During the hot days and nights of August 1466, an old drama played itself out in the streets and palazzi of Florence. Once again the city was divided into two armed camps. Once again a transfer of power was in the air. Yet the principal actors seemed strangely hesitant, as if reluctant to rehearse what had been done so many times before, or unsure perhaps as to how to proceed in these different times.
Cosimo had died and something had to change. “With Cosimo your plan is impossible,” the exiled Palla Strozzi had told Girolamo Machiavelli when the rebel came looking for support to overturn the banker’s regime. “Without him it will be unnecessary.” Cosimo was revered and he had had the money. Members of other old and wealthy families addressed him as “father.” Still, they had built the regime with him, they told themselves, not for him. And certainly not for his son. Piero had no hereditary right, no special charisma, nor perhaps so much money. The bank was in difficulty. Banks in general were in difficulty. So while in 1458 the challenge to the Medici had been launched through legal institutions, in line with the constitution, it now came, more seriously, from Cosimo’s ex-partners in the regime—the ones who for decades had manipulated the constitution on his behalf. Suddenly, four canny old men were talking about liberty.
Dietisalvi Neroni, one of Cosimo’s oldest collaborators and brother of the city’s new archbishop, had been annoyed when plans to expand the Medici palazzo threatened to take light away from his own. Such a slight would clearly be perceived as a comment on his diminishing importance. Immediately after Cosimo’s death, Neroni wrote to Francesco Sforza in Milan that just as Cosimo had been a father to other members of the reggimento, so they would now be fathers to Piero—i.e., the Medici are no longer the leading family. This is an oligarchy, not a principality.
Agnolo Acciaiuoli, like Cosimo, had been exiled in the 1430s for his opposition to Rinaldo degli Albizzi and had been in the Medici regime from the beginning. But in 1463 Acciaiuoli’s daughter-in-law abandoned her husband Raffaello. He preferred boys and old Agnolo was violent, she complained. She wanted her dowry back. Being a Bardi girl, this was big money, 8,500 florins. Called in to arbitrate, Cosimo had said the young wife should be guaranteed her dowry, after which she could decide of her own free will whether or not to return to her husband. Agnolo was not happy with this. And he was particularly unhappy when Cosimo, having promised that another son of his, Lorenzo Acciaiuoli, would be given the next available bishopric in Tuscany, in the event preferred his own relative, Filippo de’ Medici, when that bishopric turned out to be in the sensitive subject town of Pisa. “Cosimo and Piero are cold men,” Agnolo wrote in one of many letters to Duke Francesco Sforza. “Sickness and age have made them such cowards that they run away from everything that bothers them or requires any effort.” Ever since Milanese troops had presided over that parliament of 1458, everybody, it seemed, was eager to present himself to Sforza as the next leader of the regime.
Everybody except Luca Pitti. Pushing seventy, Pitti had always been one of the most authoritarian and antidemocratic members of Cosimo’s coterie. As gonfaloniere della giustizia, he personally had called the 1458 parliament that put an end to republican opposition. He had suffered no slights from the Medici family, but as an extremely wealthy banker in the process of completing a palazzo that was intended to surpass any in town, Luca had no intention of bending a knee to anyone now that Cosimo was gone. In November 1465, when Piero de’ Medici insisted that he had Sforza’s blessing for running Florence, Pitti replied that he would rather be governed by the devil than by Milan. All at once he became the figurehead of an opposition, which, however, didn’t seem entirely consistent on foreign policy.
Niccolò Soderini, the fourth man, the most charismatic, may indeed have been a fervent republican. Or perhaps all he wanted was to reorganize those electoral bags to guarantee an upper-class oligarchy in which no single family would dominate. The Florentine patriarchy had always loathed Cosimo’s sly habit of bringing in “vile new men” who gave him a power base beyond and potentially opposed to the older families’ interests. Niccolò may also have resented the fact that his younger brother, Tommaso Soderini, was a major figure in the Medici faction. As always in Florence, there was a thick web of family relations straining this way and that. Cosimo, for example, had always thought Agnolo Acciaiuoli a bad influence on his (Cosimo’s) nephew, Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who was married to Agnolo’s daughter Laudamia. Pierfrancesco was important; as the only son of Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo, he held fifty percent of the Medici stake in the whole bank, though he didn’t work for the bank or seek important roles in government. With Cosimo’s death, Pierfrancesco was theoretically an equal partner with Piero. Having spent a great deal less on gathering allies about him, he possessed a great deal more ready cash.
NOW THAT HE was gone, it soon became clear how much Cosimo had relied on consensus for his authority. The special powers of the eight police chiefs, the so-called otto di guardia, were due to lapse. Piero wanted them renewed. The old men of the regime opposed him. The powers were not renewed. Piero wanted the accoppiatori to keep choosing a safe, pro-Medici signoria. The old men insisted on a return to random election. They had their way. And surprise, surprise, the first randomly chosen gonfaloniere della giustizia was Niccolò Soderini, one of the four. His two-month spell of government in late 1465 achieved nothing, but it left the town aware of being radically split. “We have divided the earth,” Acciaiuoli would later say, “and division breeds leaders, leaders get nervous.”
Piero had every reason to be nervous. Taking over the bank from Cosimo, he had found it undercapitalized, overstretched. He called in debts. Was it his covert enemy Dietisalvi Neroni who advised him to do this? In Florentine Histories, Machiavelli claimed it had been a ruse on Neroni’s part to make Piero unpopular. Successful godfathers do not resort to credit squeezes. Many companies failed. People were resentful. All at once the Palazzo Medici was attracting fewer petitioners. Everybody was paying respects to Luca Pitti in his even-grander palazzo. A rival mesh of patronage was gaining ground.
Then in March 1466, with exquisite bad timing, Francesco Sforza died. The duke’s wife and son immediately begged the Florentine signoria for a loan of 60,000 florins to pay for the military presence that would guarantee the Sforza family’s succession throughout Milan’s subject territories. Dietisalvi Neroni and Agnolo Acciaiuoli immediately changed position on Milan. After years of currying Sforza’s support, they now would not give a loan to his successors, who, of course, represented Piero’s potential army.
