First son after three sisters, his mere arrival was a triumph. Vast resources stooped over him, anxious to be of use. Even his wet nurse received begging letters.
Spectacularly ugly, he was brought up to seduce. At the age of five, he was dressed as a little French boy to greet Prince Jean d’Anjou. Alas, his nose was flattened on his face. At the age of ten, he recited poems for the visiting Galeazzo Maria Sforza, for Pope Pius II. His protruding jaw pushed the lower lip above the upper. He learned to play the viola and the lute. He learned to ride on horseback and to hold the falcon. Deprived of any sense of smell, he began to write poetry full of flowers and bees. It was love poetry. At the age of sixteen, his bumpy forehead and bushy eyebrows had won the heart of pretty Lucrezia Donati. Hoarse and unpleasantly high-pitched to the ear, in verse his voice chimed with precocious harmony. “Tender age will not forego to follow Love.” He knew his models: Petrarch, Dante, Ovid. With charming assurance, he elaborated his pain. “So cruel the first wound was!” Young Lucrezia was promised to someone else.
Already men wrote to him begging favors: stonecutters, farmers, painters, poets. And Lorenzo interceded with his father on their behalf: I trust you will “honor me in this,” the Medici heir solemnly writes, when gouty Piero is no more than a couple of rooms away. Other people’s anxieties prompt exercises in style. Surrounded by some of the finest minds of the time, the young man discussed the consolations of philosophy, the nature of good government. “He stays out late,” complained his tutor in a letter to the boy’s parents, “flirting with the girls and playing pranks.”
Formal visits to other courts began when he was in his early teens. Aware of that ugly face, that grating voice, he dazzled with an extraordinary intellectual energy. In Milan, he threw parties in the bank’s magnificent premises and met Ippolita Sforza, the duke’s daughter, who was about to marry the son of the king of Naples. The two adolescents exchanged letters, on literary matters, and later Ippolita asked for a loan of 2,000 ducats. “I promise on my honor I will pay it back.”
In 1466, now seventeen, he was sent down to Rome to sign some dull contract regarding the merchandising of alum, a mineral essential to the wool trade. It is his first involvement in banking business. Fortunately, the death of Francesco Sforza turns the trip into a dramatic diplomatic mission. He must convince the pope that the duke’s son should be allowed to succeed as lord of Milan. Sforza had been a usurper. Sforza is the Medici’s main ally. Lorenzo must hurry down to Naples to check that King Ferrante has no alternative arrangements in mind.
Returning to Florence in time for his father’s showdown with the anti-Medici conspirators—Pitti, Acciaiuoli, Dietisalvi, and Soderini—Lorenzo makes his dramatic appearance together with the troops from Milan, armed and on horseback, at the parliament in the Piazza della Signoria. It is a gesture at once of seduction and coercion. Florence must love me. An artistic gesture. The young man dismounts and stands together, as an equal, with the priors in their red robes as the request for a balia with unlimited powers is read out, and the people, surrounded by armed men, vote away their republican rights. It is in the nature of every artist to combine seduction and coercion. The public must succumb to my point of view, to the point of my sword. There is no radical split between Lorenzo the poet and Lorenzo the politician. Way below the eligible age for public service, he was nevertheless given a place on the balia, which, with its unlimited powers, would once again put the city firmly in Medici hands.
Lorenzo de’ Medici, in a bust attributed to Verrocchio. Hardly Adonis, Lorenzo was obliged to master other forms of seduction. He remains one of the finest of fifteenth-century poets.
Alum, one suspects, was not on Lorenzo’s mind as he faced the Florentine people in the piazza at that moment of crisis. But it was present everywhere. It was with alum that raw wool from England was cleansed of its grease. Everyone in the square was wearing wool. It was alum that fixed the dyes in the priors’ crimson gowns and alum that cured the leather on the horsemen’s saddles. And three years later, in 1469, when Lorenzo married Clarice Orsini by proxy and, in her absence, celebrated this great step from merchant to aristocrat with a lavish tournament in Piazza Santa Croce, alum was present again in another way. This gritty white sulfate was largely responsible for paying the 10,000 or more florins that the event is reputed to have cost.
Pearls and velvet abounded at that expensive celebration. Young Lorenzo carried a standard given to him not by his new wife but by his old girlfriend, Lucrezia Donati. It showed a woman twining a laurel crown, for her poet. And since Lucrezia was queen of the tournament, it was she, and not Lorenzo’s new but absent wife, who placed a silver helmet on the warrior’s head when, inevitably, the family who had financed the event had its boy win. What Lorenzo had signed down in Rome in 1466 was a contract giving the Medici the total monopoly over all sales of alum throughout Christendom. There is no indication from his writings that Lorenzo had grasped the importance of this. Perhaps what mattered more was that Lucrezia too was married now, though her husband was abroad on business. People were gossiping. Meanwhile, Clarice, married and virgin, wrote from Rome to say that the mere thought of Lorenzo’s being involved in a tournament had given her a migraine. From a family of real soldiers, and with no experience of Florence and its amorous ways, she could be forgiven for mistaking the real source of danger. “All libidinous and venereal,” as Guicciardini described him, “marvelously involved in things of Venus,” as Machiavelli added, Lorenzo continued to write poetry. To Lucrezia.
MONOPOLIES, LIKE USURY, were illegal under Church law. Because unnatural. God had given the natural world to all mankind, not to a chosen few. Denying people liberty and keeping prices artificially high, monopolies were obviously a form of stealing and could only lead to perdition. As with usury, the Church insisted that only full restitution of ill-gotten gains could make amends and get you to heaven, though it is difficult to see how, after exercising a monopoly for some years, you could ever calculate the exact amount of what had been stolen, or from whom.
The Church’s concept of the monopoly was not restricted to the situation where a single organization had control over the sale of a particular product. To form a workers’ union, for example, was also a monopoly, and of the most pernicious variety: It restricted freedom of labor and the right of an employer to hire any worker on any terms. A union was unnatural. Any association of wool-workers, for example, in this cloth-manufacturing town of Florence, was immediately condemned and crushed.
Despite this exemplary strictness, in 1466 Pope Paul II declared that the Church, in alliance with the Medici bank, would now operate a monopoly on the sale of alum throughout Europe. After salt and iron, alum was the most important mineral of the time. Without it, the cloth trade could hardly have functioned. But how could the Church justify such a flagrant breach of its own laws? The profits from this ambitious commercial venture, said the Holy Father, would go toward a new crusade against the Turks. This made the monopoly not only legal but virtuous. It was a case of the desirable end justifying the otherwise-sinful means. A dangerous precedent for a religious organization.
Here are the circumstances. The annual European market for alum was worth something in excess of 300,000 florins, almost ten times what the king of England owed the Medici bank. Only a very small amount of the mineral was actually mined in Christendom, on the island of Ischia at the northwest entrance to the Bay of Naples. The quality of this deposit was poor, so poor that in some northern European markets its use was banned, because potentially harmful to the wool it was supposed to treat. Hence most alum had to come from mines in the Gulf of Izmir, on the eastern shores of the Aegean, now under the control of the Turks, and hence Islam. These mines had been developed for the most part by the Genoese, who thus controlled most of the trade in alum, paying taxes and customs duties to the Turks and thus helping to finance the constant Turkish expansion into Christendom, through Eastern Europe.
In 1460, the Italian merchant Giovanni da Castro, whose father had been a close friend of Pope Pius and who had recently escaped from creditors in the Eastern Mediterranean to live under the pontiff’s protection in Rome, discovered a huge deposit of high-quality alum in the mountains of Tolfa, northeast of Rome. Understanding the importance of the discovery, Pius at once declared this barren area of land to be Church property. Castro would mine and refine the alum and the Church would market it, thus gaining a huge income for themselves and taking away a huge income from their enemies, the Turks.
To market the mineral on a wide scale, however, both credit and commercial expertise were necessary. Hence in 1466, Pius’s successor, Paul II, decided to make a contract with the Medici bank that allowed them to use their Europe-wide trade network to sell whatever the Italian mine produced. At the same time, Pope Paul announced that any merchant found to be purchasing Turkish alum would be punished with excommunication, since buying from the Turks what could be bought from the pope amounted to aiding the attack on Christendom. All this came as very bad news for the Venetians, who had recently taken over from the Genoese the concession to work the alum mines in the Gulf of Izmir.
In 1470 the papal monopoly was firmed up by establishing an alum producers’ cartel with the owners of the mine in Ischia and with the king of Naples, to whom those owners paid a duty on whatever they produced. Under this agreement, the entire volume of alum mined and refined for the European market would be controlled by the Church in such a way as to keep the prices as high as possible, a sort of fifteenth-century OPEC. Only a year after signing up to the cartel, however, the Medici and Pope Paul pulled out when it became clear that Ischia would never be a dangerous competitor, and this for the simple reason that wool manufacturers much preferred the better-quality alum from Tolfa.
At first glance, such a coup seems to put the Medici bank in a league of its own. They now have sole rights to sell one of the most important industrial products of their time. Those rights are backed up by the threat of excommunication. In Rome, Giovanni Tornabuoni is absolutely convinced that all the bank’s problems are now solved. This is the dream deal that everybody has been looking for, the deal that will take all the tedium and risk out of banking and allow important people like himself and Tommaso Portinari to spend more of their time building up their libraries, commissioning paintings, attending lavish functions at court, and, in general, behaving more like their Medici masters.
Alas, it was not to be. In England, in Burgundy, in Venice—the main markets for alum—monarchs and merchants were not as impressed as they had once been by the threat of excommunication. It was hard to feel that what you had been doing in good conscience all your life had suddenly become a mortal sin. They employed local theologians to argue the case against the papal monopoly. A sin (like a monopoly) is always a sin, these wise men decided, even if the profits from it, at least as far as the pope was concerned, were indeed being used to pay the Hungarian king to fight the Turks. In Bruges, Tommaso Portinari counseled and counseled rash Duke Charles of Burgundy, begging him to impose the alum monopoly throughout his dukedom and ban sales of the mineral from any source other than the Medici bank. Offered a cut on profits, the duke at first agreed. But however rash he might have been, Charles recognized the signs of rebellion when he saw them. The local merchants, both importers and end users, were furious. The wool trade was at risk, they said. In the end, the duke backed down. Turkish alum continued to arrive in the port of Bruges.
When planning production at the mines in Tolfa and Ischia, the monopolists had imagined they would have the market entirely to themselves. They aimed to meet the entire European demand in just a few years. So when the threat of excommunication failed to stop the Venetians and Genoese from dealing in Turkish alum, the sudden glut caused by supplies from both sources made it hard to maintain old prices, let alone increase them as the monopolists had planned. Bulk buyers of alum in London and Bruges formed associations and lobbies to increase their negotiating power. The papal percentage on incomes from sales had to be halved, which soon meant less money to fund the Hungarian king.
To make matters worse—at least as far as the Medici bank was concerned—this venture into merchandising alum represented another blow to the already-precarious balance of trade and movement of money among the bank’s various branches. Here was yet another product moving north from Italy. Once again cash would have to be collected in London and Bruges and sent south. Why couldn’t the alum have been discovered in the Cotswolds, for heaven’s sake, to replace the wool the English were now so reluctant to sell? That would have been so convenient. Unwisely, in return for its rights of monopoly, the bank had agreed to pay the pope his cut on whatever was mined before the product was shipped and sold.
Given the tensions between the Bruges and Rome branches of the bank, particularly since Giovanni Benci’s death in 1455, the problems arising from the alum monopoly were predictable enough. As always, Bruges and London were slow to send money down to Rome. As always, Tornabuoni, in Rome, was impatient, suspecting as he did that Bruges and London were squandering the incomes from alum sales in loans to dukes and duchesses. An employee from the Rome branch was sent north to see what was going on. Then the pope sent his own negotiators to tackle the duke. But if there was one thing Tommaso Portinari loathed, it was interference. Papal spies! he complained in a letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici. If I can’t counsel the duke, what chance has a bishop got?
As the years pass, the situation deteriorates. A Florentine galley sinks. The cargo is lost. Then two galleys arrive simultaneously from Genoa and Venice, bringing Turkish alum. At this point, the port of Bruges is warehousing a three-year supply of the mineral all at once. Needless to say, the price collapses. More and more, the alum deal comes to assume the function of a chimera; if only the bank could really impose this monopoly, everything would be okay. But in the meantime, there are shipping costs and warehousing expenses and very little income. On March 18, 1475, Tornabuoni tells Lorenzo de’ Medici that between paying the producers and the papal dues and the galleys, the bank is actually losing money on alum. Meantime, there was the Volterra affair.
ALONG WITH THE family’s source of wealth, another thing to be got out of the way, in young Lorenzo’s Neoplatonic vision of things, was the regime’s hold on power. It seemed that whatever balia, council, or institution the Medici set up to guarantee their authority, as time passed even the most carefully selected allies began to vote along more republican lines. People have a stubborn bias toward freedom. When Lorenzo took over from his father, the signoria was being selected by nine accoppiatori, who in turn were selected annually by the Council of 100, the sort of permanent Medici balia established after the 1458 parliament. But the council was no longer doing as it was told. Lorenzo found he had to attend its assemblies in person if members weren’t to vote against him. It was irritating. “I plan to behave the way my grandfather did,” he had told the Milanese ambassador soon after his father’s death, “which was to do these things in as civil a way as one can, and as far as possible within the constitution.”
But how civil and constitutional can one be if one wants to have a rock-solid guarantee of remaining in power? Almost immediately, Lorenzo went far beyond his grandfather. By the end of 1471, the signoria was still being chosen by nine accoppiatori, but now the accoppiatori were chosen every July by their nine outgoing predecessors together with the signoria in office at the moment. Power was thus entirely circular. To console the Council of 100 for their loss of influence over the accoppiatori and hence the government, they were now allowed to ratify the decisions of the signoria directly, without the need of further ratification from the traditional Councils of the Commune and of the People—which more or less ceased to have any reason to exist.
At this point, the Medici are exercising almost complete control over the affairs of state. And yet a certain façade of constitutionality is maintained: The councils do meet and vote; the selection of the signoria is still recorded as though it were a fair lottery. Such pretenses of constitutionality quickly fell away when both banking income and political authority were threatened by the discovery of alum in Volterra.
Volterra is a small town some forty-five miles southwest of Florence. In the fifteenth century, it was a subject community, paying a tribute to Florence but running its own government. Naturally, everybody was excited about the alum, then disappointed when the mining concession was given to a private consortium with Florentine backing. It was important, of course, for the Medici bank to bring this new source of the product into their monopoly. The government in Volterra, run by a faction opposed to the consortium, confiscated the mine. Florence intervened to reverse the decision.
This is June 1471. Lorenzo has had a busy eighteen months since his father died. A rebellion, instigated by the conspirators of 1466, was put down in Prato. There were executions. His first child, Lucrezia, was born in 1470 and his first son and heir, Piero, arrived in February 1471. Clarice was playing her part. In March, Lorenzo was host to Galeazzo Sforza, duke of Milan, who brought an embarrassingly large entourage and indulged the scandalous habit of eating meat during Lent. Inevitably, God showed his wrath by having the Church of Santo Spirito burn down, and the frightened Florentines did penance with some strict new laws on luxury clothes and foods.
Throughout his wife’s pregnancies, Lorenzo continued to write love sonnets to Lucrezia Donati and was simultaneously working on a parodic Symposium of more than eight hundred lines featuring a wildly drunken evening among local philosophers and clergymen. It is hilarious. Certainly more of his time was given to this first experiment in satire than to the reopening of Medici bank branches in Venice and Naples.
Then, just as the Volterra crisis was hotting up, Pope Paul II died—this in July 1471—and Lorenzo had to hurry down to Rome for the coronation of Pope Sixtus IV. One can imagine how hard it was for a twenty-two-year-old to concentrate on politics, banking, babies, and poetry all at once. In his brief ricordi, Lorenzo describes the trip to Rome thus: “I was much honored, and brought back two antique marble busts of Augustus and Agrippa, that Pope Sixtus gave me, plus an inlaid cup of chalcedony and many other cameos and medals that I purchased.” Though he wrote these memories in 1473, Lorenzo doesn’t mention the most important event of his rule to date, the sacking of Volterra. It was not something to be proud of.
With the quarrel between the mining consortium and the town’s ruling faction deadlocked, the Volterrans appeal to Lorenzo to arbitrate. Predictably enough, Lorenzo decides that the alum consortium, which includes two prominent, pro-Medici Volterrans, should keep its concession. The opposing faction rebels, riots, kills the two prominent Lorenzo supporters, and declares independence from Florence. Nevertheless, the aging counselor Tommaso Soderini tells Lorenzo that there really is no need to send an army. A crisis like this can be solved with patience and negotiation.
Soderini, who had remained faithful to the Medici throughout his elder brother’s rebellion in 1466, was now pushing seventy. He was married to Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s sister, Lorenzo’s aunt, and, as the regime’s most senior man, he no doubt expected to exercise a certain influence over his young nephew. But this was precisely the kind of presumption that Lorenzo would not accept. Less like his grandfather Cosimo than he claimed, Lorenzo was determined not just to be in charge, but to be seen to be so. He, a Medici, a man married into the Orsini family, a man who had hosted the duke of Milan in his palazzo, had been insulted, his friends killed.
Lorenzo hires and sends an army. After a month’s siege, the Volterrans surrender on the understanding that their lives and properties will be spared. Entering the town, the mercenaries sack, rape, and kill. It is the right of a mercenary army to sack the town they have taken. Everybody knows that. From now on, the Volterrans will be Lorenzo’s implacable enemies. Appalled by the bloodshed resulting from his decisions, Lorenzo tries to make amends with a personal gift to the Volterrans of 2,000 florins. It is less than a fifth of what had been spent on his famous marriage tournament three years earlier. Even before the material damage to the town can be repaired, the recently discovered alum mine is closed down. The deposit turns out to be scanty and the quality poor. The whole brutal affair has been completely unnecessary.
“LORENZO’S GREATEST FAILING,” wrote the historian Guicciardini in 1509, “was suspicion.” First of a new species—the aristocrat by education, marriage and money, rather than hereditary right—Lorenzo was afraid that others wouldn’t recognize his superiority, then afraid, when they did, that they would try to bring him down. A pattern of behavior emerged: imagining himself threatened, or offended (it was the same thing), he would overreact and bring about the clash he feared. That was how the massacre in Volterra was provoked. There was worse to come.
Pope Sixtus, who had been so generous to Lorenzo with the chalcedony cups at his coronation, who supported him over the Volterra affair and even granted him and his mother and brother a plenary indulgence—a place in heaven no less—now tries to regain control of Città di Castello in the northern Papal States, not far from the southern borders of the Florentine Republic. The signore of the town—or usurper, as Sixtus sees it—is a friend of Lorenzo’s and appeals for his help. Lorenzo immediately takes the pope’s campaign as a personal affront and sends troops to help his friend, though not enough troops to do anything more than alienate the pope, his bank’s most important client. Despite all the diplomatic missions in adolescence, Lorenzo is still a very young man to be running a state.
