Catherine de Medici arrived in France as a teenage Italian bride whom the French court openly despised. Over the next forty years, she would outlast husbands, outmaneuver rivals, and hold the French throne together through religious civil wars that tore the kingdom apart — including the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre that stained her name with blood forever.

This episode traces Catherine from her orphaned childhood in war-torn Florence through her years as a sidelined queen, her emergence as the real power behind three successive kings, and the impossible choices she made in the wars between Catholics and Huguenots.

• Catherine’s orphaned childhood in Florence and her arranged marriage to the French heir
• The decades of political humiliation she endured before seizing real power
• The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and Catherine’s disputed role in the killing
• How she held France together through three reigns and thirty years of religious civil war