The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King by HRH Princess Michael of Kent Page B

but injury was still commonplace.
    When Renaissance cavaliers were not at war, they practiced their skills and honed their courage by jousting in tournaments.
    After touring his wife’s considerable estates in the Auvergne, the Duke of Urbino brought his duchess home to Tuscany, where they spent an idyllic three months before he fell ill. Unlike his famous forbear, this Lorenzo de’ Medici had only succeeded in mastering dissipation and drunkenness during his short life. If the pope and the king knew about it, neither had mentioned the “bad blood” of the Medici, which carried tuberculosis, and worse. Lorenzo was a victim of the so-called
mal français or mal de Naples
, which had been brought from the New World allegedly by the Spanish: syphilis.
    All the well-laid plans of the Medici pope and the French king came to nothing. Lorenzo took to his bed with consumption. OnApril 13, 1519, one year after her wedding, Madeleine gave birth to a daughter, but Lorenzo was already too weak to go to his wife’s room to see her. The frail child was immediately baptized Catarina 4 Maria Romula. Two weeks after the birth, Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne died of puerperal fever and complications from her husband’s double wedding gifts of syphilis and tuberculosis. One week later, Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, ruler of Florence, and master wastrel, joined her in the tomb. He was twenty-eight years old. Although François I and Pope Leo X may have thought their dynastic alliance ended with these two deaths, no one could have foretold the intertwining of the destinies of François’ second son, the one-month-old Henri d’Orléans, with Catherine de’ Medici—and with Diane de Poitiers.

    P EACE at home did not prevent the king’s mother from plotting another campaign. Why should not François become Holy Roman Emperor? With the death of the past incumbent, Maximilian, an election was due soon. Despite its grandeur, the title was largely honorific; it conferred nominal sovereignty over a “mosaic” of principalities, duchies, free cities, margravates, baronies, the many small kingdoms that now comprise modern Germany, and the sizable duchy of Savoy.
    By ancient tradition, the emperor was chosen by seven German Electors, although some of them could be bribed. Louise, determined to add the crown of Charlemagne 5 to her son’s glory, noted that there were really only three contenders: François I; Henry VIII (although hewas certainly not rich enough to compete); and the Habsburg Charles, king of Spain.
    Five years younger than François I, Charles, son of the Austrian Archduke Philip “the Handsome,” was in almost every way his father’s opposite. How shrewdly the Venetian diplomat Marino Giustiniani, who had served at the courts of both François and Charles, observed: “They will hate each other until one of them dies.” Where François was dashing and ebullient, Charles was cold and phlegmatic. With his long Habsburg chin and the permanently open mouth of the adenoid sufferer, Charles was far from good-looking. He wore the colors of shadows and hated the ostentation that the French king loved. The excitement of the chase, which occupied so much of the life of the Valois court and of François in particular, was anathema to the calm and curt Charles of Spain. In fact, although his extended jaw made him look stupid, he was blessed with a rare intelligence. Charles was tenacious, possessing total self-control and patience. With the wealth generated by the New World, he could also afford to outbid François for the crown of Charlemagne.
    In addition to being king of Spain, and by dint of other inheritances, Charles had the right to be named ruler of “Sicily, Jerusalem, the Balearic and Canary Islands, the Indies, and the Mainland on the Far Side of the Atlantic.” He was “Archduke of Austria; Duke of Burgundy, Brabant, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Luxembourg, Limburg, Athens and Patras; Count of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol;