o the
recognition of this bastard as chief of the republic and head of the
house of the Medici was his marriage with Margaret of Austria, natural
daughter of Charles V.

Francesco de' Medici, husband of Bianca Capello, accepted as his son a
child of poor parents bought by the celebrated Venetian; and, strange
to say, Ferdinando, on succeeding Francesco, maintained the substituted
child in all his rights. That child, called Antonio de' Medici, was
considered during four reigns as belonging to the family; he won the
affection of everybody, rendered important services to the family, and
died universally regretted.

Nearly all the first Medici had natural children, whose careers were
invariably brilliant. For instance, the Cardinal Giulio de' Medici,
afterwards Pope under the name of Clement VII., was the illegitimate son
of Giuliano I. Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici was also a bastard, and came
very near being Pope and the head of the family.

Lorenzo II., the father of Catherine, married in 1518, for his second
wife, Madeleine de la Tour de Boulogne, in Auvergne, and died April 25,
1519, a few days after his wife, who died in giving birth to Catherine.
Catherine was therefore orphaned of father and mother as soon as she
drew breath. Hence the strange adventures of her childhood, mixed up as
they were with the bloody efforts of the Florentines, then seeking
to recover their liberty from the Medici. The latter, desirous of
continuing to reign in Florence, behaved with such circumspection that
Lorenzo, Catherine's father, had taken the name of Duke d'Urbino.

At Lorenzo's death, the head of the house of the Medici was Pope Leo
X., who sent the illegitimate son of Giuliano, Giulio de' Medici, then
cardinal, to govern Florence. Leo X. was great-uncle to Catherine, and
this Cardinal Giulio, afterward Clement VII., was her uncle by the left
hand.

It was during the siege of Florence, undertaken by the Medici to force
their return there, that the Republican party, not content with having
shut Catherine, then nine years old, into a convent, after robbing her
of all her property, actually proposed, on the suggestion of one named
Batista Cei, to expose her between two battlements on the walls to the
artillery of the Medici. Bernardo Castiglione went further in a council
held to determine how matters should be ended: he was of opinion that,
so far from returning her to the Pope as the latter requested, she ought
to be given to th