Letizia Bonaparte

Letizia Bonaparte, born Maria-Letizia Ramolino in Ajaccio, Corsica, in 1750 (some accounts say 1749), was the Corsican noblewoman who became the matriarch of the House of Bonaparte. She married Carlo Buonaparte in 1764 at the age of fourteen and bore thirteen children, of whom eight survived to adulthood. They included Joseph, Napoleon, Lucien, Elisa, Louis, Pauline, Caroline and Jerome. Widowed in 1785, she held the family together through poverty, flight from Corsica in 1793 and a hard stay in Marseilles, until Napoleon's rise transformed her circumstances. As mother of the Emperor she took the style Madame Mere, though she kept her distance from court life and lived modestly. After 1815 she settled in Rome under the protection of Pope Pius VII and died there in 1836 at the age of 85, nearly blind. Her remains were later moved to the Imperial Chapel in Ajaccio.