When Lorenzo was born on January 1, 1449, the astrologers did not fail to note that he was a Capricorn - endowed by the stars, or so they must have reported to his father and grandfather, with strength, determination, and physical endurance. In truth, Lorenzo had more than that. As a child and young man, he had everything.

He was blessed with a strong, athletic body, intelligence, and a wide range of talents. He had all the money he could want, and he had a large, loving, and attentive family. To such a young man, nothing could seem impossible. He had the greatest asset anyone can have: He grew up believing that there were no limits to what he might achieve.

All of Lorenzo’s natural abilities were developed to a point of excellence by the best schooling the Renaissance could provide. His education began, as does any child’s, in his home, and his first lesson was the importance of the family itself. The primary source of power in Italy, Luigi Barzini, Jr., has written, “is the family. The Italian family is a stronghold in a hostile land: Within its walls and among its members, the individual finds consolation, help, advice, provisions, loans, weapons, allies, and accomplices to aid him in his pursuits. . . . Scholars have always recognized the Italian family as the only fundamental institution in the country . . .”

The point cannot be overemphasized. All businesses in Italy were family businesses; all political parties, alliances of families; and alliances, domestic and foreign, cemented by marriage. Again, Barzini: “The family extracts everybody’s first loyalty. It must be defended, enriched, made powerful, respected, and feared by the use of whatever means are necessary . . . Nobody should defy it with impunity. Its honor must not be tarnished. All wrongs done to it must be avenged. All enemies must be kept at bay, and the dangerous ones deprived of power or destroyed. Every member is duty-bound to do all he can for its welfare, give his property if needed, and, sometimes, when it is absolutely inevitable, sacrifice his life. Men have spent their last penny to save a relative from bankruptcy.”

Lorenzo learned all of this first, and he learned it well. The sanctity of the family explains many of his actions. Certainly, it helps us understand the thoroughness with which the Pazzi family was punished after its attempt to depose the Medicis: In the defense of his family, Lorenzo could be ferocious.

He learned everything of importance within the quiet security of the massive stone walls of his own home. He learned first to recognize struggle and warfare as a familiar sight in Italy. On the wall of his own bedroom hung a huge painting by Paolo Uccello, The Rout of San Romano, a tumultuous tangle of lances and horses and armored soldiers that commemorates a victory by the Florentines over their neighboring town of Siena.

In the courtyard of his home was Donatello’s statue of David - symbol of Florentine liberty. As little David had conquered Goliath, so had Florence overcome the swaggering duke of Milan in 1402. It was a lesson in courage and perseverance, of which Lorenzo was reminded daily by the presence of the statue.

Around the same courtyard were eight medallions by Donatello, copied from ancient cameos and medals, and from those and from the books and manuscripts and other objects in his home, Lorenzo developed a curiosity and knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome that he kept all his life.

In the small chapel of the Medici palace was Benozzo Gozzoli’s gold-gilt fresco of the journey of the Magi, a constant reminder to Lorenzo that the kings of this world owe ultimate homage to God. It is said that the youngest of the three kings is the young Lorenzo himself - and, if that is true, the painting must have had an especially strong impact on the young man. But the lesson would have been twofold: Remember that you owe devotion to God, but remember, too, that you are a great prince of the world.

Lorenzo’s grandfather had built country villas at Cafaggiolo, Careggi, Fiesole, and Trebbio outside Florence, and Lorenzo spent a good deal of time at them, learning to ride horses, hunt, bring down game birds with falcons - and learning, no doubt, how grapes are grown, how wines and cheeses are made, what the star constellations are, and a good bit else about the natural world that gave him a deep and abiding love of the country and of farming.

Surrounded by paintings and bronzes, sleeping in a great canopied bed, covered by gold-embroidered quilts, moving among tapestries, his touch always rewarded by the textures of velvets and silks, Lorenzo nonetheless avoided the greatest curse of the rich: He was never spoiled. He was born not to rest in his palace, but to use it as a stronghold from which he could sally forth on new adventures and to which he always could return.

