Olympia Morata, Scholar, Teacher, and an "Italian Heretic"

Olympia Fulvia Morata (died 26 October 1555)

Olympia Fulvia Morata was the daughter of the Italian humanist Fulvio Pellegrino Morato. A Mantuan, he was exiled from the city by 1517 (for unknown reasons) and made his way to the Este court in Ferrara. There he was appointed to oversee the education of the two youngest sons of the duke, Alfonso I. And there, in Ferrara, he married Lucrezia Gozi. Their eldest daughter, Olympia Fulvia Morata, was born in 1526; her father provided her with an excellent classical education. 

Olympia Morata, c. 1550

But in 1532, Morato left Ferrara--again, the reasons aren't clear--and took his family to Vicenza, in the Veneto, where he secured a post as a public master of Latin. He also gave lectures, wrote, and published.

During the years of his absence from the Este court, Morato also spent time in nearby Venice and began not only expressing anti-clerical views but also opening his home to young intellectuals for discussions of the work of religious reformers like Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin.

All of which drew attention from the Council of Ten in Venice, anxious about the dangerous effect of teachers like Morato on the religious views of their students. Papal legates arrived in Venice in order to investigate, and prosecutions followed. Although Morato was not accused of heresy, he felt himself to be in some danger and, after six years of absence, he returned to Ferrara.

Back in Ferrara, Morato was once again appointed to oversee the education of two young sons of the Este court, these the children of the new duke, Ercole II, and his mistress, Laura Dianti. Morato also took up a position teaching rhetoric, oratory and Latin authors at the University of Ferrara.

The court to which Morato returned had become a refuge and support for religious dissidents, especially those fleeing from France. The duchess of Ferrara, Renée of France, had grown up under the influence of her aunt, Marguerite d'Angouême, a supporter of French Huguenots. Renée had carried her reformist views with her to Ferrara, and she had begun to shelter to religious dissidents, including John Calvin, whom she met in 1536 as he fled persecution in France. She also fostered intellectuals, like the poet Vittoria Colonna, who found themselves investigated for their religious views.

Soon after her father's return to Ferrara, between 1539 and 1541, Olympia Morata joined the court of the duchess of Ferrara, where she was to be the companion of Renée's daughter, Anna d'Este. There she continued her studies, earning praise as a prodigy of learning. As Jennifer Haraguchi notes in her biographial essay on Morata, the young woman, still in her early teens, "was considered a 'fanciulla prodigio,' and won the praise of many intellectuals for her fluency in Latin and Greek."

A poem from this period reflects on Morata's aspirations and her sense of herself:

And I, though born female, have left feminine things,
     yarn, shuttle, loom-threads, and work-baskets.
I admire the flowery meadow of the Muses,
     and the pleasant choruses of the twin-peaked Parnassus.
Other women perhaps delight in other things,
     These are my glory, these my delight.

While at the ducal court, Morata shared tutors and texts with the young Anna, but these educational opportunities came to an end in 1546 when Morata returned home to take care of her sick father. After his death in 1548, Olympia Morata attempted to return to court, but she met with obstacles--her father's interest in Protestantism (some sources indicate he converted to Calvinism before his death) and her own religious sympathies may account for some of the problems. But during Morata's absence, Anna d'Este had been married to a French prince, a member of the Guise family, and had left Ferrara--Morata was no longer needed as a companion. And, finally, increasing pressure on the Calvinist sympathies of the duchess may also have prevented Morata's return.

Having lost her father, her friend, and her position at court, Morata remained in her mother's house, and it seems to have been during this period that she herself became a Protestant. She continued her correspondence with other intellectuals, including one through whom she met a student who had come to study medicine in Ferrara, Andrew Grunthler of Schweinfurt.

In 1550 she married Grunthler, and within a few years the two left Ferrara, taking Morata's younger brother with them, at least in part to evade the Inquisition. Grunthler found a position in Schweinfurth, a Protestant town, where he was physician to Spanish troops that had been stationed there. The couple were caught between opposing forces in the city when religious tensions broke out into war--a Protestant town, pillaged by the Spanish soldiers garrisoned there, trying to withstand the emperor's troops that were besieging Schweinfurth. The city suffered famine, bombardment, plague, and fire.

They were eventually able to escape to Heidelberg, where Grunthler took up a medical lectureship. Olympia Morata began to tutor Latin and Greek.

She did not live long, however. She died on 26 October 1555, just twenty-nine years old. Two months later, her husband and brother were also dead. She is buried, with her husband and brother, in St. Peter's Church, Heidelberg.

