The Red Lily Crown (44 page)

As always, my family and my friends (including many writer friends) offered unfailing support as I worked on this book.

In particular I'd like to thank Lynne Smith and Sharon Ward, for pictures and anecdotes from their own visit to Florence.

Thanks also to Sam Rogerson of the Cornish Language Project.

Thanks to Danielle DeVor, for beta reading.

My amazing agent Diana Fox is always there with a reassuring and encouraging word when I need it most. I'd also like to thank her assistants, Brynn Arenz and Isabel Kaufman, for their thorough readings and critiques.

There's no one in the world like Betty Anne Crawford of Books Crossing Borders. Huge thanks to her for her kindness and support.

I've been fortunate to work with thoughtful and perceptive editors. Thanks go to Ellen Edwards and Gillian Holmes, and particularly to Rosie de Courcy.

And in the end as in the beginning, thanks to Jim and our own parti-colored hounds for putting up with me while I wander dazedly around the real world, my heart and mind lost in the sixteenth century.

THE RED LILY CROWN

A NOVEL OF MEDICI FLORENCE

ELIZABETH LOUPAS

NOVEL OF MEDICI FLORENCE

A CO
NVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH LOUPAS

Q. You set your novel
The
Second Duchess
in Italy in the 16th century. What prompted you to return to that period for
The
Red Lily Crown
?

A. I was always interested in Barbara of Austria's little sister Giovanna, and in one of the early drafts of
The Second Duchess
she and her husband Francesco de' Medici actually played a part. So I wanted to write more about her and her life as part of one of the greatest romantic triangles of the Renaissance. At the same time there is simply something about the sixteenth century in the Italian city-states that calls to me very strongly—the magnificence contrasted with the squalor; the flowering of literature and art and music; the belief in magic, astrology and alchemy co-existing with the first glimmers of the Enlightenment in science and the humanities.

Q. Can you tell us more about the Austrian family that produced Giovanna and Barbara, and held so much power in the region during this time?

A. The Habsburgs originated with Otto II, Count of Habsburg, in the twelfth century. From 1438 to 1740 they held the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, and by means of marriage and conquest ended up as monarchs all over Europe. Giovanna and Barbara were daughters of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I and his wife Anne of Bohemia and Hungary. Ferdinand and Anne had fifteen children, and all but two reached adulthood, which was quite a feat in those days.

Q. How close to the historical record did you stick when creating the Medici characters? I'm especially fascinated by your portrait of Francesco and Bianca Cappello, whose long relationship and violent deaths are psychologically complex and a bit creepy. Did they really fake the birth of a son, and murder everyone who might have revealed their ploy?

A. The historical record is murky, to say the least, on the subject of Prince Antonio de' Medici. It's difficult to separate what was known (or believed) at the time, from propaganda disseminated by Ferdinando after Francesco's and Bianca's deaths.

What is certain is that although Francesco had Antonio legitimated and clearly intended for him to inherit after the death of poor little Prince Filippo, there was no resistance or question, either in Florence or anywhere in Europe, when Francesco's brother Ferdinando took the crown for himself after Francesco's death. Antonio would have been eleven or twelve (his actual birth date is uncertain) and if he had had a legitimate claim to the throne, one would think someone would have come forward on his behalf, if only to grasp power for themselves as a regent. No one did. He remained a minor figure connected to the Medici court and never married.

There are all kinds of lurid stories about his birth. The story of him being smuggled into Bianca's room in a
mandolino
is from some gossip of the day, as is the story of at least one murdered maidservant. The other maidservant, Gianna Santi (her real name was Giovanna Santi, which I shortened to avoid confusion with the Grand Duchess Giovanna), did apparently survive an assassination attempt, at least long enough to dictate a written “confession” mentioning “several pregnant women of the lower class.” This confession was produced by Ferdinando to support his own succession to the throne. A little too convenient? It's impossible to tell for certain.

