Prologue

         ON APRIL 26, 1478, during Ascension Sunday Mass, Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother, Giuliano, the young leaders of the Florentine city-state, were attacked in the Duomo. Giuliano suffered nineteen stab wounds and died instantly. Lorenzo, though injured, managed to escape. The Florentine mob, faithful to the Medici, reacted violently and slaughtered all the killers they could put their hands on.

This brazen attack, one of the most infamous and bloodiest plots of the Italian Renaissance, has come to be known as the Pazzi conspiracy. While historians have long been aware of the plot’s broad outline, its far-ranging significance has not been entirely understood. And the truth behind its origins has remained elusive. As its name suggests, the plot has been considered the outgrowth of a family feud between the powerful Medici and the Pazzi, a rival merchant family aiming to replace them as the rulers of Florence and bankers to the pope.

It turns out that this is only a part of the story. One would think this period had already revealed most of its secrets, but in the summer of 2001 I had the good fortune of coming across one of its darkest ones: I found and deciphered a coded letter that exposed hitherto unknown but essential information about the Pazzi conspiracy. The discovery was that Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1422–1482), portrayed for centuries as the “Light of Italy” and the humanist friend of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492), was the hidden schemer behind the 1478 conspiracy to eliminate both him and his brother.

The discovery—and decoding—of this forgotten letter radically changed the perception of a turning point in Italian history. Montefeltro’s letter, written two months before the attack, revealed that the complicated plot ranged far and wide, much more so than had been previously thought. This book tells the full story behind the conspiracy and its repercussions over six tumultuous years, from December 1476 to September 1482. It is a partly old, partly new story, which has never before been told in its entirety. It is one of friendship and betrayal, religious power and moral corruption, political struggle and artistic vendetta.

At the heart of the story, of course, lie the Medici, the family of patrons of arts, poets, politicians, merchant princes, and popes. Had Lorenzo not survived the 1478 attack, it is possible that Michelangelo’s talent might have gone unnoticed. Nor would some of the most prized paintings, sculptures, and buildings of Western civilization have been commissioned. And two of Lorenzo’s family members would never have ascended to the papacy. We tend to think of Lorenzo as the man he was at the peak of his career, forgetting how hard it was for him to achieve the reputation of “Magnificent.”

The Duke of Urbino, famously painted in profile by Piero della Francesca, lends his name to the title of this book because of his pivotal role in the Pazzi conspiracy. Like the other Renaissance men readers will meet here, he is a man of many dimensions, despite the portrait’s depicting only one side of his face. He was a mercenary captain, brilliant student of the classics, and a generous patron of the arts, but he also had a dark side, which has come to light to its full extent with the cracking of his coded letter.

The third man at the center of this story is the reason I was able to decode Montefeltro’s letter. Born in Pavia, near Milan, almost five hundred years after the Pazzi conspiracy, I was always intrigued by the story of my distant ancestor, Cicco Simonetta (1410–1480), who served the powerful Sforza family for nearly half a century, first as a secretary, later as regent of the Milanese duchy. Cicco, also close to the Duke of Urbino, wrote the code book that allowed me to decipher the Montefeltro letter when I found it in a family archive in Urbino. (For more details on the discovery, see the Afterword.)

Of course there are a host of other characters, many of whose names will at first be unfamiliar. The story takes the reader on a tour of Renaissance Italy, a patchwork of city-states rather than a united nation. Each city-state was controlled, with varying degrees of tyranny, by one family dynasty: there were the Sforza in Milan and the surrounding Lombardy region, the Medici in Florence and a large chunk of Tuscany, the Aragon in Naples and the whole southern tip—all major states. The republic of Venice was an oligarchy ruled by rich merchant and noble families. And of course there was Rome, under the eternal and ever-changing aegis of the popes’ families. Among the minor states, the ruling dynasties were the Montefeltro in Urbino, the Malatesta in Rimini, the Este in Ferrara, the Gonzaga in Mantua. Leaders of these last four, given the relatively insignificant size of their territories, were regularly employed as mercenary captains, or condottieri, by the richer powers. The system of condotte, or hiring contracts, safeguarded the political balance by preventing the ambitions harbored by these captains from becoming real threats. The Italian peninsula thus remained in a fragile peace, with the system guaranteeing that no single state could overcome the rest.

