9

Luxury lodgings and entertaining one’s mistress were intrinsic to a princely lifestyle, but there were serious matters of government to address in Florence too. In later histories Alessandro de’ Medici would take the blame for his regime’s tyranny, but even before his arrival in Florence his ministers were convinced that only severe repression would make the city safe for the Medici party. Francesco Vettori, one of the most senior of Florence’s statesmen, complained that Fra Benedetto da Foiano, a republican leader detained in Rome, was not facing tough enough questioning. The lax treatment of men such as Fra Benedetto set a ‘bad example’. Francesco Guicciardini, another important figure in government, was accused of particular cruelty in his dealings with opponents.¹ Back in 1527, many of the men who ended up in Alessandro’s government – Guicciardini, Vettori, Strozzi and Valori – had flirted with the republic. But like most of the ottimati they had fallen under suspicion for their historic ties to the Medici, had left Florence and had broken with the republican regime before the start of the siege. This tension between the elite and the more radical faction of the republicans (the popolari) was to haunt those who opposed Medici rule.²

The key sanction against political opponents was exile. This was not so straightforward as a simple expulsion from the city. Those deemed enemies of the new regime were constrained to live within a certain distance of a certain town or city, often one long distant from Florence. In Italian they were called confinati: literally, ‘the confined ones’. If they broke their confinement, they risked losing all their property in the city of Florence. One step up from the confinati were the banditi, those who had been declared rebels and their property forfeit.³ Florence, a city of bankers, targeted financial interests to ensure compliance. (Most of those sentences had been handed down in late 1530, when Alessandro was away in Flanders, allowing him to deny any charge that he was taking personal revenge on his family’s opponents.) Other measures were used to avoid the removal of resources from Florence. Although it had been agreed after the siege that anyone who wished to leave could do so freely, this offer was quickly revoked. The new regime was not prepared to risk a collapse in population, and with it a collapse in the economy. Nor was it prepared to risk an organised campaign by the exiles. They were deliberately confined in different parts of Italy, so as to make it harder for them to meet.⁴ The satirist Pietro Aretino joked that on the gates of Florence were written the words ‘Abandon hope all ye who leave.’⁵

Despite the sentences of exile imposed on many opponents there was a collective nervousness in Florence. Entry to and exit from the city was regulated. Men needed permission to leave the city at night, to take post horses. After long years of war, suspicion of spies was rife. In 1527, Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo had fretted that his letters had been intercepted: some opened, some stolen.⁶ This was commonplace enough. Information was a saleable commodity. As a consequence, sensitive messages were rarely written down. Wherever possible, they were sent orally by messenger; where not, secretaries cultivated vagueness. Rather than spell out details of a problem, they referred to ‘that business with the countess’ or ‘this issue with the preacher’.

Alessandro and his ministers set up intelligence networks to protect their regime. The accounts of the Otto di Guardia, the committee responsible for internal security, show numerous payments to ‘secret spies’. Some received just a florin or two for their services; others, commissioned to work outside the Florentine dominion, were paid much greater sums, over a hundred florins in some cases.⁷ In his dialogue on the Duke’s actions, Alessandro Ceccherelli tells the story of how, shortly after taking control of Florence, Alessandro had richly rewarded a spy. This man pretended to take the side of the popolari, and reported back on their activities in the city. When he was denounced publicly, he went to Alessandro, complaining that he’d been called a spy, and demanding that Alessandro set things right. Alessandro replied: ‘Don’t be surprised: the man who called you that is a man who calls a cat a cat, who tells it like it is.’ Hearing the Duke’s response, the spy left, doubly mocked.⁸ The moral of the tale: he who betrays his friends risks betrayal.

