Even before coming here I felt attracted by the strange figure of a
woman, which appeared from out of the dry pages of Gualterio's and
Padre de Sanctis' histories of this place. This woman is Medea,
daughter of Galeazzo IV. Malatesta, Lord of Carpi, wife first of
Pierluigi Orsini, Duke of Stimigliano, and subsequently of Guidalfonso
II., Duke of Urbania, predecessor of the great Duke Robert II.

This woman's history and character remind one of that of Bianca
Cappello, and at the same time of Lucrezia Borgia. Born in 1556, she
was affianced at the age of twelve to a cousin, a Malatesta of the
Rimini family. This family having greatly gone down in the world, her
engagement was broken, and she was betrothed a year later to a member
of the Pico family, and married to him by proxy at the age of fourteen.
But this match not satisfying her own or her father's ambition, the
marriage by proxy was, upon some pretext, declared null, and the suit
encouraged of the Duke of Stimigliano, a great Umbrian feudatory of the
Orsini family. But the bridegroom, Giovanfrancesco Pico, refused to
submit, pleaded his case before the Pope, and tried to carry off by
force his bride, with whom he was madly in love, as the lady was most
lovely and of most cheerful and amiable manner, says an old anonymous
chronicle. Pico waylaid her litter as she was going to a villa of her
father's, and carried her to his castle near Mirandola, where he
respectfully pressed his suit; insisting that he had a right to
consider her as his wife. But the lady escaped by letting herself into
the moat by a rope of sheets, and Giovanfrancesco Pico was discovered
stabbed in the chest, by the hand of Madonna Medea da Carpi. He was a
handsome youth only eighteen years old.

The Pico having been settled, and the marriage with him declared null
by the Pope, Medea da Carpi was solemnly married to the Duke of