Born: 25 November 1454, Italy
Died: 10 July 1510
Country most active: Cyprus
Also known as: Catherine Cornaro, Αικατερίνη Κορνάρο
This biography, written by Holly Marsden, is shared with permission from Team Queens, an educational history blog run by a collective of historical scholars. All rights reserved; this material may not be republished without the author’s consent.
Caterina Cornaro was born in 1454 to a powerful Venetian family of noblemen, politicians and military officials. Her father Marco Cornaro served as a knight of the Holy Roman Empire and her mother was Greek princess Fiorenza Crispo. She had seven siblings.
Caterina was educated in Padua where she honed her love of the arts and humanist philosophy. The Cornaro family were tied to Cyprus through exporting Cypriot goods like sugar. This was solidified in 1468, when Caterina married King James II of Cyprus.
After the death of James’ father King John II in 1458, the heir to the Cypriot throne was contested. However, when Caterina and James were betrothed, and ties with the Republic of Venice were secured, James became king and Caterina, only 14, his consort queen.
The new queen travelled to Cyprus in 1472. James II died soon after whilst Caterina was pregnant. A plot to depose the new King James III meant Caterina was then imprisoned, but the plot was unsuccessful. Her son died in 1474 and Caterina became sole monarch.
Caterina ruled Cyprus with Venetian merchants until 1488, when Venice recalled her to the Republic after hearing of plots to take her crown. She was persuaded to abdicate by both her mother and brother in 1489 and the doge of Venice was given power over Cyprus.
In her life in Venice, Caterina was allowed to keep the title of queen and was also made a lady of Asolo, a county in the region. The Asolo court was known for its literary and artistic productions. Queen Caterina Cornaro died in 1510.
Her Cypriot summer palace in the village of Potamia is currently being restored. Her life and character are documented in many early modern paintings such as the above painted by Titian in 1542. Caterina’s image and legacy in trade are still remembered, and romanticised, today.
Recommended Reading
Holly Hurlburt, Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)
Liana De Girolami Cheney, “Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus,” in The Emblematic Queen: Extra-Literary Representations of Early Modern Queenship, ed. D. Barrett-Graves (New York: Springer, 2013)
Lisa Hopkins, “Caterina Cornaro and the Colonization of Cyprus,” in Colonization, Piracy, and Trade in Early Modern Europe: The Roles of Powerful Women and Queens, eds. Claire Jowitt, Estelle Paranque, and Nate Probasco (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Hidden women of history: Caterina Cornaro, the last queen of Cyprus
Craig Barker, University of Sydney
In a new series, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.
The life of Caterina Cornaro could easily be the plot of a novel or TV drama. One of the most significant woman of Venice’s golden age, Cornaro (1454-1510) was an important figure in Renaissance politics, diplomacy and arts. She reigned as the queen of Cyprus for 16 years under immense pressure.
As a patron of the arts, she was painted by greats such as Dürer, Titian, Bellini and Giorgione. Yet today she is relatively little known outside of Venice and Cyprus.
Caterina was the last monarch of the Kingdom of Cyprus between 1474 and 1489. Her tragic reign saw the Mediterranean island transfer from the hands of the Lusignan dynasty who had dominated the island since the Crusades, to the Republic of Venice, one of the clearest signs of the mercantile nation-state flexing its imperial muscle.
This significant event took place against the backdrop of interference from Venice’s rival, Genoa, and the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the east. Despite the complex political intrigue, Caterina became a much-admired figure in contemporary European society. Still, separating the real Caterina from the romanticised version of her can be a challenge.
Early life
Caterina was born in 1454, into one of the most noble and influential Venetian families. (It had produced four Doges, the senior-most elected official of the Republic.) She grew up in the family palace on the Grand Canal. Amongst the family’s many financial interests were rich sugar plantations on Cyprus. They developed close relations with the Lusignan family who had reigned over Cyprus since 1192.
After a period of instability, James II became King of Cyprus in 1468 and chose Caterina as his wife. The marital bond was supported by Venice: commercial rights on the island were now secured for Venetian interests. She was presented with a dowry of 100,000 ducats; a not inconsiderable sum of gold and silver coinage.