The political ruthlessness of Alessandro’s regime was the kind of behaviour that might later be labelled ‘Machiavellian’. The most original thinker of Renaissance Florence had died in 1527, but the ghost of Niccolò Machiavelli haunts Alessandro’s story. He had been a civil servant and diplomat in the republican government after 1498, while the Medici were in exile. Imprisoned, tortured and then exiled himself after their return in 1512, he had sought to regain their favour. He planned to dedicate his book The Prince to Giuliano de’ Medici, then seeking a state to rule in Italy. (The Prince is a complex text that seemed to advise princes even while undermining the practice of princely government.)⁹ For several years, especially via his friend Francesco Vettori, Machiavelli sought a return to government. Finally, after Alessandro’s father, Duke Lorenzo’s death in 1519, the Medici sought Machiavelli’s opinion on the government of Florence. In 1520 Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici commissioned him to write the city’s history, and in 1526, as war loomed, he sought his advice on Florence’s defences.¹⁰ It was not until the summer of 1531, however, four years after Machiavelli’s death, that Cardinal Giulio, now Pope Clement VII, granted permission to Antonio Blado, a printer in Rome, to publish three works by Machiavelli: the Florentine Histories, the Discourses on Livy and The Prince. The last of these three had eventually been dedicated to Duke Lorenzo de’ Medici, but the printed edition had a new dedicatee: Filippo Strozzi. In a changing political world, there was evidently a market for new ideas. Blado’s edition sold well, and the Giunti printing house in Florence saw a lucrative business opportunity. Bernardo Giunti applied to the Pope for a licence to print the book himself, citing the backing of Machiavelli’s heirs (which Blado had not secured) and insisting that, as Blado’s print run had all but sold out, the Pope could grant him exclusive rights to the works for ten years without compromising his rival’s profits. On 20 December 1531, Clement granted Giunti that privilege.¹¹ Even the story of this book’s publication contains a lesson on the reach of papal power.

In September 1531, Alessandro went to Rome for his first meeting with Pope Clement since he had left Italy for the Imperial court the previous year. His visit was in large part aimed at seeking his great-uncle’s advice on managing Florence and working with its leading politicians. Much had changed in their relationship. Though Clement was still the family patriarch, Alessandro now had independent access to the Florentine treasury, and he could wield his new personal relationship with Charles V.

Alessandro had meetings at least once a day, sometimes twice, with the Pope. They discussed the merits of a new citadel in Florence, to house a personal guard for Alessandro. In 1522, trying to lead the government of Florence, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, as he then was, had survived a republican conspiracy to assassinate him, uncovered when the plotters’ correspondence was intercepted. Pope Clement knew well the dangers of Florentine politics. His advisers, however, were not all convinced that a fortress was the answer.¹²

Three years since he had returned to Rome after his exile in Orvieto and Viterbo, tensions remained between the Pope and the city. Part of the reason was that the Roman countryside had not fully recovered from the recent war and harvests were poor. Another, though, was Clement’s determination to pursue his family interests in Florence – whatever the cost to the people of Rome – embodied in the person of Alessandro. Verse six of a satirical poem on the seven joys of the Church, posted on the Pasquino statue, spells out the source of the tension:

Hail, pure and immaculate dove

Example to all of patience

You’re starving Rome like never before

To keep a mule in Florence;

You’ve failed in your duty to feed us

But Strozzi will do penance

What he should sell for six goes for twenty

This sixth joy is for the discontented.¹³

The avaricious Strozzi here was Filippo, banker to the Medici, husband of Alessandro’s aunt Clarice. The ‘mule’ was Alessandro, the bastard whose costly campaign to rule Florence was pushing up taxes in Rome.

Alessandro arrived around sunset on 14 September. He made an informal entry, without the grand ceremony that a duke arriving in Rome might demand, but nonetheless with ‘many gentlemen and priests’. A large entourage was a good demonstration of power, and the Mantuan ambassador reported that his ‘beautiful and flowering’ company was welcomed with ‘happiness and good cheer’.¹⁴ There was always an impressive welcome for distinguished visitors to Rome. It was known as the ‘theatre of the world’ for good reason.

The court of Rome watched carefully for clues to the state of Alessandro’s relationship with Ippolito. Ippolito had made some effort not to greet his cousin at all, but it could not be avoided. They made a pretence of friendship as they dined together on the Tiber Island but observers were sure that their ‘exterior caresses’ hid an absence of affection. There was ‘hatred and malevolence’ between them, wrote the Mantuan envoy. Clement was increasingly unhappy about Ippolito’s behaviour, but the Cardinal did little to allay his uncle’s fears. Facing down his criticism, on one occasion Ippolito, ‘almost as if he didn’t care, or was unable to do otherwise, raised his head and shrugged his shoulders.’ On the 17th they dined together again, this time in the company of Clement, Catherine and John Stewart, duke of Albany, a relative of Catherine de’ Medici’s mother Madeleine. Besides Alessandro’s role in Florence – which Ippolito saw as rightfully his – there was a vicious squabble over money. Alessandro had an income of some 20,000 ducats from Florence, and Ippolito wanted a share. Clement brokered a deal in which the money would be split equally between them, but Alessandro, confident in his new relationship with Charles V, had his eye on another source of income. He hoped to become Captain-General of the Church: head of the papal armies.¹⁵ It was a role that could bring not only wealth but princely honour.

