Cosimo I de' Medici

Grand duke of Tuscany (1569-1574)

• Born: June 12, 1519
• Birthplace: Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: April 21, 1574
• Place of death: Villa di Castello, near Florence (now in Italy)

Cosimo I centralized the governmental and cultural institutions of the Tuscan state, giving permanence to its transition from a republic to a hereditary principality. He provided the city of Florence and the Medici halls of state with ornamentation fit for the seat of a duchy, employing an outstanding group of artists and architects.

Early Life

Cosimo I de’ Medici (KAW-see-moh day MEHD-ee-chee) was born to a celebrated military leader, Giovanni delle Bande Nere de’ Medici, descended from the younger son of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici. The junior, or younger, branch of the family had always been active in Medici business enterprises but not in Florentine politics. Cosimo’s mother, Maria Salviati, was a member of the senior Medici line descended from Giovanni di Bicci’s first son, Cosimo the Elder. Cosimo I was born in the Salviati palace in Florence, and his great uncle on his mother’s side, Giovanni de’ Medici (later known as Pope Leo X), chose the boy’s name in honor of his illustrious ancestor.

The unstable political climate in Florence forced the family to move frequently. When Cosimo was seven, his father died in battle near Mantua, and after having spent much of his early childhood in Venice, the boy was shuttled between Bologna, Genoa, Naples, and his family’s villa, Il Trebbio, north of Florence, where he could indulge his passion for hunting. Surrounded by his father’s former officers, Cosimo aspired to become a soldier. He often dressed as one until his great uncle, Pope Leo’s successor Clement VII, ordered him to stop.

On January 7, 1537, Lorenzino de’ Medici assassinated his unpopular cousin Duke Alessandro of Florence, who had ruled the city with a heavy hand. Lorenzo’s subsequent flight and the illegitimacy of Alessandro’s four-year-old son Giulio left the seventeen-year-old Cosimo the logical successor. At the time of his formal election on January 8, 1537, he and his mother were staying in a house next to the Palazzo Medici in Florence.

Life’s Work

Many politically active members of Florence’s patrician families welcomed the accession of Cosimo. Since the boy was neither deeply familiar with Florence nor schooled in the arts of statecraft, political veterans such as Francesco Guicciardini expected to manipulate or lead him, governing in his stead. Showing surprising acumen, however, Cosimo outmaneuvered his would-be handlers, managing to gather the reins of power into his own hands. In 1540, he moved into the Palazzo Vecchio, former seat of Florence’s republican government, an event that heralded his dominance. He was assisted by his dashing father’s popularity among the lower classes, his mother’s intimate knowledge of the Florentine elite, and the astute advice of his secretary Francesco Campana. Eventually, he would succeed in transforming the old governing class into courtiers, appointing them to honorary posts in which they exercised little real power.

Decisive in strengthening Cosimo’s rulership was the Battle of Montemurlo, fought near Prato on July 31, 1537, in which he defeated an army led by Piero Strozzi and other anti-Medici Florentine exiles. On October 4, 1539, he augmented his international stature by marrying Eleonora de Toledo, daughter of the imperial viceroy of Naples, Pedro de Toledo. Otherwise secretive and often cold, Cosimo was a loving husband, fathering eleven children with Eleonora. It was Eleonora who purchased Florence’s spacious Pitti Palace, which, enlarged by sculptor and architect Bartolommeo Ammannati and others, became the permanent Medici seat.

Cosimo developed Florence’s diplomatic and intelligence network to serve his dynastic plans, which included territorial expansion. In 1546, he sought to annex Lucca after discovering a plot by the Lucchese Franceso Burlamacchi, who wanted to free Pisa from Medici rule and rally other Tuscan cities to expel the Spanish and overthrow Cosimo. Loyal Lucchese officials, however, appealed to the emperor and forestalled the duke’s plans. Cosimo enjoyed more success with Siena, when, after an expensive three-year war, he managed to win that city for Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1555.

Although failing once again in negotiations that would have allowed his victorious army to assault Lucca, and unsuccessfully petitioning Pope Pius IV in 1559 to be crowned king of Tuscany, he succeeded in other efforts. In 1562, he arranged for Pius IV to found the military order of Santo Stefano with Cosimo as its head, a privilege reserved normally for royalty. In 1565, he wedded his son and eventual successor, Francesco, to the Austrian archduchess Joanna, daughter of the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand I and sister of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. Since Cosimo had supported certain Counter-Reformation measures of Pius V, that pope granted him the hereditary title of grand duke on August 27, 1569, in a lavish ceremony in Rome.