She and James married by proxy in St Mark’s Cathedral on 30 July 1468 when Caterina was 14-years-old. She set sail for Cyprus in 1472 to finally meet her husband.
Caterina arrived and married James in person at the Cypriot harbour city of Famagusta. James, however, died a mere ten months after the two met, leaving the heavily pregnant queen consort to become regent to her newborn son James III. Tragedy struck the young queen again on 26 August 1474 when her son and last legitimate heir to the Lusignan line died. The child’s passing left Caterina as queen regnant, a role she would hold for 16 years. Rumours spread that James II had been poisoned by the queen’s relatives.
Thrust into a position of power and prestige through the title, Caterina was immediately the centre of various intrigues within the court. She survived conspiracies from within to overthrow her, and pressure from Naples and the Papal state.
It was Venice that exerted the greatest threat to Caterina. Control of Cyprus would consolidate the Republic’s influence over the entire Mediterranean, so they removed many of the queen’s trusted advisers and replaced them with commissioners and counsellors influencing decision making. While it is easy to portray her as a victim of Venetian manipulation, for years she faced down considerable pressure by the Republic to surrender the throne.
Removal from Cyprus
In 1489 Caterina finally relented to the Republic’s exertions, mediated by her brother, to abdicate. Although she lost political power, she was still able to stage manage her image successfully. Contemporary chronicler George Boustronios’s account tell us
on 15 February 1489 the queen exited from Nicosia for Famagusta to leave … she went on horseback wearing a black silken cloak, with all the ladies and the knights in her company …. Her eyes, moreover did not cease to shed tears throughout the procession. The whole population was bewailing.
The reality was more complex. Cyprus was locked into a feudal system which was retained by the Venetians; for most Cypriots life would not change with their queen’s exile and the collapse of the monarchy.
The pageantry of the fleet carrying the exiled Queen home was played as a brilliant piece of propaganda by both the Doge and by the former Queen. Her disembarkation in Venice became a common scene in contemporary painting.
Queen of the arts
On return to Italy, Caterina was granted for life the fiefdom of Asolo, a town in the Veneto region of northern Italy, in 1489.
Under Caterina, it became a flourishing court for Late Renaissance art and learning. Painters such as Gentile Bellini and poet Andrea Navagero were welcomed. The reputation of the Queen’s court soon spread, particularly after humanist Cardinal Pietro Bembo used it as the setting for his famed dialogues on platonic love, Gli Asolani.
There is some debate about who really spent time in Asolo, leading to one historian to describe the “mirage of Asolo”. Whatever the true nature of the court; the image of the cultured Queen in exile was manipulated by Caterina. She became a standard figure of portraitists. In later life, and in even in death, Cornaro had far greater control than she ever did during her reign.
In 1510 she died in Venice. The crowds wanting to participate in the funeral of Caterina were so large that a bridge of boats was constructed to allow greater pedestrian movement. She was buried in the church of San Salvador near the Rialto Bridge.
Legacy
Death was not the end of Caterina’s story. Even centuries later she continued to influence the arts. The audience hall of Caterina’s castle at Asolo was converted to a theatre in 1798; the theatre itself was later purchased by the John Ringling Museum of Art where it has been reassembled in Sarasota, Florida.
In 2017, a portrait of Caterina from a private collection underwent conservation and was exhibited in the Leventis Museum in Nicosia in Cyprus for the first time. The conservation work included both art historical research and scientific analysis and confirmed a 16th century date for the portrait.
Copies of original portraits of the queen continued to be made into the 18th and 19th centuries. The University of Sydney has within its art collection a large oil painting of unknown hand, but from the tradition of a lost Titian. The queen wears a black widow’s gown, a coronet and necklace.
Robert Browning wrote of Asolo. The libretto based upon her life by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges would go onto to form the basis of five operas. A highly romanticised novel Royal Pawn of Venice: A Romance of Cyprus was published in 1911.
It is time her story was once again better known. The story of the republican queen of arts.