In addition to the lessons he simply absorbed from his surroundings, Lorenzo learned by example from his family. He was his father’s and his grandfather’s constant companion, and they made certain that he had the advantage of seeing the workings of the adult world at every opportunity. He watched as the very idea of capitalism took shape, as many of the fundamental techniques of modern banking were worked out in his grandfather’s study at the Palazzo Medici, and as his grandfather developed a new concept of business - the conglomerate.

Lorenzo watched as his father and grandfather received resplendent ambassadors from Venice and France, cardinals from Rome, and slick politicians from the intriguing world of Florentine government. His father and grandfather shrewdly dealt, cajoled, bargained, flattered, threatened, and perhaps bribed their way through the thicket of business and politics. No doubt he was there to see his grandfather compose a letter to a foreign prince or give his instructions personally to an ambassador about to leave for Paris or to a bank manager about to leave for Bruges. He watched, he learned, and his father and grandfather tirelessly instructed him in all the knowledge and wiles that he one day would need as head of the Medici family. He was fifteen years old when his grandfather died in 1464 - and he already was well schooled in the ways of the world.

Lorenzo’s mother, Lucrezia, came from a family of bankers, the Tornabuoni. She was a masterful organizer. A bright and attractive woman - she served as the model for Saint Elizabeth in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco at Santa Maria Novella) - she stayed in the background while she helped her men move into the foreground. Deeply religious, Lucrezia required her son to visit church every evening, and, although his religious convictions became quite liberal as he grew older, he never broke from the Catholic Church. She was a cultivated woman, and it was doubtless from her that Lorenzo acquired his own interest in writing poetry, for she was a poet as well, and some of her works are quite pleasant. As if to prove, however, that the Renaissance had not completely left the Middle Ages behind, her forte was lauds and hymns written in a medieval manner. If Lorenzo learned most of the facts of business and political life from the men of his family, he acquired from his mother the moral sensibilities that gave form to his life, and she remained until her death his most constant and trusted advisor in all things.

In the Florence of Lorenzo’s time, about 8,000 to 10,000 students were learning to read; about 1,000 were learning arithmetic; and about 600, grammar and logic. Lorenzo was studying all these subjects and more - though not very quickly. At the age of ten, we hear of him memorizing poems given him by Gentile Becchi, his first tutor and later ambassador to France. At the age of thirteen, he was reading Latin fables by Ovid and history by Justinus. He learned Greek from Argyropoulos and poetry and rhetoric from Cristoforo Landino, the translator of Aristotle and commentator on Dante. He learned philosophy from the leading philosopher of the age, the great devotee of Plato, Marsilio Ficino.

Lorenzo was, in short, at the very center of the learning that made the Renaissance the Renaissance. While the teacher was a stock comic character in Italian plays, Lorenzo’s instructors were among the most respected scholars in Italy.

It must be admitted, however, that his heart was not in his studies. To be sure, learning Latin at the age of thirteen was not disgraceful. But it was not remarkable either. Lorenzo’s son Piero probably was not naturally as brilliant as his father. Yet, he was reading the Latin poetry of Virgil at the age of six and writing letters to his father in Latin at the age of seven.

Lorenzo’s heart was in play. He loved horses and hunting and athletics. It is said that his favorite horse would go days without eating when Lorenzo traveled. And Lorenzo already had begun to exhibit those characteristics that, while they probably horrified his mother, were to make him popular as an adult: his dancing, his singing, his clowning, and his jokes. At Carnival time, he was the life of the party. His gift for poetry turned into a talent for writing outlandishly bawdy songs, which he sang with unbounded enthusiasm, in a very bad singing voice, out of tune, and as loudly as he possibly could. For any excess energy, there was always a snowball fight, wrestling, tennis, and acrobatics. When he became older, he took out all this energy in great drinking bouts, hunting parties, and love affairs. He had, as one of his teachers generously put it, a “naturally joyful nature.”

