Itemising the Medici wardrobe in 1537, after Alessandro’s assassination, the wardrobe master noted that the Duke had owned ‘plenty’ of mail. Alessandro’s doublets were reinforced with a fine chain mail known as gazarina. In April 1532 alone the master of the wardrobe took custody of a mail shirt, a jacket, and collars adorned with black and grey velvet. Another collar was decorated with silver chains and lined with red satin. Alessandro’s wardrobe was managed by one Pietro Monferrati da Lucca, nicknamed Pretino, the ‘little priest’.1 It held not only Alessandro’s clothing but items for his courtiers, as well as being a storage facility for textiles and other valuables. Pretino monitored the transfer of items from the store to Alessandro’s courtiers and in particular to his chamberlain, Girolamo da Correggio. He issued lengths of fabric to the Duke’s tailor to be made up into new clothes in the latest styles. This was a post that carried with it considerable responsibility. The rich velvets, silks and satins that clothed the Duke and his courtiers were expensive commodities. When Agostino, Alessandro’s tailor, came to pick up fabric, he had to sign it out, noting the length in Pretino’s record book.
More generally, Pretino’s book records the numerous purchases and commissions of items for the Duke’s use, and offers a window onto the luxurious world of Alessandro’s court. It details not only clothes and fabrics but other items for the household: in March 1532 the chamberlain handed over for safekeeping forty-nine taffeta standards, in multiple colours, and a swordstick decorated with the arms of Pope and Duke. Weapons feature regularly in these wardrobe accounts. Alessandro owned numerous stioppi: matchlock handguns, most imported from Germany, Imperial territory. (Firearms were not yet accurate at long range – although, as Cellini had discovered, they could be lethal close up – but the new matchlock mechanism allowed the gun to be held steady with both hands when firing, which helped to some extent.) One was decorated with gold, as much for showing off as for practical use. There were swords too: some for one hand, some for two, some gilded, some in worked leather scabbards. In February 1532 Federico, a chamberlain, brought in a sword inscribed in French, a Turkish dagger and two stioppi designed for use on horseback. Arms and warfare still defined a prince. When Baldassarre Castiglione had written his book on the courtier, published just a few years before, despite his emphasis on the courtier’s literary and artistic accomplishments he had made clear that ‘the first and true profession of the courtier must be that of arms.’2
Alessandro made regular gifts of weapons, too: a new German stioppo went to the lord of Monterotondo, father of his courtier Valerio Orsini. Tomaso da Castello got a new sword blade, Captain Fabrizio Maremano a pair of arquebuses and Captain Rosa da Viccio a stioppo.3 The Battle of Pavia – the stunning victory for the Imperial troops at which they had taken the king of France hostage – was said to be the first battle in which small arms were decisive: it had been fought just seven years before. The fact that Alessandro’s guns were German hinted at the source of his political power. The fact he owned them at all was also a provocation. At the end of the siege one of the new government’s first acts had been to disarm the populace.4 For his courtiers to enjoy such privileged access to weapons surely aroused resentment.
If weapons had both a symbolic and practical purpose, so did many of the other items in the ducal wardrobe. Here were the makings of an aristocratic household, the piecings together of the Medici collection of old. Some of these objects had once belonged to Lorenzo the Magnificent, in the heyday of Medici pre-eminence in Florence. There were eighty-seven pieces of porcelain, large and small. There were eighteen new arras cloths, some depicting historical events, others with a Deposition from the Cross and the image of Our Lady. Two old panel paintings showed the triumphs of Petrarch (there had once been four). There were red silk bedcovers, beds for the stable-hands, seven portraits and seven relief heads of Medici ancestors. There were little pictures of Saint Sebastian, usually shown pierced with arrows, and Jerome, the scholar, often portrayed in his study or removing a thorn from a lion’s paw. There were two globes, one of the earth, one of the heavens, later given away as gifts. There was a lily branch, from the San Giovanni palio, Florence’s annual horse race. For learning and leisure there were seventy-four books in Latin and vernacular, a chess set in agate and jasper, and twenty-five masquerading costumes in purple, yellow, green and grey. There was a marble vase with gold handles, and an ancient stone wine-cooler. There was one white skin of a Levantine goat, one cradle, two gilded coffins.5
On his travels to Rome in the autumn of 1531, Alessandro had arranged for the dispatch of further goods to Florence. His agents sent up a stunning set of jousting gear: silk, satin and taffeta to dress the horses. They sent horse-tack for jennets; half a dozen sets of spurs; dozens of breastplates. There were velvet saddle-covers, velvet caps, more costumes for the masquerade.6 A year later, Pretino recorded further additions to the wardrobe: a silver cup with a cover, decorated with reliefs of foliage and enamel roses, newly restored; two more silver-gilt cups; a little silver clock with bas-reliefs of foliage, possibly German (by the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, artisans could produce clocks small enough to carry on the person or in a bag); a striking sword belt, trimmed with enamel, silver and gold, and a silver-gilt bracelet, adorned with six pearls.7 This is probably far from the total: these items were recorded by mistake in Pretino’s book, crossed out and the entries transferred to another volume which is now lost. The full splendour of Alessandro’s court remains to be imagined.
