April 28, 2010 • 25 mins
In this episode of the continuing Medici super series, Katie and Sarah follow up on the further adventures of Catherine de'Medici. Listen in and learn how the St. Bartholomew Day's massacre contributed to Catherine's notorious reputation in this podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And when we
left Katherine de Medici in our previous podcast, she was
(00:20):
a grieving widow. Her husband had just been killed in
a jousting accident, a terrible jousting accident which I'm going
to take the opportunity to relive one more time. He
receives a lance in the eye through the brain and
it takes him ten agonizing days to die. So that's
where we left off, and it's where we're gonna pick
(00:40):
up again. I can see why you want to relivet up, Sarah.
She's left as regent for her sickly weak minded fifteen
year old son, Francis the second, who ended up married
to Mary, Queen of Scott's which connects our Medici series
to our Tutor Stewart series, Which that's the key, that's
why this is a super series which you've been so
excited about. Um. But Catherine replaces her cheery personal symbol
(01:05):
of a rainbow with that of a broken lance. She
starts wearing exclusively black morning attire, usually with a white
ruff to set it all off for the rest of
her life, for the rest of her life. And and
she gets to work, and she effectively rules France through
three successive sons who are a king until she dies
just shy of seventy years old. But don't think there
(01:27):
wasn't any trouble, because there definitely was. The first son, Francis,
didn't live very long at all. He died at sixteen,
and he was succeeded by his ten year old brother,
who became Charles the ninth. And Catherine took this opportunity
to seize full control of the regency, using her very
excellent scheming skills to remain in control of her kid
(01:50):
amid these jostling factions in France. Yeah, and she promotes
them to majority at age thirteen, which is a year
earlier than normal. But she she wanted a real king
of France because these factions were so contentious at this time.
And she takes them on a grand progress of the
country and it's a big deal. It's twenty eight months
(02:10):
of traveling, moving between chateau and tents and taking barges
and horses and having all these elaborate festivals and banquets,
and Catherine is kind of an elaborate lady. Anyways, we
learned in Leonie Frieda's book, Um Catherine de Medici, Renaissance
Queen of France, that she keeps bears in her retinue.
And you know how much Katie and I love bears,
(02:31):
but a woman after these are kind of sad bears
though they have pierced noses and their their chain to
her leader, but they follow her around. I mean, how
crazy is that She's also got a monkey, a parent,
and an entire household of dwarves who wear brocades and
fur and have their own footman and tutors, which they
(02:52):
all hang out with her constantly. But the point of
this tour is is not just to to show off
and show off how magnificent the crown is, but to
have the king meet and mingle with his people, and
to keep the nobles entertained, keep them away from their
their country houses where they could, I don't know, cook
up plans against the monarchy and um just try to
(03:15):
bring the country back together. And she's hoping that everyone
will ultimately rally around the king and rally together for France.
And this is something the country really needs at the time, right,
because when Henry the Second died, he'd had the personal
loyalty of all of their nobles, and once he was gone,
the country is split again by feuding noble factions. Each
(03:37):
of them wants control of this young king. Yeah, they're
loyal to the crown still, but they don't have that
personal loyalty that they had to the to Charles and
Frances before him, to their father. So the principal nobles
were going to keep an eye on. Here are the
Geese family and they are the ultra Catholics, and then
(03:58):
there's the Bourbon family, who are Princess of the Blood,
which makes them, uh, the second family in France after
the royal family itself, and the Bourbons are Protestant. So
just remember those two sides throughout this whole thing, and
the issues between these two groups of nobles are also
representative of religious issues in the country as a whole.
(04:20):
So we're going to give you a little background on
that to make it easier to understand. Yeah, the Reformation,
of course, got its start in fifteen seventeen, two years
before Catherine was even born. Um when Luther posted his
ninety theses and then the zealous Protestant John Calvin is
largely responsible for spreading the new religion in France. Um
(04:41):
and just to get a scale of how quickly things
happen here, by the fifteen fifties we have the first
French Reformed churches, so this takes off from forty years
for the whole thing. And Catherine's husband, Henry the Second,
who as we learned in our previous podcast, was obsessed
with his foreign war, was a little bit too distracted
(05:02):
to deal adequately with these religious fractures, and he also
underestimated them and their power. And then you know, right
after he made his foreign peace, he died with a
lance in his eyes. So that cut that short anyways, definitely.
So we're left with these weak child kings and Catherine
trying to patch everything up, patch up these feuding nobles
(05:23):
and country split by religious differences, and she's trying to
protect her children's throne, she's trying to defend her own religion,
she's a Catholic, of course, and deal with the factions,
and she can't please everyone. Nobody can juggle all of that.
