Life
Eleanor was born in Alba de Tormes, Salamanca as the second daughter of the Viceroy of Naples, Don Pedro Álvarez de Toledo, Marquis of Villafranca (Charles V's lieutenant-governor) and Maria Osorio, 2nd Marquise of Villafranca. Her father was the second son of Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo, 2nd Duke of Alba and therefore, the third Duke of Alba was his eldest brother.
Eleonora di Toledo became the wife of Cosimo I de' Medici, the ruler of Tuscany, whom she married in 1539. The new couple had a large gathering at the Medici Villa in Poggio a Caiano to celebrate the nuptials. Her father demanded that Cosimo settle a large amount of money on her as her dowry, but as the Medici were new to their ducal status, the marriage was attractive for a variety of political and dynastic reasons. Eleonora's royal Castilian ancestors and relations with the Habsburgs provided the Medici with the blue blood they had hitherto lacked and began the process of placing them on a footing with other European sovereigns.
Through her father, Eleonora also provided the Medici with a powerful link to Spain, at that time ultimately in control of Florence, so that the marriage offered Cosimo I the opportunity to show sufficient loyalty to and trust in Spain that Spanish troops could be withdrawn from the province.
Read more about this topic: Eleanor Of Toledo
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cooled
To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in’t. I have supped full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry. Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may be even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)