It was the eve of Epiphany, 1537, a night of the most dazzling moonlight. Alessandro de’ Medici, duke of Florence, had an assignation. His cousin Lorenzino, little Lorenzo, had promised him the favours of Caterina de’ Ginori.
Alessandro’s enemies called Lorenzino his pimp.
Caterina, it was said, was beautiful and virtuous. She was married, but tonight her husband was many miles to the south in Naples on business. Lorenzino had assured Alessandro, lord of the city, that Caterina could be persuaded.
After dinner that night, Lorenzino had explained his plan. Caterina lived on the narrow street just behind the Palazzo Medici. Alessandro should make excuses to his friends and head for the privacy of Lorenzino’s palace apartment rather than his own. Lorenzino would bring Caterina in discreetly, by the back door, to protect her reputation.
Clad in a cloak of fine Neapolitan silk, lined with sable, the Duke headed out with four friends. In public he usually wore a doublet lined with fine chain mail to protect himself from any enemy quick with a knife. But there was no need for such precautions on a short walk to meet the pretty Caterina. Arriving in the Piazza di San Marco, just a few minutes away from his home, Alessandro dismissed all his companions except one. His servant l’Unghero was to keep watch on the comings and goings at Lorenzino’s from the Sostegni house across the road. L’Unghero, lazy and familiar with the Duke’s womanising, expected a long wait. He decided not to watch but to take himself off to sleep.
There was a warm fire burning in Lorenzino’s chamber. Alessandro took off his sword and threw himself down on the bed. He too had decided to take a nap.
When Lorenzino came into the room and found his cousin asleep he took Alessandro’s sword and quickly wound the belt around its hilt, so that it could not easily be drawn from its sheath. He placed it carefully by the bolster, crept out of the chamber and closed the door behind him.
Lorenzino’s companion that night was one Piero di Gioannabbate, known by the curious nickname Scoronconcolo, a man of low rank whose ears he had filled with his grievances against a certain unnamed courtier. This courtier, Lorenzino told Scoronconcolo, had cheated him and interfered in his business. Scoronconcolo, who owed Lorenzino favours, had promised to deal with Lorenzino’s tormentor, even to kill him. Even if he were a favourite of the Duke’s. Even if he were Christ himself.
‘My brother,’ said Lorenzino, ‘now is the time; I have shut that enemy of mine in my chamber, and he is asleep.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Scoronconcolo.
When they reached the landing, Lorenzino turned to Scoronconcolo and said: ‘Don’t worry that he’s a friend of the Duke, just make sure you get his hands.’
‘That I’ll do,’ replied his friend, ‘even if he’s the Duke himself.’
‘Are you ready?’ asked Lorenzino cheerfully. ‘He can’t slip through our fingers now. Let’s go.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Scoronconcolo.
Lorenzino tried the latch. The door did not open.
He tried again. This second time, he entered.
‘My lord, are you asleep?’ he asked, and plunged his sword into Alessandro’s stomach.
Alessandro lurched up from the bed and made a dash for the door, seizing a stool to use as a shield, but Scoronconcolo pulled a knife. Slashing down from the left temple, he sliced open the Duke’s left cheek.
Lorenzino pushed Alessandro onto the bed. He used the weight of his own body to force the Duke down. He tried to cover Alessandro’s mouth so he couldn’t scream, but the Duke bit so angrily into his thumb that Lorenzino collapsed beside him.
As the pair grappled, Scoronconcolo drew his sword. Fearful of cutting Lorenzino, he managed only to slash the mattress. Finally he pulled a knife and plunged it into Alessandro’s throat.
It was said that for all the time that Alessandro waited, held down by Lorenzino, for Scoronconcolo to strike, he never wept or pleaded for his life. Nor once did he let go of his cousin’s thumb.
Lorenzino and Scoronconcolo lifted Alessandro’s body from the blood-covered floor, and placed it on the bed. They left it hidden beneath the canopy and went on their way.
