For three centuries, the Medici family remained among the most powerful in the world—as the supreme ruler of Florence, and later of Tuscany. They produced three popes and exerted a lasting influence in Europe through royal marriages.

Though born as daughter of Lorenzo de Medici, duke of Urbino, in 1519 to this powerful family, Catherine turned into a rather small and slender teenager, not quite five feet in height. Her face boasted nothing but plain and indelicate features and eyes too large for her face.

In 1533 Catherine married the duc d’Orléans, later King Henry II. At the time, the French court became the most splendid on the earth. Those who populated Paris grew so elegant and glamorous. How could tiny, plain Catherine possibly charm the high society of such a world? How could she make a dramatic and imperious impression on the fabulous French court?

If you want to know about the Florence movie, click the above picture. It shows the Uffizi Palace—the house of the Medicis. A new window will appear.

In desperation, young Catherine sought the aid of the ingenious Ruggieri brothers—Cosimo and Lorenzo. The Ruggieri family members had been physician, astrologer and mathematician to the Medici. Cosimo had cast the horoscope of Catherine’s nativity with such accuracy (including her peril during the siege of Florence and her marriage to a Prince of France) that it would have predisposed her to believe the truth of astrology had she not already naturally accepted it.

Even as a child, studying the fresco of The Journey of the Magi on the walls of the Medici chapel and the picture of The Adoration of the Magi by Botticelli in the Church of Saint Maria Novella, Catherine began to consider the Magi as the particular protectors of her house and observed their feast, the Epiphany, with particular reverence. Catherine recognized astrology as an intrinsic part of the Christian religion, since Christ’s birth was recognized, apart from few shepherds in the immediate vicinity, only by three royal astrologers who, by the exercise of their art, had been star-led to a stable in Bethlehem.

When Cosimo Ruggieri came to France, Catherine relied on his advices wholeheartedly. On his part Cosimo devoted himself entirely to her, whereas his brother Lorenzo accommodated himself to a more general practice among the courtiers. Eventually she took no major decision without consulting Cosimo as to whether the stars ratified the advice of her counselors or her own analysis of a political situation. Cosimo continued to predict the apparently impossible. He even told her that she would become a mother of ten children.

      Catherine confided in this clever man’s advices.
      “Cosimo, tell me what I should do at the royal ball. They might ignore me, or at worst they would make a fool out of me.”
      Cosimo smiled. “Your Highness, don’t worry too much.”
      “But this is important. I cannot afford to make a mistake. Please tell me what to do.”
      “Well, you cannot do too many things, but I have some ideas. just do as I tell you.”
      Relying on this man’s advices, Catherine hoped that he would cast a spell over the entire French nation.

Catherine’s appearance created a sensation. The men got staggered by this sensuous Florentine girl. The women became breathless with envy. The participants all found something indefinably alluring in her walk—a subtle undulation and a gently seductive sway—the like of which the French had never seen.

Although the Ruggieri brothers worked magic at the French court, their spell didn’t solve all her problems. Neglected during the reign of her husband and that of her eldest son, Francis II, she became regent in 1560 for her second son Charles IX, who succeeded Francis. She remained his adviser until his death in 1574. Concerned primarily with preserving the power of the king in the religious conflicts of the time, she at first adopted a conciliatory policy toward the Huguenots, or French Protestants, with the aid of her chancellor Michel de L’Hôpital,

The outbreak of the Wars of Religion in 1562, however, led her to an alliance with the Catholic party under François de Guise. After the defeat of royal troops by the Huguenot leader (Gaspard de Coligny), Catherine agreed in 1570 to the peace of St. Germain. Subsequently Coligny gained considerable influence over Charles IX. Fearing for her own power, and opposed to Coligny’s scheme for expansion in the Low Countries (his scheme might lead to war with Spain), Catherine and Henri de Guise arranged Coligny’s assassination.

When the first attempt failed, Catherine took part in another scheme. On Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, the Catholic zealots murdered Coligny and hundreds of other Protestants.