Pope Sixtus announces that he wants to buy the lordship of Imola, a town northeast of Florence, for his nephew, Girolamo Riario. Almost everything Sixtus does, he does for his nephews. To secure the deal, however, he needs to borrow more than 40,000 florins. From his banker, obviously, who else? But Lorenzo feels that Imola should be in Florence’s sphere of influence, not the pope’s. Looking at the map, one can’t help but agree. He refuses the money. He warns another Florentine bank dealing with the pope to refuse too. The Pazzi are an ancient and highly respected family—one old uncle and a dozen adult nephews—with an international bank similar in structure to that of the Medici. Not only do they go ahead and lend the cash to Sixtus, but they actually inform him of Lorenzo’s attempt to stop them, as if the Medici were the merest commercial competitors and not the rulers of Florence. This is a major insult, and a big risk for the Pazzi. Clearly they feel that Lorenzo hasn’t been giving their family the honors it deserves—for example, in the scrutiny of 1472 when the Pazzi got very few name tags in the electoral bags. Well, they certainly wouldn’t be getting any more now.
In 1474, Pope Sixtus proposes Francesco Salviati as archbishop of Florence. But Salviati is a close friend of the Pazzi. The pope, however, despite Lorenzo’s attempt to stop him from buying Imola, proves amenable to protest and nominates Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, Rinaldo Orsini, instead. Which was generous. Then the archbishopric of Pisa falls vacant, and this time the pope appoints Salviati without consulting Lorenzo. In the meantime, he has ordered an audit on the Curia’s alum accounts with the Medici bank. The price in Bruges and London has plummeted. The forecast income isn’t forthcoming. Lorenzo is deeply offended. It’s a dishonor to audit me! My family has served the pope for decades. And he denies the new archbishop, Salviati, right of entry to Pisa. Pisa is subject to Florence. I should have been consulted. No one can be bishop in Pisa without my consent. The pope threatens Lorenzo with excommunication. And he appoints a Pazzi as bishop down in Sarno near Naples.
“Puffed up by his Majesty [King Ferrante of Naples] … these Pazzi relatives of mine are seeking to harm me as much as they can.” Thus Lorenzo in a letter to Duke Galeazzo Sforza in Milan, begging him to put pressure on the pope to withdraw the appointment of Salviati to the archbishopric of Pisa. Lorenzo refers to the Pazzi as relatives because his older sister Bianca has long been married to one of the Pazzi nephews, Guglielmo.
But Pisa is a battle Lorenzo can’t win. The Church is too strong. Not long after Salviati is finally allowed to enter the town and take up his archbishopric, the pope declines to renew the Medici’s alum monopoly and gives it instead to the Pazzi. Again the bank pays the consequences for the politicking that its wealth has made possible.
Would the tit-for-tat never end? Apparently not. In March 1477, a dispute arose between Giovanni Pazzi, another of the dozen nephews, and the cousin of his wife, Beatrice Borromei. The Borromei family was extremely rich. Beatrice’s father had just died. Since Beatrice had no brothers or sisters, she expected to inherit the old man’s wealth, which would thus enter into the Pazzi family. But her cousin, Carlo, disagreed. He seized part of the fortune and insisted that, being male, he should have it. Lorenzo intervened—Don’t do this! his younger brother, Giuliano, warned him—to get a law passed that would give nephews precedence over daughters. This was a major change in social custom, no doubt affecting hundreds of lives, calculations, prospects. Despite urgent advice to the contrary, Lorenzo went ahead and the money was kept from the Pazzi family. “Giuliano de’ Medici complained over and over to his brother,” writes Machiavelli, “that by wanting too many things, all of them might be lost.” As far as Giuliano was concerned, they were. He was assassinated by the Pazzi during mass in the duomo in April 1478. Lorenzo escaped.
THE HUMANISM OF the fifteenth century has generally received an enthusiastic press: the enquiring mind turns away from abstruse metaphysics to concentrate on what is human. That must be a good thing. Yet the phenomenon was so various, the human is so various, that it is truly hard to approve of every manifestation of the movement. Unless perhaps what most attracts us to humanism, what makes most of us humanists in fact, is the movement’s greatest outrage: its dismissal of what came before as a thousand years of darkness, as if the middle ages had somehow been inhuman. Why did the humanists have to do that? Why is the dismissal still so important to us?
Marsilio Ficino, protégé of Cosimo de’ Medici, spoke little of darkness but a great deal about illumination. Sixteen years older than Lorenzo, he made, in the early 1470s, a rather more successful bid than the aging patrician Soderini to influence the young ruler, presenting himself as a philosophical father to a privileged disciple, not an interested party with advice to give on contentious issues. As a thinker, Ficino’s most characteristic gesture was conflation. Reading and translating widely, searching back in time long before Rome and abroad far east of the Aegean, he had an uncanny ability to find the same thing wherever he looked and above all to superimpose one tradition on another. The mountain Dante ascends in the Commedia is obviously the Olympus of the Greeks, the Pradesha or “supreme field” of Sanskrit, the Pardes of the Chaldeans, the Arab mountain of Qaf, and even the mons Veneris of sensual delight. The Orphic Hymn to the Sun, which Ficino translated, was clearly akin to Plato’s metaphor of the cave and the light in The Republic, which Ficino translated, to the late classical theologian Proclus’s Hymn to the Sun, which Ficino translated, and to St. Augustine’s notion of God as “the sun of the soul,” which, in the Soliloquia, Ficino both translated and wrote a commentary on. The whole world, it seemed, had always followed a single faith whose ancient priests included Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, St. Paul, St. Augustine.
Supremely eclectic, Ficino’s humanism annihilated all divisions—this in stark contrast to the Christianity of the previous centuries, which had followed a single tradition, concentrated on an established canon of authors, yet managed to divide the world very sharply, perhaps depressingly, into good and bad, true and false, right and wrong, heaven and hell. This was why, for the humanists, the recent past had to be not so much argued with as surpassed, forgotten. It would not permit the thrill of the exotic, or a more personal selection of what to read and think. From now on instead, any argument would take place within a new zona franca where ancient met modern, East met West, and the excited mind was free to try out what it liked. Humanism, in short, unlocked the door to that supermarket of ideas we live in today.
There were aspects of Ficino’s thought that were extremely attractive to Lorenzo. One of his conflations was the fairly common one of the authoritative father figure with the prince or political leader. Following the birth of his daughter Maddalena in 1473, Lorenzo was now a father three times over. Father is a more positive word than tyrant. Never one to leave anything out of an equation, Ficino brought in God and artists too, as analogous to fathers and princes: “The son is the work of the father, and there is nothing that man loves more than his own work. And this is why God loves human nature and authors their books, and painters the people they have painted.” By the same mental process, Lorenzo would eventually be able to think of Florence as becoming—through his government, his marriage-arranging, his manipulation of available patronage to painters, poets, sculptors, and architects—his own personal work of art. He loved it because he was making it what it was. At which point, whether money flowed out of Lorenzo’s purse toward the town or, more likely, with the bank’s now-rapid decline, out of state coffers and into the Palazzo Medici, was unimportant. Father and son keep their money in common.
Nor was Ficino’s eclecticism alien to elitism. The world had always been as he described it—the soul of man yearning for the divine light—yet it was not given to everybody to understand that. Most people would remain in ignorance. And this was how it should be. Ficino translated into Latin, after all, not into the vernacular. Only the best educated could read Latin. “Religious mysteries,” wrote Pico della Mirandola, another disciple of Ficino’s, “would not be mysteries if they did not remain occult.” A fair point. The deeper truths could thus only be written about “under enigmatic veilings and poetic dissimulations.” This explained the complex, often ambiguous nature of myth, and indeed many of the somewhat puzzling paintings of nymphs and satyrs that were beginning to flow from Sandro Botticelli’s workshop. Only those already in the know, those who could afford to commission a painting, were to understand.
Certainly, after drawing close to Ficino, Lorenzo’s sonnets to Lucrezia had changed. They became densely enigmatic. Old and obvious sensual urges (once they had been called sins) must now be conflated with mysticism’s ancient ecstasies and the yearning for truth and beauty. This wasn’t always easy. And as Lorenzo’s rule over Florence progressed, the habit of political secrecy intensified too; “the secret things” grew more secret. The regime’s leaders, it seems, had begun to think of themselves as initiates in a cult, of philosopher kings perhaps. A cult of power.
The longer Lorenzo ruled Florence, the less documentation we have of the deliberations of the various government committees. Only a few fragments of the bank’s accounts remain from this period. What we do have instead, in refreshing contrast to the by-now-arcane love sonnets, are all the bawdy songs Lorenzo composed for the town’s popular Carnival celebrations. Here the only conflation, as interminable as it is scabrous, was that of the double entendre. “Oh pretty women,” ends his “Song of the Bakers,” “such is our art: if you’d like something to pop in your mouths, try this for a start.” The working men of the town must have loved it. Quite probably the women, too. One of the tenets of Ficino’s Platonism was that you draw other souls to your position through song, as Orpheus drew Eurydice from the darkness with his lyre. You don’t try to convince with reasoned argument. Here is Lorenzo’s “Song of the Peasants”:
Cucumbers we’ve got, and big ones,
Though to look at bumpy and odd
You might almost think they had spots on
But they open passages blocked
Use both hands to pluck ’em
Peel the skin from off the top
Mouths wide open and suck ’em
Soon you won’t want to stop.
Ascending the Platonic categories of the spirit in his esoteric love sonnets, Lorenzo seduced his less-educated Florentine subjects with rhyming obscenities. Everyone agreed he was a genius. Who, one wonders, was using Cosimo’s prayer cell in San Marco?