The other rulers of Italy saw Alessandro very much as Clement’s man. If they had a deal to make, they went to Rome, not to Florence. The city’s real business was done at the Curia. Nonetheless, Alessandro could and did lobby for his own interests – and those of his most powerful backer. He asked for a cardinal’s hat for Nicolas Schömberg, archbishop of Capua, a German cleric who was currently papal representative in Florence. Clement pronounced himself in favour, though he never delivered and Schömberg had to wait for his successor as pope to grant the promotion.¹⁶ Alessandro and Clement, meanwhile, had arranged for the departure of two Florentine ambassadors to the Emperor. Palla Rucellai and Francesco Valori went on behalf of the city to welcome Charles’ appointment of Alessandro as the city’s governor. Between the formalities, they had a message for Charles: with the Medici in power, he would have a friendlier Florence than with any popular government.¹⁷

Around 19 October, Alessandro left Rome and headed back to Florence. His ministers were busy with plans for reform of the monte di pietà, Florence’s public pawnbroker and a key source of credit in the city. Otherwise things were quiet. Ippolito headed south, to Naples and Ischia. Some said he sought a warmer climate and the company of women. Giulia Gonzaga, widowed at fifteen, celebrated for her beauty and learning, and once touted as Ippolito’s bride, became his mistress. Others, more suspicious, thought he had his eye on a deal with Cardinal Colonna: he would back Colonna as the next pope, if Colonna would back him over Florence.¹⁸

When Alessandro had come to Poggio a Caiano as a teenager, in 1525, it had been to live at a discreet distance from the city while his cousin Ippolito learned to govern. When he came back in 1531, the Poggio villa became his retreat from city life and political business. It was one of several Medici properties in the hills that ringed Florence. There were other country houses at Careggi, La Petraia and Castello. The white facade of the villa at Poggio faced south, beneath its red-tiled roof. Half a dozen windows spanned the upper floor. Above the colonnaded entrance with its marble floor was a blue-and-white ceramic frieze, after the same fashion as the tiles in the Palazzo Medici study. It showed an allegory of time, a great serpent consuming its own tail. Time and its passing had been a fascination for the learned men of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s court some fifty years before. Images of renewal and regeneration underlined the continuity of the dynasty.¹⁹ Down the straight steps at Poggio, there were formal gardens, an orchard and stables. In the near distance were small hills. There was a view of the mountains, a welcome breeze, calm, stillness, perhaps the chatter of cicadas away from the heat and bustle of the city.

The interior of the villa was a work in progress. In the Hall of Leo X, the family arms were displayed on the ceiling. As yet it had only two of its four planned large frescoes. One, by Franciabigio, depicted the return of the Roman politician Cicero from exile during the time of Julius Caesar, a reference to the return of Cosimo the Elder to Florence in 1434. Since then the Medici had been exiled twice more, in 1494 and 1527, and twice they had returned. The second fresco, by Andrea del Sarto, showed Julius Caesar receiving tribute from Egypt, a reference to gifts sent to Lorenzo the Magnificent by the Sultan of Egypt: a parrot, a goat, a monkey, a giraffe. Jacopo da Pontormo had contributed a fresco for a lunette. It showed the story of Vertumnus and Pomona, a tale from Ovid in which the god of seasons tricked his way into the orchard of the young woman in order to seduce her.²⁰

