Cosimo I de' Medici
Cosimo I de' Medici was the seventeen-year-old from a cadet branch whom the Florentine senators chose as a manageable duke in 1537, after the murder of Alessandro, and who within a year had beaten the republican exiles at Montemurlo, executed their leaders and made himself absolute; he conquered Siena in a four-year war, was made the first Grand Duke of Tuscany by the pope in 1569, built the Uffizi, the Vasari corridor and the Pitti gardens, founded the Florentine Academy and the port of Livorno, and left a state that lasted, under his descendants and then the Habsburgs, until 1859. He was the son of the condottiere Giovanni delle Bande Nere and of a Salviati mother, a granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and had been kept out of politics. Francesco Guicciardini, who proposed him, expected to govern through him. Cosimo took the title of duke, dropped the senators, and when the exiles under Filippo Strozzi marched on Florence in July 1537 with French money he had them surprised at Montemurlo and their leaders beheaded in the Bargello; Strozzi died in prison. He then made himself the emperor's man, married Eleonora of Toledo, the Spanish viceroy of Naples's daughter, in 1539, got the Spanish garrisons out of Florence and Livorno in 1543, and in 1554 sent the Marquis of Marignano against Siena, which had gone over to France. Siena starved for fifteen months and surrendered in April 1555, and Philip II gave it to him as a fief in 1557; the republic of Siena reconstituted itself at Montalcino for four more years. Pius V crowned him Grand Duke in Rome in March 1570 over the emperor's objection. He governed by a small bureaucracy of new men, made the Florentine magistrates into salaried officials, built a fleet and the order of Santo Stefano to sail it against the Turks, drained the Val di Chiana, and spent on Vasari, Bronzino, Cellini and Ammannati as a matter of state. Eleonora and two sons died of malaria in 1562. He handed the government to his son Francesco in 1564, kept the title, married his mistress, had a stroke in 1568 and died at the Villa di Castello in April 1574.
- Lived: 1519 CE – 1574 CE
- Nationality: Florentine
- Roles: grand duke, monarch
