Ricciarda Gonzaga

Ricciarda Gonzaga (22 August 1698 – 24 November 1768) was the eldest surviving daughter of Camillo III Gonzaga and Matilda d'Este. She married Alderano I Cybo-Malaspina, becoming Duchess consort of Massa, and Princess consort of Carrara. Her granddaughter, Maria Beatrice d'Este, would start the co-founder of the House of Austria-Este.

Upon the death of her older brother, Filippo Alfonso Gonzaga, she would become the last Countess of Novellara, Bagnolo and Cortenuova.

Biography Ricciarda Gonzaga was born on 22 August 1698, to Camillo III Gonzaga and his consort, Matilda d'Este. Her older sister, also named Ricciarda, had died in infancy in April 1698.

Marriage Ricciarda married her distant cousin, Alderano Cybo-Malaspina, the heir presumptive to Alberico III Cybo-Malaspina, on 29 April 1715, in Milan. A few months after the celebration of the marriage, the reigning Duke died and, to succeed him, Aldemaro I had to come to terms with his older brother, Camillo, who was on his way to an ecclesiastical career and was the future Latin Patriarch of Constantinople and cardinal. In order to renounce his rights to the duchy, he obtained the right to keep for himself as an appanage all the feudal and allodial assets that the family owned in the Papal State and in the Kingdom of Naples.

Also, due to the loss of such income, Alderano I encountered considerable difficulties in governing the duchy, whose distressed finances were not sufficient to support the court and the dissipated lifestyle of the monarch, while his marriage also seemed to be heading, like that of his predecessor, towards sterility.

After having sold all he could of the family's patrimony, from silverware to artillery, Alderano I finally believed he had found the solution to his problems by putting the sovereign duchy itself on the market. There was talk of a purchase by the Este family of Modena, or by Pope Innocent XIII on behalf of his brother Giuseppe Lotario Conti, but in the end, in 1724, Alderano began secret negotiations with the Republic of Genoa in order to reach the definitive alienation of the duchy to the Genoese. When the agreement had practically been reached, however, Ricciarda, a capable and resolute woman, decided to intervene and informed the Emperor and the Grand Duke of Tuscany of her husband's intrigues, who certainly did not look favourably upon a possible Genoese expansion, and the deal was ruined by the intervention of an imperial commissioner.

Practically at the same time, in 1725, the Duchess finally gave birth to her first daughter, Maria Teresa, who was followed, in the next five years, by two other girls. In this period, thanks above all to the intervention of Ricciarda, the financial situation of the duchy was able to register some improvement.

The fact that the duke's offspring were made up only of females did not constitute an insurmountable succession problem, given that the Salic law did not apply in the duchy by virtue of the decree of 16 July 1529 with which the emperor Charles V had granted the investiture of the marquisate of Massa and lordship of Carrara suo jure to Ricciarda Malaspina, ancestress of Alderano, to her male descendants or, in their absence, also to her female descendants, a principle of which Alderano had in any case confirmed by the emperor shortly before dying, in Rome, on 18 September 1731. In his will, drawn up a few days before his death, he named Maria Teresa universal heir and entrusted the regency to his wife and his brother Camillo. Ricciarda took over the government with a firm hand, which was formally confirmed with an imperial diploma of 15 September 1732, with which she was officially invested with the guardianship of her daughters, and she then maintained it until June 1744, when Maria Theresa, having reached the age of majority, was formally invested with the duchy by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII.

Daughter's marriage As a sovereign duchess of her small state, Maria Teresa was a desirable match, and it was Ricciarda's job to ensure a suitable marriage for her, according to the customs and standards of the time. To this end, she signed two successive marriage contracts for her daughter during the 1830s.

The first was connected with the project of establishing a second Savoyard state in central Italy. To this end, the famous general and Prince Eugene of Savoy, a cadet of a collateral branch of the family, requested the hand of the very young duchess for his great-nephew Eugene Jean, Count of Soissons, the only male descendant of his family line, with the approval of the emperor Charles VI and the king of Sardinia Charles Emmanuel III, to whom he looked up to as the head of the family. The marriage documents were signed in Vienna, where the prince resided, on 2 May 1732 and, in the month of October, were ratified by personal signature of the regent and the two engaged couples during a courtesy visit of the eighteen-year-old count to Massa: the marriage, however, could not take place due to the premature death of the young man, in Mannheim, on 23 November 1734.