King Charles IX died on May 30, 1574, and his brother Henry, Duke of Anjou, ascended the throne as King Henry III. After the accession of her third son, she vainly tried to revive her old conciliatory policy. However, Catherine had less influence over Henry and he allowed for ongoing religious strife among the French people.

Catherine urged her son to look beyond his close circle of courtiers and to work for unity and peace, but she died before France took even a brief respite. Catherine took her last breath on January 5, 1589.

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Born in 1542, Mary—Queen of Scotland—became one of the most tragic queens in the British history. Her mother, Mary of Guise, came from a prestigious French family. The young Mary never saw her father as he died six days after she came into this world. Mary became queen before she turned a year old and for her own safety her mother sent her to France at the age of six.

Ten years later, she married Francis, son of the French king Henry II and Catherine de Medici. However Francis died two years into their marriage. The French throne had now passed to Francis II’s younger brother Charles, a child of ten, while the power behind the throne passed into the hands of the queen mother, Catherine de Medici, whose chief preoccupation lay in defending the rights of her remaining Valois sons against any further incursions by the predatory House of Guise, and she made no secret of the fact that she hoped the Queen of Scots would soon make other arrangements.

Mary could have ridden out the new regent’s hostility had she wished, but she didn’t want to play second fiddle. Like her cousin Elizabeth of England, she became interested in power. Although Mary wrote to the Scottish Council that she intended to come home as soon as she had settled her affairs in France, she craved for another continental marriage—at least as glorious as her first. Indeed, speculation about the identity of her second husband had begun over the deathbed of the unhappy Francis.

If you want to know about the Queen Mary of Scots, click the above picture. A new window will appear.

Mary had left Saint Germain and set out for the long journey escorted by a solid phalanx of Guise uncles, who wanted to see her safely home to Scotland. She had left France in tears, but when she stepped ashore at Leith, her melancholy gave way to her high spirits, undamped even by a thick sea-mist, which the more pessimistic members of her party saw as an omen.

Mary had nothing to complain of in the general enthusiasm of the welcoming crowds who came to cheer her on her way. The noblemen also hurried to present themselves at Holyrod and took their first glimpse of their sovereign lady. All of them agreed that Mary Stewart had turned into a fascinating woman with a tall graceful figure, flawless complexion, wide pure brows, heavy-lidded soft brown eyes and rich dark gold hair.

With an instruction from Elizabeth, Henry Stuart (Lord Darnley—Mary’s cousin and English nobleman) met Mary, but he soon fell ill with an attack of measles. The queen of Scots took care of him at his bedside. In the intimacy of the sickroom flourished romance. By the time the invalid got on his feet, Mary fell in love with him.

Some people said openly that Elizabeth had sent Darnley to Scotland on purpose to match the queen of Scots meanly and poorly. In retrospect, if Elizabeth’s purpose had been to use Darnley as bait to trap Mary into a misalliance, she had succeeded brilliantly.

The queen of Scots at twenty-one turned out a warm-blooded young woman, impatient for a husband in her bed as well as the added status and protection that marriage and children would give her. Darnley had appeared at a time of her mounting frustration and disappointment. In the circumstances nobody doubted that she should have seen him as an answer to prayer.

In 1565 Mary married Lord Darnley. The bridegroom became King of Scots. Their only child was to become James I of England. Mary, however, didn’t guess that beneath the surface of this tall handsome princeling, with his pretty manners and courtly accomplishments, lay a spoilt, loutish, unstable youth with all the makings of a vindictive bully.

Mary soon became disenchanted with Henry as he had become overbearing and arrogant, carried away by his new title. He made enemies of some powerful nobles. Because of this enmity, several people toyed with a plot to kill him. Before long, Henry, along with his servant, was found strangled to death after the failure of gunpowder blast intended to take his life. The rumor went around that Mary had knowledge of the plot.