The details of the plot as I describe it are fictional. However, I tend to believe that Antonio was not Bianca's child. She had a daughter when she was very young (only a few months after eloping from Venice with her lover, who became her first husband), and although she was Francesco's mistress for twelve years and his wife for nine years after that, comprising her life between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine, there is no undisputed record of any further pregnancy or miscarriage. For whatever reason—whether her first pregnancy was mishandled, whether she had a disease (some sources say both Francesco and Bianca suffered from syphilis), or whether she damaged her own health with the odd (to say the least) contraceptive practices of the day—it doesn't seem logical that in the midst of years of barrenness she would suddenly produce a healthy baby boy out of nowhere, just in time to steal poor Grand Duchess Giovanna's thunder. So I suspect Antonio was not hers. He may have been Francesco's, and my Francesco of the story hints at this. In any case, Antonio de' Medici was treated much as an illegitimate son would have been treated, and in time was somewhat grudgingly recognized as a member of the Medici family by Grand Duke Cosimo II, Ferdinando's son.

Q. Can you give us more background on the practice of alchemy? How widespread was a belief in the Philosopher's Stone as a source of gold, healing and eternal life? When did alchemy begin to fall out of favor?

A. In the sixteenth century, alchemy was beginning to divide itself into two parts, the more esoteric and “magical” side, and the purely physical-science side, which would ultimately lead to Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and modern chemistry and physics. Chiara and Ruan are avatars of these two parts—Chiara believes in the magic of alchemy, while Ruan is a physical scientist and metallurgist. The belief in the Philosopher's Stone goes back to antiquity, and continued through the Early Modern period, until physical science took over. Even then, however, a spiritual and symbolic Philosopher's Stone was pursued, and the quest for self-actualization continues today, using the language and symbols of alchemy.

Q. It's shocking to read how the husbands of Isabella and Dianora justify their murders. I'm also struck by how Grand Duke Cosimo promised both his mistress and his daughter financial security but never signed official documents assuring it. Were these attitudes typical of men toward their wives and daughters during this time, or restricted to the royal court?

A. Such attitudes were fairly typical of society in general at this time. The murder of an unfaithful wife was thought to cleanse a man's honor of the stain she had cast upon it. This point of view is not entirely eradicated even today!

As for wills, that was probably more a personal quirk of Cosimo's. There are thousands of wills surviving from the period, many of them very detailed. But some people even today resist making a will because they can't bring themselves to face the fact of their own mortality, and I suspect that might have been part of Cosimo's reasoning. He did suffer several strokes of apoplexy in the last years of his life; at one point the Venetian ambassador described him as being “more like a plant than a man.” So he may have put off writing a detailed will (he did leave some bequests) until it was too late.

Q. Sexual masochism. Torture. Murder. Was it the absolute authority of the de' Medicis that made 16th-century Florence so violent, or was violence widespread throughout Europe, through all social classes, at this time?

A. I think violence of all kinds was much more common than it is today—or perhaps I should say that it was much more woven into everyday life and casually accepted. There was no political correctness, and money and position almost always trumped the authority of the law.

We have to be careful of terms like “masochism” or “sadism,” because of course Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade were far in the future at the time of the story. However, the psychological conditions their names have come to exemplify have certainly existed from the beginning of humanity. If a person has an innate tendency toward taking pleasure in the suffering or abasement of others, being in a position of power would certainly tend to reinforce it. The opposite would be true as well.

Torture was an accepted part of the judicial process. Most of the time, I suspect, it was pretty routine. On the other hand, from time to time one might come across a person who took pleasure in it.

Q. Cornishman Ruan Pencarrow is a fascinating character. Is he a purely fictional creation, or did you base him on a historical figure? And haven't I read about a Lovell family whose home in the English Cotswolds is a ruin today?

A. Ruan is completely fictional, although the background of the Prayer Book Rebellion, the massacres and the confiscation of Cornish estates by the English is historical.

The Lovells are an old and prolific English family, and the famous ruin in the Cotswolds is Minster Lovell Hall. There's a grisly legend that in the early 1700s the skeletal remains of Francis, Lord Lovell, were discovered walled up in a secret room there. I chose the name because for me it exemplifies “Englishness.” My Andrew Lovell, however, is completely fictional and shouldn't be taken as any sort of connection to the historical Lovells.