The slide accelerates. In May 1465, four hundred leading citizens of Florence swear and sign an oath to uphold the old republican system of government with election by lottery. Piero’s cousin, Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, signs. Has he been pushed to make the gesture by his Acciaiuoli wife, his persuasive father-in-law? Does he perhaps believe the bank would do better if it retreated from politics? The reasons can hardly matter to Piero. He is so paralyzed by gout these days that there are times when the only thing he can move is his tongue. His main business partner is undermining him. Everybody can see how weak he is.
Then in June 1465, the government starts debating the dissolution of the so-called Council of 100, the permanent balia of Medici men set up after the 1458 parliament to ratify everything the Medici governments wanted. With its departure, the return to the old constitution will be complete and the family’s power at an end. The change that Palla Strozzi foresaw after Cosimo’s death is at hand. Piero is beaten, unless … unless he himself can bring about a different kind of change, a metamorphosis of the family and its relationship with the other patriarchal families in the regime. In this long and no doubt suffocatingly hot Tuscan summer, political emergency accelerates a trend that has been underway for decades, and at last creates something new.
THE REAL SCANDAL of money, as we have already said, is that it does not respect traditional hierarchies. The merest artisan can make a fortune and start strutting around in expensive crimson. The feudal order breaks down. But once made, money notoriously seeks that which cannot—supposedly—be bought. Perhaps the first generation is happy to have acquired material wealth, but the second yearns for a distinction that is not based on money, a distinction that in the past only birth could give. In the end, the individual, even the richest, resists the idea that his worth is to be quantified in money terms, especially if it wasn’t he who earned the cash. So we come back to Achilles’s conviction that human uniqueness has no price, and we arrive at the roots of every snobbery: I wish to be distinguished, but how?
Education is a good place to start. Money buys it and it then generates a value that goes beyond money. Art achieves the same alchemy. “Money alone,” remarked the wondering Galeazzo Sforza (Francesco’s son), when shown around the art treasures of the Palazzo Medici, “would not be able to compete with what has been done here.” Yet everything had been bought with money.
What was the proper education for a rich banker? Giovanni di Bicci had done no more than follow fashion when he gave Cosimo his humanist tutors. Steeped in Cicero, the young man was seduced by the ideal of the noble leader. He wanted to be such a man. The Florentine constitution, with its system of election by lottery, forbade these ambitions, yet was so weak that it more or less invited a rich man to spend his way to an ambiguous, covert sort of power. If one of the huge problems of any democracy is what to do with big money and its attendant political ambitions, squalid or noble, Florence had clearly got it wrong.
No doubt aware of the many conflicts within himself, between private and public interest, between moneymaking and getting to heaven, Cosimo decided to educate his three sons for different and separate careers. Piero, the eldest, would be groomed for government; Giovanni, the favorite, for the bank; Carlo, the illegitimate boy with the foreign features, could go to the Church. It was as if the three strands of Cosimo’s achievements could be separated out. Though Cosimo’s genius had lain in intertwining those strands.
Carefully laid, the plans made no allowance for character and circumstance. Carlo was happy enough as a bishop, but fat Giovanni couldn’t get excited about banking. Jolly, well loved, and vain, he chose the peacock as his personal emblem. “For the view,” he explained to Cosimo, who couldn’t understand why his son was building a villa in Fiesole with no agricultural land around it. A villa was always a farmhouse for Cosimo. You give your children an expensive education and their values start to shift. Cosimo should have been ready for this, since his own education had led to radical departures from his father’s lifestyle.
Determined to please, perhaps precisely because he was not the favorite, Piero was most at home overseeing Cosimo’s commissions of buildings and works of art. An avid collector, in love with lavish furnishings and beautiful domestic interiors, he would spend hours gloating over stacks of illuminated manuscripts, or collections of antique coins. He slept on silk sheets embroidered with the family coat of arms. But you must train for government, his father insisted. And train Piero dutifully did. He held a number of government posts: prior, accoppiatore, even gonfaloniere della giustizia. As his personal emblem, he chose the falcon, which always returns faithfully to its master. “Honored, like your father,” was how people addressed him in their begging letters. “A most careful imitator of his father’s admirable virtues,” wrote Donato di Neri Acciaiuoli in a dedicatory preface to his Life of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus. But imitate as he might, Cosimo’s role wasn’t available to Piero. Because Cosimo hadn’t succeeded anyone.
Accusations that Cosimo had been eager to become a prince were off the mark. He thrived on the complications, the ambiguities, the idea that his fellow Florentines had elevated him despite the constitution. Florence had stripped its feudal nobles of their privileges and didn’t want a return to the past. Yet education was breeding aristocratic presumptions in the banker’s children. Their life began to resemble that of noblemen. Is it possible, they must have started to wonder, to invent an aristocracy, a new, more sophisticated version of the crude old birthright—not simply and brutally to seize power but to create, over two or three wealthy and well-read generations, a new hereditary privilege?
The future of Europe for centuries to come would depend on the answer to this question. And that answer, of course, is no. Money and culture do not amount to a divine right to pass on political power to one’s heirs. And yet … if sufficiently enlightened, if supported by effective propaganda, if interminably intermarried with others who had similar pretensions, or who had once been recognized as royal, perhaps the world might be convinced by an expensive parody, an ersatz aristocracy—especially if, at the end of the day and in the teeth of the evidence, the people enjoying the privileges were always willing to declare themselves ordinary citizens. Paralyzed on silk sheets through the summer of 1466, Piero de’ Medici could hardly be likened to a chrysalis turning into a butterfly. But before the year was out, he would have freed the Medici family from the sticky limitations of the old Florentine oligarchy. With wings bought from usury, the Medici bankers would soar above their station at last. The gouty man was plotting a marriage that would turn those republicans green with envy.
Like art and education, marriage was something that involved an exchange of money but also had the potential for distinctions that went beyond money. These are the interesting things in life, where countable and uncountable values rub and spark together. Traditionally, it was the bride who had to purchase, with her dowry, the right to her husband’s protection. Piccarda de’ Bueri’s 1,500 florins had been crucial for husband Giovanni di Bicci’s initial investments. The Bueri were solid Florentine merchant stock; no more. A distant cousin of Piccarda’s would serve the Medici bank as an agent in Lubeck, collecting papal dues from Scandinavia; trading in furs, amber, and linen; keeping all his accounts in Italian to baffle the local taxman.
