Afterword

NOT IN MY WILDEST DREAMS DID I IMAGINE THAT COMING TO the United States would lead me to solve one of Italy’s oldest and bloodiest mysteries. When I arrived at Yale in 1995 to begin work toward my PhD, I decided to enroll in a paleography class in order to learn how to read ancient handwriting. When I met the professor, Vincent Ilardi, a distinguished historian of the Sforzas, he immediately suggested that I write a biography of my ancestor Cicco Simonetta, the longtime chancellor of the ruling Milanese family. But how could I do research on this obscure character and remote period while so far away from the original sources?

This question was soon, and amazingly, answered. Professor Ilardi had in fact built a huge microfilm collection of diplomatic documents of the Sforza period (1450–1500), which bears Ilardi’s name. It comprises about two thousand reels and about two million documents, all stored in the subbasement of Sterling Memorial Library. This extensive collection of dispatches allowed me to enter into the daily life of my ancestor, one of the major but overlooked political figures of the Italian Renaissance.

In 1998, while investigating the political relationship between Cicco Simonetta and Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, after the assassination of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1476, I came across some enigmatic letters written by Federico in the aftermath of the 1478 Pazzi conspiracy. Reading these letters piqued my interest, and I soon began to look into the intriguing possibility of Federico’s personal and active involvement in the infamous attempt to kill the two Medici brothers.

In a biography of the duke written by Walter Tommasoli in 1978, I noticed a reference to a private archive in Urbino where some ducal family letters of the late 1400s had been preserved. For about three years I tried to gain access to the archive, which holds the Ubaldini family papers and a few documents from the Montefeltro family, to which they were related. The curator kept telling me that these documents did not exist. Finally, in June 2001, when that curator was no longer in charge, I was granted permission to visit the archive. There I found a well-preserved batch of letters from the years 1478–1480. Some were addressed to Ottaviano Ubaldini, Federico da Montefeltro’s half brother, but one (the longest of them all) was an original dispatch sent by the duke himself to his ambassadors in Rome. The date, February 14, 1478, made me think that this could be the smoking gun I was looking for, but the letter was heavily ciphered and I had no way of knowing its contents. I received permission from Countess Luisa Ubaldini to copy the document, and I brought the copy back with me to the United States.

I decided to use Cicco Simonetta’s Rules for Extracting Ciphered Letters Without a Sample, his tract about the art of code-breaking. I did not know before I went to the United States that this existed, that it was originally part of Cicco’s Diaries, or that the four pages on which it was written had been stolen from Milan and brought to Paris under Napoleon. I retrieved the autograph of the Rules in the Ilardi Collection and, as I describe in chapter 5, by following Cicco’s tips I was able to start the process of decoding. After a few weeks of hard work I finally managed to crack the code. It was a truly exciting breakthrough, which confirmed all of the indirect evidence I had been collecting and proved Federico da Montefeltro’s devious involvement in the Pazzi conspiracy.

I continued to assemble many other documents and finally in 2003 I published my findings in an article in Archivio Storico Italiano (the oldest academic journal in Italy, founded in 1888). To my surprise, there were no immediate reactions among scholars. But to my even greater astonishment, the media did respond. In early 2004 the Russian Pravda, then the Italian La Repubblica—with a full-page article by New York correspondent Alberto Flores d’Arcais—and later many other international newspapers reported the discovery. In February 2005, the History Channel released a documentary on a simplified version of the decoding story.

I decided to write this book in order to tell my own, fuller version of the Pazzi conspiracy. Two recent books, April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici (2004) by Lauro Martines and Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (2005) by Tim Parks, deal with some of the same historical characters, but these authors have very different approaches and focuses from mine: the first gathers what is already known about the plot, from the perspective of the Pazzi family, but does not look at it through the lens of new evidence; the second retells the tale of the rise and fall of the Medici wealth. My intention has been to fill in the blanks of the picture, adding new archival discoveries and new interpretations. I have tried to reconstruct as accurately as I could the behind-the-scenes historical truth about two consecutive plots in Italian Renaissance history. I have also hypothesized a connection between the Sistine Chapel and the Pazzi conspiracy that has never before been explored.

It had always struck me as odd that Sandro Botticelli, the quintessential Florentine artist, had been summoned to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV, the most violent foe of the Medici at the time. Botticelli was a client of the Medici who had posthumously portrayed Giuliano de’ Medici and also painted the hanging corpses of the Pazzi plotters on the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio. How could he have accepted the job of decorating the papal chapel without even thinking of his beloved patrons? The last chapter of this book is an attempt to answer that question.

Not everyone will agree with every detail of my interpretation of Botticelli’s works. As a literary scholar and historian, I try to keep my eyes at once on texts and images, and on their original context. If this endless exercise in critical thinking has failed somewhere, my consolation is that it will be improved by the next discovery.