Much of Morata's work was lost--some during the siege of Schweinfurth and the hasty flight from the city, some when Renée of France's archive at the ducal court was destroyed in 1559 by the Roman Inquisition. But Morata's husband sent Morata's surviving work to Celio Secondo Curione, who had been Fulvio Morato's friend and who had been one of Olympia's most dedicated supporters and a life-long correspondent.

An Italian humanist scholar, Curione had fled the Inquisition himself, eventually winding up at the University of Basel. Curione published Olympia Morata's collected work (in editions of 1558, 1562, 1570, and 1580): fifty-two letters (most written in Latin), two dialogues (in Latin), two declamations (in both Greek and Latin), eleven poems (eight in Greek and three in Latin), translations of seven Psalms (in Greek), and the first two stories of Boccaccio's Decameron (in Latin).

Curione's 1580 edition of
the works of Olympia Morata

For Haraguchi's essay, part of the University of Chicago's Italian Women Writers database, click here. An extended account of Morata's life and work, in addition to a complete edition of her texts, is Holt N. Parker's The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic. 

Jules Bonnet's full-length biography of Morata, The Life of Olympia Morata: An Episode of the Revival of Letters and of the Reformation in Italy, is dated in style and tone (it was originally published in 1854), but it is still a useful source. The biography is prefaced with an extended account of the Reformation in the Italian states, a geographical area not often considered by those reading about the Protestant Reformation. There is also an excellent contextual essay focusing on Renée of France and her daughter, Anna d'Este. And best of all? You can access the entire book via Google Books! (Click here.)

Bona Sforza, Queen of Poland: "Her Yoke Chafed"

Bona Sforza, queen of Poland (died 19 November 1557)

Raised at the brilliant Renaissance court of Milan, Bona Sforza was well educated, her studies including the discipline of statecraft as well as languages, literature, and music, more traditional occupations for women.* And, by the way, she is Caterina Sforza's niece, the daughter of Caterina's half-brother, Giangaleazzo, and his wife, Isabella of Aragon (also, by the way, a Sforza, the daughter of Ippolita Sforza).  

Bona Sforza in 1517,
just before the year of her marriage

In 1518, Emperor Maximilian, the long-standing ally of Milan, arranged the young woman's marriage to Sigismund, the king of Poland; the formal wedding ceremony and coronation took place in Naples on 18 April 1518.

Bona proved to be successful wife, mother, and politician: as a wife and mother, she promptly bore her husband six children, including four daughters, Isabella, Sophia, Anna, and Catherine Jagiellon. 

As a politician, Bona proved herself skillful in maintaining good relations with the contending European powers, including Spain and the Habsburgs and France.

She was, in historian Roland Bainton's estimation, able to manipulate this "unstable balance" of powers to Poland's advantage by her "adroit and even devious diplomacy."

Nor did she ignore domestic politics, where her aim was to strengthen royal power. Thus "she undertook to make Poland a centralized national state in accord with the pattern emerging in Spain, France and England," working to check and balance "the power of the lords, lay and clerical."

She handled the appointment of bishops (with papal permission and her husband's consent), undertook agricultural reform, regained crown lands that had been granted to the nobility, and arranged for her ten-year-old son to be crowned king during his father's lifetime. 

She began a vast building program, provided for mercenary armies, and arranged a series of politically advantageous marriages for her children. Along the way she enriched herself as well as the royal treasury, which drew criticism, though her efforts "to relieve Poland by bringing in the revenues from her Italian estates" drew no praise. 

As her husband's health failed, Bona Sforza "became the real ruler of Poland," and whatever criticism she endured in her own day, her achievements have been recognized by some modern historians:

Bona exerted a powerful influence on the form of the modern Polish state not only by reason of her intellectual gifts but even more because she possessed a profound feeling for the essential needs of the state. She fused completely the foreign Italian strand with the emerging Polish national movement. In the social and economic sphere she aspired through her excellent reforms to create a strong authority based on just distribution of goods. In many respects Bona was ahead of her times and that was the tragedy of her life.

The "tragedy" of her life occurred after her husband's death, when Bona's son Sigismund Augustus, now king of Poland, rejected the political marriage his mother had arranged for him with Anne of Ferrara, daughter of the duke of Ferrara and his wife Renée of France, the daughter of Louis XII of France. 

Sigismund preferred Barbara Radziwill, daughter of a Lithuanian noble, whom he married secretly in 1547. Bona was not the only one to object to her son's marriage; the Polish diet insisted that Sigismund repudiate his bride, but at length, in the face of Sigismund's insistence, they accepted her.