But a future husband, or his negotiating parents, also had the option of accepting less money in return for more prestige. Her branch of the family being out of luck, Contessina de’ Bardi didn’t bring Cosimo much cash, but she was still a Bardi. It was a valuable alliance. The wife chosen for Cosimo’s son, Piero, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, brought even less money, a mere 1,000 florins, but in return for even more prestige. Once aristocratic, Lucrezia’s family had changed its name from Tornaquinci to Tornabuoni to avoid the ban on noblemen participating in public life. The girl had blue blood. How strange that the Florentines had banned the nobles from exercising political power but were still impressed by their pedigrees. Many modern democracies are still tensed by this contradiction. Lucrezia, however, legitimized her special status by being nobly educated as well as nobly born. But can one really say, “nobly educated”? Doesn’t such an expression mean we’ve accepted the premise that education can buy certain rights? In any event, Lucrezia was well read. She wrote devotional poetry, of the kind sung by religious confraternities. She made her own small venture into business, redeveloping some rundown sulfur baths, no doubt with her menfolk’s gouty joints in mind.
Accepting Piero’s illegitimate daughter, Maria—these little trials came with the territory—Lucrezia produced two daughters, Bianca and Lucrezia, and two sons, Lorenzo and Giuliano. Most of all, she presided over Lorenzo’s extremely noble education and, when his turn came, played an important role in choosing his wife. With Piero’s health so feeble, Lorenzo would have to marry young, while the family still had clout. In Rome, Medici banking agents were already negotiating for the hand of an Orsini. This was a family of feudal lords, cardinals, condottieri. A family with a private army, no less. Inevitably, news of the possible marriage fed the Florentine opposition. Why was Piero looking outside his hometown for his son’s wife? People started complaining, remarks Machiavelli, “that he who does not want citizens as relatives wants them as slaves.” Before bankers and feudal lords could mix, Piero de’ Medici would have to survive this dangerous summer of 1466.
IN BED, Piero calls for lists to be made of those for him, those against. Interestingly, the two lists include many of the same names. It’s a good sign: minds are malleable, or susceptible to patronage perhaps. In late August, the sick man precipitates the crisis. An ambush, he claims, was laid to murder him as he was being carried toward Florence in a litter from the family villa in Careggi. The assassins were troops of Borso d’Este, marquis of Ferrara. Could this be true? They were in the pay of Luca Pitti and Agnolo Acciaiuoli. So Piero claims. Anyway, he is taking up arms in response. Suddenly, the whole Medici countryside to the north of the town is on the move. Two thousand Milanese troops are approaching from Bologna. And I need 10,000 florins, Piero tells his business partner and cousin Pierfrancesco. At once!
Despite having sworn that oath to defend the republic, Pierfrancesco obeys. Why? Does he believe this unlikely assassination story? Is he afraid that if Piero were to be murdered, the bank might collapse? Whatever the reason, he produces this vast sum at once, in cash. Hours later, all the bread, wine, and arms in the town have been bought up. These provisions are a magnet to the waverers. Scaffolding appears around the Palazzo Medici, creating vantage points from which to pelt attackers. The nearest city gate is seized to allow friendly troops to enter. So much for the coward who would run away from everything that required effort.
The opposition is thrown. They are indeed in alliance with Borso d’Este of Ferrara, but can they get the condottiere and his army into the town before the Milanese arrive? Are they willing to put their hands in their pockets, or other people’s, as deeply and drastically as Piero has? They hesitate. To arms, Niccolò Soderini insists. They must ride through the streets, now, rousing the common people who are doubtless on their side. They must attack Piero’s house. There is no time to lose. But what, the others ask, if the people, after winning, want real power? What if, having sacked Piero’s palazzo, the plebs start attacking other palazzi? In the middle of the night, armed men bang on the gates of the Palazzo Medici. Panic spreads among Piero’s defenders. It’s only Antonio Ridolfi, another supporter come to join them. The opposition has missed its moment. It is never enough just to have money—the Strozzi family, for example had had more money than the Medici in 1433, and they were still in exile—you must know how to use it when it matters. Above all, you can never afford to be tight.
Piero staged this melodrama on August 27, one day before a new signoria was to be elected, by lot. Was this because he feared that he would need to be armed if the draw went against him? Or because he had fixed the election somehow and knew it would be in his favor? As it turned out, the new signoria was decidedly pro-Medici. Fixed or not, nothing could have demonstrated more clearly the need for a less erratic form of election.
There is now a four-day interregnum before one signoria hands over to another. The city is surrounded by foreign troops, from both sides. Anything could happen. Negotiations begin. To discourage rash decisions, Piero makes promises. Behind the scenes, the Medici bank’s general director, Francesco Sassetti, goes to talk to the aging Pitti. Time to change sides, Luca. And Pitti, the figurehead of the opposition, betrays his friends in exchange for three guarantees: the promise of a position as accoppiatore for himself; the appointment of his brother to the otto di guardia (with the power over exile); and the marriage of his daughter Francesca to “someone very close to Piero.” By whom Pitti believes they mean Piero’s eldest son and heir, Lorenzo.
A few days later—and this is a coup within the coup—it is Luca Pitti, not Piero de’ Medici, who proposes the inevitable “parliament.” Two thousand Milanese troops preside. Joining them, armed and on horseback, is Piero’s son, the seventeen-year-old Lorenzo. It’s quite a show. In very short order, all the regime’s old electoral controls are reintroduced. And more. Seeing the makeup of the new police commission, which once again has special powers, Dietisalvi Neroni, Niccolò Soderini, and Agnolo Acciaiuoli flee the city before the inevitable sentence of exile is passed. If the 1458 crisis served to define the relationship between the regime and the institutions, the 1466 parliament settled the Medici’s position within the regime: total domination.
Ghirlandaio’s Birth of John the Baptist (detail), in Santa Maria Novella (Tornabuoni chapel). Acting on instructions from Giovanni Tornabuoni, the painter seems more interested in his portrayal of these fifteenth-century spectators—the women of the Tornabuoni family—than in the biblical scene itself. The older of the two women wearing white headscarves is Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lorenzo’s mother.