Q. Does a poison comparable to
sonnodolce
actually exist? The poisoned labyrinth reminded me of one of my favorite short stories by Nathanial Hawthorne, “Rappaccini's Daughter.” By any chance, did that story inspire your creation?

A. The image of the poison garden in “Rappaccini's Daughter” is a powerful one, and although it wasn't conscious, it could very well have been part of my inspiration for the labyrinth. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where ideas come from, or even when one has them! Flowers were a common means of transferring poisons in the sixteenth century, although the poison powder or liquid was applied from without. I wanted Francesco to have an interest in creating flowers with the poison already inside them.

Sonnodolce
is entirely fictional (thank goodness). To some extent it's inspired by another legendary poison, cantarella, which was supposedly a secret of the Borgias. If they had their own secret poison, well then, the Medici needed one too.

There were mithridates, complex and much-sought-after formulas in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which supposedly warded off the effects of poisons or the plague. Those substances were also an inspiration for
sonnodolce
.

Q. Can you provide more background on when Florence was a republic and how life changed for the average citizen once it was governed by the de' Medicis? Were the de' Medicis generally unpopular?

A. Florence as a city has existed since the time of Julius Caesar. The first republic was founded in the early twelfth century, and over the next three centuries the republic came and went as wars and great families overran the city, seized power and lost power. The Medici first gained power in the mid-1400s under the first Cosimo de' Medici (confusingly called
il Vecchio
, and not Cosimo I). They lost power in 1494 and regained it in 1512.

The republic that Nonna would have supported was the republic of 1527, which ousted the Medici and lasted for four years. The Medici took over again in 1531, after besieging the city for almost a year. In 1532 the pope abolished the republic for good and created the hereditary ducal state.

The republic of 1527–1531 had an elected government that put power in the hands of the mercantile class and, in theory at least, allowed the common people to govern themselves. After the siege the Medici were very unpopular, and Duke Alessandro was assassinated in 1537. Cosimo I (who was actually the second Cosimo) was seventeen at the time, and only distantly related to the ruling branch of the Medici—his mother was a granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Influential men in Florence thought they could control him, or perhaps make him a figurehead for a new republic. They were really, really mistaken.

At first Cosimo never went anywhere without bodyguards. As time passed and his authoritarian rule made the city more powerful and more prosperous, he became more accepted, although he never really trusted the common people of Florence.

Q. Medical care during this period seems so primitive. Can you explain in general terms what men understood about illness and how it should be treated?

A. Most health issues were still thought of in terms of the four humors of Hippocrates—the sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. Remedies were conceived in relation to the humors—heat to cold, moist to dry—in order to achieve a balance. Even most physicians still believed in demons, as with Chiara's symptoms of post-concussive syndrome being thought of as demons' voices, and magic, as with the belief that things a woman sees or touches during pregnancy could “mark” her baby.

Even small wounds and injuries could be very serious, as there was yet little understanding of the value of antisepsis. Chiara was lucky that the grand duke used Ambroise Paré's methods to treat her broken fingers. Paré, who served four kings of France in the sixteenth century, is generally considered the father of modern surgery and a pioneer in battlefield medicine. He treated wounds with egg yolk, oil of roses and turpentine, instead of cauterizing them with hot irons and/or boiling oil, and (not surprisingly) found his method was more successful, not only because it was less traumatic, but also because of the antiseptic effect of the turpentine.

Q. What happened to the Medici family in Florence after the events of the novel?

A. Ferdinando gave up his cardinal's hat, married Christine of Lorraine and had nine children. The seventh and last Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany, Gian Gastone, died in 1737, a hundred and fifty years after Francesco's death. Gian Gastone loathed his wife, refused to live with her, and had no heirs; with the death of his sister, Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, the Electress Palatine, the royal house of Medici became extinct. The grand duchy of Tuscany, after some political maneuvering, went to Gian Gastone's distant relative Francis of Lorraine, later the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I, who was the husband of Maria Theresa of Austria and the father of Marie Antoinette.