TWO DAYS AFTER the death of Piero de’ Medici in December 1469, a delegation of leading Florentine citizens called at the Palazzo Medici to see his son Lorenzo. They were led by Tommaso Soderini, who had remained loyal to the Medici throughout his brother Niccolò’s revolt and exile. First the delegation offered Lorenzo their condolences on the death of his father; then, as Lorenzo wrote in his Ricordi (a brief record of the Medici family): ‘Although I was very young, being just twenty years of age, they encouraged me to take upon myself the care of the city and the state, as my father and grandfather had done.’ Thus, the Medici succession was now openly acknowledged. Lorenzo goes on: This proposal was naturally against my youthful instincts. Feeling that the burden and danger might be too much for me, I consented to it unwillingly.’ This is of course false modesty (a rare instance in Lorenzo’s case); he had been groomed for leadership from an early age, a fact of which he had long been aware. Yet his bashfulness was not total hypocrisy, for he knew that the people of Florence still wished to see themselves as citizens of a republic. This was part of their proud patriotic heritage, which distinguished them from the other states in Italy.
This essentially unresolved issue between actual and constitutional power would remain acceptable, but only for as long as all consented to the charade. In his Ricordi, Lorenzo goes on to explain the real reason why he was willing to ‘take care’ of the city: ‘I did so in order to protect our friends and property, since it fares ill in Florence with anyone who is rich but does not have any control over the government.’ The situation was unavoidable: the Medici were recognised as leaders, but not accorded the title – yet they had to take on the role, in order to survive. The historian Francesco Guicciardini, who was a child in Florence at the time of Lorenzo, would aptly characterise the contradictions of Lorenzo’s rule as ‘that of a benevolent tyrant in a constitutional republic’.
Lorenzo de’ Medici was born in 1449, and his life reached back to the great founding years of Medici power: as a young child he had been his grandfather Cosimo’s favourite. One day, when the aged Cosimo was meeting an important delegation from Lucca, his grandson had happened to wander into the room carrying a stick. Lorenzo asked his grandfather if he could carve the stick into a flute, and Cosimo at once set to work, whittling away the wood. After the child had left, happily bearing his new flute, the delegates from Lucca remonstrated with Cosimo for interrupting an important meeting. Undaunted, he replied: ‘Aren’t you too fathers or grandfathers? You are lucky the boy didn’t ask me to play a few tunes on his new flute. For if he had, I would certainly have gone on and done so.’
A major influence on Lorenzo was undoubtedly that of his mother Lucrezia (née Tornabuoni); her powerful and profoundly artistic personality would introduce – by nature and nurture – a creative side into the Medici inheritance that had not previously been evident. Related to this was another formative aspect in Lorenzo’s upbringing. Hitherto, the powerful families in Florence had existed largely as clans; and this was reflected in not only how they lived, but where they lived. Extended, almost tribal families would live together in the family palazzo, with one leader presiding over a largely communal existence; loyalty, and to a large extent individuality, would be subsumed into a clan identity. This would also be true of the family clans that did not live in palazzi: these would be gathered together in neighbouring houses.
Yet something different was beginning to emerge in the new palazzi which the leading families of Florence were now building for themselves. These palazzi were still large: the one being constructed by the Pitti family was larger than the palaces of many rulers in Europe. But with the emergence of a new humanist individuality, the family clans began to separate out into individual nuclear families – a development that was reflected in the interior design of these new palazzi, and in the way they were occupied. The Palazzo Medici was built for one family and their dependants, not for the whole clan; whereas the Palazzo Bardi, in which they had previously lived, stood on an entire street of Bardi properties, whose doors would be open to all other members of the clan. At the Palazzo Medici, by contrast, the family in residence could withdraw from public life and enjoy a private life that was their own: in such a way, a separation between public and domestic life began to evolve.
This loosening of the clan bond led to a tightening of the bonds within the family – parents became closer to their children, and their grandchildren. Witness Cosimo’s words to the delegation from Lucca: ‘Aren’t you too fathers or grandfathers?’ He considered playing with Lorenzo almost as important as meeting a foreign delegation, whilst tellingly the members of the delegation from Lucca, where the ideas of the Renaissance had not yet fully taken hold, simply did not understand what he was talking about.
