Dux ludens : Eleonora de Toledo,Cosimo I de’ Medici,and Games of Chance in the Ducal Household of Mid-Sixteenth-Century Florence

On 12 June 1543, Lorenzo Pagni – one of the secretaries attached to the ducal household of Cosimo I de’ Medici and Eleonora de Toledo – reported to the major-domo, Pierfrancesco Riccio, that he had not been able to reply the previous day because the duchess had begun to gamble immediately after dining and had not stopped until the arrival of her mother-in-law, Maria Salviati. ¹ Eleonora’s enthusiasm for games of chance was well-known. Pietro Aretino acknowledged it in his dialogue Le carte parlanti, published the same year, noting ‘the watchful elegance’ with which Eleonora played. ² In 1561, the Venetian ambassador, Vincenzo Fedele, identified gambling as the duchess’s preferred recreation. ³ However, Eleonora was not alone in her pursuits. Correspondence produced by the ducal secretaries attests not only to the gambling habits of the duchess, but also of Cosimo and other members of the court and family. Games of chance, played for high stakes, appear to have been a regular source of diversion and entertainment in the household. Indeed, in 1547, the Jesuit father Juan de Polanco identified gambling as the key fault in the household. ⁴ Despite this specific disapproval and the broader cultural disapprobation that games of chance attracted, both Eleonora and Cosimo gambled frequently and openly throughout their lives. Indeed, in this article I will argue that, from the perspective of Cosimo and Eleonora themselves, the playing of games of chance was far from a fault. Rather, their gambling made manifest their self-control and suitability as governors of Florence and its dominion.

At least since Johan Huizinga published his study of the play element of culture, in the first half of the last century, scholars from diverse disciplines have agreed that there is more at stake in playing games than simply having fun. For Huizinga, the stake of play was the contest itself: the demonstration of excellence and success that came from winning but also the tension and uncertainty that come from taking risks, from competing. ⁵ Clifford Geertz, in his famous essay on Balinese cock fighting, elucidated the concept of ‘deep play’: a contest in which the stakes are too high for the competitors to sustain, in which the players are in over their heads, because they stand to lose not only material wealth but also status, prestige, and character. ⁶ Erving Goffman, in his description of ‘action’ described gambling as a behaviour that is undertaken consciously despite the potential consequences of loss. Like Huizinga, for Goffman the commitment to losing control necessary for taking such a chance – the tension and uncertainty of play – was key to action: gambling (and some other types of play) is problematic and consequential, and so where the action is. Like Geertz, Goffman identified the potential immaterial gains of risk taking (character, face) as being at the heart of what is really at stake in any gamble, not the money or goods staked. ⁷ In a society such as sixteenth-century Florence, in which credit referred not only to financial health but also to honour, the lines between status, material worth, and the risks of gambling blurred easily. But for Cosimo and Eleonora the benefits of gambling – of demonstrating themselves to be people of action, by Goffman’s definition – outweighed many of the risks. The realm of play became a space for the representation of the contest for power at the heart of European court culture and for the representation of the ducal couple’s mastery of this contest.

In many ways, the Medici court in Florence at the mid-sixteenth century offers historians a unique object for analysis: a new court created by a new dynasty in a setting that had no tradition of princely government. Until 1532, the city had a republican constitution dating back to the thirteenth century. ⁸ Governing magistracies had rotated regularly between the members of a restricted, but socioeconomically heterogeneous, office-holding class. The political culture of the city, expressed in public speeches, humanist treatises, and works of art, celebrated the ideal of the res publica – of a shared commonwealth – and imagined the governors as an egalitarian fraternity of civilian magistrates. While the Medici family dominated Florence politically during the fifteenth century, at the head of an oligarchic faction, the republican institutions and ideals of the city endured. In the early sixteenth century, however, tensions between demands for equality and the necessity for security and effective government increased to breaking point during the Italian Wars: the dynastic struggle between the Habsburgs and the Valois for hegemony on the Italian peninsula. The city oscillated between more- and less-restricted republican constitutions in an increasingly bitter and divisive struggle for control over the state. Finally, the Medici, expelled in 1527, returned in August 1530 with the military support of the Habsburg emperor Charles V. Two years later, the family and its supporters transformed the city and its dominion into a hereditary principality. Cosimo I was the second Medici duke of Florence, inheriting the position in 1537 following the murder of his predecessor.

Cosimo, Eleonora, and their advisors, then, were essentially building a political culture and institutions ex novo but within the institutional remnants of the previous republican system. This does not mean, necessarily, that their every action needs to be freighted with political meaning; but it does suggest that everything they did possessed a certain rawness and self-consciousness that long-lived dynasties and long-established principalities lacked. This heightened performative nature of the ducal household, its very conscious construction of a new socio-political space and order, meant that even ludic pursuits, like gambling, could and did serve to further the transformation of Florence from a republic to a principality. In this regard, then, the household of Cosimo and Eleonora in the mid-sixteenth century offers historians a valuable insight into what could be termed, paraphrasing Huizinga, the play element of European court culture. ⁹ It casts into sharp relief the way in which play was not simply one aspect of life in the princely households of early modern Europe but a constitutive element of court life, one that represented the contest for power and status at its heart.

