Kinship and the Marginalized Consort: Giovanna d’Austria at the Medici Court

Giovanna d’Austria (1547–78), the youngest of the fifteen children of Emperor Ferdinand I and Queen Anna Jagiellonka of Bohemia and Hungary, was welcomed into Florence by Cosimo I de’ Medici on 16 December 1565 as the bride of his son and heir, Francesco.¹ The duke of Tuscany, who had managed every aspect of Giovanna’s lavish bridal entry down to the smallest detail, took tremendous pride in this marriage to a Habsburg archduchess, the most prestigious match that the Medici had ever made.² Cosimo had accomplished much for the Medici since he unexpectedly came to power in 1537, but the union with the Habsburgs came to be considered one of his greatest achievements. One hundred years later, Cosimo’s great-grandson Ferdinando II de’ Medici commissioned a tapestry series to honor the duke’s accomplishments. The series, which includes images of Cosimo overseeing the construction of the Uffizi and his victory over Siena, culminates with a depiction of Giovanna’s entry into the city, showing her kneeling to be crowned as Cosimo looks on. Thus, many years after the fact, this first Medici-Habsburg marriage was seen as a major event in the history of the dynasty.³

Although the Medici had indeed increased in stature prior to the marriage, Giovanna was nevertheless of considerably higher rank than her new family and the Habsburgs certainly expected that she would be in a position to exert significant influence in Florence on their behalf. However, her thirteen years as a Medici consort (first as duchess and later as grand duchess) were fraught with tension. Her marriage and status at court were undermined from the outset by ongoing issues outside her control: the hostility between her two families and the constant public presence of her husband’s mistress. Giovanna’s own inability to fully identify with and demonstrate her allegiance to the Medici further contributed to her predicament. Unable to play the influential role she had expected at the Medici court, Giovanna looked outward, focusing on alternative channels to demonstrate her power and prestige to those at court and to the people of Tuscany: her Habsburg network, her religious patronage of local churches and monasteries, and her highly public pilgrimage to Loreto. A comparison of Giovanna’s difficulties with those of other foreign consorts reveals some of the crucial elements that could make a woman successful or unsuccessful at the court of her marital family.

Until quite recently, the limited historiography on Giovanna portrayed her as timid, uneducated, and narrow-minded, and her piety as completely out of place at the dynamic Medici court. In a typical comment on Giovanna, Mary Steegman writes: “her views on life and its conduct were strict, narrow and conventional . . . she was utterly incapable of adapting herself to, or even remotely understanding, a condition of society different from that in which she had been born and bred.”⁴ This traditional view of Giovanna, perpetuated by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians,⁵ remained unquestioned well into the twenty-first century. However, important recent scholarship has taken a fresh look at Giovanna by returning to the primary sources, revealing a woman who is much more complex than the nineteenth-century caricature.⁶

Recent scholars have also shown great interest in exploring the role of the consort and the different ways in which women could access power and exert influence at court.⁷ While a consort might exercise power directly by governing as regent, she also had access to a number of informal channels of influence. However, she could encounter a number of impediments to her attempts to establish herself and, for some women, these obstructions could prove insurmountable. A consort’s success depended on both factors within her control, particularly her ability to establish her reputation at her new court and form effective patronage ties, and factors outside her control, such as the relationship between her natal and marital families and the presence of a rival at court. In addition, while she might exert influence on behalf of her natal family, it was...