Messer Domenico, Cammilla’s great-grandfather, was one of Savonarola’s keenest opponents, chiefly in the interests of the Medici, and the great Cosimo counted him among his most trusty friends, but he suffered for his fidelity by being assassinated in 1531, by one Paolo del Nero.  Another relative of Cammilla died tragically, Lodovico, who was killed by Giovanni Bandini in a duel at Poggio Baroncelli in 1530—­a duel fought for the hand and heart of the beauteous Marietta de’ Ricci, a relative of that other fateful flirt, Cassandra, who was the cause of Pietro Buonaventuri’s tragic death, and died by the knives of assassins.

The Martelli were associated with many of the pious works of the Medici:  for example, they assisted munificently in the building and endowment of the great church of San Lorenzo.  In some way or other Messer Antonio had lit on evil days, at all events he appears to have lost the banking business, which had been mainly operative in the raising of his house, and had reverted to the less lucrative but still honourable occupation of his family—­the craft of sword-making.  He carried on his business in a house which he rented under the shadow of the Palazzo Pitti.

Both Cammilla and her elder sister Maria were good-looking girls.  The latter, in 1566, married a wealthy shoemaker from Siena, Gaspare Chinucci, but her husband divorced her; and then Duke Cosimo caused her father to marry her, in 1572, to an opulent foreign merchant—­Messer Baldassarre Suarez, who had come over from Spain and was a protege of the Duchess Eleanora.

Cammilla, born in 1547, possessed all the personal attractiveness which distinguished her mother, whose sister, Nannina, the wife of Messer Luigi degli Albizzi, was mother of Eleanora, Duke Cosimo’s druda.

“Tall and of a good figure, fair complexion, with light hair, and a pair of dark eyes like two brilliant stars, she was also most graceful in her carriage and manner, full of intelligence in conversation, and quite naturally fond of admiration and amours.”  This is a contemporary word-picture of the physical and mental charms of one of the most lovely girls that ever tripped merrily along the Lung’ Arno Acciaiuoli—­in the footsteps of Beatrice de’ Portinari.

That promenade of Prince Cupid was always thronged by the belles and beaux of Florentine society.  There the young men, and old men too, could meet and salute their innamorate.  Duke Cosimo had not observed for nothing the daily walk of his fascinating young neighbour, he never overlooked a pretty face and comely figure, and his heart was large enough to entertain the loves of many women!  His experience was very much like that of Dante Alighieri, who one day saw his Beatrice “in quite a new and entrancing light.”

It was in May, in 1564, when all was gay and fresh in Florence, that Duke Cosimo chanced upon Cammilla de’ Martelli, as he passed on his way from the Pitti Palace to Castello, to dawdle with the lovely Eleanora degli Albizzi, her cousin.  Something prompted the Duke to accost the maiden,—­her blush and his own tremor revealed delightful possibilities quite in his way!  Very warily he approached Messer Antonio.  His idea was probably to keep Eleanora at the Villa del Castello, and to take Cammilla away to his favourite residence, the Palace at Pisa.