Gian Gastone de' Medici
Gian Gastone de' Medici was the last Medici to rule, and he undid his father's reign from bed. He was born in Florence in 1671, the younger son of Cosimo III, and was a bookish, melancholy boy who was not expected to reign because his brother Ferdinando would. In 1697 he was married for the succession's sake to Anna Maria Franziska of Saxe-Lauenburg, a widowed Bohemian heiress who refused to leave her estate at Reichstadt, so that he spent years in a damp castle in the Bohemian countryside with a wife who preferred her horses, escaping to Prague to drink and gamble with his valet Giuliano Dami. There were no children, which was the point of the marriage and the end of the dynasty. Ferdinando died in 1713 and Gian Gastone became heir. He succeeded in October 1723 at fifty-two and set about reversing everything: the fines on Jews were lifted, the executions stopped, the taxes were cut, the spies were dismissed, the Aristotle-only rule at Pisa was dropped and the university was allowed to teach the new science again. The Florentines were grateful and rarely saw him. He appeared in public for the last time at the feast of St John in 1729, drunk in his carriage, and after 1730 he governed from his bed, surrounded by the Ruspanti, the young men Dami recruited and paid in coins called ruspi. The succession had already been decided elsewhere. The Quadruple Alliance of 1718 had given Tuscany to Don Carlos of Spain, whose troops garrisoned Florence in 1731 without asking the grand duke; then the War of the Polish Succession moved the pieces, Don Carlos took Naples instead, and in 1735 the powers assigned Tuscany to Francis Stephen of Lorraine as compensation for the duchy he was giving up to France. Gian Gastone signed nothing and was consulted about nothing. He died in July 1737, and his sister Anna Maria Luisa had to arrange with the new dynasty what he had not: the Family Pact that kept the Medici collections in Florence.
- Lived: 1671 CE – 1737 CE
- Nationality: Tuscan
- Roles: grand_duke, monarch
