Cosimo III de' Medici
Cosimo III de' Medici reigned over Tuscany for fifty-three years, the longest of any Medici, and left the state poorer, emptier and more pious than he found it. He was born in Florence in 1642, the son of Ferdinando II, who had protected Galileo, and of Vittoria della Rovere, who had not; the mother's devotion won. His father married him in 1661 to Marguerite Louise d'Orléans, a cousin of Louis XIV, who loathed him, loathed Florence, bore him three children and went back to France in 1675 to a convent she treated as a salon, never to return. Between the wedding and the separation he travelled, to Spain, Portugal, England and the Netherlands in 1668 and 1669, and the diaries his household kept of the journey are among the best descriptions of those countries in the period. He became grand duke in 1670. His government was a long act of religious anxiety: sumptuary laws, fines for Jews who employed Christian servants, prizes for converts, a ban in 1691 on the teaching at Pisa of any philosophy that was not Aristotle's, and public prosecutions for sexual offences that filled the prisons. Taxes rose to pay for the piety and for the price of a title; in 1691 the emperor let him style himself Royal Highness. Trade and the wool industry declined, the population of Florence fell, and the countryside was worked by peasants in debt. The one lasting act of his administration was an edict of 1716 that drew the boundaries of the Chianti, Pomino, Carmignano and Valdarno di Sopra wine districts, the first legal wine appellations anywhere. His sons failed him. Ferdinando, the heir, was clever and syphilitic and died childless in 1713; Gian Gastone had a marriage as empty as his father's. Cosimo spent his last decade trying to have his daughter Anna Maria Luisa recognised as heir and the powers ignored him; the Quadruple Alliance of 1718 assigned Tuscany to a Spanish prince without asking him. He died in October 1723 at eighty-one, and the state passed to a son who despised everything he had done.
- Lived: 1642 CE – 1723 CE
- Nationality: Tuscan
- Roles: grand_duke, monarch