The rift between Mary and her husband had become public knowledge. For support, she turned to a Scottish powerful nobleman—the Earl of Bothwell. He and other Scottish noblemen proposed to do whatever they could to help the queen in her dilemma. This decision led to a failed explosion plot and to the strangulation death of Darnley. A few months later, Mary and the Earl married. This angered the populace who suspected Bothwell’s participation in the murder of their king. Mary’s subjects became outraged and turned against her.

She fled to England to ask for help from her cousin Queen Elizabeth I. Instead, Elizabeth imprisoned her. After nineteen years of trying to obtain her freedom, Mary found herself helpless. Found guilty of taking part in a plot to kill Elizabeth, she took the sentence and placed her neck under the ax of the executioner. At forty-four, Mary lost her head at Fortheringhay Castle in 1587.

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Born on April 21, 1729, Catherine the Great—a German princess with a French education—ruled the vast Russian empire as an autocrat for thirty-four years. At sixteen she got married to her 17-year-old cousin Peter, an heir and nephew of Russia’s reigning Empress Elizabeth, who had noticed Catherine’s fecundity. (Elizabeth herself turned out childless.) Unfortunately, Peter grew crazy, impotent and sterile. Catherine contemplated suicide, and then sought escape in voracious reading and long strenuous hours on horseback. At last, after nearly ten years of marriage, she gave birth to a son—not by her husband, but by her first love, Sergei Saltykov, a young Russian nobleman.

Since Peter became crazier and more unpopular each day, Catherine’s own chances of succession looked hopeless too. In addition, Peter threatened to divorce her more than once. She decided that she would have to invoke a coup d’etat. In June 1762, Peter, emperor of six months, stayed away from the palace, planning an insane war against Denmark. Catherine donned a lieutenant’s uniform, rode into St. Petersburg (then the Russian capital) at the head of a detachment of imperial guards, and had herself proclaimed empress. Shattered by the news, Peter lost his words. Soon afterward, he got arrested and murdered. Catherine’s chief accomplices turned out her lover Count Grigori Orlov, a baby-faced colossus, and his two brothers, all officers in the Horse Guards.

In the course of her long reign she broke the power of the clergy, put down a major rebellion, recognized the civil service, forced the Ukrainian peasants into serfdom, and added more than 200,000 square miles to Russian territory—at the expense of ninety-five percent of the population who worked the land.

Her Amatory Life

One stormy night on an island in the Baltic Sea, her lady-in- waiting, on the empress’s instruction, left Catherine alone with Saltykov, a hardened young seducer. He had promised her rapture, and he did not actually disappoint her. The affair with Saltykov unleashed Catherine’s sexuality. After two miscarriages, Catherine again became pregnant. No sooner had her son Paul been born than the empress snatched him away. Catherine lay unattended in a drafty room while Russia celebrated.

If you want to know about the Catherine the Great movie, click the above picture. A new window will appear.

Her second baby girl, also officially Peter’s, died soon after the natural father, a young Polish nobleman employed by the British ambassador, went back home in disgrace. Peter once muttered, “I don’t know how my wife became pregnant.”

Catherine’s three remaining children—all boys, fathered by Grigori Orlov—came to this world in secrecy. Catherine’s hoop skirts successfully concealed each pregnancy. The first birth occurred while Peter still sat on the throne. To lure him away from the palace as she went into labor, Catherine had a faithful servant set fire to his own house in the vicinity. Peter could never resist a fire and he dashed out to see it. The other two children, brought up for a while in the homes of servants, did not wobble into the court nursery until they grew up so that nobody could recognize them.

These maneuvers became necessary because Catherine, determined to keep the Romanov dynasty, had refused to marry Grigori, who retaliated by making love with the ladies of the court once in a while. Nevertheless, Catherine stayed faithful to him for fourteen years and forced him out only when he seduced her 13-year-old cousin.