The documentary record for gambling in the ducal household is substantial and provides both qualitative and quantitative evidence. Specifically relating to Cosimo and Eleonora, letters and other papers exist dating from January 1542 to January 1573. Some of the references to gambling in correspondence simply refer to the duke or duchess playing. Lorenzo Pagni’s letter of 12 June 1543, for example, with which I began, reads: ‘after she had dined, she turned to playing and played until the arrival of the Most Illustrious Signora Maria’. ¹⁰ On other occasions, the game is specified: most often primiera – a poker-like card game – or centuno. ¹¹ On 30 November 1543, for instance, Pagni reported to Pierfrancesco Riccio that he had not read the latest letters to Cosimo because ‘at the time of their arrival he was playing at primiera’. ¹² Records from Eleonora’s few surviving financial records also indicate that she made bets on the sex of at least one of her own unborn children, as well as those of other women connected to the ducal household or service: the notorious Italian game of maschio o femmina. ¹³

A book of creditors and debtors to the Medici guardaroba for the years 1544–1553 reveals the apparent frequency with which the duke and duchess gambled and borrowed cash from the government purse to cover their losses. Given the lapidary nature of financial accounting, the entries in this record are not always specific. Some refer openly, if euphemistically, to gambling, such as that of 20 July 1544: ‘fifty gold scudi in cash to His Excellency [Cosimo I] himself, carried by Gusman, portiere, to the chamber of the duchess, for passing the time’. ¹⁴ Others make no mention of the purpose of the loan but the locations and amounts mentioned strongly suggest that the money was for games of chance. The sums are regular – 50 or 100 scudi, or multiples thereof – carried to the chambers of Eleonora or her head lady-in-waiting, Caterina Tornabuoni, or more rarely of Cosimo himself; such as that of 31 May 1552 for 200 scudi ‘given in cash to Her Excellency in the Camera Verde in a handkerchief’. ¹⁵

Gambling appears to have been a principal source of ludic diversion for the ducal couple, especially Eleonora. Cosimo, according to the documentary record, also played pallacorda – a ball game similar to royal tennis but originally played by hand rather than with a racquet – although on at least one occasion he appears to have combined the two pursuits by betting on the outcome of games. ¹⁶ Gambling consumed their leisure time wherever they were and at all times of the year. When outside of Florence, the villa at Poggio a Caiano appeared a favourite location: a majority of the correspondence from various ducal secretaries that mentions the ludic habits of Cosimo and Eleonora originated there. ¹⁷ In the city itself, they played games of chance regularly in their personal chambers in the Palazzo della Signoria, usually ‘in the chamber of the duchess’, also referred to as the ‘camera verde’, more rarely ‘in the chamber of the lady Caterina Tornabuoni’, who was Eleonora’s head lady-in-waiting, and, even more infrequently, in Cosimo’s rooms. ¹⁸

This range of spaces immediately suggests the pursuit of recreation and diversion; that is, only when away from the immediate business of government did the ducal couple find time to indulge in play and games, whether at their favourite villa or in the more personal – although by no means private – rooms of the Palazzo della Signoria. References, such as that to Cosimo, Eleonora, and Francisco de Toledo ‘passing time happily’ by gambling at centuno at Poggio a Caiano reinforce this perception. ¹⁹ But it also suggests a strict geography of behaviour. Cosimo and Eleonora were both deeply concerned to produce and promote a public image as wholesome, virtuous, and self-controlled. ²⁰ While Eleonora’s gambling habits were well known, even notorious, the quarantining of it to specific places suggests as much a conscious choice as the simple acknowledgment of leisure time.

A similar logic appears to have worked in the temporal context of Cosimo and Eleonora’s ludic behaviour. Indications and reports of gambling – both probable and explicit – range across the calendar. However, the clear majority within Florence occurred during the Carnival season, from late December to early February. ²¹ Outside of the city, most mentions of gambling appear during the summer and autumn months. ²² While this clearly reflects the seasonality of the ducal couple’s villa residence, June, July, and September are also the next most prominent after the winter months for records of gaming debts in the Palazzo della Signoria. In June 1552, for example, Cosimo amassed several hundred scudi of gambling losses in the days leading up to the festival of San Giovanni, Florence’s celestial patron protector. ²³ There is also some coincidence between pregnancy and Eleonora’s gambling habits, but not enough to suggest any real pattern of behaviour. ²⁴ So while games of chance appear throughout the year, clearly the ducal couple favoured certain seasons for intense ludic diversion: Carnival, when the sins of concupiscence were indulged, high summer, and the autumnal hunting season.