And contrary to Catherine's later reputation as this crazed ultra
(05:44):
Catholic whose intent on spilling Protestant blood. Would like to
do a little myth busting here, because she really strived
for moderation whenever she could, and she granted freedom of
conscience and limited access to worship, which was a big,
big It's basically separating sedition from heresy, and no one
is happy. Still. The Catholics think she's capitulating or maybe
(06:08):
she'll even become a Protestant horror of horrors, and the
Huguenots think that it's still not enough. Yeah. So it's
weird though, because this piece that she tries to establish
the freedom of conscience and the limited access to worship
is what we end up with decades later, after nine
civil wars of religion. Um, you end up with the
(06:29):
same thing. It's crazy. But that's not to say that
her reputation for Florentine tactics, which by we mean murdering
people and interest in the occult, wasn't deserved because even
though she was a devout Catholic, she relied heavily on medici, astrologers, magic,
and her own dream visions another podcast theme. She had
(06:51):
consultations with no stra Damis, but her main astrologers were
the Florentine Ruggieri brothers, who were magicians, necromancers and men
who are known for being very skilled in the black arts.
And just this weird magic mirror story about Catherine. Supposedly,
shortly after her husband died, she um she consults one
(07:12):
of the Riggieri brothers. Um wants to have him foretell
her son's futures, and in this mirror he pulls out
she sees her son's faces circling by, and Ruggieri tells
her that each circle they make will stand for how
many years they'll rule the kingdom. She sees Francis go
by once, her second son, Charles the ninth, goes by
(07:34):
fourteen times, and then her third son, who is later
Henry the Third, goes by fifteen times. In the final
faith she sees is Henry, Prince of Navarre. So it's
really spooky and kind of a bad uh, a bad
omen for Catherine. She also had a guy in her life,
Metro Renee, who mixed up potions for her and supposedly
(07:57):
poison gloves and poison rude. And although it's likely that
Catherine had people taken out, you know, had her own
little hit list, she probably didn't poison any fellow queens
with poisoned gloves. But this is the kind of stuff
that earns her her nickname the Black Queen, and that
massacre were about to discuss. Yeah, that's a really big
(08:19):
part of it. So we're gonna set the stage for
the massacre. While there are eventually nine mores of religion
in France at the time of the massacre, which is
in fifteen seventy two, we've only had three so far,
and the wars have polished off the main Bourbon Protestant leaders,
leaving two young princess figureheads, and that's the Prince de
(08:39):
Colonde and Henry of Navarre, who we've already mentioned. Um
and Catherine has just arranged a peacemaking marriage kind of
I think, uh the Yorks and the Lancasters sort of
like that, between Henry of Navarre and her daughter Margaret,
who's known as Margot. And this marriage is going to
unite the Valwa family, the royal family with the Bourbons,
(09:01):
So that's uniting the senior in the junior branches of
the royal line, and it's also going to unite the
Catholics and the Protestants because of course Margot is a Catholic.
Henry of Navar is a Protestant. So it's this great
um symbol of peace and goodwill, and thousands of people
are going to come into Paris, nobles, regular people of
(09:22):
both religions to see the nuptials. And we have another
important player in this setup. Since the Bourbon Huguenot leaders
are dead, we have a guy named Admiral gast Bar,
the second Coligni, at the head of our movement. He
had just returned to court about a year earlier and
had begun currying favor with the king, and his uncle
(09:46):
had been a great trusted adviser to Henry the second,
so Lansking. Yes, so guess Far's idea is that maybe
he can take on a similar role with Charles the Ninth, who,
as a young man, is you know, starting to get
ready to take on more responsibility, take over some of
it from his mom and upstage his younger brother's glamorous
(10:07):
military reputation. So Gaspard has a plan and he's hoping
that it will bring him personally closer to the king,
but he's also hoping that it will give the Huguenots
more recognition, more rights, more respect in France, and the
plan is to take French Catholics and French Huguenots and
together fight the Spanish in the Netherlands. And the wedding
(10:31):
ceremonies that are going on in Paris offer the perfect
opportunity for Gaspard to discuss this plan with Charles and
to try to get his approval. But unfortunately for him,
Coligni is very unpopular with the other members of the court.
The very Catholic Gee family doesn't want war with Spain
and they hate Collini because they consider him responsible for
(10:55):
a murder in their family, the murder of Francois de
Guise ten years earlier. And Catherine doesn't want more with
Spain either. She thinks it could be disastrous and she
doesn't like Collini's influence on her son. So this isn't
just a religious issue. It's a it's a mixture of
personal vendettas and political problems. But going into this, we
(11:17):
have two things happening, this big marriage between Margo and
Henry and the arrival of Colin. You to attend the
wedding and discussed the plans for the war against Spain.
So Catherine had long banned the geezes from enacting their
revenge on Collini for this murder. He may not even
have been involved by the way his name got roped
(11:37):
into it, and yeah, he probably didn't have much to
do with it. But then she lifts this band so
he's basically back on a possible hit list, and approves
the plan to assassinate him the day after the wedding
ceremonies end. So we have a brief interlude here of
the happy peacemaking wedding. On August eighteen, fifteen seventy two,
(12:00):
Margot and Henry Nvar marry outside of Notre Dame, and
then she has a mass inside with her brother by
proxy because of course Henry, as a Protestant, cannot take
part in a mass, and she wears an ermine trimmed
crown and a coat with a thirty foot train. We
just thought we'd throw in a few we like fashion
details before things get really bloody here, and the fistivities
(12:22):
go on for days, you know, kind of like the
wedding we talked about earlier of Henry the Second and
Catherine Um just grand festivities, days and days of them.
