1519
Florence, Italy
1589
Paris, France

Regent, queen

Catherine de Médicis was never able to rule France as its monarch because of the Salic Law, which restricted royal succession solely to men. Despite this law, she reigned as regent (one who rules in place of a young monarch) for nearly thirty years and did everything she could to strengthen the positions of her three weak sons. She presided over, and was partly responsible for, many of the horrors of the French Wars of Religion in the 1560s and 1570s. The worst of these was the massacre of Protestants gathered in Paris to witness the marriage of her daughter Margaret Valois to Duke Henry of Navarre in 1572. Catherine's calculating policies yielded short-term victories, but when she died in 1589 her hopes for her family's long-term future lay in ruins.