In all, however, the spatial and temporal aspects of the ducal couple’s ludic behaviour do not appear particularly influential. Two further contextualizing factors – whom the ducal couple gambled with and the stakes of their games – are far more suggestive and significant for understanding the gambling of Cosimo and Eleonora. One of the most striking aspects of their ludic behaviour is their choice of playing partners, who were almost always of a notably lower status than themselves. A few exceptions appear in the record: Don Pedro de Toledo, viceroy of Naples and the duchess’s father; Don Francisco de Toledo, his cousin; Pietro Antonio Sanseverino, the prince of Bisignano and count of Tricarico; Cardinal Benedetto Accolti; and Cardinal Giovanni Salviati, the duke’s maternal uncle. However, references to such prestigious gaming companions surface rarely in the records, generally only once or twice. ²⁵ In general, while the ducal couple’s partners were uniformly aristocratic – being drawn from the upper estates of the Florentine office-holding class – they were all courtiers and subjects of Cosimo and Eleonora. This stands in contrast, for example, to the reports of gambling at the vice royal court of the duchess’s father during the same period. Pirro Musefilo, recounting to Cosimo the high-stakes gaming habits of the Neapolitan court in the autumn of 1539, recited a list of players weighty with titles and nobility: ‘the Duke of Gravina [Ferdinando Orsini] […] lost over 2000 scudi, Cesare Pignatella lost over 1000, those who won [were] the Prince of Bisignano [Pietro Antonio Sanseverino], over 2000 scudi, the Prince of Stigliano [Luigi Carafa] won over 1000, the Duke of Terme won over 2000’. ²⁶

Certainly the newly created Medici principality lacked an established class of titled, feudal nobility like that of the Regno, but the choice of lower status partners was problematic. Girolamo Cardano, the Milanese physician, astrologer, and inveterate gambler, in his treatise on probability and games of chance, De ludo aleae, urged caution in the choice of playing partners: ‘Likewise, a disreputable opponent, or one of base condition and habituated to the game, is shameful and even harmful’. Cardano counselled that anyone wishing to gamble should do so ‘at one’s own home or at the house of a friend’, implying that games of chance were more appropriately played between peers and close companions. ²⁷ Sixteenth-century Venetian legislation similarly attempted to prevent gambling between those of different social ranks by providing exceptions to penalties only to nobles gaming with friends and relatives in private homes. ²⁸

The stakes for which the ducal couple played were also significant. From 1538, as a money of account, one scudo could purchase around fourteen days’ unskilled labour: Eleonora and Cosimo won and lost hundreds or even thousands of scudi in games of chance, reflecting lifetimes of labour for their poorest subjects. ²⁹ Although an extant invitation from the duchess to Piero Salviati, Lorenzo Pucci, and the Abbott della Stufa to join her at Poggio a Caiano to gamble in late August 1545 promised stakes ‘no higher than one scudo a hand’, other indications suggest that Eleonora did not hesitate to play for large sums or at least to play until she amassed large debts or winnings. Certainly the same invitation was for four days ‘to play at primiera day and night’; so even at one scudo per hand the potential existed to win or lose large sums by incremental bets. ³⁰ A letter from September 1549, described more spectacular stakes: ‘my Lady lost, from the day before yesterday to now, three thousand or more’. ³¹ When betting on the sex of unborn children, Eleonora also gambled for large sums in cash and/or precious fabrics: 561 scudi in October 1552, 343 the following February, and 390 in October 1554. ³² In a few days in late December and early January 1547/48, Cosimo amassed losses of 1000 scudi gambling in the Camera Verde. He lost double that sum in the days following Christmas 1552, when his father-in-law, the viceroy, was in Florence. ³³ In later years, following Eleonora’s death, Cosimo seems to have gambled less speculatively, preferring smaller stakes. A record of payment for his gambling debts in February 1571, amounted to only 90 scudi in total, over half of which he owed to his second wife, Camilla Martelli. One year later, the sum owed by the Grand Duke was larger, just over 307 scudi, but still smaller than the debts he had acquired twenty years earlier. ³⁴

These details provide a framework through which the significance and meaning of gambling in the ducal household begins to emerge. Counter-intuitively perhaps, gambling provided the ducal couple with one vehicle (among others) for constructing public, courtly personae as virtuous, self-controlled, and capable governors of Florence, Siena, and their dominions. The fact that their secretaries recorded and reported the ludic habits of Cosimo and Eleonora so carefully underlines the importance of games of chance to the ducal persons. Play, in the ducal household of Florence, was never simply about diversion.

In losing bets and large sums on card games, and doing so often to social inferiors, Cosimo and Eleonora were not risking their status and positions. The concept of ‘deep play’, as elucidated by Geertz, operates at a more profound and complex level than simply the stakes of honour and shame. Because, as he observed, despite the risks, no real change in status occurred: no one ever ascended the social hierarchy by winning a cockfight. At the most, the victor gained a moment of glory, the loser a moment of ignominy. Both shared a moment in which the possibility of inversion and disruption was briefly manifest before the next fight began.

