Catherine (Caterina) de Medici had one of the saddest lives as a child that I can remember for someone who was destined to such high status. She didn't really have a home, her mother died not long after her birth, her father died not long after that. She was raised first by her paternal grandmother (an Orsini) who then died as well, when she was less than 2 years old. Then she was raised (among cousins) by her aunt. After the de Medici were thrown out of Florence in 1527, when Catherine was 8, she was moved from convent to convent as a hostage (losing contact with her aunt and cousins). Back in Florence, people were demanding that Catherine be killed and her body displayed on the city walls. She was 8-10 years old while this was going on.
The only thing that saved her was that the pope was a relative. His biggest concern, after bringing her to Rome, was to marry her off to the highest position.
On her wedding night, her husband's father stayed in the bedroom to make sure the nuptial duties were performed (and was back again in the room at breakfast time).
Her husband of course had an open affairs with Diane de Poitiers and others, even wearing Diane's colors at jousting competitions instead of his wife's!
There wasn't much pressure on Catherine and Henri to have conjugal relations until his brother died, and then advisors urged Henri to divorce the childless Catherine. They apparently tried every kind of fertility enhancement available to them, although to me, some of it sounds like humiliations thought up by "doctors" of the day (I'm very interested in medicine of the period and have had the chance to review several medical texts of the time - they are of course nearly medieval in character, but none of the ones I've seen say that placing cow dung and stag antlers on her "source of life" area was a good practice). She did have to subject herself to several gynecological exams, all of it must have been humiliating and upsetting.
She strikes me as a strong, embittered woman with good intentions as a monarch. Her husband pretty much ignored her, I don't know how much a motherless woman would know about mothering, but she certainly protected her sons and thought about their future.
Then, to top it all off, once she is finally Queen of France, her husband is killed in a terrible jousting accident, with medical consequences that make my heart hurt. She nursed him and stayed by him, and was terribly upset when he died.
Compared to other powers in France at the time, Catherine was a voice of reason, although she certainly didn't have the intensive education that some of the Italian Renaissance princesses had had, but she did work hard at understanding affairs of state, especially after the death of her husband.
Then, her oldest son, the new King of France (François II) dies of a bad ear infection (had always been prone to them). How much Catherine endured! It's unbelievable.
By then, she was a better negotiator, and I'd say, fairly savvy about how to protect her next eldest son, who was 9 years old when he took the throne. He doesn't outlive her, though, she has to live through his death as well. Once she started having children, she had quite a few, although her last two died in infancy or in utero (she had ten children altogether). But Henri III was the third of her four sons, and she must have felt she was losing all of them so quickly. She writes such tender words to Henri and worries that he will predecease her. But, he outlived her - she lived to a fairly old age for those days (69), although the violence involving the Guises is said to have hastened her death.
Catherine was a great patron of the arts, and it's thanks to her, in part, that we have such good portraits of Charles IX and others in the court at that time.
I need to read more about her, but merely knowing the number of deaths she suffered through among close family members softens my view of her. No one ever really loved her for herself, except perhaps her children, and she had to be always worried about them being murdered, poisoned or simply ill. It is a good thing she died when she did, else she would have had to live through that third son's murder, as well (eight months after she died). Her fourth and last son had already died, of illness.
That's how the Crown of France passed to the husband of one of her daughters, all four of her sons were dead.