And Colleeney himself isn't a big party or so he's
not really taking part in a lot of his celebration,
and he doesn't even really want to be there. In fact,
his wife's just had a baby. But he's hanging around
(12:44):
so that he can talk to the King about this
Spanish expedition he'd like to get going. And he's becoming
increasingly angry because Charles keeps putting him off and putting
him off, and eventually he warns him that they might
soon be discussing civil war rather in foreign war if
he doesn't get his meeting. And he also hears the
(13:04):
plot might be hashing. I mean, you know, word is
going to spread in these times, but it doesn't bother
him too much. He's gonna stick around in Paris because
he really wants to talk to Charles. So Friday, Augusty,
the celebrations end and Colony is out on a walk
when the Geese assassin strikes and it's a shot from
(13:25):
a window above the street, but right at that moment,
Colony bends down to adjust his shoe, so the shot
misses him. It just strikes his arm, breaks it and
almost shoots off his finger, but he's not killed. There's
a lesson there, maybe to always tie your shoe. I'm
not sure, but the Huguenots, of course, are enraged by
(13:46):
this incident, and Charles, who didn't know about it, promises
that he'll find the party's involved, not realizing of course,
that his mother is behind it. And remarkably, Coligny stays
in town instead of leaving, which I would have done,
because he trusts Charles and trusts that he'll figure this
out and set things right. He believes them well, and
(14:07):
fleeing would have been a huge insult to the king
once he asked him to stay. And by this point too,
things are starting to get kind of scary in Paris.
The Huguenots are obviously furious that their leader has had
this assassination attempt, and the Catholic Parisians are starting to
get kind of angry too. I think they're tired of
(14:28):
the Huguenots being around. This party has gone on too
long by this point, but Catherine's involvement in this failed
assassination attempt cannot be found out, so she meets with
Nobles secretly to determine what to do next, and their
decision is to kill all of the Huguenot Nobles and
(14:48):
captains who are still in Paris, which makes you wonder
how they came to such a radical decision. And this
is where things get a little bit dicey. Historically, Suppo
Lee the royalists, you know, Catherine and her nobles had
heard that the Huguenots were about to attack them, so
in order to avoid a coup, they decide, okay, well
(15:10):
will attack first. But later historians have said that it's
probably unlikely there was a major Protestant coup in the
works at this time, although I watched an interesting video
from historian Barbara at Diefendorff at Boston University, and she
said it didn't really matter if the Protestants were actually
(15:31):
going to stage a coup or not. Just the fact
that Catherine and the other nobles thought it might happen
was enough to to warrant their strike in their eyes
at least. And this is there. Let me think about it.
You have all of the powerful Huguenots in your own capital,
some of them them are staying in your own palace
to love, and in a few days they're all going
(15:52):
to go home, back to their own palaces, maybe raised
their own armies. If they're planning a coup. It's the
time to strike. This is reminiscent of the Pozzi conspiracory reminiscing. Okay,
so they've made their decision, but they need the King's
approval to go through with it, and they break to
him that actually they were behind the plot the whole
(16:13):
time and convince him that the Huguenots are about to
try to pull this coup, and he's basically bullied into
giving his assent to execute a select list of people
to kill, and he supposedly says kill them all, kill
them all, or maybe one of the geezes says that
later as a direct quote of the king, but um,
(16:37):
we should emphasize that his ascent is to kill the
people on the list, and just the people on the
it's not consent to the masker that ends up happening.
The killings are planned for the early morning on St.
Bartholomew's Day, August, and they're to be carried out by
the King's royal bodyguards and GE's troops. At the same time,
(16:59):
militia men would be guarding the city's gates and barges
would block the sun, so they're shutting off the city
and the signal would be the three am bell of
the Palais de Justice. But the massacre starts a minute
earlier when a bell rings out from a different church,
and the first one to be killed is COLLEENI, one
of the first major major leaders, and he's very disdainful
(17:22):
of his Geese guard assassin. He says, I should at
least be killed by a gentleman and not by this boar.
