Parallel Aspirations

The early decades of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) had a dramatic impact on the political landscape of Italy and radically changed the nature of military conflict. This chapter explores the efforts of Francesco Gonzaga and Isabella d’Este to realize their youthful ambitions in a rapidly changing political environment. The marquis wished to make his name as a military strategist and warrior, while his wife aspired to try out her diplomatic talents. Both individuals enjoyed initial success in their respective endeavours, as they worked together effectively, if not entirely harmoniously, to maintain the Gonzaga regime on an even keel during the first French invasion of the Italian peninsula.

The Crafting of Identity and the Division of Political Labour

The use of gender as a category of historical analysis has prompted historians to rethink the modalities of politics during the Renaissance period. While women were rarely rulers in their own right, they sometimes exercised a political authority drawn from cultural influence, or directly assigned to their person by virtue of deputizing for absent husbands. This chapter explores the extent to which the political collaboration of Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga emulated precedents established by their parents and grandparents. The ways in which Isabella exploited gender tropes, or submitted to them, is considered alongside Francesco Gonzaga’s projection of a virile masculine identity, through an analysis of how the pair used art and other forms of cultural patronage to shape their respective identities and political qualities.

Risk-Taking and Risk Management

This chapter explores the ways in which gender shaped the respective approaches to political decision-making by the marquis and his wife. I argue that while the delegated nature of her authority encouraged Isabella to keep her emotions strictly in check and to be prudent in a diplomatic setting, Francesco was far more erratic. On the one hand, he adopted strategies of temporizing, prevarication, and swift changes of allegiance to hedge his bets politically, seen by contemporaries as intrinsically female vices, on the other, he indulged in reckless and competitive behaviour designed to display his masculine courage and princely disdain for caution. Together the couple evaded the dangers posed by the second French descent and the fall of Milan to Louis XII, but it was Isabella’s prudence that neutralized the ill-considered risk-taking of her husband.

Parenthood and Politics

An earlier generation of historians claimed that medieval and early modern parents often withheld love from their children for fear they would die, or treated those who survived as ‘little adults’. Recent research has shown that many mothers and fathers formed close bonds with their offspring, whom they cared for in ways that were entirely age appropriate. The correspondence of Isabella and Francesco shows that children could bring parents closer together and improve a relationship that was initially emotionally quite distant. Through close analysis of archival documentation, this chapter explores how the Gonzaga children were monitored and guided through their infancy and childhood by parents who reacted with delight to their developmental milestones, but also made sure they were rigorously prepared for the dynastic roles they would assume in adulthood.

Conclusion

Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga together navigated the highs and many lows of the first conflicts of the Italian Wars, their cooperation underpinned by a mutual devotion to their children and concern for the future of the Gonzaga regime. But this study has shown that it was difficult to agree about the terms of that collaboration, a situation that the richly nuanced sources permit us to understand within the terms of premodernity. The couple’s acrimonious epistolary negotiations during the last years of their union over the extent to which the conventional marital hierarchy should be observed provide evidence of the powerful influence of gendered norms, but also of how prescriptive social rules might at times be modified or ignored by individuals when pragmatic issues overtook ideology.

A Mind of Her Own

This chapter examines the tensions and strategies at play in the last years of the Gonzaga-Este marriage, when Isabella demanded greater physical mobility and diplomatic autonomy on the grounds that she had proved both her political competence and utter loyalty to Gonzaga interests. But as his illness worsened and undermined the physical virility on which his vision of masculinity so relied, Francesco’s conviction in his status as the dominant partner found expression in a greater desire to be seen publicly to command a wife who had acquired a reputation for wilfulness. The acrimonious divergence of views between the pair about how their marriage ought to work in its mature phase, documented in their correspondence and that of Isabella’s secretary, Capilupi, is analysed here alongside episodes of reconciliation, in which Isabella and Francesco recognized the bonds that still united them. The evidence reveals the emotional complexities of a relationship in its third decade.

Years of Crisis

The advent of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) coincided with a devastating epidemic, initially dubbed the mal francese by Italians, because it was thought to have been brought to the peninsula with Charles VIII’s invading army. Francesco was an early victim of the Great Pox. This chapter explores the physical and mental anguish associated with a disease from the perspective of an infected individual. The illness ruined Francesco’s military career and compromised the physically robust image of masculinity he had always cultivated. His alternating bouts of hope and despair provide an insight into how elite sufferers, such as he, dealt with the disease. The marquis assumed he would be able to prevail over the affliction, since he had the requisite courage and enough money to secure an effective cure, an attitude that led to his capture by Venetian mercenaries and year-long incarceration in Venice, when he returned to the battlefield while still in an enfeebled state.

Building a Spousal Relationship

As was the case with other politically significant unions, the early years of the marriage of Francesco Gonzaga and Isabella d’Este were dominated by the expectation that the couple would quickly produce an heir. While this pressure was most acutely felt by Isabella, the lack of a son represented a significant source of worry for a ruler who sought to secure a dynastic legacy. This chapter explores the struggle of a newly married couple to develop trust and to become sexually comfortable with each other, a process that proved far from straightforward. Francesco was known for his ribald humour and frank sexuality, while Isabella married with little awareness of what to expect in relation to her duty to bear a son. By piecing together evidence relating to their early relationship, the chapter traces the emotional discomfort the marital partners experienced in the initial stage of their union, the lengths to which Isabella’s parents and members of her own household went to resolve them, and the public scrutiny to which the marchioness was subject in the lead up to the birth of her first child.

Betrothal

While historians have acknowledged the importance of dynastic marriages to political strategy and diplomacy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, little attention has been paid to how individuals were readied for such marriages by their families. The Este-Gonzaga match was a neighbourly one. The close proximity of Ferrara and Mantua and a decade-long betrothal permitted the two families to try to establish familiarity between their betrothed children in order to reap the political fruits that a harmonious marital relationship would provide. This chapter provides an insight into what contemporaries believed to be the foundations for a successful marriage and uncovers the very different journeys towards wedlock of a young, strictly cloistered, aristocratic girl and a mature bachelor prince.

Introduction

The historical specificity of how patriarchy was interpreted and the ways in which social position and gender interacted to shape an elite marital relationship are the focus of this study of Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga. The pair’s agile improvisations in relation to masculine and feminine identities and to the division of work, were usually prompted by the diplomatic dilemmas they faced. Inevitably such experiments prompted uncertainty and sometimes sharp discord, as they struggled to work out a modus vivendi in a rapidly changing and perilous political environment. In analysing how this marriage was inhabited emotionally, alongside how it operated politically, the book aims to uncover the intricate intertwining of the private and public in a marriage that had to succeed on both levels.