The death of the Savoy pretender did not at all determine the weakening of the emperor's interest in the marriage of the Duchess of Massa, and, after the names of a couple of princes from the German area had also been put forward, in the end the choice for the candidacy fell on Ercole Rinaldo d'Este, the last scion of the dynasty ruling the Duchy of Modena and Reggio, who was actually two years younger than Maria Theresa. For the Este family, the small Tuscan state would have constituted the longed-for outlet to the sea (after the loss of Ferrara a century and a half earlier).

For several years, however, Ricciarda remained adamant in refusing to consider further candidates, given her daughter's still-infantile age. This was despite the fact that the question of succession to her ancestral county of Novellara and Bagnolo was still open, a resolution for which Ricciarda depended exclusively on the benevolence of Vienna. In 1728, in fact, her brother Filippo Alfonso Gonzaga had died, leaving no children and no other male heirs, and Ricciarda was called upon to administer, during the interregnum, the county, which had become a vacant fief, pending the imperial decisions on its fate.

When the little duchess turned twelve in 1737, the emperor on one hand invested Duke Rinaldo I d'Este, grandfather of his candidate for marriage, with the county, and on the other he returned to the charge with Ricciarda: the uncle of the duchess regent, the marquis Carlo Filiberto II d'Este di San Martino, was again charged with returning to Massa to reopen the negotiations, also on behalf of the new duke of Modena Francesco III d'Este, father of the groom. This time Ricciarda agreed and the wedding documents were signed on 20 March 1738. The bride was awarded a dowry of one hundred thousand scudi, but the duke of Modena on the other hand committed himself, from his own pocket, to increase by twenty thousand scudi the dowries established in the will of Alderano I for the two younger sisters of Maria Teresa. Once the marriage had taken place, the Duchess would have associated her husband in the government of her states, while the Duke of Modena would have committed to allow the separation, in favour of Ricciarda Gonzaga, of the allodial assets from the feudal rights of the county of Novellara and Bagnolo, and, once the marriage had taken place, to leave full government of them to Ricciarda herself for life, "so that the transferor would have nothing left but the right of sovereignty, which he cannot divest himself of."

The marriage, however, had to be postponed until 1741 so that the young Este could at least reach the age of fourteen. The wedding was finally celebrated by proxy in Massa on 16 April, with Maria Teresa's aforementioned great-uncle, Carlo Filiberto d'Este, representing the groom, and it certainly proved to be anything but happy for the young duchess.

Death From then on, Ricciarda divided her life between Novellara, Massa (which she continued to govern indirectly due to her daughter's frequent absence) and Reggio, the residence chosen by Maria Teresa after her de facto separation from her husband.

She died on 24 November 1768, at the age of 70, in Massa, and was buried in the Cybo-Malaspina crypt in the cathedral.

Issue Ricciarda and Alderano had 3 daughters:

Maria Teresa Cybo-Malaspina (29 June 1725 – 25 December 1790), buried in the temple of the Blessed Virgin of Ghiara in Reggio, succeeded her father as sovereign of the Duchy of Massa and Carrara, under the regency of her mother until 1744, and with her assistance also thereafter; Princess Maria Anna Matilde (15 August 1726 – 8 October 1797), married in 1748 Orazio Albani, 2nd Prince of Soriano nel Cimino, patrician of Urbino and Genoese patrician; Princess Maria Camilla (29 April 1728 – 2 August 1760) married in 1755 Restaino Gioacchino di Tocco Cantelmo Stuart, fifth prince of Montemiletto, fifth prince of Pettorano, titular prince of Achaea, tenth duke of Popoli, fourth duke of Sicignano and duke of Apice, Neapolitan patrician, Venetian patrician and grandee of Spain.