LORENZO HAS LEFT his infantile “games”—meaning his profane poems—to concentrate on “the Supreme Good.” Thus Ficino, rather optimistically, in a letter to a friend in 1474. Lorenzo had now started a long and solemn work called The Supreme Good, which paraphrased Ficino’s views. At the same time, the argument with the pope over the appointment of Francesco Salviati had begun. Ficino was a good friend of Salviati’s. This was embarrassing. And though the would-be archbishop was no Platonist, the Church as a whole was not hostile to the new humanist eclecticism. At one party thrown by Cardinal Pietro Riario—another friend of Salviati’s and another of the nephews whom Pope Sixtus had elevated to high office—a poem was read out about how the gods of Olympus had refused to answer Jupiter’s summons because they were busy serving the cardinal and his guests with, among other things, cakes designed to represent scenes from classical mythology. It’s curious how this vertiginous mixing of traditions and upsetting of hierarchies (a god serving a cardinal!) always seemed to go hand in hand with the feeling that all the traditional codes of behavior could be broken. No pope had ever appointed so many members of his family to positions of power, whether spiritual or secular, as did Sixtus. Later, knowing full well that the plan was to kill Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano, the Holy Father would nevertheless give his blessing to the Pazzi conspiracy to oust the Medici, “so long as death doesn’t come into it.”
But the codes you broke depended on who you were and which of the classics you were reading. While Lorenzo and Ficino and friends were spending pleasant afternoons in Medici country villas playing Socrates and Alcibiades, while Giovanni Tornabuoni and Tommaso Portinari were having their images superimposed on various biblical scenes, a young man called Girolamo Logiati was reading Sallust’s account of the conspiracy of Catiline in 63 B.C. In December 1476, imitating antique role models, Logiati and two fellow conspirators assassinated Galeazzo Maria Sforza, duke of Milan, at high mass on St. Stephen’s Day. Perhaps one becomes aware that one has entered the modern world when even the most courageous of actions seem wrapped in a sticky film of parody, of inappropriate repetition. Sforza was a loathsome man, he had raped and tortured. But this was not republican Rome. The common people had not been reading Sallust. They did not rise up to celebrate their freedom. Instead they went after the conspirators. All three were executed.
When the grand virtues risk appearing as charade, or as borrowed from a different drama, the one sure value that remains is money. You can count it. You can weigh it. You can check it with your teeth. In Rome, Francesco Pazzi, head of the family’s bank there, took note of how easy it was to see off a political leader. Republican values might have more pull in a town like Florence, which already enjoyed the collective illusion that it was the modern manifestation of antique glory. So small in stature that he was generally known as Franceschino, this particular Pazzi was renowned for his bad temper and good luck. The Medici had already alienated their main client, the pope. They had alienated the king of Naples. They had alienated all those republican Florentines who believed in the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune. Most of all, Lorenzo de’ Medici would never let the Pazzi family back into public life in Florence. If Lorenzo and his brother were killed, the Pazzi bank—which, like so many others, was going through hard times—would be in a position to take over a large part of the Medici’s business. Money would bring power.
Franceschino drew in Archbishop Salviati in Pisa and Girolamo Riario, the pope’s nephew, now running Imola and eager to build up a serious dukedom before his uncle departed this world. The conspiracy could count on the military support of the Papal States and of Naples. Uncle Iacopo, however, the patrician head of the Pazzi family, a great blasphemer and gambler but highly respected all the same, was reluctant. The stakes were high and the odds poor. For a long time he argued against the assassination attempt. But eventually he came on board. Hadn’t Franceschino, he later justified himself, always been the lucky one?
Only two important members of the Pazzi family were not involved in the plot. Guglielmo Pazzi, Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, was not even approached. His loyalty would be divided. Renato Pazzi, on the other hand, reputedly the brains of the family, simply thought that murder was unnecessary. The Medici bank was in desperate straits. The best way to destroy Lorenzo would be to lend him money and watch him waste it. His debts would overwhelm him. Renato, then, believed that the Medici’s political prominence still depended on the bank. The family’s identification with the Florentine state was not complete. They were not, that is, in a position where they could just collect taxes for themselves to pay off their debts.
What did the Pazzi really know about the Medici’s financial troubles? In 1475, the Bruges branch had lost a legal battle against ex-London manager Gherardo Canigiani. This was public knowledge. Furious that Canigiani had used Medici money to become an English gentleman, Tommaso Portinari had invited him to act as agent for the bank and buy a shipload of English wool to send to Florence. As soon as the wool was safe at sea, Portinari refused to pay for it, claiming that Canigiani owed the Medici this and more. “Not even a Turk would behave so,” Canigiani protested, and, playing the card of his friendship with King Edward IV, managed to get an agent of the bank imprisoned and eventually to recover his money. Edward still owed the Medici around 30,000 florins.
The murder of Galeazzo Sforza, it was obvious to everybody, would make the chances of the Medici’s recovering the huge debts owed by that family even more remote. Galeazzo left an infant son and a shaky maternal regency that was constantly threatened by Galeazzo’s ambitious brother, Lodovico. Milan, Francesco Pazzi reckoned, would not be able to help Lorenzo in a crisis.
Then the death in yet another reckless battle, of rash Charles of Burgundy—this only three weeks after Galeazzo Sforza’s murder—was evidently another serious blow to the Medici bank. This was January 1477. Even assuming that Charles’s family were able to succeed to his dukedom, they wouldn’t want to pay off their debts in the near future. The director of the Pazzi bank in Bruges, Pierantonio di Bandini Baroncelli, was a close relative of Tommaso Portinari’s young wife, Maria di Bandini Baroncelli. They lived in the same small Italian community in a foreign town. If Pierantonio didn’t know that Tommaso was looking at overall losses of 100,000 florins—a vast sum—he certainly would have been aware that things were getting desperate. In the end, it was another close relative of Pierantonio’s, Bernardo di Bandini Baroncelli, who struck the first blow against Giuliano de’ Medici during mass in the duomo fifteen months after the duke of Burgundy’s death. More than anything else, it was the murder of Giuliano that saved the Medici bank and set it up for another fourteen years of Lorenzo’s mismanagement.
Girolamo Riario lent Francesco Pazzi his personal condottiere, Count Montesecco. They plotted. But Lorenzo refused their invitation down to Rome. He was suspicious. Where could they kill him then, and when and how? They must act soon, before someone got wind of the plot. In April 1478, the seventeen-year-old Cardinal Raffaele Riario (nephew to the lord of Imola and great-nephew to the pope—in short, nepotism incarnate) was visiting Florence. Armed men could be sent to the city as his escort. The Medici brothers had offered the child cardinal a celebratory lunch at their villa in Fiesole. The two could be murdered there. But Giuliano didn’t turn up for the party. There was no point, the conspirators had all agreed, in killing one brother without the other.
So the appointment with death was set back a week, to another Sunday lunch, after mass, at the Palazzo Medici in town, where the juvenile cardinal was now invited to inspect Il Magnifico’s famous collection of cameos. For all the animosity between the families, it seemed there was no question of renouncing formal visits with all their etiquette. Sometime during the morning, however, it turned out that once again Giuliano wouldn’t be eating with his brother. Frantic, the conspirators agreed they must do the deed at mass, only minutes away. But Count Montesecco shook his head. Not in church, he protested. God would see him in church. Did he imagine the Almighty was blind elsewhere? Montesecco had been Lorenzo’s designated assassin and was the most professional of the bunch. A key man. All in a hurry—because now it appeared that someone would actually have to go to Giuliano’s house and persuade him to come to church—two priests were given Montesecco’s brutal job. Nobody appears to have found their willingness strange. One hailed from Volterra and so had good reason to bear Lorenzo a grudge. Meantime, an army of papal soldiers was within striking distance of the town to the south and the archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, with about thirty armed men from Perugia, set off to take over the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government.
IT WAS ONE of the rules of Florentine republicanism that for their two-month term of government, the eight priors and one gonfaloniere della giustizia must spend the whole time together in the Palazzo della Signoria, eating and sleeping included. Looked at this way, eight weeks in power could seem rather a long time, which is perhaps why the Medici so rarely served on the signoria. In any event, as luck would have it, the gonfaloniere that day, Cesare Petrucci, was the same man who, as captain of Prato, had courageously put down an armed insurrection in 1470. When Salviati came asking for an audience, it took Petrucci just a few moments to appreciate that there was something suspicious about the archbishop’s behavior and to have both him and his men locked up.
In the church, too, everything goes wrong. The Medici brothers are standing well apart. At some agreed moment in the liturgy, Francesco Pazzi and Baroncelli simply massacre Giuliano. Why hadn’t they been assigned to Lorenzo? Francesco strikes so repeatedly and violently that he stabs himself in the leg and can barely walk. No doubt the packed church is in an uproar. But the two priests have failed to dispatch Lorenzo. Il Magnifico draws his sword, runs. Francesco Nori, once would-be inspector of Accerito Portinari’s accounts in Milan and now head of the Florence branch of the Medici bank, blocks the path of the assassins. It’s unusual to think of a bank manager protecting his boss with his body. Baroncelli stabs him to death. But Lorenzo is already locked in the sacristy. He is safe. Outside, at the city gates, the papal troops have failed to show. In desperation, old Uncle Iacopo takes to his horse yelling, “Liberty!” up and down the streets. The confused crowd is not impressed. In the end, the common people rally to Lorenzo. He speaks from the balcony of his house. He is identified with law and order. It’s a huge step toward a Medici dictatorship.
Revenge is rapid and brutal. Archbishop Salviati, Francesco Pazzi, and scores of others, many innocent, are strung from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria, or in some cases simply tossed to their deaths from the higher floors. Bodies are dragged about the streets, derided and defiled. Only Baroncelli escapes. The young Cardinal Riario is held prisoner; a hostage is essential to discourage the pope from taking revenge on Florentines in Rome. All adult Pazzi males, with the exception of Lorenzo’s brother-in-law Guglielmo, are killed or imprisoned. Their children are ordered to change their last name. Their widows and daughters are forbidden to marry. All over Europe, Pazzi assets will be tracked down and confiscated for years to come. The family’s name and emblems must be destroyed wherever they are found.