Between social unequals, such as the ducal couple and their regular gaming partners, the momentary inversion glimpsed when the courtier won a hand against the duke or duchess took on a heightened poignancy. For one brief moment, the actual hierarchy of court and government overturned: the subject mastered his or her ruler. What mattered more than this moment of inversion, however, as reality re-imposed itself and prince and courtier played another hand or turned to other diversions, was not the fact of the loss but how Eleonora or Cosimo responded to it. As Girolamo Cardano observed: ‘play is, in fact, a rack: anger, greed, and honesty or dishonesty are found out in play’. He continued, that great utility lay in the manner in which gaming served ‘as a trial of self-control, for when you have been defeated by anger, by honest men, and finally by the game itself’. The Milanese physician, in fact, included the revelatory nature of gambling – the way in which it unmasked the true character of one’s opponents – as one of play’s utilitarian features. ³⁵

Indeed, the way in which games of chance could reveal the nobility or otherwise of gamblers became a recurring theme in sixteenth-century commentary. Baldassare Castiglione, in Il cortegiano (1528), had Federico Fregoso state that playing at cards or dice was an acceptable pastime for the courtier, ‘except for those who do so too assiduously […] or truly for no other reason than to win money’. Such a player, Fregoso continued, will ‘demonstrate avarice’ by showing great displeasure at losing. ³⁶ Le carte parlanti (1543), Pietro Aretino’s fantastical dialogue between a deck of playing cards and their creator, the well-known card painter Federico Padovano, makes a similar observation when discussing the behaviour of Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno and one of Aretino’s patrons. ‘Instead of the horrified visage and beastly language that play usually puts on the face and in the mouth of those who lose’, the cards pronounce, a player of ‘such high status’ as Sanseverino ‘deports himself with a playful visage and graceful words’ when faced with a loss. ³⁷ Torquato Tasso observed in his dialogue Il Gonzaga secondo ovvero del Giuoco (1582), through the protagonist of Annibale Pocaterra, that avaricious players reveal themselves because they play more cautiously. The avaricious player does not play for pleasure – ‘which is not a simple pleasure, since the pleasure is mixed with other emotions’ such as tension, uncertainty, fear, and sadness – but only for material gain. By contrast, the honest, generous player will lay down money more easily, accept greater stakes, and play with greater abandon. ³⁸

An anecdote from the Medici court, in fact, testifies to the seriousness with which courtly society judged behaviour at the gaming table. In 1541, Cosimo had rid himself of his military commander Pirro Colonna, who had been appointed on the recommendation of Alfonso de Ávalos, marchese del Vasto and imperial governor of Milan. The Medici duke had grown tired of Colonna’s pride and his close ties to Ávalos, one of Cosimo’s most implacable opponents. ³⁹ In order to circumvent any protest from either the former commander or his patron, the duke instructed his ambassador to Charles V, Agnolo Niccolini, to justify the dismissal. In addition, Lorenzo Pagni sent a poison-pen letter detailing Colonna’s alleged insolence and excesses, which included a revealing story of dishonourable behaviour while playing primiera.

According to Pagni, Colonna became angry after losing 25 scudi playing cards with Cosimo, Eleonora, and others. The commander had vented his feelings by blaming the presence of the court dwarf: ‘this pig of a dwarf is giving me the evil eye’. The situation soon became violent: Colonna beating and kicking the target of his wrath. ⁴⁰ Whether this incident actually occurred or not, or if it did, whether the account is accurate, is irrelevant. Pagni, and by implication Cosimo himself, thought it an ideal accusation to demonstrate the commander’s lack of self-control, his avarice, and his unsuitability for court life. That he could grow so enraged over such a small sum and lose face so badly, testified that Colonna was the very antithesis of Tasso’s ‘honest, generous player’.

Generosity and honesty, of course, were part of what mattered for Cosimo and Eleonora, when it came to gambling: the opportunity to demonstrate their liberality, their indifference to loss, through playing games of chance, and also the certainty they possessed about their socio-political status. In Le carte parlanti, in fact, Aretino has the cards observe that, ‘Because playing for nothing is the action of a nobody, it is necessary to place on the table as much money as one can lose without caring’. ⁴¹ This is not to imply that either the duchess or duke necessarily played to lose. Indeed, the Venetian ambassador Fedele reported that Eleonora possessed a competitive desire to win. ⁴² Rather, it suggests that more than winning or losing, playing well and with a certain heedlessness to the material consequences mattered to the ducal couple. Notably, when Cristiano Pagni reported Eleonora’s spectacular losses in September 1549 (3000 scudi in three days), he prefaced the report by observing that Cosimo and Eleonora had ‘played the most beautiful game’. ⁴³ On another occasion, Giovanni Francesco Lottini noted that, ‘Yesterday a most excellent game of primiera was played by the Lady duchess, so much so that messer Lorenzo Pucci recovered in one day the seven hundred scudi that he had lost in four’. ⁴⁴ The games were ‘beautiful’ and ‘excellent’ not because the ducal couple won (although perhaps Cosimo did in September 1549), but because they played freely, for high stakes, and the losses and wins were spectacular: the players were, demonstrably, not avaricious and were unconcerned for the material outcome.

