At fifteen, young Piero was sent off to Pisa and attached to the staff of the Admiral of the Florentine fleet, Cavaliere Cesare Cavanglia.  In various encounters with Turkish galleons and the barques of buccaneers, the young Medico proved himself no coward—­indeed the Admiral reported of him most favourably.  Well for his fame had Piero remained before the mast and upon the quarter-deck.

The lad was practically his own master, and the memories of Florentine gallantries filled his mind with desires for their resumption.  Two years of naval-military discipline were quite enough for him, and he returned home again.  He found Donna Eleanora de Garzia a grown woman and a woman of the world; an arrant flirt, like her protectress, the Duchess Isabella; dividing her time between the Villa Poggio Baroncelli and his father’s villa at Castello.

Rumours of illicit intercourse between her and the Grand Duke were current all over Florence, and evil gossips at Court affirmed that the liaison had been of long continuance, wherein, too, the Duchess Isabella was herself implicated.  Cosimo seems to have been conversant with the tittle-tattle, and, fearing the evil effect it might have for all concerned, determined to take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and to keep the scandal within the family.

His son Piero—­who was walking closely in his father’s footsteps, and leading a free and fast, wild life, heavily in debt and habitually intoxicated, and the companion of loose women and gamesters—­should be his scapegoat.  He would marry him to his cousin!  At the beginning of the negotiations Piero refused stoutly his father’s proposition, asserting his intention not to marry.  By dint of ample offers of enlarged pecuniary emoluments and by tempting promises of exculpation from the consequences of his lustful extravagances, Piero at last yielded an unwilling assent to the betrothal.  How far he was influenced by threats we can well imagine.

Piero de’ Medici and Eleonora de Garzia de Toledo were married in the private chapel of the Pitti Palace on the morning of 21st April 1571.  That very night his young wife revealed the fact that she was enceinte, and she named his father, Duke Cosimo, as her ravisher!  The Prince was too much taken up with his own pleasure to care very much about this revelation:  he would go his own way, and his wife might go hers—­such was the morality of the day!  Still, this discovery was the first page in the tragic history of beautiful Eleanora di Piero de’ Medici.

Very shortly after the marriage Eleanora, who was then at Pisa, was delivered of a child, whom, in the absence of her husband, she named Cosimo—­a significant nomenclature!  She caused letters to be written to the Grand Duke Francesco, her brother-in-law, to acquaint him with the birth of the child, and to crave protection for his father’s son!

Following the unhappy example of Paolo d’Orsini and Isabella de’ Medici, and being absolutely their own masters, Piero and Eleanora agreed to live separate lives—­he, a boy of seventeen and she just eighteen.  What more disastrous beginning can be imagined for two young wedded lives, and yet it was inevitable.  Piero did not care a bit for Eleanora, and Eleanora hated and despised Piero.