Despised and ignored, the turncoat Luca Pitti got his position of accoppiatore as promised, and with his brother on the Eight of the Guard, he was spared exile. But his young daughter, Francesca, did not get to marry Lorenzo. Instead she was given to Lorenzo’s uncle, Piero’s brother-in-law, the thirty-six-year-old Giovanni Tornabuoni, head of the Medici bank in Rome and already well advanced in negotiations to bring that Orsini girl to Florence for his nephew.
“She walks with her head a little stooped,” complained Lucrezia Tornabuoni. A bare six months after the political crisis, Lorenzo’s mother was down in Rome to size up her future daughter-in-law. “I believe this comes from shyness.” Did the child have breasts? “Hard to tell the way these Romans dress.” Anyway, “as well as half of Monte Ritondo,” Lucrezia writes home to Piero, “the family also owns three other castles and … are better off every day because, apart from being maternal nephews of the Cardinal, of the Archbishop Napoleone, and of the knight, they are also related as cousins via their father for he is second cousin to the aforesaid Lords who love them greatly.” This was what mattered. The girl was sixteen. Oh, her name is Clarice, the future mother-in-law remembers to say halfway through a second letter. Only eighteen, Lorenzo was taken down south to view the goods and said they would do. The Medici were about to move into a different class. The trend behind that move would be the ruin of the bank.
“THIS COMPANY USED to promote everyone who was good at his job, without any regard to family or privilege.” Back in 1453, Leonardo Vernacci, deputy director of the Rome branch, had written to Giovanni di Cosimo, then deputy director of the Medici holding, to complain about the promotion of Giovanni Tornabuoni. Tornabuoni had joined the company at the age of fifteen in 1443, the same year Piero di Cosimo married his sister, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. Vernacci accused young Giovanni of slacking. Now he was being promoted over the head of the talented young Alessandro Bardi, who quit as a result. Tornabuoni wrote to his sister’s husband, Piero (not to Giovanni), to complain about the complaints. “And Vernacci spies on me and reads my post!” In 1465 it would be Vernacci who now left the bank in disgust when Piero promoted his brother-in-law to the directorship of the Rome branch.
Giovanni Tornabuoni had no special talents; he was obstinate, touchy, and self-important, but as a relative of the family he did appear in that Magi procession that Benozzo Gozzoli painted in the chapel in the Palazzo Medici, and later in life he actually commissioned a number of fine frescoes himself—first in Rome, when the young wife whom Luca Pitti had given him died in 1477, and again back in Florence in Santa Maria Novella, where the painter Ghirlandaio depicted a now-elderly Tornabuoni and his friends and relatives in decidedly patriarchal poses. Here the religious themes, in a fresco such as The Angel Appearing to Zacharias, fade discreetly into the background, while the senatorial figures of the contemporary Florentines in their robes and caps dominate the scene in what is now almost a work of journalism.
In The Birth of John the Baptist, the Tornabuoni women stand center stage, entirely displacing the biblical scene to show off their modern, carefully tailored clothes and clearly identifiable household jewelry. It is an arrogant though always elegant parody of the early days of Cosimo’s church patronage, where at best a banker might creep into the frame through his name-saint. If the frescoes of San Marco in the 1430s made the sacred space a little less forbidding, a little more breathable for the busy dealer in dry exchanges, in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella that space has been unequivocally commandeered, utterly confused with the world of the contemporary Italian patrician. But then, as director of the Medici bank in Rome, Giovanni had spent his entire adult life in a papal court increasingly concerned with luxury, prestige, and power, not theology. And the irony is that the more worldly the Church became, the less attractive it was for bankers like Tornabuoni—as a customer, that is. The cost of the papal bureaucracy was soaring (500 employees had become 2,000), the price of nepotism likewise. Not to mention the expansionist wars. From the 1460s onward, the Medici bank was lending out more to the Curia than it was taking in with the commission on papal tributes. All too soon, the classic situation would be reached where the indebted client has the upper hand, the bank is too deeply involved to pull out.
Another man painted together with the Medici family in Gozzoli’s famous Magi procession was Francesco Sassetti, who had been appointed deputy general director of the bank’s holding in 1453, when Giovanni di Cosimo clearly was not pulling his considerable weight in the top position. Like Tornabuoni, Francesco Sassetti married an upper-class fifteen-year-old when in his late thirties, and again like Tornabuoni he had Ghirlandaio paint him (standing beside Lorenzo de’ Medici) for his family chapel, this time the Church of Santa Trinità. Was this a competition? If the Medici were to become aristocrats through marriage, education, and patronage, those around them clearly assumed that they themselves must take on a greater importance too.
A change now occurred in the bank’s structure that would eventually allow this trend to get out of hand. Whenever one of the parties involved in a company contract died, the contract was dissolved. As general manager of the Medici holding in the halcyon years from 1443 to 1455, Giovanni Benci had been signatory to all the company’s branch contracts; hence, on his death, all the bank’s contracts had to be rewritten. At this point, the idea of the holding company was dropped. There is no letter or report to explain this fatal decision. From now on, the Medici share in each branch of the bank would be held directly by members of the family in partnership with the local managers and not through the holding. This meant that the general manager of the bank as a whole—when not a Medici, and it would never again be a Medici—no longer had a personal, financial interest in each separate branch through his share in the holding. Francesco Sassetti, for example, who held the top position for most of the rest of the bank’s life, from 1458 to 1490, only had shares in the Avignon and Geneva branches. As far as he personally was concerned, all the others could run at a loss. And during the three decades of his leadership, most of them did. Dramatically. At the same time, Sassetti himself became extraordinarily rich. By 1462, aside from house, farms, jewels, and other valuables, he had built up a fortune of 45,000 florins. All made with the bank. Four years later, in a period in which the bank was losing heavily, that fortune had gone up to 97,000 florins, enough to start a major bank of his own. It included large sums of money held in “discretionary” (interest-bearing) Medici accounts under such names as “The Convent of the Celestini,” or “a friend in Florence.” And since everyone had now understood that a show of learning reinforced claims to nobility, Sassetti had built up a library too, a very considerable library. In each book was a bookplate with his name and the little motto: À mon pouvoir (in my power…).