A public persona of generosity and liberality was of importance to both Cosimo and Eleonora. In the case of the duke, concern for such an appearance manifested itself in his use of the Florentine monte di pietà. Established in 1495, this charitable institution provided short-term (normally one year), low-interest loans to the poor on the collateral of some small item pledged in pawn. Like identical bodies founded in other Italian cities, the purpose of the monte was explicitly anti-Jewish as well as anti-usurious. By statute, the institution could not make large loans (a maximum of 25 lire to inhabitants of the city) and had to donate any profits to charity. The Florentine monte di pietà, then, in its original establishment, existed as a mechanism that attempted to break life-cycle poverty or, at least, to provide immediate aid to the working poor of the city.

Cosimo, however, turned the monte into a political tool. From 1545, the duke initiated a policy of using the institution to make loans to friends, allies, and supporters, both local and foreign. The loans always exceeded the statutory maximums permitted and occasionally breached other contractual obligations. Between 1564 and 1569, the monte loaned over 200,000 scudi in 136 separate transactions on Cosimo’s orders. ⁴⁵ The duke used these loans to bolster his public image as generous and liberal, at no personal cost. His behaviour in this regard was not restricted to a single institution. Indeed, Cosimo used his patronage of all the major charitable foundations in Florence – including the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova and the Innocenti foundling hostel – to gain access to funds for personal and state expenditure without raising taxes. At the same time, however, the duke took great care always to present himself as the protector and promoter of these causes. ⁴⁶

Eleonora cultivated a persona of liberality through a very different strategy and also through her own money rather than that of others. The duchess’s iconography oriented around a close association between her person and the idea of abundance embodied by the figures of Ops, Ceres, Cybele, and Juno. The first three were agricultural deities, while the last was goddess of wealth and matrimony. The imagery drew inspiration from Eleonora’s personal fertility – bearing 11 children between 1540 and 1554 – as well as her personal wealth, which derived largely from agricultural landholdings and the grain trade. This complex of images and messages built a public image of the duchess as liberal and abundant, rich in children, grain, and money, a source of wealth and generosity for Florence and its dominions. ⁴⁷

This shared concern for a public persona of generosity raises the possibility that Cosimo and Eleonora’s gambling, at least in part, provided a mechanism for charity in a disguised form. It suggests that the duke and duchess might, on occasion, have used use gaming losses to provide money or goods to their courtiers and even to servants. The textual evidence, however, does not support such a conclusion. The ducal couple’s gaming partners tended to be courtiers and members of the Florentine aristocracy, men such as Pandolfo della Stufa and Piero Salviati, who had no apparent need of such charity. The former, a professional courtier who had served Catherine de’ Medici in France, held prominent, salaried offices in the Florentine dominion and served as ambassador to Philip II of Spain and Pope Pius IV. Salviati was a wealthy banker and collector. ⁴⁸ Even the bets that Eleonora made on the sex of the unborn children of Medici servants do not appear to have any altruistic motive behind them as she made them with third parties and not with the pregnant woman or her husband. ⁴⁹

Instead, the liberal indifference that Cosimo and Eleonora displayed in gambling had implications that tied the realm of play to that of governance. It did so because both invoked the concept of virtus – an ability to succeed and make one’s way in the world that combined both physical and moral fortitude, a gendered but not exclusively male concept. The realm of play invoked virtus because games of chance always conjured the concept of Fortuna and the role that it played in human existence. Any gamble, Cardano observed, provoked ‘the expectation of fortuna’. ⁵⁰ Tasso devoted several pages of his dialogue, Il Gonzaga secondo, to parsing the role in games of Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck, who captured the imagination of so many Renaissance commentators and artists. He had the protagonist Annibale Pocaterra suggest that in games such as primiera Fortuna ‘gives victory to the winner’. ⁵¹ A traditional vision of Fortuna, dating back at least to Boethius but with parallels in Roman Stoicism and still prevalent in Renaissance Italy, saw the role of chance or luck in human affairs as a moral problem.

The gifts of Fortuna in this moralized vision – wealth, honours, power, and influence in the world – were purely external and material. As a result, while actually less worthy and valuable than internal, spiritual wealth, these external goods seemed more attractive to humanity, who consequently pursued them eagerly, deluded by desire for immediate gratification. This was the heart of the moral problem: the vagaries and caprices of Fortuna seemed to offer an easier, faster road to wealth, success, and happiness. Boethius had observed that, ‘Fortune with her enticements diverts men from the path of the true good’. For this reason, the Roman statesman had argued that humans benefited more from adversity because it made them realize the worthlessness of material goods compared with the promise of eternal life. ⁵² Leon Battista Alberti, towards the middle of the fifteenth century, would make a similar point repeatedly, albeit often to satirical or ironic effect, in the Intercenales (Dinner Pieces). In the fable ‘Felicitas (Happiness)’, for example, Alberti identifies children as the happiest of all among a group of recently enslaved Scythians of all ages and both sexes, because, ‘Only you infants and children are fortunate in this worst of fortunes, for you will learn to endure without defiance whatever must be borne. No recollection of lost joys will arouse your grief’. ⁵³

