The d'Estes refused to recognize the Medici as Italian
princes. Those former merchants were in fact trying to solve the
impossible problem of maintaining a throne in the midst of republican
institutions. The title of grand-duke was only granted very tardily by
Philip the Second, king of Spain, to reward those Medici who bought it
by betraying France their benefactress, and servilely attaching
themselves to the court of Spain, which was at the very time covertly
counteracting them in Italy.
"Flatter none but your enemies," the famous saying of Catherine de'
Medici, seems to have been the political rule of life with that family
of merchant princes, in which great men were never lacking until their
destinies became great, when they fell, before their time, into that
degeneracy in which royal races and noble families are wont to end.
For three generations there had been a great Lorrain warrior and a
great Lorrain churchman; and, what is more singular, the churchmen all
bore a strong resemblance in the face to Ximenes, as did Cardinal
Richelieu in after days. These five great cardinals all had sly, mean,
and yet terrible faces; while the warriors, on the other hand, were of
that type of Basque mountaineer which we see in Henri IV.
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