Barbara died, childless, in 1551, and although Bona had reconciled herself to her daughter-in-law, she was suspected of having poisoned her. 

Bona was not reconciled to her son, however, and she decided to return to her Italian duchy of Bari for health reasons, as she claimed. Her son opposed her departure from Poland. "She wants to get back to Italy just to get her hands on all the properties of Bari, Rossano and Naples and to cut me off from my rightful inheritance from my grandmother," he objected, adding that as queen dowager she "should not be permitted to leave" Poland, even if it meant she should be imprisoned--"though it would grieve" him "greatly." It would, after all, be a "genteel incarceration." 

Bona Sforza in 1553,
also painted by Cranach the Younger

But the Polish diet agreed that Bona should be allowed to go, and she left Poland in November of 1556, nearly forty years after her marriage in 1518.

Bona's return to Italy gave her no peace, however. Philip II of Spain, having defeated the French in Italy, was determined that she should cede to him her claims in Naples and "appropriated" much of the income from her estates. She died in poverty in 1557 and was buried in Bari.

Despite her talents and abilities, Bona Sforza was resented in Poland, viewed with a mixture of dislike and suspicion.

Roland Bainton's assessment of her sounds a note that is by now very familiar:

Bona had several counts against her. She was a woman. Of course a woman could exert a powerful influence. Witness Isabella in Spain and Elizabeth in England. But Bona was resented in Poland, when as the old king grew enfeebled, she usurped authority, not only from him but also from the nobles. . . . A further count was that she was not Polish. Isabella was Castillian and Elizabeth an English Tudor. Italianism, was, to be sure, for a period very much the vogue in Cracow. At the same time many Poles resented the Italians and especially one reared in the atmosphere of the political intrigue characteristic of the despots of the Italian Renaissance. . . . Added to all this was her manner. Tomicki, her most faithful chancellor, confided to a complainer that the queen was imperious, blustering and badgering. Sometimes she was brutal. When a blind archbishop stood in her way she told him she wished he had lost not only his eyes but his tongue. Her yoke chafed.

There is no biography of Bona Sforza in English--I've quoted from Roland Bainton's Women of the Reformation from Spain to Scandinavia here. Wish I could read Polish--Maria Bogucka's Bona Sforza was published recently, but there's also a massive biography by Wladyslaw Pociecha, Królowa Bona, 1494-1557, published in four volumes (1949-58).

Update, April 2022: For the HistoryExtra podcast episode "The Jagiellonians, the Dynasty that Shaped Central Europe," click here. 

*This brief sketch of Bona Sforza has been adapted from The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe.

Catherine Jagiellon, Her Mother's Daughter

Catherine Jagiellon, queen of Sweden (born 1 November 1526)

I have already posted about two of Catherine Jagiellon's sisters, Isabella, queen of Hungary, and Anna, queen of Poland. (A fourth sister, Sophia, would become duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg.) 

A miniature of Catherine Jagiellon,
painted in 1563 by Cranach the Younger

Born in Krakow, Catherine was the fifth child (and fourth daughter) of Sigismund I, king of Poland, and his wife, Bona Sforza. 

In 1562, Catherine was married to John Vasa, duke of Finland, thus becoming duchess of Finland. According to some sources, they eloped; at the very least, they seem not to have married with the kind of permission expected for royal marriages. It did not help that John Vasa was Protestant, Catherine, Catholic. John's half-brother, King Erik XIV of Sweden, declared war on John the next year, captured the couple, and imprisoned them in Sweden. 

Although offered the opportunity of returning to Poland, Catherine remained with her husband, giving birth to two children while being held in Gripsholm Castle. Her daughter, Isabella, was born in 1564 but died in 1566. Sigismund, born in 1566, would later become king of both Poland (1587-1632) and Sweden (1592-99). 

In 1567, John and Catherine were released from their imprisonment. An unpopular Eric (who, among other things, was thinking about separating Catherine from John and sending her off to Russia and a disappointed suitor, Ivan IV "the Terrible") was deposed, and John Vasa, duke of Finland, became John III, king of Sweden.

Catherine's Catholicism was always viewed with some suspicion in Protestant Sweden, particularly after her husband attempted a religious reformation, the "Red Book," that would blend both faith traditions and reintroduce some Catholic customs, including the use of Latin in church ceremonies, into the Swedish church, and he allowed Catholic convents to once again receive novices. Catherine's children--Sigismund and a daughter, Anna Vasa, born in 1568--were raised in the Catholic faith, Sigismund sent to a Jesuit institution in the Polish city of Bransberg. (After her mother's death, Anna would convert to the Lutheran faith.)

