On June 17th, 1579, the Venetian Senate voted a law, which reads:
As it has pleased the grand Duke of Tuscany to choose as his wife the Lady Bianca Cappello, gentlewoman of a most noble house of this city, ornate of those most clear and singular qualities which has made her worthy of every great fortune, and to make a convenient sign of the highest pleasure, with which our Republic has received this event, and in correspondence with the esteem which the grand Duke has shown us in this his important and very wise resolution: Let it be decided that the above mentioned Most Illustrious and Most Excellent Lady Bianca Cappello, grand duchess of Tuscany, be by the authority of this Senate created and declared true and particular daughter of our Republic.
What did it mean that Bianca Cappello was declared a “true and particular daughter” of the Republic of Venice?
A bit of Tuscan history
The law refers to the Duchy of Tuscany, so let’s start there.
When Cosimo I de’ Medici, Duke of Florence and later Grand Duke of Tuscany, married Eleonora de Toledo, a Spanish princess, in 1539, it was not a marriage of love.
Rather than a marriage of love, it was an alliance between the ruling dynasties of the two states. The two might later have grown to care for each other, who knowns, but that is not why they married.
Likewise, the son and successor of Cosimo, Francesco I de’ Medici, married Giovanna of Austria, daughter of the ruler of Austria and Hungary, in 1565.
It was obvious, even then, that the two didn’t love each other. They did what they had to do, each loyal to their respective dynasty, but it wasn’t a marriage of love.
Through these marriages, the Medici of Florence created some important alliances with two of the major European powers of their time.
A marriage of love
The later marriage between Francesco I de’ Medici and the Venetian noblewoman Bianca Cappello was much more a love story.
Bianca Cappello had eloped, aged 17, with her Florentine lover, so she ended up in Florence, disowned by her own family in Venice. They had no contact for well over a decade.
In Florence, the beautiful Bianca was noticed by the prince and regent of Florence, Francesco de’ Medici, and became his mistress even before he married Giovanna of Austria.
After twelve years of marriage, and ten pregnancies, Giovanna died, aged 31, in 1578. Shortly afterwards, Francesco married Bianca in secret, even before the official mourning period was over.
Bianca and Francesco had been lovers for almost fifteen years at that point. Their marriage was probably as close to a marriage of love as was possible at the time, in the cultural and political context they lived in.
The other members of the Medici family didn’t approve of the union, exactly because it didn’t serve the usual purpose of a noble marriage of the time.
Marriage to a Republic?
How did the marriage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany to his Venetian mistress affect the relationship between the two states?
In principle, it didn’t.
Bianca Cappello was at best a Venetian noblewoman, even if she might have forfeited that status when she eloped to Florence with her first lover at seventeen years of age.
The short story is that she didn’t in any way represent the rulers of the Republic of Venice. She was little more than the disgraced run-away daughter of one of them, which was in fact how a large part of the Florentine elite saw her.
Naturally, once the marriage was decided in Florence, both Grand Duke Francesco I and the Republic of Venice would want to get the most out of the connection, but how could that be done?
A fallen noblewoman
Bianca Cappello wasn’t the daughter of a powerful dynasty ruling some European nation. She was of noble birth, but of a different kind of nobility than what was practised in Florence, Vienna or Madrid.
She was born into the Venetian aristocratic Cappello family, and while her father and brother partook in government affairs in Venice, they didn’t rule Venice.
Political power in Venice was hereditary, at least following the “Locking of the Council” in 1297, but it was hereditary collectively within the nobility, not within a single dynasty.
Venice was an aristocratic republic, not a monarchy.
No single family ruled Venice. Venice was ruled collectively by maybe two hundred noble families, through the Maggior Consiglio — the Greater Council.
Daughter of the Republic
The Republic of Venice squared that circle using the legal fiction of making Bianca a “Daughter of the Republic.”
The Venetian Senate passed a special law, which declared Bianca a “true and particular daughter of our Republic.”
She was thereby formally adopted by the Republic, so the union could one of nations as well as one of individuals.
Precedents
Bianca Cappello wasn’t the first “daughter of the Republic,” because the same problem had arisen earlier.
In 1468, the Venetian noblewoman Catarina Corner was married to James II of Cyprus, and to formalise that bond, and make the marriage one of peers, Catarina Corner was declared a “daughter of the Republic.”
This model was simply reused for Bianca Cappello.
Possibly, there is an even earlier case, in 1264, when Tomasina Morosini was married to Stephen the Posthumous, son of Andrew II of Hungary. Stephen didn’t become king of Hungary, but their son was Andrew III of Hungary.
Another Morosini, Costanza, a niece of Andrew III of Hungary, was married to Stefan Vladislav II of Serbia in 1293.
The latter two cases were, however, marriages to a pretender, rather than to a monarch.
A problem of state status
The root problem was that the Republic of Venice always had a hard time getting recognised as a peer of other European powers.
The Republic of Venice was more ancient and wealthier than many of the other European powers, but the others were almost all monarchies, in the sense that power was generally hereditary within a single dynasty.
A king or duke ruled by the authority of his birth, which was sanctioned by the Catholic Church through the idea of the Divine Rights of Kings.
The Republic of Venice had no single point of authority.
The position of Doge was for life, but it wasn’t hereditary, and, for most of the history of Venice, the role was more ceremonial than actually powerful.
Venice, therefore, had no princesses to marry off to other royal or ducal dynasties. The purpose of “daughters of the Republic” was to circumvent this problem.
The story of Bianca
The story of the adventurous, if short, life of Bianca Cappello, is told in two episodes of the Venetian Stories podcast: Bianca Cappello, part 1, and Bianca Cappello, part 2.
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