In December 1476 a sudden event occurred that tipped the balance of power. The assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan and strongest ally of the Medici, set the stage for years of political plotting and counterplotting. The first part of the book investigates the unfolding machinations and shifting alliances that began with Galeazzo’s murder and led up to the attack against the Medici. With his death, the balance of power could be reestablished only by diplomatic compromise—or by violent means.

The Montefeltro Conspiracy also shows how majestic works of art and petty Renaissance politics are crucially intertwined. In fact, the last chapter focuses on the Sistine Chapel, the major icon of Renaissance Italy. When people walk into the chapel, they are usually overwhelmed by the powerful ceiling with the Creation and by the terrifying altar wall with the Last Judgment. These two Michelangelo masterpieces absorb most of the attention of the viewers, who only later turn their eyes to the frescoed walls, with the cycles of the Lives of Moses and Jesus, painted by earlier masters such as Sandro Botticelli.

The Sistine Chapel was built by Pope Sixtus IV, born Francesco della Rovere—one of the antiheroes of this conspiratorial tale—who had it obsessively decorated with the symbol of his family coat of arms: an oak tree on a gold and green background. This pope’s portrait was eventually to be erased in an act of Medici revenge.

Any reader of this book will face one key question: What is history to us? We live in a world of constant news, made ephemeral and irrelevant by its continuous flow. Is not this information age enough to keep us busy? The plots and wars of the Renaissance pale in comparison with the ones fought today. In the twenty-first century, technology has multiplied by a thousandfold the possibility of mass murder. Back in the fifteenth century, the only way to get rid of an enemy was face to face, by knife or other blade, or by poison.

Still, the human mind works the same way now as it did then. Murdering at a distance is possible by arming someone else and pretending not to know about it. Befriending your victims, sneaking behind their backs, checking whether they are wearing body armor—these are some of the most cowardly acts of violence. The poet Dante (1265–1321) knew that very well, for he considered violent traitors to be the worst sinners, and he placed them in the pits of his Inferno (Canto XXVII). An ancestor of Federico da Montefeltro, Guido (1220–1298), was among them. A fragment of the speech Dante puts in his mouth illustrates a naked philosophy of deception and death:

Mentre ch’io forma fui d’ossa e di polpe

che la madre mi dié, l’opere mie

non furon leonine, ma di volpe.

Li accorgimenti e le coperte vie

io seppi tutte, e sì menai lor arte,

ch’al fine de la terra il suono uscie.

While I was still mere flesh and bones

My mother gave to me, the deeds I did

Were not those of a lion, but of a fox.

The machinations and the covert ways

I knew them all, and was so skilled in them

My fame rang out to the ends of earth.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was only nine years old in 1478. He witnessed all the violence perpetrated in the streets of Florence as a result of the Pazzi conspiracy and probably remembered it when, in The Prince (1513), he recommended that “since it is necessary for a prince to know well how to use the beast, from among the beasts he should choose the fox and the lion.” These two animals embody fraud and force, respectively, the key ingredients for the ruthless ruler.

While working on this book, I have kept Dante’s verses and Machiavelli’s words well in mind. Writing the story of a centuries-old conspiracy is paradoxical since a crucial aim of the plotters was to remain covert, to destroy evidence that would link them to violent actions, in an attempt to avoid present danger and posthumous blame. Nonetheless, this story, and the history in which it finds its roots, is entirely true and astonishingly well documented. And the fame of its heroes still rings out “to the ends of earth.”

         Opening page of Dante’s Inferno, ca. 1478, from the Montefeltro Library. The copyist/calligrapher of the text was Matteo Contugi, a spy against Federico.