And then he's run through with the sword, thrown out
the window, alive and later beheaded. And at the loop
there's all out slaughter going on. Henry of Navarre had
woken up early, you couldn't sleep, decides to play a
(17:42):
little game of tennis with his friends while he waits
for Charles to wake up, and on the way to
the tennis courts, he and his friends are stopped by
the King's men and separated. His companions are probably all
taken away and killed immediately, but Navarre is locked up
with his cousin, the Prince of Conde. First safety. These
two are going to be spared. They're not going to
(18:02):
be killed in this massacre of Protestants. The Huguenots staying
in the palace are dragged from their beds and have
their throats slit. Some try to hide some time to
run in the courtyard, but they're shot down by archers
or pushed toward the line of Swiss guards. And a
sad note about katherine daughters Margo Um, she's now, of course,
(18:23):
the wife of a Huguenot and she's in the middle
of all of it. Yeah, her sister had tried to
warn her if something was going on, didn't give her
details of the plot, but had begged her mother to
let Margot stay with them for the night, and Catherine
wouldn't allow it because she figured if her if her
daughter didn't return to the Huguenot apartments, Um, the Protestants
(18:45):
might realize something was up. So yeah, Margot is in
the middle of all this. She's actually in bed when
one of her husband's men comes running in covered in
blood and clings to her for dear life, being pursued
you know, by an assassin right behind him. The guy
actually spares his life, and Margot personally petitions for a
couple more of her husband's men. But by five am,
(19:09):
nearly all of the major French Protestants have been killed,
so the list has been killed by five By five am,
but the killing doesn't stop with the list. The rest
of the populace gets involved. Lots of French Protestants have
brought their families into town for the wedding and they
can't escape. Their homes are rated, their children are killed,
(19:31):
their bodies are thrown in the river, and personal issues
that have absolutely nothing to do with religion were also
settled in the chaos. Because if everyone's getting killed, who's
going to know? If you kill your creditor or your
enemy or your wife, it's a good time to take
care of things. Nobody will notice. Um. So Charles obviously
(19:52):
was not intending for this level of bloodshed to happen,
and he asks the people of Paris to please stop,
and they don't. It goes on for three days, and
then it spreads to the provinces, where it goes on
until October. And Katie and I were talking about what
sort of message would that be. You have a guy
rides out and says they're killing everyone in Paris, you
(20:14):
should do that where you are. We're not sure how
that works. The final tally is a bit up in
the air. A Catholic apologist puts it at only two thousand.
A Huguenot puts it at seventy thousand, but it's likely
that there were at least three thousand people killed in
Paris alone, and a few senior Huguenots do manage to escape.
A few people have decided that they might want to
(20:36):
move their quarters across the river, you know, just in
case trouble broke out between all the Catholics and all
the Huguenots that were in Paris at once, and a
few of them ended up being able to escape, and uh,
they were the seeds for new rebellion. So the aftermath
is that the Valvois cannot get their story straight about
(20:59):
what happened. Charles is telling contradictory tales. To the Protestants.
He says that it was a popular uprising organized by
the Geese, just a personal vendetta, y'all. And then to
the Catholics, he says it was something that he specifically
ordered to prevent a conspiracy against the crown. But of
course some Catholics, like Philip the Second in Spain and
(21:22):
the Pope in Rome, see it initially as oh, Great
France has finally started a religious war, and they're really happy.
Philip even does a little jig supposedly, which seems very
unlike him. Um. But they realized pretty quickly that no,
it wasn't a religious for it was politically motivated, and
(21:43):
stop being so congratulatory. And many Protestants had been sticking
to the line that they were loyal to the king,
thinking that he just had bad advisors, that it wasn't him.
But now they decide that they can't be loyal to
the man who accepts responsibility for the massacre understandably, and
the Huguenots throw off Calvin's views towards royal allegiance, which
(22:07):
makes rebellion justifiable. Now, So we have this pamphlet battle
that begins too, and this is probably most of the
engravings you've seen. Maybe Catherine standing there in black over
piles of dead babies, this is from this time period,
and Charles is depicted as a maniacal king who laughed
when he watched his people killed from his window. Or
(22:29):
maybe he's this emotionally disturbed man who is manipulated by
his foreign mother, who's the Black Queen, and who is
not just foreign, she's Italian, which makes it doubly bad.
So ultimately we just have these caricatures of these people
instead of who they really were, and Catherine de Medici
has retained this reputation throughout much of history. Charles was
(22:52):
haunted by the massacre, actually and chronically ill. He died
soon afterward, and his brother became Henry the Third, and Catherine,
always involved in her children's lives, continues to promote her
son's throne. This is her favorite son too, by the way,
and mainly her role for him, since he is a
full grown man, is to rein him in from his
(23:14):
kind of dangerous inclinations sometimes. But she dies in fifteen
eighty nine, and eight months later he's murdered by uh
deranged friar and he dies without children, So the crown
goes to a junior branch of the family, the Bourbons,
and his cousin Henry of Navarre. Henry the Fourth, he
(23:36):
was the groom at the pre massacre wedding festivities, who's
married to Margot Valvois. But Margot and Henry, who were
never interested in each other in the first place, to
be honest, ultimately annull their marriage, which allows Henry to
make a new match, and with this new wife, he
goes on to found the Bourbon line of Kings that
ends nearly two hundred years later with Louis the sixteenth
(23:59):
and the friend Revolution and who is his wife, Marie
de Medici of course, So we're so pleased with this
little bit of historical symmetry, and it wraps up our
series in the Medici that started with the murder at
the Duomo, but it also sets up another series that
we could do someday. So Bourbon King's anybody let us
(24:22):
know what you think. You can follow us on Twitter
at misst in History. We also have a Facebook fan
page and you can give us your suggestions there. One
more little note on Catherine, though, for all of her splendor,
she liked to keep her personal quarters very personal. She
decorated them with all these family portraits, the her Medici ancestors,
(24:43):
the Vala family, her kids, her grandkids, her nieces and nephews.
So think of it kind of like a grandmother's cluttered
table of little photographs. Um. She also likes games, and
she keeps lots of them on hand, many billiards and chess,
and huge library of books that is devoted to game strategy. Um.
