Alessandro de' Medici
A tale of race, rivalry and revenge, but was he the tyrant his enemies claimed?
One of the most unlikely men to come to power in Renaissance Italy, Alessandro de’ Medici, ruler of Florence from 1531 to 1537, was probably born in Rome around 1512. He was illegitimate, and most contemporary writers say that his father was Lorenzo de’ Medici, duke of Urbino (grandson of the famous patron Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’). A minority of sources point instead to Giulio de’ Medici, the future Pope Clement VII and Lorenzo’s cousin once removed. Others, perhaps more honestly, say it is impossible to know. Alessandro may not have been certain himself.
Information about his mother is no easier to come by. She is generally known as Simunetta, though one source gives her the name Anna, and the most likely scenario is that she worked as a maid in the Medici household. It was all too common for female servants to be sexually exploited by the men they worked for, and especially if (as one source tells us) Simunetta was enslaved then it would have been very hard indeed for her to refuse.
That rumour that Simunetta was a slave, combined with other sources describing her as ‘Moorish’ and ‘half-Negro’, along with the textual and visual evidence for Alessandro’s brown skin and curly black hair, together provide evidence that Alessandro was more likely than not a man of African descent. Contemporaries did not describe Alessandro as Black, and while some regarded him as unsuitable to rule on the grounds of his birth, they generally pointed to his mother’s low status, rather than her race. This should not be a surprise, however: the modern language of race was only just beginning to develop in 16th century Europe. It came into being in the context of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans that began during Alessandro’s lifetime.
No-one expected the baby Alessandro to ascend to high office, and for the first seven years of his life we have no surviving sources for him. At the time of his birth, 1512, the Medici were about to force their way back to power in Florence after 18 years of exile. The following year, Alessandro’s great-uncle, Giovanni de’ Medici, was elected Pope Leo X. Fortune seemed to be smiling on the family. It was not to last, however. In 1516, Leo’s brother Giuliano died young, leaving only an illegitimate son, Ippolito. In 1519, Medici prospects deteriorated further with the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the last legitimate male heir in the main line of the fami
