial acumen.

As to the Dudley marriage, that might certainly be interesting, with Robert Dudley serving as chamberlain to three successive grand duchesses, and being one of the only foreigners to retain a place in the service following the death of Cosimo II. I think it's a pity that some of Ferdinando's ideas on the military and navy weren't put to better use, and a Medicean colony's always interesting.

@Uhura: thanks for the site, was interested to find out that there are still Medici bouncing around. And the Ottajano branch have the added distinction of descending from Duke Alessandro il Moro's bastard daughter, Giulia - I think - as well as from Lorenzo the Magnificent's Salviati grandchildren. So either way one would be bringing in blood from a previous sovereign.

However, Cosimo I was Alessandro's nearest Medici heir, not through his father, Giovanni delle Bande Nere dei Medici, but through his mother, Maria Salviati - who was the daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Alessandro's grandfather (if the duke of Urbino was his dad) or great-uncle (if paternity goes to Clemente VII)).
 
Top