But then, had not Plato himself in The Republic advised young men to spend most of their time in athletics? He had indeed. “Gymnastics for the body,” he had said, “and music for the soul.” Gymnastics, he meant, to develop spiritedness, and music and poetry and literature to develop a refined restraint over the spiritedness.

Taking their cue from Plato, the Florentines pursued athletics with a vengeance at the playgrounds and the stadium beyond the town walls toward Pisa. It was there that they engaged in a brutal game of football, called palla al calcio, with twenty-seven players on a team. It was there, among other places, that they boxed. (The style would have bewildered a modern boxer; one fighter would try to step on the other’s feet, then, standing immobile, nose to nose, with bare fists, the two would beat each other to a pulp.) And it was from there that the horse races began. On the way from the stadium, down the stone streets and past the stone houses of Florence, to the finish line on the opposite side of town, riders were thrown onto the streets, spectators trampled, and horses terrified by fireworks. It was great fun.

Of Lorenzo as a teenager, we have only a few glimpses, but all the events we know of reveal that poise and self-assurance that seem to come naturally to an accomplished young athlete. When Luca Pitti tried to assassinate Lorenzo’s father in 1466, when Lorenzo was seventeen, it was he, we are told, who saved his father’s life.

The conspirators decided to murder Piero if they could not otherwise get hold of the Florence government, and they decided to waylay Piero as he was being carried (too crippled by the gout to ride) from one of his country villas to town. Lorenzo, however, had left the villa before his father, and, so the story goes, when he came upon the armed men on the road, he kept them occupied, saying that his father would be along soon. Meanwhile, he sent a messenger back to tell his father to take a different road. The incident “gave a striking proof,” one of Lorenzo’s biographers has said, “of that promptitude of mind which so eminently distinguished him on many subsequent occasions.”

It was at this time, too, that Lorenzo’s father sent him on his diplomatic tour of Bologna, Ferrara, Milan, Pisa, and Venice. Diplomacy being, by nature, a secretive business, we do not know just what Lorenzo was meant to accomplish. Probably he was required only to be agreeable and meet the leaders with whom he one day would have to deal.

In any event, he was adjudged such a success on his tour that his father immediately dispatched him to Rome to see the pope. Several Italian states were typically stirring up trouble and threatening general war. Lorenzo’s job was to keep the pope from joining in the hostilities. It was an easy job, but an important one, and it is apparent that Lorenzo’s gout-ridden father already had come to rely heavily on his son for advice, as well as mere diplomatic travel, before Lorenzo’s eighteenth birthday. In Lorenzo’s absence, Piero wrote, he was “as a man without hands.”

It is very much in character that Lorenzo’s first big splash as a young man was made on horseback. He competed in a jousting tournament, the Renaissance counterpart of the modern football game or track meet, in the piazza in front of the church of Santa Croce. The tourney was arranged for February 7, 1469, and it was intended to celebrate his wedding the following June to a young red-headed Roman girl named Clarice Orsini.

The tourney was a major event in Florence, and preceding it was a procession of the competitors into the piazza, led by nine trumpeters, three pages, two squires in full armor, twelve mounted noblemen, and then Lorenzo’s younger brother, Giuliano. Giuliano wore a tabard of silver brocade, a “silk doublet . . . embroidered in pearls and silver. His black velvet cap was adorned with three feathers worked in gold thread and set in pearls and rubies.” Then there were five more pages on horseback, a line of fifers and drummers, and Lorenzo himself.

From an eyewitness account from the time: “He came, mounted on a horse presented by [King] Ferrante of Naples, richly caparisoned in red and white velvet adorned with pearls. Lorenzo wore a surcoat with puffings of red and white silk at the shoulders, and over the surcoat a broad silk scarf embroidered with roses, some fresh, some withered, with the motto, ‘Le Temps Revient’ [Time Returns], picked out upon the scarf in pearls. His black velvet cap was studded with pearls, and from it there sprang a feather of gold thread, spangled with rubies and diamonds. . . . His shield had for its centerpiece the great Medici diamond, ‘II Libro’ . . .”

