Catherine de' Medici was fourteen when the pope married her to a boy of fourteen. His father was king of France. Her parents had been dead since she was a baby.
On 28 October 1533, Catherine de' Medici married Henry, Duke of Orléans, at Marseille. The pope conducting the ceremony was Clement VII, her Medici relative and the man who had arranged the match. Henry was the second son of Francis I. His elder brother stood between him and the throne, and Catherine entered the French royal family as a duke's wife. The wedding was magnificent. Her position within the family was considerably less grand.
She had been born in Florence to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, and Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, a French noblewoman. Both died within weeks of her birth. The estates and family connections remained; the parents did not. Catherine grew up under the protection of relatives whose name could secure her an extraordinary marriage, but could also make her dangerous to have in the house.
When the Medici were driven out of Florence in 1527, the child was kept as a hostage. Her confinement took her between convents, first Santa Lucia and then the Murate. During an outbreak of plague, the French ambassador helped obtain her transfer to the Murate; fears that Medici supporters might carry her away led the city's government to send her back to Santa Lucia. Her whereabouts were a matter for governments. Before she was old enough to marry, her family name had already made her someone other people needed to keep hold of.
After the Florentine republic fell in 1530, Clement brought her to Rome. The negotiations for her French marriage put that name to a different use. Francis I wanted papal support for his ambitions in Italy, where French and Habsburg interests competed. Clement could bring his family into the royal house of France. Catherine was the connection between them. A king and a pope could both find room for their ambitions in the marriage of a fourteen-year-old.
According to one historian, Francis gave his new daughter-in-law two large pearls shaped like pears. The king was welcoming a bride, and with her the papal friendship for which the marriage had been negotiated. The pearls were a handsome present. The expectations attached to her were larger.
The contract had been concluded the previous day. Notaries read its terms before the contracting parties. It provided for Catherine's trousseau and jewels, for the income and residence she would need if she became a widow, and for what should happen to property if either spouse died without children. Other clauses dealt with the inheritance of children who might be born. At fourteen, she had arrangements for widowhood before she had a husband.
These provisions gave her rights as well as obligations. The jewellery supplied under the agreement was to become her hereditary property; her future maintenance had been considered. A great marriage required considerable attention to what might happen when it ended. The document could distribute money and safeguard possessions. It could not preserve the political circumstances that had made the match desirable.
Clement died in 1534, less than a year after the wedding. With him went much of the political promise Francis had seen in the alliance. Catherine remained in France, married to the king's younger son, while the man who had made her such a useful bride was gone.
Then Henry's elder brother died in 1536. Henry became dauphin, heir to the throne, and Catherine became the woman expected to give that heir children. The marriage had acquired a new importance. She was still without a child.
Francis became a source of protection for his daughter-in-law, defending her against criticism at court. She had established a good relationship with him, a practical advantage in a household where her marriage could be dismissed as beneath his son. But the king's goodwill did not give her Henry's devotion. As the years passed, his attachment to Diane de Poitiers left Catherine sharing her husband with a woman whose influence would endure into his reign. Her place was legitimate, her rank secure in ceremony, and her personal position much less comfortable.
The wedding's third anniversary passed, then its seventh, then its tenth. The contract had made provision for children and for their absence. Living with that absence was Catherine's part.
On 19 January 1544, at Fontainebleau, she gave birth to her first child, a son named Francis. She was twenty-four. More than ten years separated the fourteen-year-old bride at Marseille from this first birth. Others followed, including the sons Charles and Henry. She would bear ten children altogether.
When her husband became Henry II in 1547, Catherine became queen. Her later authority came in stages, through widowhood and the reigns of her sons, with the regency for the young Charles giving her power she had never possessed as the teenage Duchess of Orléans. At Marseille, the adults had arranged her future around an alliance and written careful clauses for a marriage that might remain childless. The fourteen-year-old they married that October became the mother of three kings of France.