The only possible defence against the potential caprice of Fortuna was virtus: the ability to master oneself and so resist the temptations of Fortuna. ‘Of everything that nature distributed to us’, Poggio Bracciolini explained in the proem to his mid-fifteenth-century treatise De varietate fortunae, ‘nothing [is] more excellent than virtus, over which Fortuna has no power, since it is superior to her’. ⁵⁴ In displaying liberal indifference to whether they won or lost, then, Eleonora and Cosimo manifested their virtus and ability to resist the pursuit of Fortuna’s capricious and short-lived gifts. The connection was, perhaps, more than casual. The Medici duke demonstrated a particular interest in Boethius, commissioning three separate translations of the Consolation of Philosophy. ⁵⁵ To win at a game of dice or cards might demonstrate a victory over the forces of chance. To lose with indifference and good grace, however, demonstrated the player’s virtus, by enduring in the face of misfortune and adversity. In this respect then, the more spectacular the loss, the greater credit earned by one’s indifference and fortitude: such games were ‘beautiful’ and ‘most excellent’.

In the realm of government, the possession of virtus demonstrated worthiness to rule: those capable of governing themselves were best suited to the government of others. For this reason, the Renaissance archetype of the tyrant was, above all, a prince unable to restrain his own appetites. ‘It is the mark of a tyrant’, Desiderius Eramus noted in his Institutio principis Christiani, ‘to follow the unbridled will of your mind’. ⁵⁶ Closer to home, Niccolò Machiavelli had observed that a prince who lacked sufficient will to control his passions quickly becomes hated, ‘and from such hatred feared, and finally passing from fear to offence, a tyrant is born’. ⁵⁷ An appetite for gambling might indicate the very weakness that Erasmus, Machiavelli, and other sixteenth-century writers criticized in a bad ruler. Indeed, Cardano, in De ludo aleae, explicitly observed, ‘this vice is detestable in princes’. ⁵⁸ However, Cosimo and Eleonora’s ludic behaviour, in fact, demonstrated the admirable self-control of the ducal couple.

The same fortitude that they displayed when losing, which made them generous players, also underlined their possession of suitable virtus as governors. From the later fifteenth century, the concept of Fortuna began to diversify and become more complex as writers and thinkers such as Giovanni Pontano and Niccolò Machiavelli (most prominently) began to think about the moral problems of luck and chance in a different light. They began to suggest that, if possessed of sufficient virtus and prudence, a person could in fact take control over at least part of her or his life. For these thinkers the problem with Fortuna was not so much the vanity and worldliness of her gifts – indeed Pontano observed that human happiness resided in these very possessions – but rather that Fortuna so often bestowed them on the unworthy or that princes and rulers foolishly depended on the blessings of chance rather than their own skill, ability, and fortitude, their virtus. Of those who appear fortunate, he wrote: ‘very few are the merits that render them worthy of such advantages, neither assiduous and prudent thoughts or plans, nor valuable force of ingenuity nor yet the greatest and rarest ability’. ⁵⁹ The fortunate man (homo fortunatus) in Pontano’s treatise is a fool, raised to great heights by luck, who fails to realize the actual insidiousness of the blessings rained upon him. Machiavelli, similarly, argued that any prince who depended solely on Fortuna for his rise to power would always come to grief. The Florentine compared Francesco Sforza, who acquired Milan ‘with one thousand difficulties’ but held it with ‘little fatigue’, because his rule relied more on virtus than fortuna, with Cesare Borgia, who rose and fell ‘with the fortuna of his father’. ⁶⁰

So, as well as demonstrating their liberal indifference and pleasure in the heart of competition, by losing well Eleonora and Cosimo manifested their fortitude in the face of Fortuna, the fact that they were not enslaved to good luck but had acquired and maintained their rule through ability and skill. In fact, while the Medici duke invoked the idea of Fortuna in one of his personal imprese, he did so only in a carefully balanced manner: combining the belled sail of fortune with a tortoise, the traditional imagining of the Augustan motto ‘Festina lente’ (‘hasten, slowly’). ⁶¹ The emblem implied, therefore, that Cosimo achieved his success via management of luck with prudence, in a manner that both Machiavelli and Pontano would have approved. The hostile Marucelli chronicler provides acknowledgment of the contemporary power of such judgements, albeit in relief. The chronicler consistently used the phrase ‘his good fortune’ when discussing the achievements of the duke, implying that Cosimo was, in fact, a man who succeeded only through luck and not virtus. ⁶²

This antipathy towards Cosimo and Eleonora highlights the conceptual gulf that separated the secular, neo-classical praise of fortitude from contemporary Christian ideas of forbearance and self-control. While gambling could have positive ramifications for the ducal couple, the culture of sixteenth-century Christianity continued to condemn it as sinful. The problem for the Church, as well as for secular authorities, lay not so much in games of chance themselves but in the behaviours associated with or provoked by them: blasphemy, dishonesty, theft, fraud, and violence. ⁶³ The voice of the Marucelli chronicle is moralizing and inflected with a passionate religiosity, which often appears to echo Savonarolan ideas about personal and religious reform. While eulogizing Maria Salviati after her death on 11 November 1543, the chronicler pointedly contrasted Cosimo’s late mother’s virtue with his wife’s gaming habits and pride. ⁶⁴ Towards the end of her own life, two Jesuits close to Eleonora lamented her continuing resistance to their attempts to dissuade her from games of chance. ⁶⁵