The first duke of Florence was dead.1
It was the misfortune of Alessandro de’ Medici to be assassinated twice: first with a sword, then with a pen. Thanks to Lorenzino, and to the many enemies of the Medici family, Alessandro has gone down in history as a tyrant. Not only did Lorenzino murder the Duke, he wrote an eloquent justification of his actions. He found, too, a sympathetic interviewer in Benedetto Varchi, the historian who later prepared an account of Alessandro’s years on the commission of Cosimo I, Alessandro’s successor as duke. ‘I will recount this death (about which there are various tales and reports) with greater truth,’ wrote Varchi, ‘having heard it from Lorenzo himself … and from Scoronconcolo.’2 Although the first reports of Alessandro’s death were matter-of-fact Varchi’s story of Lorenzino’s dramatic tyrannicide grips the imagination.
For centuries after Alessandro’s assassination, it suited both former allies and enemies to make a villain of him. The enemies were mostly sincere in their dislike. And it was convenient for the Medici family that Alessandro could take the blame for the brutal first years of their rule as princes of Florence. Even the friendlier historians of his rule tell a bloody tale, and it is hard to challenge their version of events because the bulk of Alessandro’s papers have disappeared. Perhaps they were lost in the chaos that followed his murder, or perhaps someone decided to destroy the evidence of Alessandro’s crimes. We are left with the partisan commentary of the contemporary historians. Alessandro de’ Medici has unreliable narrators by the dozen. Writing this book, I have sometimes felt that I have been making a compendium of stories, each told by someone with his (and it is usually his) own reasons for telling. In many cases I have only a single source, and cannot check the facts. In general, I have given a little more weight to the contemporary letters of secretaries and diplomats than to the historians writing with hindsight. I have trusted the keeper of the wardrobe a little more again. (A box of masks is either in its place or not, and if cloth of gold went missing there’d be trouble.) Still, I have more doubts and questions than I would like. Even when a writer is sincere, memory can be faulty. To make this book readable I have avoided interrupting the narrative too often with caveats and qualifications, and I encourage readers who are interested in the detail of the historical sources to consult the notes.
The most famous accounts of Alessandro begin with the tales of his wickedness, in all its bloody glory. His murder, wrote his assassin, was ‘a deed incumbent on any good citizen’. He was a tyrant like Nero, Caligula or Phalaris. He was a monster, driven by his ‘innate cruelty and savagery’. What do those words allude to? It has long been said that Alessandro was the son of a Moorish slave, or a ‘half-Negro’ woman.3 Were Lorenzino’s words a racial insult? The answer is not straightforward. Sixteenth-century people thought about the things we now call ‘race’ and ‘class’ in very different ways than we do today. Moors – Muslims from North Africa and Spain – were part of the ethnic-religious picture in sixteenth-century Europe, as were Jews, but other racial categories were only just emerging. The Ottoman Empire, which stretched from eastern Hungary through Turkey and along the coast of North Africa, was an ethnically diverse place. Its rulers had themselves portrayed with pale skin, but there were black Turks too, who sometimes appear in the European depictions of the time. In parts of Europe black saints and the black Magus were a feature of sixteenth-century art, where they pointed to the global reach of Christendom. As European slave-trading in West Africa expanded, black Africans were brought to Italy in increasing numbers: they were stereotyped as uncivilised and inferior.
Yet the modern idea of ‘race’, which emerged with the Atlantic slave trade, is very different from anything that existed in the 1530s. It may be disconcerting to readers who have grown up with today’s labels and categories that we do not find them in Alessandro’s world. Blood and descent were certainly important; positive qualities were associated with the colour white and negative ones with black.4 Yet while in Spanish and Portuguese, the European languages most associated at the time with slave-trading, the word negro had been used to mean a black person since the fifteenth century, elsewhere in sixteenth-century Europe the equivalent words were only just coming into existence. The French noun nègre, meaning a black person, was first recorded in 1516; negro, the Italian equivalent, dates to 1532. When Giulio Landi, an Italian author, discussed the Portuguese colony of Madeira in the 1530s, he made a point of explaining the racial categories used there – Moors, Ethiopians, blacks and mulattoes – to his readers.5 He did not assume they would be familiar. If you went back in time to early sixteenth-century Florence and asked whether any given individual was black or white you would probably get a puzzled look. Adjectives like moro, nero, and negro, variations on ‘black’, were used to refer to dark- or darker-skinned people but did not define a specific ethnicity.6 In the sixteenth century ‘Moor’ was a nickname given to all sorts of people. Among them was Ludovico il Moro – ruler of Milan from 1494 to 1499 – who is not thought to have had African ancestry at all. For mixed-race people the picture is more complex still. The categorisation of people of mixed African and European descent as black – through the ‘one-drop rule’ – was a phenomenon of early twentieth-century America.7 We should not expect to find it in Renaissance Italy. In the Florentine piazza, if you used the word mulatto (which was used to describe Alessandro) a person would understand you but not in straightforwardly racial terms. Mulatto – meaning ‘little mule’ – was a term applied to bastards. It had a connotation of species-mixing: a mule is a cross between a horse and a donkey. But it was not necessarily associated with race. (A more detailed discussion of this issue can be found in the Afterword.)