Yet one thing that was never in Sassetti’s power were the decisions of the Medici bank’s distant branches, decisions that he was supposed to be coordinating. Part of the problem, no doubt, was that without the holding system, he felt no pressing personal need to bring those branches into line. But this state of affairs was exacerbated by the fact that the branches’ managers now shared Sassetti’s and the Medici’s aspirations to grandeur. “Most of them do what they want,” Sassetti complained, “with no regard, and take too much freedom.” What these men were mostly doing was lending far too much of the bank’s money to the people they wished to spend time with and resemble: kings, princes, dukes, lords, and cardinals.
At which point, reenter the Portinari brothers. Cosimo had taken the three boys, Pigello, Accerito, and Tommaso, into his home when their father, head of the Florence branch, died in 1431. At that point the eldest was ten, the same age as Giovanni di Cosimo, Piero’s younger brother. But while the Medici boys got their expensive humanist education, reading Cicero and Caesar, Pigello Portinari left the Medici household at thirteen to start work in the bank—first in Rome, then in Venice—until in 1452 he was given the directorship of the newly opened branch in Milan, which immediately took on an aristocratic air. Francesco Sforza had given Cosimo various buildings in disrepair to house the bank. Cosimo brought in Michelozzo, who transformed them into a wonderful and very grand palazzo. Pigello Portinari thus spent his early years as director concerning himself to a large degree with interior decorating, importing tapestries, and commissioning artists. After all, much of the bank’s capital was taken up in loans to the duke, loans repaid by allowing the bank to collect local taxes. So high was the interest rate on these loans that Pigello was able to attract capital from other Medici branches in order to keep funding the duke and his family’s lavish expenditures. Milan thus soaked up considerable resources without producing any wealth. Everybody was living extravagantly on borrowed time. When that time began to run out, and even the duchy’s tax revenues were not enough to repay the interest owed, the bank simply took back, as collateral, many of the jewels that the Sforzas had been persuaded to buy and sent them off to safes in Venice, in case the local authorities in Milan should ever decide to seize them.
This pointless tying-up of capital was hardly satisfactory, but at least Pigello was honest. In 1464, however, against all past practices of the bank, he was allowed to take on his brother Accerito as his deputy. It was the core of an entourage, the kind of thing Cosimo had always been careful to avoid. After Pigello died in 1468, Accerito was furious when Piero sent a mere employee from Florence to examine the branch’s books. Accerito refused to show them. The bank had made all kinds of unwise loans and expenses. Francesco Sforza had died, leaving massive debts. “Accerito puffs up more and more every day,” complained Francesco Nori, the would-be inspector. “My dear brother Pigello is already forgotten,” wrote the third brother, Tommaso Portinari, from the bank in Bruges to Piero. “It’s disgraceful your checking up on him.” The veiled appeal to family connections did the job. Piero caved in and gave the directorship of Milan to Accerito, who proceeded to lose more and more money in interminable loans to the duke’s family until the branch was finally closed in 1478.
MEANWHILE, OTHER FLORENTINE banks were going under altogether. In the mid-1420s, there had been seventy-two; in 1470, there were only thirty-three, with a half-dozen failures in the mid-1460s around the time Piero was calling in loans. The main reason for these failures, no doubt, was falling trade—a decline for which historians have yet to provide a complete explanation—and the bad debts of extravagant princes. Yet one can’t help feeling that at a very deep level the whole Florentine attitude to banking had changed. The old humility, the old enthusiasm for the nitty-gritty of moneymaking, was gone. The families traditionally involved in banking were now used to their wealth and looking for other forms of excitement. Tommaso Portinari is emblematic.
If Cosimo’s mind had reached out across Europe—planning, calculating, spinning his web across the continent’s financial centers—his son Piero’s poor head, when obliged to take his father’s position at the center, was simply pained by the many tugs on that web. Piero, in the end, did no more than react to bad news. Most of it was coming from Tommaso Portinari in Bruges.
Having been part of the Medici household since he was three, Tommaso started work in the Bruges branch in 1445 at sixteen. This was shortly before the crisis brought about by the collapse of Venturi & Davanzati in Barcelona in 1447 and then the firing of his older cousin, Bernardo Portinari, who had set up the branch. The 1447 crisis, as we have seen, had to do with the bank’s traditional business of interest-bearing exchange deals linked to triangular trading patterns. Brought up in the Palazzo Medici amid some of the city’s finest artworks and in a constant back-and-forth of politicians, ambassadors, and heads of state, Tommaso set his sights instead on grander things. “Stop spending so much time at court,” Piero was already writing to warn him when he was still a mere clerk. “Who could have spread such a vicious slander?” Tommaso replied. He was trying, he claimed, to secure a first sale of Florentine silk to the duke. “Will you give me an assistant?” he coolly adds. Piero wouldn’t.
This was the duke of Burgundy, a principality that at that time occupied an area in the east of modern France stretching as far north as the English Channel, where it bordered with English territories around Calais, and then farther east up the Channel coast into modern Belgium. The dukes of Burgundy had occasionally been tempted to get involved in the Hundred Years’ War, usually on the English side against their traditional rivals, the French. Tommaso, with no prompting or brief from the bank, had got himself made counselor to the young regent and later duke of Burgundy, Charles le Téméraire, usually translated in English as Charles the Bold, though the more accurate rendering would be Charles the Rash. A duke who had earned such a name might well need a counselor, but who would lend him money? Tommaso, of course, had been given the position of counselor precisely because he was able and willing to lend money. Not his own, but the Medici bank’s. Just as Giovanni Tornabuoni in Rome had run down his boss, Leonardo Vernacci, in letters to the Medici family back in Florence, so Tommaso began to write nasty things about his director, Agnolo Tani. “A Turk!” he told Piero. “The customers hate him!”
Tani, like Vernacci, was of the old school, a cautious, crotchety, capable banking man with no particular family connections. “I will resign from the bank if he comes back,” Tommaso threatened when Tani was away on a trip to Florence. This was 1465. Overwhelmed by other worries, Piero gave Tommaso what he wanted, the top position. After all, the two men had been brought up in the same home, presumably shared the same interests. At this point, the Rome, Milan, and Bruges branches of the bank were all being run by directors who felt they had special claims on the Medici family, special privileges, men who didn’t like to think of themselves “merely” as bankers. In 1470, Lionetto di Benedetto d’Antonio de’ Rossi was given the directorship of the once-prosperous branch in Geneva, which had now moved, together with Europe’s main trade fairs, to Lyon in France. Lionetto had recently married Piero’s illegitimate daughter, Maria, and thus was Lorenzo il Magnifico’s brother-in-law. Which makes four key branches in the hands of men who can’t be fired.