At home, Cosimo also sought through a wide variety of means to strengthen his state. The year 1550 saw the maiden voyages of La Saetta and La Pisana, the first warships of Florence’s soon-considerable navy based at Elba Island. Like the military order of Santo Stefano, the navy was designed to protect shipping from Barbary Coast pirates, or corsairs. With foresight, he also promoted the development of Livorno, reducing dependence on Pisa as a mercantile port.

Yet he did not neglect Pisa, posting the engineer Luca Martini there to devise and oversee the construction of a canal system for that city. Cosimo’s other engineering projects included a scheme to drain the malarial marshes of the Sienese coastal plain following the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (April 3, 1559), which gave him formal possession of those territories. In Florence, after the Arno flood of 1557, Cosimo commissioned Ammannati to rebuild the Ponte alla Carraia and to construct another bridge, the Ponte Santa Trinità (begun 1566).

Overshadowing Cosimo’s architectural improvements in the Palazzo Vecchio was his project, begun in 1559, to consolidate the government offices in a single complex next to the Palazzo Vecchio. Giorgio Vasari designed the grand buildings known simply as the Uffizi (offices), which today houses a famous art collection.

Between March and September of 1565, Vasari constructed an elevated corridor through the city for ducal use, befitting Cosimo’s status and reflecting his continual security concerns. Known simply as the Corridoio (corridor), it connects the Palazzo Vecchio and Uffizi with the Pitti Palace across the Arno River. Cosimo also established a tapestry workshop at Florence’s Foundling Hospital to compete with the lucrative near-monopoly of the Flemish on that highly prestigious product, complementing Florence’s long-standing wool and silk industries (the latter of which he also sought to revive). Also, to stimulate commerce, he offered tax incentives to non-Florentine businesses willing to relocate to his territory.

Cosimo was also a shrewd sponsor of the arts. He founded the Accademia Fiorentina (Florentine Academy) in 1541 to promote and publicize the virtues of the Florentine language. Its illustrious membership included Italian scholar Benedetto Varchi, who wrote a history of Florence for the period 1527-1538 for Cosimo. Six years later, he ensured a publishing outlet for academy members by bringing Lorenzo Torrentino from Bologna as ducal printer, although the press foundered twenty years later. Since commissioning the spectacular decorations for his own wedding, Cosimo had attracted a circle of gifted artists, among them architect Vasari, sculptors Giovanni da Bologna (Giambologna) and Benvenuto Cellini, and painters Cecchino Salviati, Agnolo di Cosimo (Il Bronzino), and Jacopo da Pontormo.

After the mid-1560’s, Cosimo started few major enterprises. Plagued by advanced uricemia and arteriosclerosis and saddened by the premature deaths of his wife and several children, Cosimo began in 1564 to delegate official duties to his son Francesco. After illicitly fathering a son, Giovanni, by Eleonora degli Albizzi, he began a liaison with another Florentine woman, Camilla Martelli, which, in May of 1568, produced a daughter, Virginia. He astonished the court by marrying Camilla on March 29, 1570, although she never assumed the title of grand duchess. In the following years, Cosimo suffered a series of strokes that disabled him and left him inarticulate. After two months of semiconsciousness, he died on April 21, 1574.

Significance

Cosimo greatly strengthened the machinery of state, rationalizing its bureaucracy and making it more meritocratic. The measures he took for attracting new industry, revitalizing existing textile production, and reclaiming arable land brought Tuscany’s economy to the high point of its sixteenth century fortunes. His development of Leghorn also proved farsighted. On the cultural front, he transformed loosely structured local academies into state-supervised institutions and promoted the use of the Florentine idiom in literary and scientific works, preparing the way for Tuscan to become a pan-Italian language.

Bibliography

Booth, Cecily. Cosimo I. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1921. The most thorough treatment in English of Cosimo’s life.

Cox-Rearick, Janet. “Art at the Court of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici.” The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. An overview that clearly relates phases of Cosimo’s patronage of painters and sculptors and discusses stages in his political career.

Cox-Rearick, Janet. Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. Analyzes the cosmological and dynastic aspects of imagery that Cosimo used to propagandize his absolute rule, comparing it to the less-overt symbolism of fifteenth century Medici art.

Eisenbichler, Konrad, ed. The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2001. A many-faceted collection of essays examining, through case studies, Cosimo as a statesman and a patron of art, literature, and craft industries.

Hibbert, Christopher. “Duke Cosimo I.” The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall. New York: Perennial Press, 1999. Vividly depicts Cosimo as guarded and imperious but tenderly devoted to his family, and alludes in passing to his major enterprises.