The ducal couple, however, displayed a conventional piety in their lives. While Cosimo had an occasionally strained relationship with the ecclesiastical hierarchy – particularly during the reigns of the hostile popes Paul III and Paul IV – his personal religiosity appears orthodox and traditional. ⁶⁶ The duke enacted a programme of moral legislation that targeted blasphemy, sodomy, prostitution, sexual violence against women, and – ironically – gambling. In 1559, Cosimo and his advisors apparently even considered closing public taverns. He also actively promoted reform in the Franciscan and Dominican convents in Florence and issued statutes enforcing the strictures against work on Sundays and feast days. ⁶⁷ Identifying the duke’s personal religious convictions remains an elusive goal. However, his language and actions indicate his identification with the doctrines of the Roman church, in particular in relation to the role of merit and works in justification. Cosimo promoted indulgences and patronized several churches and convents in Florence in a personal capacity. ⁶⁸

Eleonora appears to have possessed a more profound, but just as conventional, piety as her husband. One of the earliest joint artistic commissions of the ducal couple was for the decoration of the duchess’s private chapel in the Palazzo della Signoria. The scheme, designed and executed by Bronzino, united frescos depicting Old Testament episodes, featuring Moses, with a Pietà altarpiece. In addition to the powerful politico-dynastic message of the Mosaic images – which celebrated Cosimo’s rule and the birth and baptism of the couple’s first male heir – the decorative scheme also contained a profound theological and liturgical message. It celebrated devotion to the doctrine of transubstantiation, to the Eucharist as the flesh of Christ and Christ as the ‘bread of life’ (John 6:48). Notably, the alterations to the chapel’s iconography in the 1560s, which Eleonora personally requested (according to Vasari), emphasized and reinforced this salvific message while obscuring the earlier dynastic elements. ⁶⁹ The duchess became a principal patron and supporter of the Society of Jesus in the late 1540s as it attempted to gain a presence in the Florentine dominion. She helped to enlist the support of an initially hostile Cosimo, and the ducal couple became financial sponsors of the Jesuit school founded in Pisa in 1551. ⁷⁰ Eleonora also had a sliver, votive bust of herself placed in Santissima Annuziata, in recognition of her frequent recourse to the Virgin. ⁷¹ So, despite the disapprobation of her Jesuit advisors and other commentators, neither Eleonora nor Cosimo apparently saw any contradiction between their piety and the neoclassical ideas of behaviour associated with their gambling.

Nevertheless, a clear tension existed between the expectations of contemporary religious morality and the ludic behaviour of the ducal couple. Even Girolamo Cardano, who conceded some benefit to gambling, still condemned it as a vice and stated that, ‘the greatest utility of games of chance is not to play’. ⁷² The despair of the duchess’s Jesuit confessors reflects the fact that this tension clearly never resolved itself. Indeed it could not. Its existence, in fact, highlights the complex, multivalent nature of the princely personae: Cosimo and Eleonora were publicly pious, outwardly generous, carefully continent in their behaviour, yet also frequent gamblers.

Different aspects of these personae spoke to different audiences and each contributed to the overall presentation. The ducal couple’s gambling was not secret. They played in the Palazzo della Signoria, which (from 1540) was both their home and the seat of government, a significant public space. Pietro Aretino, in distant Venice, knew of it; the ducal secretaries wrote about it; the Venetian ambassador saw fit to report on it. But the couple’s gaming occurred within a fairly restricted milieu. This aspect of their personae spoke more directly to the ducal household and court, and by extension to the wider pan-European court society, than it did to the larger population of Florence and its dominion. Their demonstration of virtus and self-control had particular resonance within such circles, where the nuances of behaviour were subject to surveillance and interpretation, as the rich courtesy literature of the period testifies.

Life at court revolved around a ceaseless contest for power, prestige, and status. Cosimo and Eleonora’s gambling was a constitutive part of this competition. The momentary inversion of hierarchy revealed when the duke or duchess lost at a hand of cards underlined, in relief, the real power structure of the household by a process of disruption and renewal similar to the contemporary function of Carnival. ⁷³ Moreover, the demonstration of virtus that gambling facilitated constantly re-stated both the ducal couple’s mastery of the self-control demanded by contemporary etiquette (and so their mastery of the contest) as well as their suitability to preside as rulers over Florence and its dominions. Behaviour provided a key metric for measuring success or failure in the contest of court life.