But Lorenzo’s troubles are only beginning. The next two years will constitute the great formative crisis of his life. Not only have the fortunes of his bank plummeted, not only have his brother and one of his few efficient business associates been killed, but now the pope excommunicates him and everybody who defends him. Sixtus “fills all Italy,” all Europe, with letters aimed at destroying Lorenzo’s reputation and denying him support. Then the Papal States and Naples declare war on Florence and move rapidly on the offensive. Only Lorenzo is our enemy, they announce, willing the Florentine people to ditch their leader. But such tactics rarely work. Especially after a failed assassination attempt in church.
If life hasn’t prepared Lorenzo to run the family bank, there is probably no one in Italy better trained for a propaganda war. His letters to other heads of state are endless, intimate, and persuasive. This man was brought up on begging letters. Nothing comes more naturally. And he has a remarkable facility with words. In particular, Louis XI of France is encouraged to renew Angevin claims to the crown of Naples. Milan and Venice are called on to stop arguing with each other and send troops. Back home, Sandro Botticelli is employed to fresco the spectacle of the hanged conspirators—not inside a building, but on an outside wall near the Palazzo della Signoria. And it’s the Florentine government that pays the painter, not the Medici. Forty florins. Andrea del Castagno does a similar job on the façade of the Pazzi palazzo. “Natural portraits,” enthuses the sixteenth-century art historian Vasari, “and hanged upside down by their feet in strange positions, all different and bellissimi.” Apparently there is no limit to what can be made beautiful in art. The crime and its punishment will be spectacularly present to the public mind long after the corpses have rotted. The sculptor Verrocchio is ordered to make three life-size figures of Lorenzo to be displayed in various churches. What does a city have artists for? What a shame there are no machines to duplicate these works of art, no photographs, no posters.
Meantime, the brilliant poet and personal friend of Lorenzo’s, as well as tutor of his children, Angelo Poliziano, is given the task of writing the official version of the conspiracy, portraying the Pazzi and their accomplices in the worst possible light. The model he adopts is Sallust, the same text that the assassins of Sforza had been reading, except that here the conspirators are not given the role of brave republicans and friends of the poor. They are ignorant, selfish, cruel, grasping. Advantage is taken of the printing press, newly arrived in Italy, to have this travesty distributed as widely as possible. Even today, nothing is more swiftly published than the expedient lie. One way or another, Lorenzo will convince the Florentines.
But if the propaganda war is going well at home, the real conflict is another matter. The invading troops advance into Tuscany with relative ease. Clearly, this is not a moment for restructuring the Medici bank, or thinking about the crazy policies that have brought it to its knees. All the company’s assets in Rome and Naples have been confiscated, their staff expelled. There is scarcely a branch producing profits. Yet, for Lorenzo, getting hold of money was never easier. Since his father’s cousin, Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, the bank’s second largest shareholder, died in 1476, and since his surviving heirs, Lorenzo and Giovanni, are only fifteen and eleven, Il Magnifico, as their financial guardian, holds their fortune for them in thirteen leather bags. On May 1, 1478, he takes 20,000 florins. On May 3, he takes a further 5,000. On June 2, 8,000; August 8, 8,000; August 13, 1,600; September 27, 11,000. That’s the lot. Then at some point Lorenzo also begins to procure money, with no official authorization, from the public purse, the state. This is precisely what, until the assassination attempt, Renato Pazzi was convinced he couldn’t do. But Renato has been executed now. Lorenzo will take 75,000 florins from the Florentine state over the coming years. He even sinks to begging for cash from his own bank managers. Francesco Sassetti obliges. He has so much stashed away. Tommaso Portinari does not. This personal affront finally opens Lorenzo’s eyes as far as Portinari is concerned. He decides to sever the partnership between the families and close the Bruges and Milan branches of the bank.
1479. ONE YEAR after the assassination attempt. Florence lay under interdiction. It was struck by the plague. The local priests were ordered to disobey the pope and bury the dead. The two condottieri the city had hired began to argue. Their armies had to be kept apart to stop them from fighting each other. As a result, it was difficult to bring pressure to bear on the enemy. And impossible to write poetry, of course. Even the usually obedient Clarice, now mother of six, rebelled. The family, along with the urbane poet Poliziano as tutor, had been sent into the country for safety. Mother and teacher loathed each other; both wrote to Lorenzo to complain. That man is teaching Giovanni Latin from the heathen classics instead of the holy Psalter! Giovanni was Lorenzo’s second son. The boy learns so fast, Poliziano gripes, when his mother is out of the way. It was old-style Christianity against the new eclectic humanism. As when bank managers bitched, Lorenzo didn’t know how to respond. Perhaps he actually liked the idea that those subject to him were in disagreement, rather than ganging up to threaten him. Clarice threw the intellectual poet out of the house. She preferred a priest as tutor. Lorenzo was furious but did nothing. Drawing from both sides of the conflict, young Giovanni would one day become the most eclectic, the most humanist, the most nepotist of popes.
In September 1479, the enemy took the fortress of Poggio Imperiale. The fighting season was over, but the following spring there would be nothing between the Neapolitan army and the gates of Florence. The people had now been taxed as much as a people can be, especially when the enemy has suggested that removal of their leader will resolve the problem. The Venetians and the Milanese were more concerned with their own disputes than with producing the kind of military support that might give their official ally a chance of defending itself. What was Lorenzo to do?
The history books argue endlessly over the Medici’s commitment or otherwise to a republican model, their plan perhaps to install themselves as hereditary princes. But although noble birth had certainly become part of the family strategy, Lorenzo was too intelligent to imagine that birth would be enough. Money was important, too. But there wasn’t much serious money left. What was still possible, though, was the grand gesture, the legitimacy of individual virtuosity, a cocktail of education, glamour, and charisma. In the new world that was coming, the cult of the leader might perhaps replace the legal right of the king. At dawn on December 6, 1479, laden with expensive gifts, Lorenzo set out for Pisa and a sea trip to Naples to negotiate face-to-face with King Ferrante in his own home. Having taken the decision alone, he wrote a moving letter to those who were constitutionally in power, the signoria, speaking of his willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of the city. “And with this good intention I set out: that perhaps God wishes that since this war began with the blood of my brother and my own, so too it may end by my hand…. For if our adversaries want nothing but me, they shall have me freely in their hands; and if they want something more, then we shall see.” The letter was perfectly calculated, and perhaps honest too. No doubt Lorenzo foresaw its appearance in history books.
In his Storie fiorentine, Guicciardini remarks that the expensive peace treaty that Lorenzo eventually brought back from Naples could perfectly well have been negotiated without that dangerous visit. Yet one can’t help feeling that the drama of the gesture—the just having thought of it and dared it, for there was no classical model—was absolutely central to the image that Lorenzo later created for himself as leader of Florence. Propaganda can invent a great deal, but it does prefer to work with a kernel of truth. Granted, Lorenzo had opened secret negotiations with King Ferrante long before he left; granted, he had various diplomatic cards up his sleeve, concessions to make; but all the same, it was an act of enormous courage to place oneself in the hands of a “most restless, most faithless, most hostile king,” a man who not so long ago had promised safe conduct to the condottiere Iacopo Piccinino (son of the more famous Niccolò) and then had him put to death on arrival.
Stendhal, in his Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, suggests that it was only through the drug of aesthetic passion and pleasure that the Medici were able to subdue the Florentines’ “passionate love for liberty and implacable hatred of nobility.” They accepted the Medici, that is, because the family filled the city with beautiful things. There may be something in this, but not if we are to limit aesthetics and beauty to canonical works of art. Pictures, sculptures, palazzi would never have been enough. Lorenzo had gone into the lion’s den. It was a marvelous gesture. Over three long months, he had talked the enemy around. He had seduced King Ferrante. And the drama of it, the magnificence of the adventure, had seduced the Florentines. From now on, they knew that they were governed by a man with balls and charisma. And enormous luck. For in August 1480, the Turkish army landed on the Italian peninsula and seized Otranto on the southeast coast. Twelve thousand people were killed and ten thousand taken into slavery. How all the other wars mentioned in this book pale into insignificance beside these figures. But it was excellent news for Lorenzo. In return for his contribution to the collective effort to repel the Infidel, he could demand the return of territories conceded in his treaty with King Ferrante, as well as complete absolution from the now-nervous Pope Sixtus IV.
So, quite scandalously, everything at last returned to normal, as if the Pazzi conspiracy had never been. In 1478, immediately after the assassination attempt, the Florentine signoria had written to Sixtus describing him as “Judas in the seat of Peter.” In response, Lorenzo had been condemned as a “heretic,” which meant a death sentence. And now, just three years later, all was forgiven and forgotten. In December 1481, Giovanni Tornabuoni was down in Rome again, negotiating recognition of the papal debt to the Medici bank, reassuring old clients, resuming business. Yet something had changed. In letters back to his nephew, Lorenzo, Tornabuoni for the first time switches from the familiar tu to the formal voi, as if addressing a superior. As head of the bank, Lorenzo had always been addressed as la Magnificenza vostra. The same was true of his father, and of Cosimo too in his old age. It was ordinary etiquette. But now, after the feat of Naples, after taking the city’s destiny in his own hands and delivering it from its enemies, Lorenzo is suddenly Il Magnifico. Out on his own. Everyday politeness is elevated into individual glory. A stiff old uncle bends his knee. At which point, Lorenzo’s need for the bank has really ceased to exist. It’s unthinkable that Il Magnifico might lose power merely for a lack of cash.