As an interesting link to an institution we've discussed before, Catherine supported the now-declining Vadstena Abbey, founded by Birgitta of Sweden and once the home of Birgitta's daughter, Catherine of Vadstena, who had been its abbess and who had had St. Birgitta's remains moved from Rome to the abbey.

The king and queen of Sweden would also spend considerable effort trying to gain Catherine's Sforza inheritance, which she should have received after her mother's death. They were not successful.

Catherine Jagiellon, queen of Sweden, died on 16 September 1583. Her son, Sigismund, would become king of Sweden in 1592, but he would be deposed after only seven years of rule at least in part because of suspicions about his Catholic upbringing.

Update, April 2022: For the HistoryExtra podcast episode "The Jagiellonians, the Dynasty that Shaped Central Europe," click here. 

Renée of France, Duchess of Ferrara

Renée of France, duchess of Ferrara (born 25 October 1510)

The younger daughter of Louis XII of France and Anne of Brittany, Renée of France was orphaned while still a young child--her mother died in January of 1514, when Renée was three, her father a year later, in January of 1515, when she was four. (Renée's older sister was Claude of France).*

Renée of France, c. 1520,
drawing by Jean Clouet

After her parents' deaths, Renée was raised at the court by Marguerite of Angoulême, the sister of Louis XII's successor, Francis I. Marguerite is a woman whom we have met before, noted both as a writer and for her sympathy for religious reform.

After Marguerite married Henry of Navarre in 1527, she took the young French princess with her to the Château de Nérac, a favorite residence in Navarre. (The rebuilding of the castle in the French Renaissance style would be completed by Marguerite's daughter, Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre.)

When Renée was eighteen years old, in 1528, she was married to Ercole d'Este (the son of Lucrezia Borgia) in order to strengthen the alliance between France and Ferrara. Although the Ferrarese court was "one of the most glittering in Europe," Renée's "Italian career" as the duchess of Ferrara was a disaster, husband and wife mismatched in the extreme. 

Renée remained entirely French in her language and her sympathies. Her slowness in acquiring "even a rudimentary knowledge" of Italian "remained steadily against her, keeping her, apart from any other consideration, a very isolated person in her own establishment." She "persistently refused to identify herself with her husband's interests," clinging "with stupid pathos" even to the French manner of dress.

Thus isolated, Renée turned to other pursuits, and her court at Ferrara became a safe haven for intellectuals like the classical scholar Olympia Morata, the poet Vittoria Colonna, and the French poet Clément Marot, and a refuge for French Huguenots. John Calvin visited Renée's court in 1536, and under his influence she was converted in 1540. In retaliation, Ercole dismissed and imprisoned members of his wife's household staff. 

Although she had been granted "exemptions" for her religious views by Pope Paul III in 1543, in 1554 she was brought before the Inquisition by Julius II. Ercole separated his wife from her children and imprisoned her. "We kept her shut up for fifteen days, with only people who had no sort of Lutheran tendencies to wait upon her," he wrote, adding, "We also threatened to confiscate all her property."

Renée of France,
portrait by Corneille de Lyon

In spite of all the pressures, Renée withstood her examination by the Inquisition, and a formal sentence was passed against her. She was condemned for heresy and again imprisoned by her husband. 

A week later, she recanted, however, and those whom she had formerly befriended did not rally to her defense in her time of need. Calvin's response was shocked: "What shall I say, except that constancy is a very rare virtue among the great of this world?" Olympia Morata said she was not surprised by the recantation, since she had always believed Renée's was a weak mind (une tête legère).

Renée lived apart from her husband after her release. In 1559, after her husband's death and estranged from her son Alfonso, she returned to France after thirty years in Ferrara, settling on her estates near Montargis.

During the wars of religion that raged after her return, she was besieged by her son-in-law Francis, duke of Guise. When he threatened to destroy the walls of her fortress, Renée replied that "she would herself mount the battlements and see if he dare kill a King's daughter."

Renée and Montargis withstood the siege, and in the religious persecution that followed, she offered a haven to French Huguenots "to her own constant peril." Under the circumstances, John Calvin, who seems to have been as "inconstant" as the woman whose inconstancy he had bewailed, resumed his friendship with Renée, and his correspondence to her indicates his recognition at last of her courage. 

