Giulio I Cybo-Malaspina

Giulio Cibo (1525 – 18 May 1548) (later often spelled Cybo) was an Italian noble of Genoese ancestry, who was briefly marquis of Massa and lord of Carrara from 1546 to 1547, ousting his mother Ricciarda Malaspina. However, in a few months she managed to regain power and Giulio ended up beheaded the following year in Milan, exemplarily condemned to death for treason by the emperor Charles V.

Giulio sometimes also styled himself "Giulio Cibo Malaspina", thus taking his mother's family name as well, and with the double surname he has frequently been reported in subsequent historiography.

Family and Massa-Carrara succession Born in Rome, he was the elder son of Ricciarda Malaspina, sovereign marquise of Massa and Carrara, and Lorenzo Cybo, count of Ferentillo, a grandson of Pope Innocent VIII and Lorenzo de' Medici.

Upon the death of her father in 1519, Ricciarda had become the aspiring heir to his fiefs of Massa and Carrara. His will, drawn up shortly before his death, had established as his heir in the first instance Ricciarda's eldest surviving son (if any). In the meantime, she was named "lady and mistress and usufructuary and heiress of his [Antonio Alberico's] inheritance and assets, as long as she is of age to conceive and bear children". Given the dubious legitimacy of the will due to the possible violation of the inheritance rights of Antonio Alberico's grandnephews, who were already alive at the time, and her consequently insecure position, Ricciarda secretly appealed for Emperor Charles V's superior intervention in her favour. Thus, on 16 July 1529, she succeeded in getting invested with the two fiefdoms suo jure, with a truly unusual imperial decree: in derogation of the Salic law, it gave her the right to transmit her titles not only to her male descendants, but, in their absence, also to females, always respecting the newly established principle of primogeniture. With a second decree dated 7 April 1533, she even obtained the right to nominate her own successor.

After a failed attempt to force his mother out in 1545, the following year Giulio challenged her again for control of the marquisate. With the backing of Cosimo I de' Medici and Andrea Doria, he seized power by force, occupying the lands of Massa and Carrara with troops led by his father Lorenzo. Ricciarda immediately appealed to the emperor, and Charles V decided to temporarily confiscate the marquisate placing it in the hands of his plenipotentiary in Italy, Ferrante Gonzaga, and then, at Giulio's request, in those of Cardinal Cybo.

Giulio's recalcitrance in complying with the imperial decisions and the suspicions aroused in Cosimo I by his increasingly close ties with the Doria family, induced the Duke of Florence to have him arrested in Pisa on 17 March 1547 and to keep him in prison until the 20th when he finally accepted to place the marquisate in the hands of his uncle. At that time Andrea Doria was a very high magistrate ("perpetual censor") of the Republic of Genoa, an ally of Emperor and King of Spain Charles V, to whom the petty Massese state, as an imperial fief, was also linked by a bond of loyalty.

On 27 June 1547, pending Giulio's payment of the entire agreed amount, Ricciarda retook possession of the marquisate. he had not hesitated to send a small military expedition to help Doria; which, however, had been stopped along the way by the news of the failure of the rebellion. (as his brother had done on his own initiative about ten years earlier).

Giulio Cybo was initially buried in the Milanese church of Sant'Angelo (belonging to the Order of Friars Minor, to whom Giulio wrote to his uncle to make a donation). By order of Alberico I, his body was finally transferred to Massa in 1573, and buried in the crypt of the cathedral beside the remains of his parents.