Observers noted that Florentine fashions were changing. Hooded cloaks fell out of vogue, to be replaced by hats of different types. Hair was no longer worn long, to the shoulders, but instead cut short. Beards came in. Alessandro had short hair, but his portraits show only wisps of facial hair. Breeches were now slashed, their taffeta lining made to show through the cuts, a German fashion. There had long been efforts to regulate clothing in Florence through sumptuary laws, and anxiety about citizens adopting foreign styles. Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, duchess of Urbino, had won praise for dressing all’italiana – Italian style – in her brief months in Florence. Like the guns, the latest changes in fashions hinted at Alessandro’s new diplomatic alliance. They also hinted at a more martial ideal of masculinity in Florence, a product of warfare and siege.8
As the look of the Florentine people changed, the look of the city changed too. Alessandro began to fortify the city and to rebuild the countryside castles around it. With a faltering city economy, the challenge of rebuilding was all the greater, and the weather was not helping. There had been little rain that year. The grain harvest was poor, the grape harvest worse. Now, the authorities had to avoid a situation where failed crops led farmers to abandon their land and migrate to the city. There were walls and streets to restore, roads to mend. As Varchi put it: ‘There’s not a single city, castle, town or village, however great, however small and poor, that hasn’t been sacked and otherwise cruelly damaged – often more than once.’9
Even before Alessandro’s return, measures had been taken to address the problems of flooding in the lowest-lying part of Florence, and to begin relaying the major roads out of the city. During the siege itself the city had been fortified, and some buildings demolished, to improve the chances of defence. Houses and workshops in the area immediately outside the city walls had been razed to the ground on the orders of the city authorities, the better to secure the walls. In October 1531, Florence’s five Procurators for the Fortification of the City and Countryside issued their first by-laws confirming limits on construction close to the walls. One of the first projects to be undertaken was the rebuilding of the bastion at the Porta alla Giustizia (Gate of Justice), at the eastern limit of the city, just north of the River Arno, so called because it was the site for city executions. Alessandro always put security first, wrote Bernardo Segni in his history of Florence. He wanted a secure retreat in times of trouble, where he could defend himself from popular revolt.10 He also owed it to the Emperor to provide suitable defences. This fortress had 160 placements for guns, from small arms to eight large cannons, a sizeable defence.
Besides the rebuilding of Florence, there were other towns to consider. Ready access to the ports of Pisa and Livorno was essential if the city’s economy was to improve, but this cost money. In July 1532, the local authorities in Pisa raised the price of salt by 50 per cent. Taxes on salt – a vital commodity because of its role in preserving meat – were an important component of public revenues in Renaissance Italy. The plan was to use the money to improve the embankments of the Ozzeri canal, and to do works along the road to Florence. But even with the additional salt tax, the lack of money available for such public works soon caused conflict between Florence and the subject cities. In 1532, the Pisan authorities complained that a promised contribution from Florence to the rebuilding of the Ponte a Stagno, a bridge on the post-road between Pisa and Livorno, had not arrived. The Otto di Pratica (the Florentine committee dealing with external affairs) had changed their mind. Citing poor weather that would be bound to increase the cost, and a shortage of money in the city, they wrote: ‘You have to consider that we’re aiming to save as much as possible. Nonetheless, this being a necessary task we consider that it would be worth doing, but at a time when it can be done more easily and at less expense.’11
For Alessandro and his ministers, the priority in Pisa was its fortress, on which in 1533 they spent 8,500 lire (about enough to employ fifty labourers for a year). They invested too in restorations in the border towns of Borgo San Sepolcro, where the captain’s house was restored, and Cortona, where they spent rather less: 1,000 lire.12 Behind its castle walls and chain-mail jackets, this was a regime that knew it had enemies, and that knew the risk of invasion.