BIOGRAPHIES OF LORENZO tend toward hagiography. They concentrate on this period between 1480 and 1492 and describe it as a golden age. Didn’t Machiavelli, in the gloom of sixteenth-century foreign dominance, describe it as such? Lorenzo manipulates the available art patronage, private and public, sending great painters hither and thither to those who want the best. He doesn’t commission much himself because money is short and he has, as we shall see, other uses for it. When he does spend, it’s not on the kind of public and religious projects that Cosimo patronized. Lorenzo’s purchases are private. He likes to possess things. On the other hand, he has clearly grasped the idea of using art and even poetry to enhance the reputation of the state and the legitimacy of his reign. The Florentine government would preside over and promote the production of beauty. Such a policy is widely believed to be a good thing. Fortunately, there was a remarkable supply of first-class artists: Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo, Botticelli, Leonardo. Fortunately, there were excellent writers—Poliziano, Landino, Lorenzo himself—capable of transforming Tuscan into the language of Italy, a coup beyond any military victory.
And he is praised for his diplomacy. He became “almost the balance of all Italy,” said Guicciardini, meaning that Lorenzo preserved the balance of power. Later biographers take up the expression without the almost. Lorenzo opposed Venice in its expansionist assault on Ferrara in the early 1480s; he opposed Pope Innocent VIII’s expansionist assault on Naples in the mid-eighties; but he moved more carefully now, choosing to alienate no one over the long run, offering favors to everybody. As the weakest of the five Italian powers, Lorenzo had an obvious interest in maintaining the status quo. Unable to shine militarily, his city must stand out for its artistic achievements. What was expedient then is understood as virtuous now.
Or the biographies are written in indignant opposition to the hagiographies, in much the same way that many citizens of Florence hated Lorenzo more intensely the more the world praised him. On his return from Naples, almost the first thing Lorenzo undertook was another and final reform of the state. A new constitutional body of only seventy chosen Medici supporters was given huge powers. Every vote against Lorenzo was always a personal affront. Every picture commissioned took into account the political loyalties of the painter, the propaganda value of the image. Speaking of the need for peace, Lorenzo missed no opportunity to expand Florence’s borders. In 1484, on the slightest of pretexts, the garrison town of Pietrasanta was seized from the Genoese. Writing convincingly of the need for free choice in marriage, he imposed brides on reluctant spouses. He betrothed his fourteen-year-old daughter Maddalena to the illegitimate, debauched, and drunken son of Pope Sixtus’s successor, Innocent VIII. The rhetoric of fiscal equality ever on his lips, he introduced a new coin, the quattrino bianco, in which all customs duties must be paid. The silver picciolo had long been losing value. The new money effectively increased those taxes paid by the poor by 25 percent. It did not alter their incomes.
Complaining of the heavy responsibilities of power, he exercised it ever more determinedly, “holding the city completely in his will as if he were a prince waving a baton,” says Guicciardini. Rushing out of the Palazzo della Signoria one January morning in 1489, four days after his fortieth birthday, Lorenzo waves his nowgouty arm to silence the crowd. They are demanding that a certain criminal should be spared execution. Hang him now, Lorenzo orders, here. The man had killed a police agent. The man is hanged. Four protesters are whipped and banished. Lorenzo has a considerable investment in the powers of the police. He goes nowhere now without an armed bodyguard of a dozen men, paid for by the state.
Lorenzo is a tyrant and the Pazzi conspirators were republican martyrs. Such was the burden of Alamanno Rinuccini’s Dialogue on Liberty, written, in the classical style, when its author retired to his country villa in 1479, during the war with Naples and the pope. With the state of Medici tyranny, he wrote, the only thing an honest man can do is to withdraw from public life. Rinuccini had a long record of holding high offices under the Medici, to whom he dedicated various translations from the Greek; but he had fallen out with Lorenzo and his life savings had been held in the Pazzi bank. Nevertheless, shortly after writing the dialogue, which he was wise enough not to publish, he went back to Florence and served the Medici regime in a variety of public offices for many years.
The ambiguity of the case is emblematic. Was the core of Rinuccini’s personality in his denunciation of the Medici? Or was there an element of sour grapes and rhetorical exercise? Was the man’s public service a sad charade that served to prop up a dangerous tyrant? Or was it honorable and a pleasure? “So many men on the councils denounce the Medici over dinnertime discussion at home in their villas,” wrote Marco Parenti, “then vote as they’re told when they are back in Florence.” It seemed a new sort of personality was in the making: that of the man who does not find it too much of a problem to be liberal and virtuous in private while toeing an authoritarian line in public. And perhaps this had come about in response to a new kind of society where public life would always involve a surrender of honesty, if only because the basis of power would always be suspect, always require a constant effort of propaganda to assert its legitimacy. In these murky circumstances, hardly unfamiliar to us today, to write hagiography or its opposite is to miss the point.
LORENZO WAS NOW so suspicious of all and sundry that he routinely had official Florentine ambassadors in foreign courts shadowed and duplicated by his own personal spies. Yet his trust in his bank managers seemed unbounded. The overall director, Francesco Sassetti, a man quite incapable of taking unpleasant decisions, was left entirely to his own devices, despite the fact that he worked from Lorenzo’s house in Florence. In Rome, Uncle Giovanni Tornabuoni swung from gloom to optimism with no long-term vision, no flexibility. “The pope is as stubborn as a corpse,” he complained of Innocent’s unwillingness to repay his debts. Yet Tornabuoni continued to tie up most of the bank’s capital with the Curia. In Bruges, before the final showdown, Tommaso Portinari had actually managed to persuade Lorenzo to form a separate company for the only profitable business the branch was doing, the occasional importation of English wool. Since Portinari had a larger share in this company than in the bank, he took a bigger slice of the gains, while losing a smaller percentage on the branch’s overall losses. “He took advantage of my inexperience,” Lorenzo later complained. But Il Magnifico had been running the Florentine Republic for years at the time, and a child would have understood the mathematics of the deal.
An atmosphere of farce hangs over these last years of the Medici bank. A second generation of untouchables and prima donnas was now being trained up beneath the first. In Bruges, Antonio de’ Medici, a distant cousin of Lorenzo’s, was so arrogant that when the family promoted him to deputy director, the other employees threatened a walkout and he had to be recalled to Florence. Later, Antonio would be sent to Constantinople to negotiate, successfully, the extradition of Giuliano’s assassin, Bernardo di Bandini Baroncelli. In Lyon, Lionetto de’ Rossi, Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, was convinced that one of his staff, Cosimo Sassetti, son of the general director, had been sent to spy on him. Most likely he had; Lionetto, after all, had been writing the most insulting things about the boy’s father in vitriolic letters to Lorenzo. Fortunately, the young Sassetti was as credulous as he was offensive. Overwhelmed by losses from bad loans, Lionetto sent Cosimo back to Florence with a balance sheet reporting profits. The director’s son was the only one taken in. Arriving in Lyon to investigate, in 1485, a certain Lorenzo Spinelli wrote to Lorenzo to say that Lionetto was completely out of his mind.
The bank was paying the price for its fatal attraction to political power. To lend to people whose reputation and position do not depend on honoring their debts will always be dangerous, but to give huge sums to people who actually feel it is undignified to repay is madness. These were not the kind of people you could take to court. They were the court. Often a condition of lending to one of them was that you must not lend to another. Louis XI of France was furious that the Medici were financing his enemy Charles the Bold, and so took measures against the bank in Lyon. Tornabuoni, angry that the French branch wasn’t sending him the money for papal bulls, refused to honor an important letter of credit from Lyon. The bank’s reputation could only plummet. The Florence branch started trading silk with a separate, non-Medici agent in the French town. At least they knew they would be paid. Lionetto was furious. How can I ever get my branch back into profit if the others take their business elsewhere? Far too late, Lorenzo sweetly invited his brother-in-law back to Florence to discuss matters, and on his arrival had him arrested and thrown in a debtors’ jail.
Hans Memling’s The Last Judgment (detail), commissioned by Tommaso Portinari. Despite losing 100,000 florins for the Medici bank, Tommaso instructs the great painter to imagine how the Angel of Death will weigh him in the balance when the bottom line is finally drawn.
It wasn’t the first time. Returning to Florence after the closure of the London office in 1480, Tommaso Guidetti had been arrested on the request of the Venice branch of the bank. He had not paid them for a shipload of currants. The debt amounted to more than 3,500 florins. I paid Tommaso Portinari in Bruges, was Guidetti’s claim. It was feasible. All the same, he had to flee from Florence, leaving behind a teenage wife, pregnant. The case was still unsettled more than thirty years later.
But a considerable number of court cases were now underway. Lorenzo was being pursued for the money he had taken from his young cousins, the two sons of Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. In 1485, the precious country villas had to be sold to make amends. It was a huge loss of prestige. The legal battle over the seizure of the Bruges galleys would go on into the second decade of the next century. With justice on his mind, Tommaso Portinari had Hans Memling paint him kneeling, naked, on one side of a pair of giant weighing scales held up by a great black Angel of Death. It is extraordinary that the Last Judgment scene, the final assessment of a man’s moral worth, something that had been so disturbing to the merchants of Cosimo’s time, should have become a vehicle for this sort of confident exhibitionism, as if the man were quite sure he was on his way to paradise. Weighing up Portinari’s performance in Bruges, Lorenzo calculated a loss of 70,000 florins. “Such are the great earnings that the management of Tommaso Portinari has brought,” he noted ironically. He was wrong. Losses were well over 100,000 florins.
Avignon closed down in 1478. Likewise Milan. The famous palazzo was sold. One of the two wool workshops had already gone. The silk workshop closed in 1480. That same year, the London and Bruges branches with all their debts were formally handed over to Portinari. Venice closed in 1481. In 1482, a proposal for restructuring the whole bank was drawn up. There would be two holdings, one under Tornabuoni, running Rome and Naples, the other under Sassetti, running Florence, Lyon, and Pisa. Two barons, two entirely separate entities to satisfy two considerable egos. Total capital would be only about 52,000 florins, of which Lorenzo’s part was under 20,000, the merest trifle compared with the vast sums he had inherited. Nothing became of the plan. Nothing was done to coordinate the remaining branches or to have their directors care about each other’s losses. Making no serious contribution to economic activity, serving only to finance wars and the consumption of luxury goods on the part of a debt-ridden aristocracy, the Medici bank continued its inglorious decline through those years that would soon be referred to as “golden.” Pisa closed in 1489. Which left just Florence, Rome, Naples, and Lyon.