Even when Catherine reached her late forties, her thick brown hair, expressive blue eyes, and small, sensual mouth still kept their appeal, while her figure grew more voluptuous than in her youth. One of her proteges and original supporters, a cavalry officer named Grigori Potemkin, had already declared his loyalty to her and later retired to a monastery, since he had once studied to be a priest. Potemkin turned out canny enough not to return to secular life until Catherine promised to appoint him her “personal adjutant general” or official favorite. First, the current favorite had to go. For two years thereafter the empress and her 35-year-old lover enjoyed a tumultuous affair, though with interludes of quarrels and reconciliations. When the sexual passion died down, Potemkin, willing to give up Catherine but not his influence at court, convinced her that he could replace her favorites as easily as any other servants. To make sure, he added, he would select them himself.

Amazingly, the new system worked quite well until Catherine turned sixty. A potential favorite first went through examination by Catherine’s personal physician for signs of venereal disease. If pronounced healthy, he then took a different kind of “physical”, with his virility tested by a lady-in-waiting appointed for that purpose. Once passed, he could use a special apartment, located directly below Catherine’s and connected to it by a private staircase. There he would find a large monetary gift. Repeat performances with the empress brought additional rewards and honors. Now he turned into her adjutant general and “emperor of the night”. On dismissal he might receive an estate with 4,000 peasants. In this way Catherine ran through thirteen men and a great deal of public money in sixteen years.

Potemkin’s handpicked successors turned out all handsome guard officers in their twenties. However, none of them lasted long. The gentle Alexander Lanskoy, Catherine’s favorite of favorites, died of diphtheria after undermining his health with aphrodisiacs. Ivan Rimski-Korsakov—grandfather of the composer—disgraced himself by returning to the “virility tester” Countess Bruce, for additional “tests”. Subsequently, the empress replaced the countess with an older woman. Alexander Dmitriev-Mamonov gave up his amatory position to marry a pregnant court lady. Though sulked for three days, Catherine gave them a generous wedding present.

Growing old at last, the 60-year-old empress succumbed to the wiles of 22-year-old Platon Zubov, an officer of the Horse Guards, whom Potemkin disapproved of because he became too ambitious. Zubov turned into her main sexual interest until her death at sixty-seven. Contrary to the vulgar rumor that she died while attempting intercourse with a horse, Catherine expired on November 6, 1796—two days after suffering a massive stroke.

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In 1770 Maria Theresa married her fifteen-year-old daughter Maria Antonia to the French dauphin. Known as Marie Antoinette in France, she became queen of France later when her husband ascended the throne as Louis XVI.

For all her moral scruples, Maria Theresa advised the girl to be polite to the mistresses of Louis XV so that the relations between the two courts could remain amicable. In 1775 her mother cautioned her to behave more sensibly. “Your luck can all too easily change, and by your own fault you may well find yourself plunged into deepest misery. One day you will recognize the truth of this, but then it will be too late.”

In all her faults only one became critical—a thoughtless extravagance derived from boredom and frustration. With her friends, she spent lots of money on card games, and her gambling losses grew. Besides, she gave away generously and recklessly. Yet the court and salons remained hostile to her because of her original nationality. The alliance with Austria had never been popular in France. Some suspected that Marie Antoinette favored Austrian interests at the cost of France. Nonetheless, her youthful vitality, her gaiety and kindliness, won some hearts. Mme. Vigee-Lebrun, many months pregnant, came to paint her portrait in 1779. While at work the artist dropped some tubes of color. The queen at once told her not to stoop because it would hurt the baby in her womb, and herself picked up the tubes.

If you want to know about the 18th-century pre-Revolutionary movie, click the above picture. A new window will appear.

Fearing scandal if she mingled too freely with men, she formed with women some friendships so close that scandal took another line. First came Marie-Therese de Savoie-Carignon, Princess de Lamballe, gentle, sad, and frail. Though at twenty-one, she had already been two years a widow. Her husband, son of Louis XIV’s grandson the Duke de Penthievre, were off to mistresses or prostitutes soon after his marriage. He contracted syphilis and died of it after confessing his sins to his wife in revolting detail. She never recovered from the long ordeal of that marriage. She suffered from nervous convulsions and fainting spells until, in 1792, she fell a victim of a revolutionary mob.