It goes on and on, this description of pomp, with ten mounted cavaliers, sixty-four footmen, and so forth. No one outdid the Florentines in their love of a good parade.

With the motto “Le Temps Revient,” Lorenzo announced with brash immodesty his ideal for Florence. The words are, as the historian Vincent Cronin has written: “a translation into the language of chivalry of Dante’s ‘secol si rinova,’ in turn a paraphrase of Virgil’s fourth eclogue. In that poem, written about forty years before Christ, Virgil foretells the birth of a miraculous baby, which would mark the opening of a new age of the world, a golden age corresponding to the idyllic first beginnings, where there would be no more suffering or bloodshed. The child when grown was to become a god and rule the world in perfect peace. By evoking this, Lorenzo was pledging himself to give Florence a golden age free from war, and therefore amenable to intellectual and artistic pursuits.”

In the jousting, Lorenzo took on four challengers, defeating them all. His friend the poet Luigi Pulci was moved to compare him to Achilles. Lorenzo was more modest. He knew he was given first prize more for his position than for his performance, and self-deception was not one of his faults: “Although I was not a very vigorous warrior, nor a hard hitter, the first prize was adjudged to me, a helmet inlaid with silver and a figure of Mars as the crest.”

Given to celebrate his forthcoming marriage, the tournament was, in fact, presented in honor of Lorenzo’s mistress, Lucrezia Donati, a lovely young Florentine girl whom Lorenzo loved passionately and to whom he wrote a number of sonnets. A descendant of Gemma Donati, who had been Dante’s wife, she was, in Lorenzo’s words, “astonishing. She was of a just and proper height. . . . Her countenance was serious without being severe; mild and pleasant, without levity or vulgarity. Her eyes were lively, without any indication of pride or conceit. . . . In walking, in dancing, or in other exercises which display the person, every motion was elegant and appropriate . . . there was nothing which could be desired in a beautiful and accomplished woman, which was not in her most abundantly found. . . .”

Apparently, few people were shocked by Lorenzo’s state of affairs that he should love Lucrezia and marry Clarice or that he should celebrate his wedding with a tourney given in honor of his mistress. Lucrezia Donati was of too modest a family for Lorenzo to marry. His marriage, instead, to Clarice Orsini was recognized as a simple diplomatic maneuver. Lorenzo was not expected to love his wife - and he never did. He respected her, was affectionate toward her, had several children by her, but he reserved his passion for his mistresses.

Love and marriage were not thought necessarily to go together. In rare instances when they did, so much the better. But the purpose of marriage during the Renaissance was the strengthening of the family through good alliances.

Clarice was by no means beautiful, and she must have been an aggravating young woman, too pious for Lorenzo’s tastes, uncomfortable in the easygoing, boisterous, and intellectually brilliant Medici entourage, rigid and old-fashioned in the rearing of her children. It is interesting to observe that their only serious difficulty arose over the education of their children.

Lorenzo hired his friend, the leading poet of the day, Angelo Poliziano, to tutor them. Angelo schooled them in Latin and Greek by having them read the ancient “pagan” poets of Greece and Rome. Clarice wanted him to have the children learn their Latin from the writings of the Church. When Angelo scheduled a Greek lesson, Clarice took the children off to sing psalms. Lorenzo finally solved the problem by moving his friend to another of his country villas, where the children learned of the “pagan” writers.

They were married on Sunday, June 4, 1469, and the celebration matched the splendor of the tourney four months earlier. There were five banquets in three days, at which 150 calves and 2,000 brace of capons were consumed along with oceans of wine and other comestibles. Clarice wore a gown of gold and white brocade and rode a horse from the royal Neapolitan stables. Fifty young dancing girls sat at her table, while hundreds of elder citizens, Florence’s leading businessmen and aristocrats, were deployed at other tables.