(25:05):
So we think that she probably would have liked a
couple of articles here at how stuff Works, how chess Works,
or perhaps even how Yazi Works, which you can find
if you search on our homepage at www dot how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and
(25:26):
be sure to check out the stuff you missed in
history Class blog on the house stuff works dot com
home page
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And when we
left Katherine de Medici in our previous podcast, she was
(00:20):
a grieving widow. Her husband had just been killed in
a jousting accident, a terrible jousting accident which I'm going
to take the opportunity to relive one more time. He
receives a lance in the eye through the brain and
it takes him ten agonizing days to die. So that's
where we left off, and it's where we're gonna pick
(00:40):
up again. I can see why you want to relivet up, Sarah.
She's left as regent for her sickly weak minded fifteen
year old son, Francis the second, who ended up married
to Mary, Queen of Scott's which connects our Medici series
to our Tutor Stewart series, Which that's the key, that's
why this is a super series which you've been so
excited about. Um. But Catherine replaces her cheery personal symbol
(01:05):
of a rainbow with that of a broken lance. She
starts wearing exclusively black morning attire, usually with a white
ruff to set it all off for the rest of
her life, for the rest of her life. And and
she gets to work, and she effectively rules France through
three successive sons who are a king until she dies
just shy of seventy years old. But don't think there
(01:27):
wasn't any trouble, because there definitely was. The first son, Francis,
didn't live very long at all. He died at sixteen,
and he was succeeded by his ten year old brother,
who became Charles the ninth. And Catherine took this opportunity
to seize full control of the regency, using her very
excellent scheming skills to remain in control of her kid
(01:50):
amid these jostling factions in France. Yeah, and she promotes
them to majority at age thirteen, which is a year
earlier than normal. But she she wanted a real king
of France because these factions were so contentious at this time.
And she takes them on a grand progress of the
country and it's a big deal. It's twenty eight months
(02:10):
of traveling, moving between chateau and tents and taking barges
and horses and having all these elaborate festivals and banquets,
and Catherine is kind of an elaborate lady. Anyways, we
learned in Leonie Frieda's book, Um Catherine de Medici, Renaissance
Queen of France, that she keeps bears in her retinue.
And you know how much Katie and I love bears,
(02:31):
but a woman after these are kind of sad bears
though they have pierced noses and their their chain to
her leader, but they follow her around. I mean, how
crazy is that She's also got a monkey, a parent,
and an entire household of dwarves who wear brocades and
fur and have their own footman and tutors, which they
(02:52):
all hang out with her constantly. But the point of
this tour is is not just to to show off
and show off how magnificent the crown is, but to
have the king meet and mingle with his people, and
to keep the nobles entertained, keep them away from their
their country houses where they could, I don't know, cook
up plans against the monarchy and um just try to
(03:15):
bring the country back together. And she's hoping that everyone
will ultimately rally around the king and rally together for France.
And this is something the country really needs at the time, right,
because when Henry the Second died, he'd had the personal
loyalty of all of their nobles, and once he was gone,
the country is split again by feuding noble factions. Each
(03:37):
of them wants control of this young king. Yeah, they're
loyal to the crown still, but they don't have that
personal loyalty that they had to the to Charles and
Frances before him, to their father. So the principal nobles
were going to keep an eye on. Here are the
Geese family and they are the ultra Catholics, and then
(03:58):
there's the Bourbon family, who are Princess of the Blood,
which makes them, uh, the second family in France after
the royal family itself, and the Bourbons are Protestant. So
just remember those two sides throughout this whole thing, and
the issues between these two groups of nobles are also
representative of religious issues in the country as a whole.
(04:20):
So we're going to give you a little background on
that to make it easier to understand. Yeah, the Reformation,
of course, got its start in fifteen seventeen, two years
before Catherine was even born. Um when Luther posted his
ninety theses and then the zealous Protestant John Calvin is
largely responsible for spreading the new religion in France. Um
(04:41):
and just to get a scale of how quickly things
happen here, by the fifteen fifties we have the first
French Reformed churches, so this takes off from forty years
for the whole thing. And Catherine's husband, Henry the Second,
who as we learned in our previous podcast, was obsessed
with his foreign war, was a little bit too distracted
(05:02):
to deal adequately with these religious fractures, and he also
underestimated them and their power. And then you know, right
after he made his foreign peace, he died with a
lance in his eyes. So that cut that short anyways, definitely.
So we're left with these weak child kings and Catherine
trying to patch everything up, patch up these feuding nobles
(05:23):
and country split by religious differences, and she's trying to
protect her children's throne, she's trying to defend her own religion,
she's a Catholic, of course, and deal with the factions,
and she can't please everyone. Nobody can juggle all of that.
And contrary to Catherine's later reputation as this crazed ultra
(05:44):
Catholic whose intent on spilling Protestant blood. Would like to
do a little myth busting here, because she really strived
for moderation whenever she could, and she granted freedom of
conscience and limited access to worship, which was a big,
big It's basically separating sedition from heresy, and no one
is happy. Still. The Catholics think she's capitulating or maybe
(06:08):
she'll even become a Protestant horror of horrors, and the
Huguenots think that it's still not enough. Yeah. So it's
weird though, because this piece that she tries to establish
the freedom of conscience and the limited access to worship
is what we end up with decades later, after nine
civil wars of religion. Um, you end up with the
(06:29):
same thing. It's crazy. But that's not to say that
her reputation for Florentine tactics, which by we mean murdering
people and interest in the occult, wasn't deserved because even
though she was a devout Catholic, she relied heavily on medici, astrologers, magic,
and her own dream visions another podcast theme. She had
(06:51):
consultations with no stra Damis, but her main astrologers were
the Florentine Ruggieri brothers, who were magicians, necromancers and men
who are known for being very skilled in the black arts.
