COSIMO III. -(1642-1723.)

Brought up at the Court of Ferdinand II., Cosimo III. was educated in a good school, but, endowed though he was with good natural gifts and qualities, which might have made a distinguished man of him, he did not employ them aright. He inherited from his mother a certain tendency to asceticism, and he is perhaps the only Medici who was anything of a fanatic.

It has been said that the journey which he made through Europe during his father's lifetime was more like a holiday tour than the travels of a young prince eager to see and learn. He was accompanied by Count Maggalotti of the Cimento, but the companionship of that, learned man was not so profitable to him as it should have been.

The life-long ambition of Cosimo III. was to play a leading part among the sovereigns of Europe, but he had neither the talent nor the energy for it. He was fond of distinctions, titles, and the pomp of the Court, and to shed fresh lustre upon his throne he would have made any sacrifice. As the Emperor of Germany was pressed for money, Cosimo, by a loan which was never repaid, obtained from him the right to substitute the prefix of " Royal" for that of "Most Serene" Highness. Florence at this period was the foreigner's paradise, for Cosimo was always ready to receive them with great splendor, in the hope of getting a great name for himself abroad. He was very generous, and made sumptuous presents to his ministers and to other sovereigns.

The Court of Rome profited largely by his liberality, and he gave so much to the Jesuits and missionaries that he was more than once embarrassed for money with which to pay his own troops. Large sums were also spent on religious buildings. Struck by the fact that several of the religious congregations had lost the austerity for which they were formerly noted, Cosimo sent to Spain for some Franciscan fathers from St. Peter of Alcantara to found two monasteries in which the discipline should be stricter. From the French Trappists he also got several brothers, who formed the nucleus of the Trappist monastery of Buonsollazzo on the Mugello. He attended divine service three times a day, and took much to heart the religious lukewarmness of the Florentines, who cared more for the externals of worship than for the ideal which is the aim of the pious.

He pensioned and assisted many authors of religious books ; and Giuseppe Brochi, who wrote a life of Florentine saints and good men, being unable to canonize him, includes him in the list of "Venerables."

In spite of these tendencies, Cosimo III. did not practise the Christian virtues of resignation and tolerance. An Italian by birth, with no admixture of foreign blood, seeing that his mother was a Princess of Urbino, he would have liked to substitute for the pleasures and dissipations so dear to the grand ducal Court the austere gravity of Spain.

Cosimo had married during his father's lifetime Louise Marguerite, daughter of Gaston d'Orleans, brother of Louis XIV. of France, and by her he had two sons, Ferdinand and John Gaston, and one daughter, Anna Maria Louisa, who married William, Elector and Count Palatine. This daughter, at her husband's death, returned to Florence, where she died in 1743, being the last representative of her celebrated house. Louise of Orleans entertained, however, the most bitter feeling of dislike towards her husband, and never rested until she succeeded in getting back to France, where she took up her residence in the Convent of Montmartre, but spent a great deal of her time at Court. There are several portraits of her taken in the religious garb, with the convent and heights of Montmartre in the background. The memoirs of the seventeenth century are full of details of visits paid to this abbess of royal blood, who, with her dowry and an allowance of forty thousand gold crowns guaranteed by the Court, was enabled to keep up no little state.

Cosimo, as soon as he was separated from his wife, thought about marrying his son Ferdinand, and when he was five-and-twenty he obtained for him the hand of Violante Beatria, daughter of Duke Ferdinand of Bavaria. The marriage was an unhappy one, and ended in an immediate separation, Ferdinand leading a very dissolute life and dying in 1713. The other son, John Gaston, whom his father did not like, had been sent away from home, and was married to a German princess, the daughter of Philip of Neuburg, who was the heiress of her father's principality. He lived in Bohemia on the property belonging to his wife, a very singular woman, who made his existence so intolerable that he left her in Germany and went to live elsewhere. This completed the ruin of the house of Medici, and did away with all hope of an heir being born to the throne.

Cosimo, however, had a brother in the Church, whom he induced to put off his rank as cardinal and marry, in the hope of perpetuating the dynasty. At the age of five-and-forty he married Eleanora Gonzaga, the daughter of the Duke de Guastalla, but he died two years afterwards, leaving no issue, and so all the plans of Cosimo came to nought.

It cannot be said that his reign was altogether an inglorious one. Cardinal Leopold survived his nephew two years, and if the Cimento Academy was broken up, there remained in existence a society devoted to art, science, and literature ; physics, medicine, natural history, and botany were still flourishing ; and though Cosimo had other things to attend to besides the encouragement of intellectual progress, he did not allow them to interfere with it. Francesco Redi, Averani, Gualtieri, Piero Antonio Micheli, and Giambattista Nelli belong to this epoch. The laboratory and the astronomical observatory of the Pitti Palace were still in full working order, purchases were made of instruments such as the Brugens telescope at Dresden, the first pneumatic machine was brought from Leyden, and experiments as- to the action of the sun's rays upon gems and hard stones were carried out. The prince provided out of his private purse a pension for Micheli, whom he looked upon as the first botanist of the day.

Then, again, the Apatisti, a purely literary society, was founded in the room of the Cimento, and the study of languages, poetry, and eloquence was brought into fashion again by Benedetto Averani, the two Salvino, Menzini, Filicaia, Canon Mozzi, Govi, Father Polito, and Lami, to mention only the most celebrated. The fine arts were to all intents and purposes dead, earnest as were the efforts made to revive them. Cosimo III. had made over to the Uffizi Gallery all the masterpieces derived from the Della Rovere inheritance, and all that Cardinal Leopold had collected in the Pitti Palace became national property, this being the time when the gallery of antiquities acquired that priceless treasure, the Venus de' Medici, brought from Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, with many other statues and objects of price.

Cosimo III. was deficient in greatness of soul and generosity. He was vindictive, not to say cruel; and it is said that having found out that the great geometer, Lorenzo Lorenzini, the author of the Exercitatio Geometrica," kept up a correspondence with the Grand Duchess Louise d'Orleans when she was living in Paris, he kept him twenty years in a dungeon in the tower of Volterra. He was short-sighted enough and intolerant enough to refuse permission to the Huguenots who were driven from France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes to settle in the marshes outside Pisa, and thus was lost an opportunity for reclaiming them and for founding a prosperous colony, as in England, Holland, and Brandenburg.

John Gaston, his son, and the last of the family, succeeded him in 1723.