This courage led her to write "imploring letters" to her son in 1569, protesting his persecution of those suspected of following reformed religion and to providing a haven for Huguenots again in the same year. But her son ignored her pleas, and, under threat, she was forced to send away those who had come to her for protection. She reportedly told the king's envoy that "if she had his sword in her hands, he would deserve to die, as a messenger of death."

Both her son and the French king attempted to take control of Renée's income and possessions. Her daughter Anna, by then wife of the duke of Nemours, recovered a document by which Louis XII, Renée's father, had given her a claim to her mother's independent Brittany, which she was forced to cede; "little by little," as one biographer notes, "all her lands were being taken from her":

Gisors and Vernon were given to the Duc d'Alençon, Caen and Falaise had been seized by Alfonso [her son] for debts, Chartres and Montargis were to belong to the Duchess of Nemours [her daughter Anna], but Renée was suffered to remain as a pensioner in her own castle. Her son Alfonso was furious and wrote the most bitter letters to his mother, whom he never forgave, for yielding any possible claim to [Brittany].

In 1572 Renée was in Paris for the marriage of Henry of Navarre, who would become Henry IV of France, and Marguerite of Valois. Lodging with her daughter Anna, whose Catholic husband was the duke of Nemours, Renée escaped the bloodbath of the St. Bartholomew massacre. 

She was escorted back to Montargis, all Huguenot services forbidden. There, "broken in health and spirit," she "ruled her great castle . . . in lonely state," "neglected and forgotten by her sons and daughters, on whom she had bestowed all that remained of her possessions." She dictated her last will and testament just before her death on 2 July 1575. In proudly listing her titles, she contrasted the state to which she had fallen with the state she had been born and raised to occupy:

We, Renée of France, Duchess of Chartres, Countess of Gisors, Lady of Montargis, widow and dowager of the late Monseigneur of good memory Ercole II of Ferrara, Daughter of the lady King Louis XII and the late Queen Anne, Duchess of Brétagne.

*This entry has been adapted from The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan).

And many thanks to Amy-Eloise for her correction (see below, comments)--her correct identification of an image in an earlier version of this post allowed for my correction here. The portrait she identified has been removed, and a second (correct) image of Renée of France has been added.

Anne of Brittany: Twice Queen of France--But Always a Duchess

Anne of Brittany (born 25 January 1477)

Throughout history, many royal women accrued multiple titles by marriage--a rare few, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, to name perhaps the most famous example, achieved the highest possible status through serial marriages.* Eleanor was, first, queen of France--but after fifteen years, her marriage to Louis VII of France was annulled. Eleanor then married Henry II of England, becoming, second, queen of England. But no woman--or at least no woman I know of--had quite the same marital career as Anne of Brittany, who was queen of France twice.

Anne of Brittany,
c. 1503-1508

The daughter of Francis II of Brittany, Anne became the duchess of Brittany, an independent duchy, in her own right after her father's death in 1488. Although her father had ensured Anne's succession by having her right recognized by the Estates of Brittany, his death resulted in a political crisis.

Three powerful men sought to control Brittany by means of marriage to the new duchess: the French duke of Orléans (who was already married--but, oh well); Alain d'Albret, duke of Guyenne; and Maximilian of Austria, newly elected king of the Romans.

Although her father had been forced to agree that his daughter could not marry without approval of the French king, Anne acted without consulting France. Because an alliance with the Habsburg duke seemed to offer continued independence for Brittany, the young duchess married Maximilian by proxy in 1490.

But that was not the end of the matter. Anne of France, the powerful regent of France, pursued her own kind of "alliance" with Brittany; her army invaded, captured Nantes, then laid siege to Rennes, where Anne of Brittany had retreated. Although the young duchess could have abandoned Brittany and joined her husband Maximilian, she decided to instead to marry Anne of France's brother, Charles VIII, the king of France.

Under the circumstances, she did the best she could for Brittany. By the terms of the marriage contract, if Anne died before Charles, the province would become part of France; if Charles died first, Brittany would be returned to her to rule. But the contract did contain a clause that limited Anne's options: if Charles were to die without a male heir, Anne of Brittany was to required to "marry his successor and remit to him her duchy."

(This marriage, of Charles VIII to Anne of Brittany, is the reason that Margaret of Austria, la petite reine, to whom Charles had been betrothed since 1483, was sent back home, her political usefulness no longer so useful.) 