No sooner is he director of the Bruges branch than Tommaso Portinari decides that the bank needs a palazzo comparable with the one his brother presides over in Milan. Hotel Bladelin, one of the finest buildings in Bruges, costs 7,000 Rhine florins. “And I do not live in pomp and show!” he protests in a letter to Piero. Impatient with ordinary banking trade, Tommaso goes remorselessly for the deal to end all deals. Giovanni Arnolfini—made famous by Jan van Eyck—has a concession to collect the customs duties on goods passing by cart or mule train from English-held Calais to the Low Countries. The collection point is the small coastal town of Gravelines. Counseling the duke, Tommaso takes over the contract for the Medici bank for 16,000 francs a year. Rash Charles has just banned the import of finished English wool cloth. Surely, Tommaso reasons, this will lead to a huge increase in raw wool imports, taxed at a higher rate. Can’t lose. Instead, the English take reprisals. They want to work that wool themselves. They refuse to be pushed around like this. Trade falls drastically. By the summer of 1471, income from the Gravelines concession is close to zero.
The duke of Burgundy has built a couple of galleys for Pope Pius II’s planned crusade against the ever-threatening Turk. The crusade is abandoned when Pius dies while waiting at the Adriatic seaside for his army to materialize. This in 1464. The duke now has two expensive galleys on his hands. Can counselor Tommaso sell them? With trade declining, there are no takers. To do le Téméraire a favor, the enterprising Tommaso buys the galleys for the Medici bank with Medici money. They can trade under the flag of the duke of Burgundy (the duke is flattered), thus evading Florentine taxes when they unload in Pisa. It’s another white elephant. Come 1469, when it’s time to renew Portinari’s five-year contract, Piero, now in the last stages of terminal illness, introduces a special clause to the otherwise-standard branch director format:
With the court of Burgundy or other lords or princes you must deal as little as possible … because the dangers are greater than the profits and many merchants have ended up badly in this way…. From this and other great enterprises you must steer clear, because our intention is to do business to conserve what we have of material goods, of credit and of honor, not to seek to get richer at great danger.
It’s curious reading these words of solid commercial wisdom from a man who has just launched his son into the spendthrift elite of international blue blood and who himself has spent lavishly on political ends. A certain schizophrenia is at work. Piero has one foot in the old world, one in the new. He fords the stream. Not so the young Lorenzo, who, shortly after his father’s death, will proudly confess to Agnolo Tani, still a major partner in the Bruges branch, that “I know nothing about such matters.” Meaning banking.
Tommaso Portinari had ridden on horseback all the way from Bruges to Florence to sign that new contract. And to get married. Having returned to Bruges, he felt bound to apologize to Piero for having kept this second purpose of his visit secret. Why had he done that? Why not celebrate his wedding openly? For the simple reason that, with their growing power, the Medici had taken to arranging not only their own marriages but, as in the case of Giovanni Tornabuoni, everybody else’s as well. Cosimo began it, Piero continued, and Lorenzo would excel in this department. While the Medici married up into the aristocracy, all the other noble families must marry down into the middle classes. A gap would be established. Society would thus be arranged around the Medici, for the Medici, and, most important, beneath the Medici. Tommaso, who grew up under their wing, was cutting free, as they had cut free from the Florentine mesh by having Lorenzo marry an Orsini. Piero was spared the pain of this wicked slight because he was dead when Portinari’s letter of apology arrived.
Tommaso was now forty. His bride, Maria di Francesco di Bandini Baroncelli, was fifteen. The proud husband immediately had portraits painted by Hans Memling, with the well-bred adolescent wearing the pointed hat (with drapes) of the Flemish well-to-do, plus a lavish necklace of the kind the Officers of the Night would gladly have confiscated back in Florence. Is a pattern emerging: Tornabuoni, Sassetti, Portinari? After Tommaso and Maria’s first children arrived, the whole family would appear kneeling in prayer on either side of Ugo van der Goes’s bizarre and beautiful Adoration of the Shepherds, a painting that would cause such a stir when it arrived as an altarpiece in Florence. Meantime, despite that tough new clause in his contract, the loans to the duke of Burgundy continued and, come 1473, the Medici bank was still running those miserable, loss-making galleys when they were set upon by pirates off the Channel coast at Gravelines. The San Giorgio escaped. The San Matteo was captured, thirteen of its crew killed, and its cargo seized—another big loss for the bank—including a Last Judgment by Memling commissioned by Tommaso’s ex-boss, Agnolo Tani. Instead of going to Florence, the painting ended up in Danzig, where it remains to this day.
WITH OR WITHOUT the “last judgment,” the writing was definitely on the wall for the bank. In 1467, Tani had been sent to London to see if he could turn around the now-familiar scene of excessive lending to the local monarch—in this case, Edward IV. During the financial crisis of the mid-1460s, it had been imperative for Piero to guarantee a flow of raw wool to Florence—not just for his own workshops but also to maintain employment in general and prevent the kind of labor unrest that would feed opposition to the Medici regime. Again political convenience was bad news for the bank, since to get the export licenses for the raw wool from England, the London branch had had to do endless favors for the king. “I well understand, that what I have to do here,” Tani wrote back to Piero once he had seen the accounts, “is resurrect the dead, no less.” Did he already have Memling’s commission in mind? “But if you and Tommaso do what I say, then with the grace of God….”
