3 - Marriage intrigues
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
Summary
The path that led Filippo Strozzi into the Medici family orbit was not clear-cut. Nor was the significance of his marriage in 1508 to Clarice de'Medici for his later career immediately perceptible, since at that time the Medici were out of power, exiled from Florence. In fact, until 1508 Filippo himself had had no immediate contact with the Medici, and no one would have suspected then that they would consider a parentado (betrothal) for the granddaughter of Lorenzo il Magnifico with a member of the Strozzi family which they had abused and exiled not so many decades before. Filippo had been too young to have known the Magnifico and his system of government. He grew up instead under the republican regime and had been only five in 1494 when Piero de'Medici, the father of his future bride, was exiled from Florence and the new government set in his place. Piero's two children Lorenzo and Clarice were raised in Rome in the family of their mother Alfonsina Orsini, and no evidence exists that Filippo was acquainted with them before 1507 when Alfonsina came to Florence to seek out a husband for her daughter.
On the surface it might seem unlikely that a marriage alliance between the Strozzi and Medici would ever have occurred, given the long tradition of enmity between the two families which had its roots in the persecution suffered by Filippo's father and grandfather at the hands of Cosimo. Nor had the Strozzi endeared themselves to the Medici in the more recent past. In the early 1490s Filippo's brother and sister contracted marriages of which Piero de'Medici openly disapproved.
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- Filippo Strozzi and the MediciFavor and Finance in Sixteenth-Century Florence and Rome, pp. 45 - 60Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1980