Craig Barker, Education Manager, Sydney University Museums, University of Sydney
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
Was born in Venice in the year 1454, daughter of Marco Cornelio or Cornaro, the great grandson of the other Marco, who died in 1367, and who gloriously served his country and who during the last two years of his life was Doge of Venetian Republic. Caterina Cornaro was educated in the convent of St. Benedetto di Padova, which she entered when still very young, and there she remained almost until 1469, when, from among 72 of the most noted and most promising young maidens of the Venetian nobility, she was chosen by Giacomo Lusignano XIV, king of Cyprus, Jerusalem and Armenia, to become his bride. There was great rejoicing in Venice over this union, and the aged Doge himself, dressed in his most splendid attire, accompanied the young bride from her very home, and arm in arm escorted her to the shore, from where she sailed, leaving for Famagosta, a metropolis of Cyprus, on a Venetian galley with a truly royal fleet following her. After a dangerous voyage, she finally reached her husband’s side, where she was crowned queen amid the applause and festivity of a cheering crowd, delighted by her fine graces and her suave manners. Caterina, however, lived but a short time with her husband, who died in 1473, under suspicion of poisoning. During her widowhood she reigned for fourteen years, but always against great troubles created especially by her sister-in-law, Carlotta, and in great danger of losing her kingdom and her head. At length, tired of the endless fighting, she abandoned Cyprus in 1486, and returned to Venice, together with her brother George^ who persuaded her to donate to her native country her inherited kingdom of Cyprus, Jerusalem and Armenia. This Caterina did in fact, with a solemn ceremony at the Basilica of Saint Marc. Having gone in 1489 to Fratalonga to see the emperor Maximillian passing from Milan directed to Vienna, she became enamoured with the beautiful location of Asolo, and after having expressed her desire to the Venetian Senate to have this property, on June 20, 1489, she was invested with the sovereignty of Asolo. She there established her Court, and lived for some twenty-one years, surrounded by the most noted and most splendid literary celebrities of the time. She there also had occasion of hearing the sermons of the famous monk Bernardino da Feltre. But, because of the disastrous consequences created to the glorious Republic of Venice by the League of Cambray, Caterina was forced to leave her pleasant place at Asolo, and to flee in refuge to Venice, where she died at the age of fifty-six, on July 19, 1510. She was deeply mourned by all her people.
Her body was placed in rest in the church of the Santi Apostoli, which was erected years before by her family — Cornaro, and the Erizzo family. Of Caterina Cornaro was admirable the fine sense of judgment and justice, and a certain fine quality for doing good, for which reason the most difficult and most trying cases of law and politics were by her easily solved. She can, therefore, be classed in that glorious group of reigning women who demanded the highest respect.
The following is excerpted from A Cyclopædia of Female Biography, published 1857 by Groomsbridge and Sons and edited by Henry Gardiner Adams.
CORNANO CATERINA, Queen of Cyprus. At the court of James the Fourth, King of Cyprus, resided a Venetian gentleman, exiled for some youthful indiscretions. He found especial favour with his adopted monarch. and rose to an intimate intercourse with him. One day, happening to stoop, he let fall a miniature, which represented so beautiful a face that the king eagerly inquired about the original. After stimulating his curiosity by affecting a discreet reserve, he acknowledged it to be the likeness of his niece. In subsequent conversations he artfully praised this young lady, and so wrought upon the sovereign that he resolved to take her for his wife. This honourable proposal being transmitted to Venice, she was adopted by the state, and sent as a daughter of the republic—a mode often adopted by that oligarchy for forming alliances with foreign powers. The fine climate and rich soil of Cyprus—an island so favoured by nature, that the ancients dedicated it to the queen of beauty and love—had made it always a coveted spot of earth, and on the death of James, which took place soon after his marriage with Caterina, the Venetians conceived the idea of obtaining it. Through their influence, Caterina was proclaimed queen, and afterwards as easily persuaded to abdicate in favour of the state of Venice. After various forms, and overpowering some opposition, Cyprus was annexed to the republic. On the 20th. of June, 1489, Caterina returned to her country and family, where she passed so obscure a life that no historian has taken the pains to note the period of her death.
Her name remains in the archives of Venice, because through her means a kingdom was acquired. Her features enjoy immortality, for she was painted by Titian.