Nobody did what he said. Giovanni Tornabuoni in Rome refused to accept finished English cloth in part-payment for the London branch’s debt. Later, suddenly fearing he would never be paid at all, he lost his nerve, hurried to Florence, and seized a huge quantity of cloth that Tani had sent from London to pay monies owed to Bruges, and that Bruges had then sent on to Italy (in those famous Burgundy galleys) in part-payment of their debt toward the Florence branch. Tornabuoni’s seizure of the cloth was illegal and the source of endless future accounting headaches; Francesco Sassetti as general director of the Medici bank should have prevented it, or at least censured it. But Tornabuoni was Lorenzo il Magnifico’s uncle. He was family, whereas Agnolo Tani was just a conscientious bank manager. The London branch now owed the Rome branch more than 40,000 florins, and with Pope Paul II borrowing heavily, it was becoming more and more urgent for Tornabuoni—who, as a shareholding partner in the Rome venture was liable for eventual losses—to receive prompt payment of the papal tributes that the other branches were collecting.
In London, however, it was clear to Tani that his only chance of saving the branch lay in accepting as payment for loans the one product the English wanted to give him, finished wool cloth, and getting the other branches of the Medici bank to sell it all over Europe. “Please advance me 3,000 florins for the cloth you have received,” he begged Sassetti in Florence. But Sassetti wouldn’t pay anything until the cloth was sold. He sent letters of cautious advice. “We need help, not advice,” Tani growled, this time writing directly to Lorenzo de’ Medici. “A quarter of the men in this kingdom are lawyers so I get advice in plenty…. Before I came here everybody was telling me to perform miracles, but now you’ve all gone quiet.”
In 1468, when King Edward’s sister, Margaret, became the duke of Burgundy’s third wife, Tani took advantage of the lavish celebrations to sell the king 6,000 florins’ worth of Florentine silk. Quite a coup. But in order to get the sale, he had to make another loan. To have any clout when collecting loans, it seemed one must always appear to have more to lend. In the end, only the willingness of the Milan branch of the bank to advance London money against receipt of finished English cloth eventually allowed Tani to accomplish his mission and return the London branch, if not to health, then at least to some kind of zombie status. In the spring of 1469, the aging manager made the punishing trip back to Italy, on horseback, no doubt determined to tell the Medici that if the various branches of the bank were not better directed and coordinated, then before very long the whole network would collapse.
No sooner had Tani left England than the War of the Roses, which had brought Edward IV to the throne in 1461, broke out again. This time, in October 1470, Edward lost power and all the Medici money with it. The bank was again in desperate straits. Having fled to the Netherlands, however, Edward regrouped his forces and in May 1471 returned to England and won back his throne. But the Medici had no cause for celebration. Not only had Edward had to borrow heavily to pay for his military campaigns, making it even less likely that he would pay back the bank, but to make matters worse, a long roll call of other noble Medici debtors lay dead on the battlefields of Barnet and Tewkesbury, where Edward had triumphed.
Together with his appetite for the aristocratic life, Francesco Sassetti, at the head of the organization, was also afflicted by a chronic inability to fire anyone. The two character traits are united perhaps in the love of ease, comfort, cordial relations. In any event, when the efficient Tani left London, having just about turned around the bank’s fortunes there, Sassetti did not take the opportunity to replace the local manager, Gherardo Canigiani, who had been largely responsible for causing the mess that Tani had gone to sort out. One would have thought that the crises of the previous years would have demonstrated once and for all the folly of tying up a bank’s capital in loans to a monarch who not only was barely solvent but liable at any moment to be overwhelmed by civil war. So if, on Edward’s return, Canigiani at once started extending fresh credit to the king, he presumably knew, as Portinari knew when he lent money to Charles the Bold, that he was not operating in the best interests of his employer. At last smelling a rat that was now in an advanced stage of decay, the Medici bank closed down its London operation in 1472 and terminated its contract with Canigiani, who promptly obtained a letter of naturalization from Edward IV, married a rich woman, and, with the king’s help, became a very proper English country gentleman with lands in Buckinghamshire and his own coat of arms.
While men such as Agnolo Tani, Leonardo Vernacci, and Francesco Nori (the man who had tried to inspect Accerito Portinari’s accounts in Milan) were serious and attentive bankers of the old Florentine school, ever anxious about the bottom line, others, it seemed, were only playing at banking in order to be close to kings and queens. Resurrecting the Medici business in this world was not of great importance to men like Canigiani and Tommaso Portinari, so long as they themselves could be reborn in the next: the world of royalty, art, and luxury clothing. As a major shareholder in Bruges, Tani was furious when he heard that, behind his back, Tommaso Portinari, in his role as director, had agreed that the branch would take on all London’s debts when the English operation was wound up. Why on earth had Portinari done such a stupid thing? The only answer is: to be close to the London bank’s major debtor, King Edward IV, now in military alliance with his rash Burgundy brother-in-law, planning the great invasion of France, which would eventually be launched in 1475.
THERE IS A moment, a written statement, in the history of the Medici that all the history books quote. On the evening after Piero’s death, December 2, 1469, some seven hundred citizens met in the Convent of Sant’Antonio and agreed that the “reputation and greatness” of the Medici family must be preserved. “By which they mean,” explained the ambassador of Ferrara to his lord, “that the secret things of this government will pass through Lorenzo’s hands as before through his father’s.” The following day, a group of leading citizens went to the Palazzo Medici to give Lorenzo, who was about to turn twenty-one, the news. And we come to the famous quotation, from Lorenzo’s brief ricordi, or memoirs:
Though I, Lorenzo, was very young, being twenty years of age, the principal men of the city and of the regime came to us in our house to mourn our loss and to encourage me to take charge of the city and the regime as my grandfather and my father had done. The which being contrary to my age and involving great responsibilities and perils, I accepted with reluctance, and only to preserve our friends and possessions, for in Florence things can go badly for the rich if they don’t run the state.
The history books then take sides. Fifteenth-century Florentine factionalism has proved a remarkably resilient disease. Five hundred years on, hardly a scholar escapes infection. So the detractors point out that only two days before Piero’s death, Lorenzo had written to Galeazzo Sforza, duke of Milan, to ask for military help to guarantee his succession. This hardly looks like reluctance. The supporters, on the other hand, note that as an accomplished poet, Lorenzo did indeed have other interests. In the future, various poems would speak eloquently of the desire to abandon power and responsibility, which are seen as a prison rather than a privilege.