The Medici home that day was a carnival of silks and satins, Oriental rugs, velvets and ermines, all of it lit with thousands of wax candles; and the company was entertained with dances and music and songs, some of the songs written, no doubt, by Lorenzo himself. Some years later, Lorenzo recorded the spectacular event in his memoirs: “I, Lorenzo, took for wife Clarice, daughter of the lord Jacopo,” he wrote coolly and tersely, “or rather she was given to me.”

Six months later, his father died, and Lorenzo became the first citizen of Florence. His training held him in good stead until 1471, when he made one of the bitterest blunders of his life, involving both business and politics.

As the economy of Florence was based upon textiles, the mineral alum was indispensable to the Florentine wool merchants. Alum was used to fix the dyes in woolen cloth - and it was the brilliant colors of Florentine cloth that made it prized throughout the world. The Medici conglomerate had a virtual monopoly on alum in Europe. When deposits of the mineral were discovered in the papal state of Tolfa in 1468, the Medicis were given management of the mines. When another deposit was discovered in Ischia, the Medicis arranged an agreement with its owner to insure continued control of the market. Then, in 1471, an alum deposit was discovered near Volterra, a small town that owed its allegiance to Florence.

It later turned out that the Volterran deposits were not worth mining, but, for the moment, they seemed to promise a fortune. A Florentine company drew up a contract for the alum with the town government of Volterra. The Volterrans, learning of it, felt that they had been sold cheaply by their government. First, they demonstrated, and the town, in turn, closed the mines until a new contract could be negotiated. Florence, acting to protect the interests of its company, ordered the Volterrans to open the mines again. The Volterrans responded by rising up in a violent riot in which two of the company’s shareholders were killed.

Lorenzo had been at the helm in Florence for two years when this imbroglio presented itself to him. But his position was complicated. Tommaso Soderini had arranged the smooth transition from Piero to Lorenzo, and Lorenzo and Giuliano had promised to look upon Soderini and the other leaders “as their parents.” In short, Lorenzo did not yet feel as though he and he alone led Florence.

When Volterra revolted, Soderini promptly advised Lorenzo to let the Volterrans have their way. But Lorenzo, as Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, “thinking this an opportunity for exhibiting his prudence and wisdom, and being strenuously supported by those who envied the influence of Tommaso Soderini, resolved to march against [Volterra], and punish the arrogance of the people of Volterra with arms, declaring that if [the Volterrans] were not made a striking example, others would, without the least fear or respect, upon every slight occasion, adopt a similar course.”

Pity the poor Volterrans. They knew that they were treading on dangerous ground in tangling with Florence. But they did not know that Lorenzo was impatient to make his own move, to show that he held the reins of government in Florence.

Again, Machiavelli reports: “The Florentines . . . assembled 10,000 foot and 2,000 horse, who, under the command of Federigo, lord of Urbino, marched into the country of Volterra and . . . encamped before the city.” The Volterrans soon capitulated, but then came the tragedy. The soldiers, as was the habit with mercenaries, got out of the control of their leader and marched into the town to destroy and loot it: “Neither women nor sacred places being spared; and the soldiery . . . plundered all that came within their reach.”

Florentines actually rejoiced over the event. None of their small, subject towns, they felt, should be permitted to defy Florence with impunity, and Lorenzo was celebrated as a heroic, forceful leader.

But Lorenzo never ceased to regret the fact that he had set into motion what became a punitive expedition against a traditionally friendly town, and the memory of the sacking of Volterra haunted him for the rest of his life. In terms of simple, realistic politics, too, he probably came to agree with Soderini. Asked afterward what he thought of the victory, Soderini said, “To me the place seems rather lost than won; for had it been received on equitable terms, advantage and security would have been the result; but having to retain it by force, it will in critical junctures occasion weakness and anxiety, and, in times of peace, injury and expense.”

For all the mixed feelings about the Volterran revolt, the event marked, nonetheless, the real beginning of Lorenzo’s leadership of Florence. He had made the decision. He had commanded an army to take the field. He had been - and this, above all, must have been noted by the other leaders of Italy - thoroughly tough and uncompromising.

And, of course, it marked the end of Lorenzo’s youth, for now he had blood on his hands.