The Medici sent gifts to friends, agents, diplomats and rulers all over Europe, and the objects they sent were highly coveted. Sometimes too highly coveted. In a letter thanking his Medici employers for gifts to his wife, an Italian engineer temporarily working at the German court writes: My wife thanks you very humbly for the lovely presents that you deigned to send her, though Her Highness the Electress of Saxony found them so much to her liking that she took a large number of them... Often even more highly prized than objects was the delicious produce from sunny Tuscany packed off to the Medici's frostbitten Habsburg in-laws. In one letter we read of how the Empress Maria, wife of Maximilian II von Habsburg, was unable to resist the lure of fresh citrus fruit: The lemons arrived in excellent condition, however they were so pleasing to Her Majesty the Empress, who was there when they arrived, that she took away so many of them that only a few were left for the Emperor... Maximilian, however, apparently learned to keep his gifts to himself, the edible ones at least, because we learn in another letter that in a gift basket from Florence all the jams, pastries, and other foods...so delighted His Majesty that he would entrust them to no one, but he himself locked them up and kept the key...
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