rfere with his freedom of
action.

Within six months of his acclamation by the people as "Head of the
State," Cosimo obtained from the Emperor Charles V. the full recognition
of his title of Duke of Florence.

There were great doings at the Palazzo Medici in the May of 1539, when
Cosimo welcomed his bride, Donna Eleanora, second daughter of Don Pedro
de Toledo, Duca d'Alba, the King of Spain's Viceroy at Naples. She was
certainly no beauty, but a woman of estimable qualities, and profoundly
imbued with the spirit of devotion. Hardly, perhaps, the wife Cosimo
would have chosen, had not reasons of State as usual guided him.
Eleanora, nevertheless, proved herself a worthy spouse and an exemplary
mother.

Within the palace Eleanora was shocked to find a little child, "_La
Bia_"--short for "_Bambina_," "Baby"--she was called, some two years
old. No one seemed to know quite who was her mother. Some said she was a
village girl of Trebbio, and others, a young gentlewoman of Florence.
Only Cosimo's mother, Madonna Maria, knew, and she refused to reveal the
girl's identity, but she admitted that "La Bia" was Cosimo's child.
Eleanora would not tolerate her presence in the palace, so Cosimo sent
her off with several attendants to the Villa del Castello, where,
perhaps fortunately, she died on the last day of February the following
year.

The first years of Cosimo's government were years of unrest and peril
throughout Tuscany. The adherents of the dead bastard Duke were neither
few nor uninfluential. Encouraged by the Clementine coterie in Rome, the
members of which had from the first opposed Cosimo's succession to the
Headship of the Republic, they made the Florentine Court a hot-bed of
intrigue and strife.

The party, not inconsiderable, which supported the claims of Giuliano,
younger son of Pierfrancesco the Younger, and brother of Lorenzino,
Alessandro's murderer, gave much trouble. Giuliano, who had been an
associate of the Duke and an abettor of Lorenzino's "devilries," fled
precipitately from Florence, and sought the protection of the Duke of
Milan. Lorenzino's confession was written partly with a view of removing
suspicion from his brother, and to leave unprejudiced the claims of his
father's family. There were many other cliques and parties, great and
small, each bent upon the other's destruction in particular and upon the
undoing of the Republic in general.

By far the most formidable opposition to Cosimo's rule ca