Although Anne gave birth to four children during her marriage to Charles, including three boys, none of them survived. When Charles died in 1498, Anne was still only twenty-one years old. By the terms of her marriage contract, she was to marry his successor--but that was her old adversary and suitor, Louis of Orléans, now Louis XII. And he, unfortunately, was still married--to Jeanne of France, sister of the dead Charles VIII and of the formidable Anne of France. 

Despite all the complications, the twenty-two-year-long marriage of Louis XII and Jeanne of France was declared void on 17 December 1498--on the grounds of non-consummation. (Louis "rewarded" Jeanne with the gift of the title duchess of Berry; she earned a more enduring title for herself, Saint Jeanne of Valois, establishing a new religious order, the Order of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She died in 1505, her cause of canonization beginning in 1631. She was beatified in 1742 and canonized in 1950.)

Jan Mostaert's portrait of a lady,
"possibly" Anne of Brittany,
painted c. 1520

While Louis disentangled himself from his first wife, Anne returned to Brittany, where she was warmly welcomed. She convened the Estates, toured the duchy, and determined to regain political control. The terms of her marriage contract in 1498 were better than those of the 1491 contract; if her marriage to Louis failed to produce an heir for Brittany, the duchy was to pass to her Breton heirs.

Anne of Brittany became queen of France--for the second time--on 8 January 1499 when she married Louis. Over the next twelve years, she gave birth to six children, including four boys. Only two daughters survived, Claude (b. 1499) and Renée (b. 1510). 

Anne of Brittany died on 9 January 1514, just a few days short of her thirty-seventh birthday. Over the course of her life, she had been twice queen of France and, briefly, queen of Sicily and titular queen of Jerusalem. (Charles VIII had invaded Italy and claimed these titles in 1494.)

But she would be the last independent ruler of Brittany; despite Anne's lifetime of effort, neither of her daughters would inherit an independent Brittany, much less govern there. 

Realizing he would have no male heir, Louis arranged a marriage between his elder daughter, Claude, and the man who would inherit the French throne, Francis of Angoulême. Still trying to maintain Brittany's independence, Anne attempted to make sure her younger daughter, Renée, would become duchess of Brittany. She was not successful. After Anne's death, Claude became queen of France and duchess of a no-longer independent Brittany. Anne's younger daughter, Renée, married Ercole d’ Este, Duke of Ferrarra.

Anne of Brittany's daughter, Claude,
surrounded by her daughters--
and her husband's second wife

The above portrait was commissioned by Catherine de' Medici in 1550 and is included in her book of hours. Although there are doubts about the identity of the sitters, many believe that the central figure is Anne of Brittany's elder daughter, Claude, queen of France. Claude's daughter, Madeleine of France (b. 1520), on the top right, became queen of Scotland, very briefly, in 1537 (she died just six months after her marriage). There is some doubt about the small figure at the bottom right, below Madeleine--although it may be Claude's daughter Louise, who died at age two (in 1517), there is a more general agreement that this figure represents Claude's younger sister, Renée. The figure opposite, Charlotte, is Claude's daughter who died at age eight (in 1524). Claude's daughter Marguerite (b. 1523), above Charlotte, never knew her mother, who died just months after her birth. She was named duchess of Berry in her own right in 1550. She was married, at age thirty-six, to Emmanuel Philibert, duke of Savoy. The final figure, Eleanor of Austria, became the second wife of Francis I, marrying him in 1530. Interestingly, she was also a two-time queen, first of Portugal, then of France. After Francis I died, she got to retire. But that's another story . . .

*This post has been adapted from The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan).

Update: Thanks to Rozsa Gaston for the comment about the 1520 portrait I have used, above, for Anne of Brittany, by Jan Mostaert. The sitter is unknown--the portrait is "of a lady," with the further note, "possibly Anne of Brittany." The image is on Wikimedia Commons with this information: "Owned by the Collections of the Czartoryski Princes in Gołuchów (Division of the National Museum in Poznań), lost 1941." However, the portrait was auctioned by Sotheby's in 2001. 

About the history of the painting, the list of "Wartime Losses, Foreign Painting: Oil Paintings, Pastels, Watercolours Lost Between 1939-1945," prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Poland, notes that this painting was not simply "lost" in 1941 but looted from the "Collections of the Czartoryski Princes in Gołuchów." About the Mostaert painting, the registration notes: "In 1997 the painting was offered for sale by Sotheby's in New York. The Polish authorities intervened and the auction house withdrew it from sale. The owner’s heir filed a judicial claim to obtain its return. The proceedings dragged on, so the parties to the dispute opted for a settlement under which they jointly sold the painting. Now in a private collection."