Tigress Of Forli: The Life of Caterina Sforza (Great Lives)

Sometimes a biography is so good that the subject just leaps off the page and comes into such clear focus that you feel you actually know the person. Elizabeth Lev's book on Caterina Sforza is just such a one!From her earliest childhood in mid 14th century Italy, this attractive, proud, clever and authoritative Sforza girl showed a resilience beyond her years. She was sacrificed by her ambitious father, as so many girls at that time were, to a strategic marriage. Hers was to Girolamo Riaro a nephew of Pope Sixtus. She was just 10 years old, and one non-negotiable condition of the marriage contract was immediate consummation - Riaro was 30 at the time! She eventually joined her husband in Rome, where she had her first taste of direct military action, and showed herself both braver and smarter than her lumpen spouse. Political changes in the Vatican meant a move with her husband and ever growing family to their fiefdom of Forli and Imola where plots against the unpopular Count Riario finally resulted in his assassination. Caterina's response to this outrage was strategically brilliant and perfectly judged, even to the point of risking her own children who were being held hostage by flaunting herself, and calling their captors' bluff by assuring them that she possessed the 'means to make more'. She saved not only herself and her children despite overwhelming odds, but emerged stronger. Her vengeance on the assassins (despite the fact that her relationship with Riario had caused her at times to wish herself dead), had to be seen to be effective as did her later armed defences of her castle and her sons' inheritance. Leadership meant hard decisions and she did not shy away from wreaking punishment on plotters and enemies. Her obvious femininity did not preclude great cruelty on occasions, and her revenge on the assassins of her second husband, was extreme even by the standards of the time. Her remarriages, once secretly and finally to a scion of the Medici family gave her more children and a reputation as something of a maneater.The author is particularly good at guiding the reader through the quicksands of Renaissance family loyalties and fortunes, all driven by the complex twists and turns of the political landscape as successive Popes, each with the obligatory rapacious family in tow, took control of the throne of St Peter.Caterina's eventual downfall came at the hands of the brutal Cesare Borgia (by now a new Papal family was setting the agenda!) and the conqueror of the Tigress exacted full revenge both militarily and sexually. Her latter years were spent in Florence, but even then she was still fighting, albeit through lawyers, for her rights as a widow and mother.She lived, in her 46 years, the most intense and challenging of lives. Her beauty, style, brains and ferocious defence of her lands and rights, made her notorious in her own era, and this absolutely first class biography adds to her lustre in the present.If you enjoy this, and you will, I recommend as a great companion work the biography of her great granddaughter: Isabella de Medici: The Glorious Life and Tragic End of a Renaissance Princess - which I have also reviewed.

Most people associate the Renaissance with pretty pictures and nice buildings. Judging from the life of Caterina Sforza, this period had a decidedly nasty and violent aspect as well. Poor Caterina lost not only her father but also two husbands, one lover and possibly a brother to murder. The suspects for the latter two murders very much included her son, respectively her famous uncle (Ludovico 'the Moor'). With a bit less good luck and less cold-bloodedness on her side, all her seven children would have been whacked as well.As if this was not enough, she had to marry at the tender age of ten, with a husband twenty years older who insisted on immediate 'consummation' of the marriage. Her husband also suffered from an unfortunate combination of bloodthirst and cowardice which got him in all sorts of trouble; thankfully his connections to the powerful della Rovere family and Caterina's Sforza background (she was the bastard daughter of the duke of Milan) eventually made it possible for him and Caterina to install themselves in Forli and Imola, mini-statelets in the Romagna region.It was here that Caterina obtained her greatest fame by bravely resisting the French invasion of 1494 (unlike most of her compatriots) and by thwarting a number of coups against her rule, employing clever ruses and bloody measures as required. The all time high (or low) was the epic siege in 1499/1500 by the evil Cesare Borgia, supported by his French allies, of which I won't give away the ending.A most eventful life obviously, and a story very well told. Recommended reading.

This is an accessible and readable biography of Caterina Sforza aimed at a popular general audience rather than an academic one. Lev is an art historian and her admiration for Sforza does make her sometimes a little insensitive to the more negative sources. Like Alison Weir, she is happy to quote from the positive, even hagiographical sources written by Caterina's own court followers, but dismisses those written outside of her own circle of influence as having been tampered with or edited to give a deliberately hostile picture of Caterina.Some of her readings are somewhat optimistic and unconvincing: men who described Caterina as a `virago' are deemed by Lev to be expressing their admiration of her - when, in reality, the term indicating a `manly' woman was no more flattering at the time (or, indeed, now) than to be described as a `womanly' man.That said, this is an engaging story of another one of those steely Renaissance women, this time from Italy in the late fifteenth century. I do get a little irritated that every one of these books tracing Renaissance women's lives (Elizabeth, Mary Tudor, Mary Queen of Scots, Catherine de Medici, Lucrezia Borgia, the d'Este women, the Boleyns etc.) always tries to make out that the subject of the particular book is completely unique in Renaissance culture, something which clearly, from the evidence, isn't the case.Small niggles aside, though, this is informative and entertaining even if its self-consciously feminist standpoint gives it an overly positive bias.