Marie Antoinette first took to her out of pity, then learned to love her fervently, seeing her every day, writing to her letters of endearment sometimes twice a day. In October 1775 she made the princess superintendent of the queen’s household, and persuaded the king to pay her a yearly salary of 150,000 livres. The princess had many relatives and friends, who begged her to use her influence with the queen, and through her with the king, to obtain post or gifts. Eventually, Marie, after a year, let her love fade, and took another friend.

Yolande de Polastron, wife of Comte Jules de Polignac, came from a prestigious old family—but with straitened means. Petite and attractive, no one would suspect her of such financial voracity that Turgot, the finance minister, despaired of balancing the budget while the queen found pleasure in her witty company. When the countess neared childbirth, Marie persuaded her to move to La Muette, a royal villa near the Versailles Palace. There the queen visited her daily, always bearing gifts. When Yolande became a mother, Marie grew even more generous: 400,000 livres to settle her debts, a dowry of 800,000 livres for her daughter and an embassy for her father. In 1780, she gave her father a dukedom and the estate of Bitche.

At last, Mercy d’Argentau—the Austrian ambassador and Maria Theresa’s loyal confidant—informed the queen that Yolande exploited her, and that the new duchess did not return her devotion. He proposed, and the queen accepted, as a test, that she ask Yolande to dismiss from her entourage the Comte de Vaudreuil, who became distasteful to Marie. However, Madame refused, and Marie turned to other friendships. So the entire Polignacs joined her enemies, and became a source of the slanders with which the court and the pamphleteers besmirched the name of the queen.

If you want to know about the Wonders of Man’s Creation movie, click the above picture. It shows the Versailles palace. A new window will appear.

Almost everything that she did made her enemies. The courtiers regretted the gifts she gave to her favorites, since this meant less for themselves. They complained that she so often absented herself from court functions, which reduced glamor and attendance. Many who had condemned the costly wardrobe of her earlier years now censured her for setting a new fashion of simplicity in dress, which would harm the silk merchants of Lyons and the couturiers of Paris.

Some accused her of saying, during the bread riots of 1788, “If they have no bread, let them eat cake.” Many historians agree that she never said such a heartless remark. On the contrary, she contributed abundantly from her own purse to public relief. In general, the public remained hostile to Marie. Mme. Campan, first lady of the bedchamber to the Queen, wrote:

When in 1777 the Comte d’Artois (the king’s younger brother) had a newborn baby, the market women and fishwives, asserting their prerogative to enter the royal palace at times of royal births, followed the queen to the door of her apartments, shouting in the coarsest and most vulgar terms that it was up to her, not to her sister-in-law, to provide heirs to the French crown. The queen hurried to close the door upon these licentious harridans, and closeted herself in her room with me to weep over her plight.

Was Louis impotent?

How could Marie explain to the people that the king could not “properly” make love with her? In April 1777 Joseph II (Marie’s brother and the Austrian Emperor) arrived at Versailles under the pseudonym of Count von Falkenstein. He fell in love with the charm and beauty of the queen.
      “If you were not my sister,” he told her, “I should not hesitate to marry again in order to have such a charming companion.”

Marie explained why she and the king slept in separate rooms. The king wished to go to sleep early, and they both found it wise to avoid sexual excitement. Joseph visited the king, and liked him well. The emperor talked to Louis as no one had dared speak to him on the subject. He pointed out that the king should remove the tip of his tight prepuce so that he could make love properly. Louis promised to take such an operation since he owed it to his country to have children.

Though nobody could find any written record that the king had taken the operation, the things seemed to have straightened out. On December 19, 1778, almost eight years after their marriage, Marie finally gave birth to a baby girl. Most people wanted to see a boy, but the king grew happy. The gate to the proper lovemaking had opened up for him, and he became confident that a son would come forth in time. So did Marie Antoinette, who grew radiant and now could tell the badmouthing market women and fishwives that she could indeed produce an heir.

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