And just this weird magic mirror story about Catherine. Supposedly,
shortly after her husband died, she um she consults one
(07:12):
of the Riggieri brothers. Um wants to have him foretell
her son's futures, and in this mirror he pulls out
she sees her son's faces circling by, and Ruggieri tells
her that each circle they make will stand for how
many years they'll rule the kingdom. She sees Francis go
by once, her second son, Charles the ninth, goes by
(07:34):
fourteen times, and then her third son, who is later
Henry the Third, goes by fifteen times. In the final
faith she sees is Henry, Prince of Navarre. So it's
really spooky and kind of a bad uh, a bad
omen for Catherine. She also had a guy in her life,
Metro Renee, who mixed up potions for her and supposedly
(07:57):
poison gloves and poison rude. And although it's likely that
Catherine had people taken out, you know, had her own
little hit list, she probably didn't poison any fellow queens
with poisoned gloves. But this is the kind of stuff
that earns her her nickname the Black Queen, and that
massacre were about to discuss. Yeah, that's a really big
(08:19):
part of it. So we're gonna set the stage for
the massacre. While there are eventually nine mores of religion
in France at the time of the massacre, which is
in fifteen seventy two, we've only had three so far,
and the wars have polished off the main Bourbon Protestant leaders,
leaving two young princess figureheads, and that's the Prince de
(08:39):
Colonde and Henry of Navarre, who we've already mentioned. Um
and Catherine has just arranged a peacemaking marriage kind of
I think, uh the Yorks and the Lancasters sort of
like that, between Henry of Navarre and her daughter Margaret,
who's known as Margot. And this marriage is going to
unite the Valwa family, the royal family with the Bourbons,
(09:01):
So that's uniting the senior in the junior branches of
the royal line, and it's also going to unite the
Catholics and the Protestants because of course Margot is a Catholic.
Henry of Navar is a Protestant. So it's this great
um symbol of peace and goodwill, and thousands of people
are going to come into Paris, nobles, regular people of
(09:22):
both religions to see the nuptials. And we have another
important player in this setup. Since the Bourbon Huguenot leaders
are dead, we have a guy named Admiral gast Bar,
the second Coligni, at the head of our movement. He
had just returned to court about a year earlier and
had begun currying favor with the king, and his uncle
(09:46):
had been a great trusted adviser to Henry the second,
so Lansking. Yes, so guess Far's idea is that maybe
he can take on a similar role with Charles the Ninth, who,
as a young man, is you know, starting to get
ready to take on more responsibility, take over some of
it from his mom and upstage his younger brother's glamorous
(10:07):
military reputation. So Gaspard has a plan and he's hoping
that it will bring him personally closer to the king,
but he's also hoping that it will give the Huguenots
more recognition, more rights, more respect in France, and the
plan is to take French Catholics and French Huguenots and
together fight the Spanish in the Netherlands. And the wedding
(10:31):
ceremonies that are going on in Paris offer the perfect
opportunity for Gaspard to discuss this plan with Charles and
to try to get his approval. But unfortunately for him,
Coligni is very unpopular with the other members of the court.
The very Catholic Gee family doesn't want war with Spain
and they hate Collini because they consider him responsible for
(10:55):
a murder in their family, the murder of Francois de
Guise ten years earlier. And Catherine doesn't want more with
Spain either. She thinks it could be disastrous and she
doesn't like Collini's influence on her son. So this isn't
just a religious issue. It's a it's a mixture of
personal vendettas and political problems. But going into this, we
(11:17):
have two things happening, this big marriage between Margo and
Henry and the arrival of Colin. You to attend the
wedding and discussed the plans for the war against Spain.
So Catherine had long banned the geezes from enacting their
revenge on Collini for this murder. He may not even
have been involved by the way his name got roped
(11:37):
into it, and yeah, he probably didn't have much to
do with it. But then she lifts this band so
he's basically back on a possible hit list, and approves
the plan to assassinate him the day after the wedding
ceremonies end. So we have a brief interlude here of
the happy peacemaking wedding. On August eighteen, fifteen seventy two,
(12:00):
Margot and Henry Nvar marry outside of Notre Dame, and
then she has a mass inside with her brother by
proxy because of course Henry, as a Protestant, cannot take
part in a mass, and she wears an ermine trimmed
crown and a coat with a thirty foot train. We
just thought we'd throw in a few we like fashion
details before things get really bloody here, and the fistivities
(12:22):
go on for days, you know, kind of like the
wedding we talked about earlier of Henry the Second and
Catherine Um just grand festivities, days and days of them.