In the heat of this debate, the most intriguing aspect of the statement passes without comment: the words in the quotation sound as though written decades after the event from the vantage point of middle age and maturity; in fact, Lorenzo wrote them when he was only twenty-four. Still at the beginning of his rule, that is, he was already imagining how it would be seen later; he was inventing his persona, preparing material for the historians. “He behaves like an old man,” remarked the ambassador to Milan approvingly in 1469 when Lorenzo was only twenty. But then, as Piero’s son, the boy had been sent on his first diplomatic missions when still in his early teens. Power, together with a humanist education that concentrated on the great political leaders of antiquity, had created something Cosimo could not have foreseen: an extraordinary self-consciousness. Aware of his special situation, equipped with an abundance of role models, Lorenzo was playing a part. Not a real prince, he must act the prince. There were so many adults to impress.
“WITHOUT PLATONISM MAN can be neither a good citizen, nor a good Christian,” Lorenzo de’ Medici would one day claim. What on earth did he mean by that? And why, though his grandfather would never have made such a claim, did the old Cosimo become so interested in Plato in the last years of his life?
Greek philosophy was recovered and revived somewhat later than Roman. One simple reason was language. Greek was hardly taught until the middle of the fifteenth century. But even when Plato had been read, in Latin translation, by the great humanist (and Cosimo’s friend) Leonardo Bruni, for example, the old Greek wasn’t taken seriously. These self-regarding fantasies about philosopher kings, Bruni thought, were completely impractical. Plato’s notions of a hierarchical stairway of realities, with inanimate material at the bottom and a world of ideal forms at the top, had already been widely appropriated and interminably elaborated by early Christian theologians in one form or another. It was theoretical nonsense. Stepping outside of medieval scholasticism and Christian mysticism for a breath of fresh air, the early humanists were looking for clear-sighted, secular wisdom, the lucidity of historians and political commentators: Cicero, Livy.
Under Cosimo’s protection—a house and a salary—Marsilio Ficino translated the entire works of Plato into Latin in the 1460s. It was the first time they had all appeared in a form Western Christendom could read. Later to become a priest, Ficino added his own personal but crucial twist to Christian Platonism: The human soul, he decided, was “the center of nature,” the connecting link between the hierarchies of Platonic reality. Through love and intellect, the human soul naturally strives upward, away from what is base and earthly, through the hierarchy, to the pure light of perfect eternity, God.
Discussed by Florence’s best minds, while celebrating Plato’s birthday, for example, every November 7 at the Medici villa at Careggi, such ideas came at exactly the right moment for the process of upward social transformation in which the Medici were involved. Apart from giving a new sense to courtly love poetry (the mind moving from profane to divine love), all education, refinement, and intellectual achievement could now be understood as essentially moral, involved in a process of striving toward the Divine. Certain secular activities, that is, could be described as partaking of the sacred, or at least as turned toward the sacred. Nothing good (and the dangerous implication is that we know instinctively what is good) was outside the Christian framework. At which point art and poetry need no longer turn so constantly to strictly Christian subject matter, because beauty itself is close to divinity and the human soul naturally leans toward it. Creativity, which is of God, is not, in this new and optimistic version of Platonism, denied to man, though few achieve it. But when achieved, it is essentially good. Even today, there are many who believe that art is necessarily on the right side, and do not ask which bank sponsored it. Sponsored by Medici money, Botticelli can use the same pretty model for a Madonna, or for Venus. He can leave the lady’s clothes on or he can lift them off. Either way, the mind is being lifted spiritually. At this point, the gesture of penance implicit in almost all Cosimo’s patronage of the arts can be safely and happily forgotten. Art is always sacred.
But to dig a little deeper, at what wasn’t explicitly stated or perhaps even consciously meant, yet nevertheless seeps through: the process of raising yourself up, of becoming this refined, educated, artistic aristocrat, was now no longer an evil thrusting above and beyond your proper medieval station (as the treason charge against Cosimo in 1433 implied). On the contrary, it was a sign of your upward aspiration toward the Divine. This was an attractive and soothing thought. It would galvanize Lorenzo into sponsoring, and himself engaging in, a range of lavish, public artistic projects, mainly secular, which were at once beautiful and politically convenient, in that they enhanced his and the city’s image. A leader who sponsors and, as a poet, actually creates beautiful art cannot be a bad leader. A leader who employs the likes of Botticelli to make festival banners and carnival floats will not get a bad press from posterity. And the good citizen, the good Christian, must be a Platonist because only the Platonist appreciates and participates in this striving for the beautiful and better, this aestheticizing of public life. If he wasn’t a Platonist, that is, our philistine citizen might merely start counting the florins and piccioli and making dry remarks about political self-interest.
Which brings us to the chief drawback of these exciting ideas: They had little to say about moneymaking and the price of things. The underlying contradiction here is quite different from Cosimo’s dilemma: How do I get my soul to heaven while amassing a fortune with supposedly sinful banking practices. The problem now is that while wealth is actually more important than ever—for how else can you get the best artists, the best teachers, a decent translation of Plato, not to mention the wherewithal to throw a lavish party for a dead philosopher’s birthday?—nevertheless the actual process of moneymaking is passed over as something base, something on the lowest level of the Platonic hierarchy, something the nobler soul would gladly leave behind in its struggle to be free from mere matter.
To this frame of mind, then, the complexities of accountancy, the intricate technicalities by which the sin of usury can be avoided, are no longer things to dwell on with pleasure, as Cosimo doubtless did dwell on them—Cosimo who said he would be a banker even if money could be made by waving a wand. No, now the cultured man wants to wave whatever wand comes to hand and get the problem of a good income out of the way as soon as possible: by lending money to the duke of Milan at the highest possible rate of interest, for example; by getting the concession to collect import duties at the customs post of Gravelines; or, most dramatically, in the case of the Medici bank, by the attempt to establish a permanent gold mine with the alum affair.
What was the alum affair? “It makes me think of the Holy Spirit,” wrote Gentile Becchi, Lorenzo’s tutor. “I don’t understand it.” Ironically, the two extremes of Christian Platonism’s hierarchy of realities—base matter, divine essence—seem to have become equally incomprehensible to the educated mind located somewhere in between. In any event, the eagerness to have the money problem out of the way thanks to this base material, alum—an aluminum sulfate used, among other things, for dyeing cloth—would plunge Lorenzo into the great defining dramas of his life, where the part he was learning to play would demand a divine performance.