When, therefore, in the early part of the summer of 1497, Catherine gave her hand to Giovanni de' Medici, however much this, her third marriage, may have been a matter of calculated prudence and state policy, she at least had a sufficient knowledge of the man whom she was about to make her husband. Madama was now thirty-five years of age, while Giovanni was only thirty. He had not, and has never occupied any very conspicuous place in history; but what little we hear of him is favourable. He had fought with credit, in France, under Charles VIII., and had brought back with him to Florence, a French patent of nobility, and a pension of two thousand crowns a-year, the gifts of that monarch. He had also the credit of a wise and prudent negociator and statesman. There is extant among the Florence archives a letter from Savonarola to Catherine, dated from the Convent of St. Mark, the 18th of June, 1477, of which a few copies have recently been printed by the Count Carlo Capponi at Florence. The contents are of little interest, being merely general exhortations to piety, to God-fearing conduct in the government of her states. But it is somewhat remarkable that this letter must have been written just about the time of her marriage with Giovanni de' Medici; which yet was, like the preceding union with Feo, and for the same reasons, kept perfectly secret. Yet, as there is no reason to think, that the reforming friar had any correspondence with Catherine, either previously or subsequently, it can hardly be doubted, that this letter of exhortation was motived by the occasion of the marriage; and that the friar, friar-like, knew all about it, however secret it may have been kept. This wholly volunteered and unprefaced preachment from the friar to a foreign princess, is a trait worth noting of the social position arrogated to themselves by the spiritual teachers of that day. Of this union, however, of the great houses of Sforza and Medici, the most, and indeed the only important result was the birth of a son baptised Ludovico, on the 6th of April, in the year 1498. The name Ludovico was, a few months later, changed to Giovanni; and this child became that celebrated Giovanni "Delle Bande Nere," who acquired an European reputation as the greatest captain of his day, and from whom descended the long line of Tuscan Grand-Dukes of the Medicean race. For Cosmo, his son and Catherine's grandson, succeeded to that dignity on the extinction of the elder branch of the family. Through this Giovanni, moreover, Catherine's eighth child and seventh son, she is the ancestress of that Maria de' Medici who became the wife of Henry IV. of France, and by him the progenitress of all the Bourbons, who have sat on the thrones of France, Spain, Naples, Parma, and Lucca; and who, by her daughter Henrietta, the wife of Charles I., was the mother of an equally royal, and almost equally pernicious race.