And Colleeney himself isn't a big party or so he's
not really taking part in a lot of his celebration,
and he doesn't even really want to be there. In fact,
his wife's just had a baby. But he's hanging around
(12:44):
so that he can talk to the King about this
Spanish expedition he'd like to get going. And he's becoming
increasingly angry because Charles keeps putting him off and putting
him off, and eventually he warns him that they might
soon be discussing civil war rather in foreign war if
he doesn't get his meeting. And he also hears the
(13:04):
plot might be hashing. I mean, you know, word is
going to spread in these times, but it doesn't bother
him too much. He's gonna stick around in Paris because
he really wants to talk to Charles. So Friday, Augusty,
the celebrations end and Colony is out on a walk
when the Geese assassin strikes and it's a shot from
(13:25):
a window above the street, but right at that moment,
Colony bends down to adjust his shoe, so the shot
misses him. It just strikes his arm, breaks it and
almost shoots off his finger, but he's not killed. There's
a lesson there, maybe to always tie your shoe. I'm
not sure, but the Huguenots, of course, are enraged by
(13:46):
this incident, and Charles, who didn't know about it, promises
that he'll find the party's involved, not realizing of course,
that his mother is behind it. And remarkably, Coligny stays
in town instead of leaving, which I would have done,
because he trusts Charles and trusts that he'll figure this
out and set things right. He believes them well, and
(14:07):
fleeing would have been a huge insult to the king
once he asked him to stay. And by this point too,
things are starting to get kind of scary in Paris.
The Huguenots are obviously furious that their leader has had
this assassination attempt, and the Catholic Parisians are starting to
get kind of angry too. I think they're tired of
(14:28):
the Huguenots being around. This party has gone on too
long by this point, but Catherine's involvement in this failed
assassination attempt cannot be found out, so she meets with
Nobles secretly to determine what to do next, and their
decision is to kill all of the Huguenot Nobles and
(14:48):
captains who are still in Paris, which makes you wonder
how they came to such a radical decision. And this
is where things get a little bit dicey. Historically, Suppo
Lee the royalists, you know, Catherine and her nobles had
heard that the Huguenots were about to attack them, so
in order to avoid a coup, they decide, okay, well
(15:10):
will attack first. But later historians have said that it's
probably unlikely there was a major Protestant coup in the
works at this time, although I watched an interesting video
from historian Barbara at Diefendorff at Boston University, and she
said it didn't really matter if the Protestants were actually
(15:31):
going to stage a coup or not. Just the fact
that Catherine and the other nobles thought it might happen
was enough to to warrant their strike in their eyes
at least. And this is there. Let me think about it.
You have all of the powerful Huguenots in your own capital,
some of them them are staying in your own palace
to love, and in a few days they're all going
(15:52):
to go home, back to their own palaces, maybe raised
their own armies. If they're planning a coup. It's the
time to strike. This is reminiscent of the Pozzi conspiracory reminiscing. Okay,
so they've made their decision, but they need the King's
approval to go through with it, and they break to
him that actually they were behind the plot the whole
(16:13):
time and convince him that the Huguenots are about to
try to pull this coup, and he's basically bullied into
giving his assent to execute a select list of people
to kill, and he supposedly says kill them all, kill
them all, or maybe one of the geezes says that
later as a direct quote of the king, but um,
(16:37):
we should emphasize that his ascent is to kill the
people on the list, and just the people on the
it's not consent to the masker that ends up happening.
The killings are planned for the early morning on St.
Bartholomew's Day, August, and they're to be carried out by
the King's royal bodyguards and GE's troops. At the same time,
(16:59):
militia men would be guarding the city's gates and barges
would block the sun, so they're shutting off the city
and the signal would be the three am bell of
the Palais de Justice. But the massacre starts a minute
earlier when a bell rings out from a different church,
and the first one to be killed is COLLEENI, one
of the first major major leaders, and he's very disdainful
(17:22):
of his Geese guard assassin. He says, I should at
least be killed by a gentleman and not by this boar.
And then he's run through with the sword, thrown out
the window, alive and later beheaded. And at the loop
there's all out slaughter going on. Henry of Navarre had
woken up early, you couldn't sleep, decides to play a
(17:42):
little game of tennis with his friends while he waits
for Charles to wake up, and on the way to
the tennis courts, he and his friends are stopped by
the King's men and separated. His companions are probably all
taken away and killed immediately, but Navarre is locked up
with his cousin, the Prince of Conde. First safety. These
two are going to be spared. They're not going to
(18:02):
be killed in this massacre of Protestants. The Huguenots staying
in the palace are dragged from their beds and have
their throats slit. Some try to hide some time to
run in the courtyard, but they're shot down by archers
or pushed toward the line of Swiss guards. And a
sad note about katherine daughters Margo Um, she's now, of course,
(18:23):
the wife of a Huguenot and she's in the middle
of all of it. Yeah, her sister had tried to
warn her if something was going on, didn't give her
details of the plot, but had begged her mother to
let Margot stay with them for the night, and Catherine
wouldn't allow it because she figured if her if her
daughter didn't return to the Huguenot apartments, Um, the Protestants
(18:45):
might realize something was up. So yeah, Margot is in
the middle of all this. She's actually in bed when
one of her husband's men comes running in covered in
blood and clings to her for dear life, being pursued
you know, by an assassin right behind him. The guy
actually spares his life, and Margot personally petitions for a
couple more of her husband's men. But by five am,
(19:09):
nearly all of the major French Protestants have been killed,
so the list has been killed by five By five am,
but the killing doesn't stop with the list. The rest
of the populace gets involved. Lots of French Protestants have
brought their families into town for the wedding and they
can't escape. Their homes are rated, their children are killed,
(19:31):
their bodies are thrown in the river, and personal issues
that have absolutely nothing to do with religion were also
settled in the chaos. Because if everyone's getting killed, who's
going to know? If you kill your creditor or your
enemy or your wife, it's a good time to take
care of things. Nobody will notice. Um. So Charles obviously
(19:52):
was not intending for this level of bloodshed to happen,
and he asks the people of Paris to please stop,
and they don't. It goes on for three days, and
then it spreads to the provinces, where it goes on
until October. And Katie and I were talking about what
sort of message would that be. You have a guy
rides out and says they're killing everyone in Paris, you
(20:14):
should do that where you are. We're not sure how
that works. The final tally is a bit up in
the air. A Catholic apologist puts it at only two thousand.