Other aspects of Eleonora’s behaviour, in relation to gambling, further reinforce an interpretation of playing such games as a manifestation of virtus in a specifically courtly context. In particular, the duchess implicitly connected her own gambling to notions of nobility and social status. In September 1544, Eleonora – apparently without any self-consciousness – criticized the court pages for gambling after noting the poor state of the boys’ attire. ⁷⁴ The implication here was that only those who could afford to lose should take the risk of gambling. The duke and duchess could afford to display indifference to their material losses; a pageboy could not. Moreover, the scolding also implied notions of social propriety: that gambling was properly a diversion for the aristocracy and nobility, who presumably possessed the fortitude and judgment required. Furthermore, the three recorded occasions when Eleonora made bets on the sex of an unborn child fell after a law of 6 June 1550, which explicitly banned women from gambling ‘of any sort’ and specifically from betting maschio o femmina because it offended against ‘the solemnity required by the obligations of being women’. ⁷⁵ While the law did make an exception for married women who had their husbands’ permission (which Eleonora presumably did), the duchess’s continued pursuit of games of chance again suggests a notion of superior self-control and nobility. Eleonora was not an ordinary woman and was not subject to the same perceived weaknesses.

The apparent ease with which the duchess ignored restrictions placed on other women in Florence highlights the role of gender in the ducal couple’s gambling, or rather highlights the non-issue of Eleonora’s sex. While the Marucelli chronicler implied a rebuke to the duchess’s lack of feminine piety in his comparison to Maria Salviati, for other contemporary observers Eleonora’s sex had no bearing on her ludic activities. Although the 1550 law rhetorically condemned female gambling as offensive to a notion of feminine propriety, its motivations were principally financial and patrimonial. It targeted the ‘disorders and damage’ caused by women ‘imprudently dissipating their belongings and those of their husbands’. The problem, then, was not so much that women should not gamble at all, but rather the familiar, paternalistic sexism of early modern governors perceiving women as lacking in the self-control and necessary prudence to manage their own affairs. The fact that the law permitted women who had ‘the licence and consent of [their] husbands’ to continue to place bets underlines the point: women safely under the restraining, reasoned hand of a man could gamble. ⁷⁶ A woman in possession of virtus, such as Eleonora, however, required no such tutelage.

In the realms of court society and noble life, female gambling raised no concerns related either to propriety or to patrimony. In Tasso’s Il Gonzaga secondo, the problem that the protagonists discuss with relation to women playing games is not the appropriateness of such behaviour but rather whether a man should play to lose against a female opponent or not. Margerita Bentivoglio reacts angrily to the chivalrously veiled sexism of the male discussants, who imply that men stand to gain more by deliberately losing to women. She argues that such behaviour manifests not courtesy but trickery and deception and that the sexes should compete fairly and openly. ⁷⁷ More generally, the context and content of the dialogue suggest that women at the Ferrarese court regularly played primiera and other games of chance. Indeed, although focused on learned parlour games rather than gambling, one scholar has recently argued that the ludic realm offered a space in which women of high social status could demonstrate their intellect and talent. Game playing provided an acceptable vehicle for the assertion of female agency that was neither entirely private nor public. ⁷⁸

The behaviour of Eleonora and Cosimo, then, was not exceptional but sat comfortably within the broader context of the early modern European world. The historiography of gambling in the period has demonstrated a continuum of experience and expectation extending from colonial North America to Petrine Russia. For social elites across Europe and its colonies the risk-taking of the gaming table offered an opportunity for the performance of social distinction, for the demonstration of indifference to loss, or served as a compensation for idealized but now lost arenas for earning honour and fame such as the battlefield. ⁷⁹ Even among the marginalized, such as a disconsolate and impoverished seventeenth-century rabbi, gambling could provide benefits of a non-material kind. ⁸⁰ The ludic passions of the ducal couple in Florence clearly fit within this accepted interpretation. But they also offer something more to the historical picture, because, as I have argued, the behaviour of Cosimo and Eleonora had not only social implications but also political impact.

The nature of the gambling in the Medici household was probably not much different, either qualitatively or quantitatively, from that at other European courts. But, as I have suggested, at a new court presided over by a new and recently elevated dynasty, the construction and presentation of the princely personae occurred in a more self-conscious manner, with a greater emphasis on the performance of the newly acquired role. Not coincidently, the Medici pioneered many of the techniques of court theatre as a tool of political purpose in the same period. ⁸¹ In this setting, in which princely behaviour possessed a heightened urgency and awareness, the meaning and significance of activities that in other courts might be muted by the combined weight of tradition and normality, become more apparent and legible to the historian’s eye.

Gambling, often for high stakes, constituted a principal diversion for the ducal household of Florence in the mid-sixteenth century. But in playing, Cosimo and Eleonora were doing more than simply entertaining themselves and guests and passing the time pleasantly. Subjecting themselves to the risks of games of chance – to the rack of the game, as Cardano expressed it – the ducal couple demonstrated their suitability as rulers, their possession of virtus, their lack of avarice. The dux ludens was indifferent to the outcome of the game, which was pursued for the thrill of competition and the frisson of uncertainty, which ultimately revealed the truth of his or her character and status.