For Alessandro, the hunting grounds were Poggio’s main attraction. As ever, he sought out the best stock. He asked Giovanni Borromei, the duke of Mantua’s agent, if he could get his hands on some pheasants. They proved to be out of season, but in the meantime the Duke promised to send Alessandro a couple of puppies from the next litter. Besides game birds and hunting dogs they exchanged sparrowhawks, peregrine falcons, a Hungarian horse, their qualities debated in pages of letters between the two courts. Alessandro even had a silver basin made to hold the bait for his falcons. Others were less sanguine about Alessandro’s habits. ‘The Duke attends to his hunting,’ wrote Luigi Guicciardini, an ally, if sometimes a reluctant one, of the Medici, ‘and works little.’²¹ An epitaph for Alessandro’s favourite hunting dog by the poet Francesco Berni hinted at a link between the dog’s vicious character and its master’s:

Here lies buried in this dark hole

A rebel traitor dirty dog

He was Spite, and called Love

There was naught good about him –

He was the Duke’s dog.²²

Though Luigi Guicciardini insinuated that Alessandro was lazy, he acknowledged too that the Duke had political ambitions. Luigi and his younger brother Francesco (the historian and political theorist) were important figures in the Florentine government. They had held numerous offices under the Medici. Luigi had been made commissar of Pisa in 1530, while Francesco had been appointed governor of Bologna, second city of the Papal States, an office in the gift of Clement VII. In November 1531 Luigi wrote to his brother with a long update on Florentine affairs. Alessandro was beginning to make his own political decisions, he reported. He had rejected Clement’s preferred choice of ambassador to Rome in favour of Benedetto Buondelmonti. It was not the most significant of matters, but it was a small marker of independence.

The matter of Raffaello Girolami, however, was more concerning. Girolami, the most prominent of the regime’s prisoners, was still causing difficulties. He had been transferred to the fortress in Pisa, but Ferrante Gonzaga, the Imperial military commander, continued to offer him his influential support. He had even convinced Clement to give Girolami the freedom to come and go as he liked within the castle walls (with a bond of 20,000 ducats as surety against any plotting against the current government or Clement himself). ‘This was no way to put fear into enemies,’ wrote Luigi, and he worried that Clement would do the same for others. ‘If you don’t govern states with the same rigour and rules as those who’ve held their states long-term,’ he wrote, ‘you’re bound to ruin them. Too much pity is harmful: it can destroy you.’ As far as he could tell, Alessandro had not been pleased with the Girolami decision, ‘but His Excellency has patience yet.’ Luigi blamed others of Alessandro’s ministers for the move: Nicolas Schömberg and Ottaviano de’ Medici. ‘Whoever governs a state like this one, and wants to govern it well, must court fortune, just like its other partisans: otherwise he falls into error, especially when he has to deal with desperate souls like our enemies.’ Piety, justice and reason had not won over enemies in the past: there was no reason to think they would in the future.²³

Yet if Alessandro’s ministers were dismissive of his hunting, it was quite de rigueur for a European prince, the ‘true pastime of great lords’. Half a century before, in the days of Lorenzo the Magnificent, hunting had been a patrician pursuit. One of Lorenzo’s most famous poems, ‘The Partridge Hunt’, conveyed its pleasures: the dawn start, the falconers’ banter, the beauty of the countryside. But now, in wartime, the hunt had acquired a different, military value. In The Prince, Machiavelli wrote of the importance of hunting as training for war: ‘Besides keeping his soldiers well disciplined and trained, [the prince] must always be out hunting, and must accustom his body to hardships in this manner.’²⁴ The point of hunting was both to learn the shape of his own territory and to understand better how quickly to grasp the lie of the land in another’s. Ippolito de’ Medici had also written on the links between hunting and warfare. In his Exhortation to Hunt he highlighted the parallels between the dextrous hunter and the diligent soldier. ‘Good hunters,’ he wrote, ‘know as soon as they arrive in a place how that plain lies, how that mountain rises, where those valleys lead, where one crosses that river, which roads are shorter, which easier to ride, things that for the most part – no less than other virtues of the captain – are profitable in times of war.’ The hunter’s mind and body were important too: he should have ‘a burning soul, be young in years, and dry and robust in person, so that he’s able to rise three or four hours before daybreak to ride.’ Conquering injury, thirst, hunger and exhaustion were an ‘honourable victory’ for the hunter.²⁵ Alessandro’s hunting was not just a matter of pleasure or escapism from political duties. It was part of becoming a prince.

But however appealing country life might be to Alessandro, the dangers of the city were constant. He surrounded himself with guards. According to Benedetto Varchi, the Duke never went out without protective clothing.²⁶