A Huguenot puts it at seventy thousand, but it's likely
that there were at least three thousand people killed in
Paris alone, and a few senior Huguenots do manage to escape.
A few people have decided that they might want to
(20:36):
move their quarters across the river, you know, just in
case trouble broke out between all the Catholics and all
the Huguenots that were in Paris at once, and a
few of them ended up being able to escape, and uh,
they were the seeds for new rebellion. So the aftermath
is that the Valvois cannot get their story straight about
(20:59):
what happened. Charles is telling contradictory tales. To the Protestants.
He says that it was a popular uprising organized by
the Geese, just a personal vendetta, y'all. And then to
the Catholics, he says it was something that he specifically
ordered to prevent a conspiracy against the crown. But of
course some Catholics, like Philip the Second in Spain and
(21:22):
the Pope in Rome, see it initially as oh, Great
France has finally started a religious war, and they're really happy.
Philip even does a little jig supposedly, which seems very
unlike him. Um. But they realized pretty quickly that no,
it wasn't a religious for it was politically motivated, and
(21:43):
stop being so congratulatory. And many Protestants had been sticking
to the line that they were loyal to the king,
thinking that he just had bad advisors, that it wasn't him.
But now they decide that they can't be loyal to
the man who accepts responsibility for the massacre understandably, and
the Huguenots throw off Calvin's views towards royal allegiance, which
(22:07):
makes rebellion justifiable. Now, So we have this pamphlet battle
that begins too, and this is probably most of the
engravings you've seen. Maybe Catherine standing there in black over
piles of dead babies, this is from this time period,
and Charles is depicted as a maniacal king who laughed
when he watched his people killed from his window. Or
(22:29):
maybe he's this emotionally disturbed man who is manipulated by
his foreign mother, who's the Black Queen, and who is
not just foreign, she's Italian, which makes it doubly bad.
So ultimately we just have these caricatures of these people
instead of who they really were, and Catherine de Medici
has retained this reputation throughout much of history. Charles was
(22:52):
haunted by the massacre, actually and chronically ill. He died
soon afterward, and his brother became Henry the Third, and Catherine,
always involved in her children's lives, continues to promote her
son's throne. This is her favorite son too, by the way,
and mainly her role for him, since he is a
full grown man, is to rein him in from his
(23:14):
kind of dangerous inclinations sometimes. But she dies in fifteen
eighty nine, and eight months later he's murdered by uh
deranged friar and he dies without children, So the crown
goes to a junior branch of the family, the Bourbons,
and his cousin Henry of Navarre. Henry the Fourth, he
(23:36):
was the groom at the pre massacre wedding festivities, who's
married to Margot Valvois. But Margot and Henry, who were
never interested in each other in the first place, to
be honest, ultimately annull their marriage, which allows Henry to
make a new match, and with this new wife, he
goes on to found the Bourbon line of Kings that
ends nearly two hundred years later with Louis the sixteenth
(23:59):
and the friend Revolution and who is his wife, Marie
de Medici of course, So we're so pleased with this
little bit of historical symmetry, and it wraps up our
series in the Medici that started with the murder at
the Duomo, but it also sets up another series that
we could do someday. So Bourbon King's anybody let us
(24:22):
know what you think. You can follow us on Twitter
at misst in History. We also have a Facebook fan
page and you can give us your suggestions there. One
more little note on Catherine, though, for all of her splendor,
she liked to keep her personal quarters very personal. She
decorated them with all these family portraits, the her Medici ancestors,
(24:43):
the Vala family, her kids, her grandkids, her nieces and nephews.
So think of it kind of like a grandmother's cluttered
table of little photographs. Um. She also likes games, and
she keeps lots of them on hand, many billiards and chess,
and huge library of books that is devoted to game strategy. Um.
(25:05):
So we think that she probably would have liked a
couple of articles here at how stuff Works, how chess Works,
or perhaps even how Yazi Works, which you can find
if you search on our homepage at www dot how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and
(25:26):
be sure to check out the stuff you missed in
history Class blog on the house stuff works dot com
home page
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