The Gondi: Family Strategy and Survival in Early Modern France by Joanna Milstein (review)

In this illuminating study, Joanna Milstein plots in meticulous detail the spectacular social and political ascent of the Gondi, a Florentine merchant-banking family, in sixteenth-century France. Migrating from Italy to Lyon, to where they, largely, also shifted their commercial activities, the Gondi were among an influx of Italian merchants and bankers to strike new roots in the urban centre, transforming Lyon into a dominant centre of European trade and banking.

The resultant monograph is an exhaustive examination of the complex of office, obligation, and patronage through which this foreign family’s dramatic rise to eminence in the court of Catherine de’ Medici and her sons, Charles IX and Henri III, was engineered, and which armoured them against the resentment their ascendancy and prominence provoked. In spite of their extraordinary economic power and considerable political and cultural influence in early modern France, the Gondi have remained underexplored by modern scholars. Milstein’s study is a valuable corrective to this neglect. Drawing extensively on manuscript sources in French, Italian, and American archives, the author analyses the apparatus of Gondi service as the family percolated up the chain of power and influence in the Valois court.

The Introduction surveys succinctly the scholarly works in which the Gondi have received some treatment. The author emphasises the xenophobic backlash against these immigrant newcomers, which suffuses through the writings of sixteenth-century chroniclers and polemicists. Therein, Milstein finds embedded a deep-seated negativity and envy regarding the inordinate wealth and power accumulated by these Florentine immigrants. The importance of these contemporary accounts for Milstein’s discussion lies in the basis they form for much of the uncritical historical work previously undertaken on the Gondi.

The first chapter treats this unsavoury reputation of the Gondi, blackened further over time, in Milstein’s view, by a wave of anti-Italianism. The author’s aim is to interrogate the persistent correlation, forged by contemporaries and later historians, of the enhancement of Albert de Gondi’s power, and that of the family overall, with the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. Through a penetrating treatment of anti-Italian xenophobia and invective, anti-court rhetoric, and the perceived ‘usurpation’ (p. 55) of the French nobility by foreign newcomers, Milstein offers fresh insights into, and a reorientation away from, this misconception.

The indispensability of the Gondi’s commercial and financial acumen, and the zenith of their might as bankers to the monarchy, particularly as the Crown’s finances crumbled throughout the turbulent decades of the French wars of religion, are treated in Chapter 2. Through the mutual indispensability of the Gondi’s financial services to the Crown and Catherine de’ Medici’s unstinting patronage of these fellow Florentines, Milstein underscores the volatile boundaries between the distinction and vilification of the Gondi, who, inevitably, shared in the unpopularity of the Italian queen.

In Chapter 3, Milstein unravels the labyrinthine channels of Gondi power and influence in the politics of the court and royal diplomacy. In their skilful and supple execution of overlapping roles – as diplomats, advisers, intelligencers, and procurers of ready cash and credit – the Gondi men cemented their indispensability to the Crown. With an observant, critical eye, the author, importantly, perceives the clannish solidarity that underscored these activities and the kin patronage that was its strategic outgrowth.

Chapter 4 magnifies the significant ecclesiastical dimensions of this multifaceted royal service, the apogee of which was the capture of the bishopric of Paris by Pierre de Gondi, persuaded to do so by Catherine. In a deftly crafted analysis of the strategic breadth of his religious capacity, Milstein charts the relationship between ecclesiastical institution and multi-generational family strategy. With an eagle eye fixed on present and subsequent generations, Pierre obtained lucrative benefices and a variety of Church positions for several relatives. The author argues that such positions were amassed when royal favour was at its peak, then distributed to the...