It is significant that the Medici moved into their new palazzo on the Via Larga just five years before Lorenzo was born. In his case, this would result in an unusually close relationship with his mother; and as we shall see, he also developed a particularly close relationship with his attractive younger brother Giuliano. Piero’s relationship to his eldest son also seems to have been closer and more sophisticated than the paternal relationships of the previous generations. Giovanni di Bicci’s influence over his son Cosimo, for instance, had been almost total; again and again, Cosimo’s principal decisions had been identical to those his father would have taken. Only later, after Giovanni’s death, had Cosimo managed to emerge from his father’s psychological shadow and begun to blossom as an individual character. In Cosimo’s relationships with his sons, on the other hand, the heavy patriarchal influence had been tempered by closeness: when suffering from gout, they all took to bed together. The sons were also given responsibility, being delegated with the important and costly business of commissioning painters. This trust came to fruition in Piero’s unobtrusive but able rule: more than once his decision saved the day, yet he was capable of entrusting his young son Lorenzo with missions of almost equal decisiveness. Piero’s relationship to his son would be especially close and understanding, the like of which had not previously been seen in the Medici family.
When grandfather Cosimo died and Piero the Gouty took over the reins of power, Lorenzo de’ Medici was just fifteen years old. Piero must have known that he had not long to live, for Lorenzo was not only prepared for leadership, but in many respects became the public face of his father’s rule. This is no exaggeration, for at the age of fifteen Lorenzo was already being despatched on missions in the place of his incapacitated father, as the representative of the Republic of Florence. His first mission was to Milan for the wedding of the son of Ferrante, King of Naples, to the daughter of Galeazzo, Duke of Milan. ‘Remember to be civil and alert,’ Piero wrote to his teenage son. ‘Act as a man, not as a boy. Show sense, industry, and manly endeavour, so that you may be employed in more important things.’ Piero’s trust in his youthful son proved well founded, and soon Lorenzo was being entrusted with missions to Bologna, Ferrara and Venice. He would be just seventeen, but already possessed of some diplomatic experience, by the time he was sent to Rome to see Pope Paul II in 1466, with the delicate task of securing the alum monopoly for the Medici Bank.
Yet it was at this time that Piero made his one great, and possibly unavoidable, mistake over his son. Whilst Lorenzo was in Rome he was expected to undertake a crash course in running the bank from his uncle, the able manager of the Rome branch, Giovanni Tornabuoni. However, owing to circumstances, this course lasted just a few weeks: Lorenzo had neither the time nor the inclination to learn about banking. His personality, his artistic intellect, his flamboyant character were completely unsuited to the meticulous and for the most part cautious business of running the family bank. This would later prove to be a severe flaw, but for the time being it was a mere shortcoming, one that could easily be overcome by expert advice from the trusted managers who oversaw the day-to-day running of each branch of the Medici Bank.
Even at this age, all the evidence points to Lorenzo being more than just talented. In the family tradition, he had received the finest humanist education available; no prince in Europe could have been so well tutored in the new learning. First he had been instructed by the skilled Latinist Gentile Becchi (later Bishop of Arezzo), from whom he had learned to love the poetry of Ovid, together with the rhetoric and civic values of Cicero. Later, he had learned Greek from Cosimo’s protégé Marsilio Ficino, whose infectious enthusiasm had instilled in Lorenzo a deep love of Plato’s idealist philosophy. Ficino had enjoyed teaching Lorenzo, remarking upon his ‘naturally joyful nature’. By his early teens, Lorenzo had been allowed to attend the meetings known as the Platonic Academy, which had been instigated by Cosimo. Here he had witnessed, and soon begun to take part in, intellectual debate of the highest order; he would have heard Bracciolini and other members of Cosimo’s humanist circle discussing the emergent discoveries of Greek philosophy, Latin rhetoric, the latest ideas of art and science. He would also have heard the likes of Joannes Argyropoulos, the leading Byzantine scholar, who had first met Cosimo at the Ecumenical Council of Florence, and had later settled in Italy to play a leading role in the revival of Greek learning. It would all have appeared so fresh, so new – even though much of it had lain dormant for more than a thousand years. Lorenzo was very much a product of the Florentine intellectual tradition, on which he in turn would be such an influence.
