On the eleventh of July 1576, Pietro de’ Medici wrote to his brother Francesco, the Grand Duke of Tuscany: “Last night at six hours, an accident occurred to my wife, and she died. ” The message sounded innocent enough, but it was a lie. In truth, Pietro had viciously murdered his young wife. And they were not merely husband and wife; they had been raised together like brother and sister.
Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo was born in March 1553 in Florence, the daughter of García Álvarez de Toledo y Osorio, a senior Spanish nobleman who held the titles of Marquess of Villafranca and Duke of Fernandina, and Vittoria D’Ascanio Colonna, a member of one of the most powerful Italian noble families. Her mother died when Eleonora was very young, and her father was frequently away, dispatched by King Philip II of Spain to govern parts of Italy under Spanish control. For much of the 1560s, he served as governor of Spanish Sicily, and he later played a senior role at the Battle of Lepanto, the great naval clash between the Christian fleet and the Ottoman Empire. Left in Florence, Eleonora was raised by her cousins, the Medici family who ruled the city.
She became what was known in the Spanish tradition as a manina, an aristocratic child fostered out to another family to strengthen ties between the houses. Her aunt, another Eleonora of Toledo, who had married Duke Cosimo I of Florence in 1539, became her surrogate mother until her death in 1562. Even after that loss, nine-year-old Eleonora remained at the Florentine court, where her uncle-in-law, Duke Cosimo, was so fond of her energetic charm that he raised her as his own. The Medici family had risen from modest Tuscan origins to become powerful bankers in Florence, lending money across Europe.
On the back of their financial success, they became the unofficial rulers of the Florentine Republic and sponsored the Renaissance, supporting artists like Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. In Eleonora’s youth, she would have walked past paintings by these masters hanging in the family’s palazzos. Yet in 1494, at the start of the Italian Wars, the Medici were removed from power and exiled. They regained control of Florence in the 1510s, and in 1532, they became hereditary dukes.
Cosimo was only the second Medici duke, and he was acutely conscious of the need to secure the line of succession. He himself had come to power in 1537 only because his cousin, Duke Alessandro, had died without legitimate heirs. Determined not to face the same problem, Cosimo arranged advantageous marriages for his own children and for those under his protection. In this dynastic calculation, he made a fateful decision: Eleonora would marry into the very family that had raised her.
Her husband was chosen to be her first cousin, Pietro, the youngest son of Duke Cosimo and Eleonora of Toledo, just a year her junior. First-cousin marriages were not unusual among Europe’s great dynasties, but this union had a more unsettling aspect. Eleonora and Pietro did not just share blood; they had grown up side by side in the same household. For all the world, they were brother and sister in everything but name.
As the youngest son, Pietro was not in line to inherit the duchy, but in an age of high infant mortality, he or his children might one day become rulers of Florence. It was therefore important that he marry young and produce children. Eleonora and Pietro were betrothed in 1568 when she was fifteen and he was fourteen. The marriage did not take place until April 1571.
Eleonora’s father, preparing to lead part of the Christian armada against the Turks at Lepanto, provided a dowry of 40,000 gold ducats, a sum equivalent to around twenty million dollars today. Duke Cosimo bestowed substantial estates on his son so the newlyweds could live comfortably. On the surface, the marriage began well, and in 1573, a son named Cosimino was born, a possible future heir to the duchy. Behind the scenes, however, all was not well.
Duke Cosimo may have been fond of his niece-in-law, but he did her no favors by marrying her to Pietro. His youngest son was disturbed, with a fragile psychological state known from his early years. He was frequently violent and kept a number of mistresses. Rumors at the Florentine court claimed he had to be forced to consummate the marriage on his wedding night and was reluctant to enter the union despite its political and financial benefits.
Things worsened in the following years. Both Pietro and Eleonora kept lovers, and Pietro was said to physically mistreat his wife. Duke Cosimo managed to keep his son’s behavior in check, but he died on the twenty-first of April 1574. He was succeeded by his elder son Francesco, who proved far less able to control his disturbed younger brother.
Two years later, on the eleventh of July 1576, Grand Duke Francesco received the shocking letter from Pietro claiming his wife had died in an accident. The following day, Francesco wrote to his other brother Ferdinando: “Last night around five o’clock, 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. ” The story spread that she might have died of a heart attack, an unlikely scenario for a healthy twenty-three-year-old woman.
In reality, Pietro had strangled his wife to death with a dog leash while they were staying at a Medici villa away from court. Francesco knew the truth, yet he did not seek to bring his own brother to justice for murdering his wife. Worse followed. Six days later, another member of the extended Medici family, Isabella, was killed.
Like Eleonora, with whom she had been close friends, Isabella was trapped in a loveless marriage and had taken a lover. In fact, one of the men Eleonora had been romantically involved with, Bernardino Antinori, a courtier, knight, and poet who had fought at Lepanto, had been murdered six days before Eleonora herself. This was seemingly done on the Grand Duke’s orders. The wave of killings of Eleonora, Isabella, and Antinori appeared to be an effort to crack down on adultery against the leading male members of the Medici family during the new reign.
It was all highly controversial. Eleonora was the daughter of a leading Spanish noble and one of the most important officials in Italy; Antinori was a hero of Lepanto. When letters were sent from the Florentine court to Rome and Naples in the days that followed, the story was put forward that Eleonora had died in a freak accident. Few were fooled.
Francesco, who had sanctioned the murder of Antinori, was likely deeply annoyed with his brother for killing his wife so callously, yet he never sought to have him prosecuted. Eleonora’s father died in Naples a year later, unable to seek any retribution, and in any case, his relationship with his absent daughter had always been distant. The Spanish court was scandalized, and with mounting pressure, Francesco had no choice but to confess the truth to King Philip II. He wrote: “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. ”
The murder was also recounted by a prominent local priest and musician in Florence, Agostino Lapini, who kept a valuable diary of events in the city over several decades. Of Eleonora, he wrote that she was twenty-one years of age, beautiful, gracious, gentle, charming, affable, and had two eyes in her head like two stars in their beauty. He noted that everyone said she was murdered, and she was buried with rites in San Lorenzo.
Despite the Medici family’s efforts to cover up the crime, it became widely known in the city that Eleonora had been murdered, even if the brutal manner of her slaying was not fully public. Eleonora’s legacy remained mixed over the centuries. Her only child, Cosimino, outlived her by just a month, dying from an illness contracted in infancy, a common occurrence in the sixteenth century. This ruled out any possibility of succession from her short and violent marriage.
Pietro had no further legitimate children, though he fathered many out of wedlock. He spent the rest of his life until 1604 as a constant burden on his family, a spendthrift and unstable man who often lived exiled at the Spanish court, trying to acquire money from creditors to fund his lavish lifestyle. His brother Francesco tried to keep him away from Florence, though Pietro occasionally appeared to seek money from the family coffers. The Medici family did their best to suppress what had happened to Eleonora, something that reflected very poorly on them even by the standards of Renaissance Italy, a violent time and place.
It was only in the last couple of decades that her story was fully rediscovered, thanks to studies by historians of the Medici women. A possible portrait of her by the Italian painter Alessandro Allori hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna today, though it may also depict one of Duke Cosimo’s daughters.