The Gondi: Family Strategy and Survival in Early Modern France

Abstract

The Florentine Gondi family owed their spectacular rise at the French court of the sixteenth century to the patronage of Catherine de Medici. Their enemies were many and vocal. Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantôme, detested Albert de Gondi: he was, wrote the memoirist, ‘sly, cunning, deceitful, corrupt, a great liar and dissimulator’. Albert, count then duke of Retz, is best known for his alleged involvement in plotting the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and via the anti-Italian invective that followed. As Joanna Milstein’s meticulous study demonstrates, however, there is far more to the Gondi story than that event. Albert’s father, Antoine de Gondi, settled in Lyon in the early years of the sixteenth century, bought himself a title and married the daughter of better-established immigrants the Pierrevive (formerly Pietraviva). While Albert made his way up the secular ranks, his brother Pierre entered the Church, becoming bishop of Paris, confessor to Catherine de Medici and finally a cardinal. A second branch of the Gondi maintained business interests in textiles, spices and banking. In the second half of the sixteenth century they became financiers for the French crown.