Yet Lorenzo’s education had extended to more than intellectual learning. He enjoyed hunting – on horseback and with falcons – as well as the boisterous rough-house of that early ‘no rules’ ball game, played between packs of boys, that was the precursor of modern football. He was strong, intelligent, energetic: a natural leader. Out riding, he enjoyed leading the group in facetious bawdy songs, which he often wittily embellished on the spur of the moment. All this is more than just the understandable hyperbole that so often accrues to the youth of a great figure: at the very age when he was first being entrusted with diplomatic missions by his father, Lorenzo was also beginning to produce his first original poetry. This he wrote in Tuscan dialect, rather than the more formal Latin preferred by many. At seventeen, his linguistic ability was such that he could confidently assert: ‘Tuscan can faithfully express just as many subjects and feelings as Latin.’ This was the Florentine dialect that Dante had been the first great poet to champion, the idiom that was in the process of becoming the Italian language, and several of the poems produced by Lorenzo de’ Medici in his maturity would be of sufficient calibre to enter the canon of early Italian poetry.
There is no doubt that from the outset Lorenzo de’ Medici was impressive, though curiously we know from his many portraits that his physical appearance was distinctly unimpressive (see page 2 and front cover). In this, he was very much a Medici. His sallow features were undeniably ugly, framed by lank centre-parted hair that fell to his shoulders; below his beetled brow his eyes were heavy-lidded, like his father’s. He had an over-emphatic chin with a protruding lower lip, while his nose was broad and squashed, so much so that he literally had no sense of smell – though this may have accounted for the precision with which he used his other senses, in aesthetic judgement and in his poetry. His movements were clumsy, his figure tall and powerfully built, but ungainly; only his hands were long and delicate. According to Guicciardini: ‘his voice and pronunciation [were] harsh and unpleasing, because he spoke through his nose. But the fact remains that he was attractive to women.’ The man himself appears to have been the antithesis of his physical appearance.
These contrasting elements echo throughout descriptions of his character. According to Machiavelli: ‘to see him at one time in his grave moments and at another in his gay, was to see in him two personalities joined as it were with invisible bonds’. The enigma of Lorenzo’s character appears to have struck many perceptive observers. His friend, the poet Angelo Poliziano, describes a day spent in his company: ‘Yesterday we all rode out of Florence, singing happily. Occasionally we broke off to talk seriously of holy things, to remind outselves that it was Lent.’ They stop to drink; Poliziano remarks on the ‘brilliance’ with which Lorenzo enlivens the whole company. That evening they sit reading the philosophy of St Augustine, ‘then the reading resolved itself into music’ and dancing. First thing next morning, he observes Lorenzo setting off for Mass. Thus did twenty-four hours in Lorenzo’s company pass.
It all seems too much: yet the frantic pace, and the frantic switches of mood, would continue. The privileged youth of Florence of this period lived a golden life; a friend describes a delightful episode, in a letter to Lorenzo, who happened to be away: ‘The entire city is covered in snow – a nuisance for some, because they are forced to stay indoors, but a source of joy for us.’ At two in the morning, bearing flares, playing trumpets and flutes, a group of them sets off to serenade the girl to whom one of them is betrothed. They start throwing snowballs up to her balcony. ‘What a triumph, when one of us succeeded in raining snow over her face, which was as white as snow itself! . . . And Marietta, as skilled as she was beautiful, began pelting snow down upon us, while the trumpets tooted and the others cheered in the night.’
Such a scene remains as vivid now as it must have been then. In referring to this event, the Medici biographer G. F. Young points out the appositeness of Lorenzo’s poem:
Quant’è bella giovinezza
Che si fugge tuttavia.
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia
Di doman non c’è certezza.
(How youth is beautiful
Yet also so ephemeral.
Waste not time on sorrow
For there’s no certain tomorrow.)
But this is poetry of reflection: reflecting on such scenes, and reflecting too Lorenzo’s character. If there was an ‘invisible bond’ between Lorenzo’s ‘two personalities’, it may well have lain in this very double-sided element: participation and reflection.