FORTUNATELY, THERE WERE other things for bankers to do aside from banking. Cosimo had used his staff to hunt down ancient manuscripts. Piero had bought paintings, tapestries, ponies for the kids. After 1483, Lorenzo began to send his bank managers on a hunt for lucrative Church appointments for his fourth child and second son, Giovanni, who had just received the tonsure and ordination into the priesthood. He was eight years old. Almost immediately, the Lyon branch of the bank entered into negotiations that would make the boy abbot of Fontdouce in western France. Later he acquired the priory of Saint Gemme, near Chartres. Ecclesiastical incomes were steady and risk-free. The monks of the Abbey of Le Pin, near Poitiers, barricaded themselves inside when Cosimo Sassetti arrived with orders to take possession in the name of the infant bishop. Having lost so much through banking, Lorenzo had finally found a way of making money in which he excelled. It was a question of connections, favors, gifts, promises. One by one the Church benefices fell into his son’s lap: the Abbey of Passignano on the road to Siena, churches in Prato, the Arno Valley, the Mugello; the Abbey of Monte Cassino near Naples, Morimondo, near Milan. By the time the bank collapsed, the Church incomes would be there to give the family a new economic base.
It was a policy that required the investment of whatever resources Lorenzo could muster. As with every project, he was ambitious. Shortly after marrying off his young daughter Maddalena to the pope’s dissolute son, he had the bank lend the Curia 30,000 florins. This was stretching credit to the limit. He accepted alum instead of cash for arrears repayments on papal loans, though the Medici no longer held the monopoly on merchandising alum and had few outlets from which they could sell the mineral. Every diplomatic courier traveling from Florence to Rome starts to bring gifts for Pope Innocent. Apparently the pontiff loves to eat game. Then ply him with game. He loves wine. Here are eighteen flasks of finest Vernaccia. And beautiful fabrics. And the best artists. Anything that will make His Holiness happy. “The pope sleeps with Lorenzo il Magnifico’s eyes,” commented a delegate from Ferrara. Until at last the seduction was complete. In 1489, the pope caved in, waived age restrictions, and made the thirteen-year-old Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici a cardinal. Now he could accumulate even more benefices. “The greatest honor ever conferred upon our house,” Lorenzo announced. Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, later Pope Leo X, would keep the Medici fortunes alive after their expulsion from Florence in 1494 until their return in 1512.
BUT THE CHURCH was not entirely rotten. While the Medici were seeking to consolidate the family’s temporal power through acquiring Church incomes, Il Magnifico’s near-contemporary, Girolamo Savonarola, was climbing the ecclesiastical hierarchy in an entirely different spirit. Like the young Giovanni, Savonarola too would one day be offered a cardinal’s hat. And as with Giovanni, the appointment, or rather its offer, came as part of a bargain, an exchange, as though Church appointments were a recognized form of currency. With Giovanni, the honor constituted a payment for favors the Medici had already granted to pope and Church; in Savonarola’s case, the offer of the cardinalship was conditional on his granting a favor to Rome in the future: He must moderate his inflammatory preaching, he must get back into line, he must stop behaving as if he were in direct contact with God and holier than the official Church. Savonarola refused. “I don’t want any hats,” he replied to the pope, “nor mitres great or small; the only thing I want is what you gave your saints: death. A red hat, a hat of blood, that’s what I desire.”
Savonarola was the antithesis of Lorenzo and of the Medici and bankers in general. Here, at last, was a man who wouldn’t trade, a man who had no use for the art of exchange, who couldn’t be seduced. Yet, like Lorenzo, Savonarola was an artist, and in his own way a showman. His terrifying sermons of gloom and doom, of the need for radical spiritual renewal, transformed the Florence of Lorenzo’s and the Medici bank’s last years, setting Il Magnifico’s ethos and achievements in sharp and twilit relief.
It had taken medieval Christianity a thousand years to produce the cautious revolution that was humanism, a movement eager to escape Christianity’s straitjacket, but careful never to renounce its principles. It took eclectic humanism only a hundred years to provoke the reaction that was Savonarola. But from the moment the secular began to creep into the sacred space, the bankers to gratify their vanity in altarpieces and tombs, the cardinals to collect their “discretionary” returns on deposits, the popes to mix up myth and prayer book—not to mention holy wars and commercial monopolies—Savonarola and, soon after him, Luther were figures in the making, men formed in opposition to a Church authority that was seen as corrupt; fundamentalists. Unlike the early Christians, they did not call their followers out of the world to a radically separate life. Instead, they demanded that official and powerful Christendom become truly Christian. The political consequences of such a transformation, should it ever take place, were enormous.
Born in Ferrara in 1452, called away from a career in medicine by a verse from Genesis—“Get thee out of thy country!”—Savonarola first preached in Florence between 1482 and 1487. “He introduced almost a new way of pronouncing God’s word, Apostolic, without dividing up the sermon, not proposing questions and answers, never singing, avoiding ornament and eloquence. His aim was just to expound something from the Old Testament and introduce the simplicity of the early church….”
Thus the comment of a contemporary. It was not, then, a return to medieval Christian preaching. The negatives in this description tell us that. There would be no old-style scholastic caviling. But neither would there be pretty quotations from classical authors, nor any reference to authorities outside the word of God. In a society buzzing with too many ideas, a Church cluttered with pricey secular bric-a-brac, Savonarola strips his Christianity down to the bare scriptures, the naked crucifix. “I sense a light within me,” he says. It is Christ, the light of the world. But not, as Ficino would have it, Plato’s light, or Proclus’s, or that of some Orphic hymn. “Oh priests, oh prelates of the Church of Christ,” cries Savonarola, “leave your benefices, which you cannot justly hold, leave your pomp, your splendid feasts and banquets.” He might have been preaching directly to Giovanni de’ Medici. Lorenzo also warned his son not to be corrupted by that “pit of iniquity” that was Rome. But there was no question of abandoning the benefices. Why else did one go into the Church?
The contrast alerts us to a condition essential to the development of international banks of the Medici variety: a certain laxity in the application of religious law, or, better still, a complete separation of church and state. In short, there is an affinity between money and eclecticism. “No man can serve two masters,” says Jesus. But money can serve any number. It is no respecter of principles. Broken up into discreet and neutral units, value flows into any cup, a shower of gold into any coffer, be it in Constantinople, Rome, or Jerusalem. The alum merchant trades with the Turk. The silk manufacturer is happy to sell provocative clothes to the pretty ladies of Florence. The idealist, whether Christian or Muslim, Communist or No-Global, must always be suspicious of money and banking. But the idealist is not to be confused with the ideas man. Quite the contrary. Admirably flexible, the humanist thinkers with their eclectic reading were notorious for finding authorities to justify whatever form of government best suited their paymasters. In 1471, Bartolomeo dedicated his treatise, “On the Prince,” to Federico Gonzaga. In 1475, the same text reappeared as “On the Citizen,” dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici. In the same period, depending upon which patrons were paying him, Francesco Patrizi wrote “On Republican Education” and then “On the Kingdom and Education of Kings.” Both systems were best. Money has a way of being right. Only popular government by the poor is unforgivable.
Savonarola, as portrayed by Fra Bartolomeo. The austere lines and sharp contrasts underline the man’s unswerving devotion and refusal to compromise. Finally, the Medici had met someone who could not be bought.
Spiritual renewal can only come through poverty, Savonarola preached, through an end to the clergy’s collusion with wealth and power. His would not be a church that worked with banks. Largely ignored, the monk left Florence in 1487. Meanwhile, the great political upheavals of his career behind him, Lorenzo was writing poetry again: cycles of love poems, dense with labored references to classical myth but lightened by marvelous landscape description. Busy with his verses, Il Magnifico ignored a proposal from Lorenzo Spinelli, the new director in Lyon, to revive the Medici bank’s old holding structure. Lorenzo himself was one of the bank’s main debtors now, one of the political leaders who would never repay. In 1488, a ban on public festivities in Florence, something that had been in force since the Pazzi conspiracy ten years ago, was finally lifted. Is it a coincidence that Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice, had succumbed to tuberculosis that same summer? Lorenzo was away at the thermal baths when she died. He wrote no poem for her. But for the first celebration of Carnival after a decade’s break, he produced some new Carnival songs, and some moving lyrics about youth. The loves of Bacchus and Ariadne are evoked to remind the adolescents of Florence to seize the day:
Quanto è bella giovinezza, |
How fine youth is |
che si fugge tutta via |
Though it flee away |
Chi vuole essere lieto, sia, |
Let he who wishes, enjoy |
di doman non c’è certezza |
Nothing’s certain tomorrow |
Stiff in the joints though he now was, Lorenzo practiced what he preached and got on his horse at night to visit Bartolomea de’ Nasi when she was away from her husband in her country villa. “Crazy,” writes Guicciardini, “to think that a man of such reputation and prudence, forty years old, was so taken by a woman, hardly beautiful and full of years, as to do things that would have seemed dishonest to every youngster.”
