The Romance of a Medici Warrior; Being the True Story of Giovanni Delle Bande Nere, to Which Is Added the Life of His Son, Cosimo I., Grand Duke of Tuscany; A Study in Heredity

by Hare Christopher

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

364 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 2013

Reviews

[Redsteve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the title, this book is nonfiction, drawing extensively on period letters and state papers. Christopher Hare is actually a pseudonym for Marian Andrews, an English historian writing in the early 20th Century. A product of her time, her writing is a bit florid and mannered. She tends to gloss over some of the more salacious stories of the period. This book is split about evenly between biographies of Ludovico de' Medici AKA Giovanni delle Bande Nere, a famous 16th Century Italy, and his son, the future Grand Duke Cosimo I, ruler of Florence. The author draws a strong contrast between Giovanni (“the lion”), who was widely famed and well regarded but died in debt, and Cosimo (“the fox”), a Machiavellian schemer who went from being an exiled orphan to being absolute ruler of Florence. While she generally sticks to the facts, the author is certainly a big fan of Giovanni and roundly condemns Cosimo. In fact, she rarely has anything nice to say about the entire Medici family (except for Giovanni) – Lorenzo de ’Medici (the Magnificent), Pope Leo IX, Duke Alessandro de ’Medici, Pope Clement VII, Cardinal Ippolito de ’Medici, Queen Catherine de’ Medici – all are described as crafty, treacherous, and greedy. Her book also includes a brief biography of Catherine Sforza, Countess of Forli (Giovanni’s mother). This edition is scanned reproduction of the original text and illustrations and is quite readable (although in a few places the typeface jumps around). Some of the paintings reproduced in the original look a bit “squished” in this copy, but it’s not a huge problem. In some ways her writing reminded me of Rafael Sabatini, which isn’t surprising as his biography of Cesare Borgia came out in 1912 by the same publisher. 3 stars.