It was not until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that discussion of Alessandro’s ‘race’ came into its own – and then not in a good way. Scientific racism provided the intellectual backdrop against which historians of the Medici judged Alessandro’s rule. But Alessandro also attracted the attention of scholars seeking to challenge racism. In 1931, in the United States, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, co-founder of the Negro Society for Historical Research and creator of one of the most important collections of sources for African history, wrote an article about him for The Crisis, the magazine of the US-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Still, while the story may have been known in the USA, it was far from visible to me as a traveller to Florence, which I had visited three times before I heard it. When I did, I found it not in the city’s galleries, but in an academic book chapter in the University of London library.8 In the museums of Florence itself there was scanty evidence even for Alessandro’s existence. A few years ago, when I visited the Uffizi Gallery, his portrait was not on display. To prove to friends that he was real, I was reduced to apologetic leafing through old exhibition catalogues in the gallery bookshop. A friend who had spent a decade studying sociology at the University of Florence knew nothing of the tales of Alessandro’s ethnicity. Nor did my Florentine landlady, who had lived in the city for years. She smelt a conspiracy. In the past ten years or so, there has been greater acknowledgement – both in academic literature and in the art world – of the likelihood that Alessandro was mixed-race.9 Yet he is still very far from a well-known historical figure.
Probably the only black person in the western popular imagination to exist before the seventeenth century is fictional. Shakespeare’s Othello is a timeless character, often transplanted out of the sixteenth-century context, but the text gives us important clues to how Europeans saw Africans in this period, not least the ambiguity of their language. Shakespeare calls Othello ‘the Moor of Venice’, but we cannot tell from the text whether Othello is meant to be from North Africa, or further south. The insults directed at Othello sometimes point in the direction of Arab ancestry (‘Barbary horse’), and sometimes to sub-Saharan origins (‘old black ram’, ‘thick lips’, ‘sooty bosom’ and simply ‘black Othello’). Different productions make different choices. Othello is a former slave, captured by his enemies then redeemed. When Brabantio says angrily that if Othello gets away with marrying Desdemona ‘bondslaves and pagans shall our statesmen be’ his concern is with Othello’s status and (supposed) lack of Christian religion. Othello himself emphasises his ‘free condition’. The writers who insult Alessandro do so by saying that his mother was a peasant and a former slave. Yet, as we will discover, perhaps a more telling parallel between Othello and the story of the Medici lies in Shakespeare’s portrayal of a man – Iago – who like Alessandro’s cousin and rival for the dukedom of Florence Ippolito de’ Medici believes he has been passed over for a promotion he deserves.
For a very long time, the city of Florence has been mythologised as the symbolic heart of European culture, the cradle of western civilisation. It abounds with the images and stories of great men: Dante, Botticelli, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo, Galileo. The Renaissance was the first period – so the traditional history went – in which we could truly speak of the great individual, of the ‘Renaissance man’. Alessandro’s story reminds us that Renaissance men may not always have been white. Alongside the art and poetry, the scheming, intriguing, bloody side of Renaissance politics is well known too. As Orson Welles famously riffed, ‘In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.’ To terror, murder, and bloodshed, Alessandro’s story adds slavery and the seeds of racism. That said, I have tried to tell it on its own terms, and to avoid imposing a modern mentality of ‘race’ that he and his contemporaries did not share.
Alessandro’s story is a challenge to the way we think of the Renaissance and Florence. His is an exceptional life, and that is why we know so much about it. It is not always a heroic life. Alessandro de’ Medici is not a fine example of princely virtue. He may well have been responsible for murder. But you could say much the same of many contemporaries in European politics. For centuries, Alessandro’s story has been distorted and overlooked. There is good reason to rediscover it. It would be no bad thing to hang his portrait a little more prominently on Florence’s gallery walls.