Yet eclecticism and promiscuity are always vulnerable to a nostalgia for rigid principles, as the moneyed classes yearn for a value that can’t be counted. The brilliant Pico della Mirandola, master of many languages, lover of the mystics and the Kabbalah, was impressed by Savonarola’s preaching, by his strict attention to the words of the biblical text. Bring him back to Florence, he told Lorenzo, he’ll be an asset. Suffering severely from gout, aware that his own death couldn’t be far off, Lorenzo was persuaded. He and Pico couldn’t have known that Girolamo was now in a decidedly visionary mood, having convinced himself he was a reincarnation of the Old Testament prophets he had studied for so long. On August 1, 1490, in San Marco, the monastery that Cosimo had had rebuilt, Savonarola began his series of sermons on the Apocalypse. He had three basic themes: The need for Church renewal; the belief that before renewal God would punish all Italy with some terrible catastrophe; the conviction that this must happen soon.
What could such a prediction mean but the end of Medici rule? In Lent of 1491, Savonarola preached what he himself described as terrifica praedicatio—a terrifying sermon. Despite invitations from both the signoria and the Church authorities to take it easy, he repeated his themes again and again. This disaster will happen very soon. Had he seen the Medici’s balance sheets? Cardinal Giovanni was already living far beyond his means, borrowing from the bank to the tune of 7,000 florins. Sassetti was dead. Tornabuoni and Spinelli were desperate. With the general decline of trade, the English refusal to export their raw wool, almost all the other Florentine banks had gone under.
In April, Savonarola preached to the priors in Palazzo della Signoria. He condemned Lorenzo’s tyranny. He condemned corruption. Those on the losing side of the Medici regime flocked to hear him. The poor were enchanted. Oppressed by asthma and arthritis, Lorenzo couldn’t persuade the priest to compromise, or even to talk to him in person. The eclectic tries to include the fundamentalist in his collection, his entourage of artists, philosophers, poets; the banker seeks to finance him, to count him among his debtors; but the fundamentalist won’t have it.
In July 1491, Savonarola is elected prior of San Marco. He takes the cell at the opposite end of the monastery from Cosimo’s. There are no pretty paintings. “The real preacher,” he says, “cannot flatter a prince, only attack his vices.” Clearly this man is an opponent of a quite different caliber from the debt-ridden Innocent, the murderous Sixtus. Even good Archbishop Antonino, in Cosimo’s time, was always open to compromise. But Savonarola preaches values that are beyond money’s grasp. He yearns for poverty, even death. It’s a showdown.
Near death himself, Lorenzo begins to write religious hymns. As always, he is master of form and content, conversant with his predecessors, intimate and seductive. Some of the hymns are written to be sung to the same tunes as the bawdy Carnival songs. At the same time he presses on with his Commentary on My Sonnets, a long work in which he rearranges the old love poems to Lucrezia in a prose analysis that offers an imaginary autobiography of unhappy love and Platonic transcendence. Supremely self-conscious, even in the grip of terminal illness, Lorenzo is still performing.
On April 5, 1492, lightning strikes the dome of the duomo. “Behold,” preaches Savonarola, “swift and sudden the sword of the Lord upon our land.” Only three days later, religious prophecy and Renaissance theatricality come together in the perfect deathbed scene. At his last gasp, kissing a silver crucifix encrusted with precious stones, Lorenzo calls for Savonarola.
Was this a victory or a defeat? From Giovanni di Bicci’s first contracts with the Curia, Cosimo’s supervision of the design of Giovanni XXIII’s tomb, the history of the Medici bank had always been intertwined with that of the Church. They were two institutions that repelled and attracted each other, came together and fell apart, in one drama after another. Exiled, Cosimo had hidden his money in churches; almost all his patronage had favored religious buildings, devotional paintings. The same was true of his great director Giovanni Benci. “Should pay up by John the Baptist’s Day,” was a typical comment in bank correspondence. Interest on loans accumulated from one martyr’s festival to the next. “In the name of God and of Profit,” announced the account books. And as the decades passed, Medici employees all over Europe had poured the bank’s money into chapels and churches. Lorenzo had almost been murdered in church. Wounded by two priests, he had fought one pope, flattered another, and finally brought family and church together in a son who was already on his way to squandering what was left of the family resources, as one day he would ruin the finances of the Curia.
Now Savonarola meets Lorenzo at death’s door. Lorenzo has already been granted extreme unction—the last rites of the Church—so the priest has no power over his eternal soul. On the other hand, he can hardly refuse the invitation to speak to a dying man. If you recover, you must change your life, Savonarola says. Knowing there is no recovery, Lorenzo agrees. Savonarola gives his blessing. It’s a standoff, a stalemate, an insoluble antagonism: money and metaphysics, eclectic humanism and rigid fundamentalism. The wonder is that history should offer us an encounter so emblematic of the forces whose clash will decide the future of Europe. Twenty-five years later, Giovanni de’ Medici’s frank enjoyment of the papacy would be challenged by the revolt of Martin Luther. Banking would be profoundly affected. Protestant England was the first to legalize usury. Catholic Italy, under the Counter-Reformation, reimposed the old laws that bred the old subterfuges.
HOW DIFFICULT TO be Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici! “I have three sons,” Lorenzo is reputed to have said, “one dumb, one smart, one sweet.” Piero was the dumb one, Giovanni the smart. If the authority of Lorenzo had depended first on wealth, later on charisma, Piero possessed neither. The money had mostly been spent, and there are cases where even the best education is just wasted time. Piero was good at sports, particularly an early form of football. But the era of the sports celebrity had not yet arrived. He had inherited Lorenzo’s suspicious nature but not his charm. And yet, remarks Guicciardini, the succession was so smooth, “the good will on the part of people and princes so great, that had Piero had even an ounce of wit and prudence, he could not have fallen.” He didn’t and he fell.
Throughout the fifteenth century, it had been the habit of the Italian city-states, at some crisis point in their internal struggles, to play the threatening card of calling on a foreign ally to tip the balance in the peninsula. In desperate straits against Rome and Naples in 1480, Florence had invited the French to reconsider their claims to the throne of Naples. In 1482, during the Venetian assault on Ferrara, Florence and Milan had encouraged the Turks to step up their attacks on Venice’s maritime possessions. Venice had replied by inviting the duke of Lorraine to consider his claim to Naples, the duke of Orleans his to Milan. In a pointless war against Naples in 1483, Pope Innocent VIII had again suggested that the duke of Lorraine might want to take the kingdom. Dangerous games. Nobody seems to have considered what might actually happen if a foreign army did push into Italy. It was Piero’s bad luck to find out.
Ignoring the bank, rapidly alienating Florence’s patrician families, Piero also infuriated Lodovico Sforza, now duke of Milan, by appearing to prefer the city’s other ally, Naples. All too soon, Sforza was inviting the king of France to consider himself king of Naples. In Paris, young Charles VIII had only just shaken off an oppressive regency and come into his own. He wanted to do something bold. And he did. He gathered 30,000 men and marched over the Alps, down through Lombardy, heading south.
Allied to Naples, Florence was a potential target for this campaign. Suddenly an army far bigger than any the Florentines had had to deal with in recent decades was heading toward the city, an army with a foreign king at its head, not a paid Italian condottiere who might be bribed. In desperation, as the French approached and with the city’s political class almost entirely against him, Piero tried to repeat the gesture his father had made when he went to Naples to deal face-to-face with King Ferrante more than a decade ago. But the boy was only twenty-two. He hadn’t prepared the ground. It was the gesture of a novice trying to copy the maestro’s masterpiece. He even repeated the same charade of leaving the town first and sending back a letter to be read to the signoria.
I won’t sack Florence if you hand over Sarazana, Sarzanello, Pietrasanta, and the ports of Pisa and Leghorn: those were the French king’s conditions. He was demanding more or less all of Florence’s gains over the last century. To everybody’s surprise, Piero agreed. The signoria was furious and refused to recognize the agreement. It was a crucial break, a reminder that constitutional power did not lie with the Medici. The signoria sent out Savonarola to talk to Charles, the irony being that Savonarola actually welcomed the French arrival. This foreign army was the fulfillment of all his prophecies of doom.
Piero returned to Florence on November 8. The next day, in an apparently unplanned incident, someone decided to bar the doors to the signoria when he arrived there with a number of armed men. In a matter of hours, the town was in an uproar, the cries of “popolo” and “libertà” had begun. Piero panicked, got on his horse, and headed out of town. The Palazzo Medici was sacked. Suddenly the silk sheets, the precious sculptures, the painted reliquaries were being dragged out into the street. A hundred years of careful accumulation was lost in a matter of hours. On November 10, the very day after Piero’s departure, all Medici innovations in the republic’s constitution were dismantled, all Medici enemies exiled since 1434 were recalled; the hated new heavyweight coin for customs taxes was abolished, and, of course, the Medici bank and all its assets were confiscated. To have moved so fast, there must have been those who couldn’t wait to see the back of the family. A month later, Savonarola declared Jesus Christ king of Florence, as if the Savior himself had pushed over the bank’s changing tables.
It wouldn’t last. In 1498, accused of heresy by the official Church and abandoned by much of his congregation, Savonarola was burned at the stake. Fundamentalism is one thing in the pulpit, another in government. And fourteen years later, having finally infiltrated to the highest levels the institution that had been the source of so much of their wealth, the Medici returned to Florence on the back of Vatican power and overturned the republic. In 1529, they were officially recognized as dukes and ready to serve the Counter-Reformation in that long war of retrenchment that would keep an imitation of the older world—complete with those two complicit conundrums, the divine right of princes and the temporal power of the Church—in suffocating place for more than three hundred years.
These new Medici of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ordered monuments of tax-funded magnificence to establish an aura of legitimacy. All the fruitful ambiguity that had characterized old Cosimo’s commissions, all the urgent tension between money and metaphysics, was gone. With the grand dukes of Tuscany, we are in the world of larger-than-life equestrian statues, flattering official portraits, imagined military glory, and extravagant, though always breathtaking mannerism. In such circumstances, there was no need to revive the bank. In fact, the sooner people forgot that the family had ever sat behind their tables in via Porta Rossa, copying down the details of dubious exchange deals, the better.