Like his grandfather, Lorenzo developed a profound love of Plato’s philosophy, according to which the world was a mere dream, though this dream was constructed from perfect abstract ideas. The beauty of this appealed to Lorenzo, inspiring his creativity; yet Ficino remarked perceptively that Lorenzo did not believe in Plato, he used him – though it is possible that Lorenzo used Plato for more than creative purposes. Behind all the display, the bouts of glorious but ephemeral energy, there lay a certain detachment, a hint of almost philosophic contemplation, which may well have informed the deeper elements of Lorenzo’s character, the devil-may-care confidence, the occasional acts of selfless bravery.
Where Lorenzo was concerned, Piero was determined to leave nothing to chance, and during the last two years of his life he set about arranging a good marriage for his eldest son. The leading families of Florence invariably cemented their alliances with marriages, and Piero had even promised Luca Pitti that he would marry Lorenzo to one of his daughters, as a gesture to unite the city. Though this was quietly shelved, for two reasons: Piero had later learned of Pitti’s insistence on his murder, and also, following the failed coup and Pitti’s abject cowardice, this once-powerful figure was now regarded with derision and contempt by the citizens of Florence.
Piero was a realist, and broke his promise, but he also broke with the old Florentine tradition of marrying his son into a leading local family; controversially, he decided to look further afield for a suitable wife for his son and heir. However, he was too ill to travel himself, so the reconnaissance work would be done by his wife Lucrezia. On the pretext of visiting her brother Giovanni Tornabuoni, Lucrezia was despatched to Rome, from where she sent a report on the sixteen-year-old Clarice Orsini, the girl whom Piero had in mind for Lorenzo: ‘She is fairly tall and fair-skinned. She is gentle in manner without the sophistication of a Florentine, but she should be easy to train . . . Her face is on the round side, but pleasant enough ... I could not judge her breasts, for the Romans keep theirs covered, but they appeared to be well formed . . . She appears above average, but cannot be compared to our daughters.’ Such were the bloodstock reports that preceded arranged marriages, though Lucrezia did add: ‘If Lorenzo approves, he will inform you.’
Despite this, it appears that Lorenzo had little choice in the matter; Piero had his own agenda, and in choosing a Roman wife for his son and heir he was quite willing to court unpopularity in Florence. Rome was considered very provincial, and the Florentines regarded themselves as the new Romans, the inheritors of the mantle of Ancient Rome; while marrying into a Roman family suggested that no Florentine family was good enough. Yet there was no denying that the Orsinis were an old and distinguished Roman family; their family seat was the most magnificent castle in central Italy, on the shores of Lake Bracciano twenty miles north-west of Rome, and they also had large estates on the outskirts of Naples. But most of all, they maintained their own sizeable private army. Piero had learned his lesson from the recent revolt led by Luca Pitti, and was determined that from now on when the Medici required armed backing they would not have to depend on the support of others; they would be a force to be reckoned with in their own right.
Yet this was not all, for Piero was almost certainly carrying on a secret Medici agenda passed down to him by Cosimo; in marrying an Orsini, the Medici were for the first time marrying above their class, into one of the leading aristocratic Italian families. The Medici may have been the papal bankers, but the Orsini had power within the Church itself; Orsini were regularly appointed cardinals, and one had even been a pope. By marrying Lorenzo into the Orsini family, Piero was undoubtedly looking to the future.
As expected, Florence did not take kindly to a Roman bride being selected for Lorenzo, and to overcome this Piero decided to mount a festival for the people of Florence, to celebrate his son’s betrothal. Or so it would appear; in fact, by this stage Piero was too ill to organise such an event, and instead Lorenzo himself took charge. And it was now that he began to emerge in his authentic colours, for the result was a truly spectacular tournament, which was staged in the traditional arena of the Piazza Santa Croce in March 1469.
We have to imagine the expanse of the stone-slabbed square covered with sand (to prevent the horses’ hooves from slipping). One side of the square was lined with a specially erected stand, draped with vivid awnings, where the leading families of Florence were seated. The colourful crowds were crammed beneath the buildings on the other three sides of the square, with others craning from the windows and balconies with their draped pennants, and yet others perched high on the rooftops beneath the clear blue sky. The line of liveried heralds played a fanfare as the eighteen competing knights appeared on horseback, each led into the arena by a pageboy in coloured tunic. One by one the knights filed past the stand, dipping their lances before the throne of the ‘Queen of the Tournament’; this was Lucrezia Donati, the young wife of a leading citizen, who was popularly acclaimed as the most beautiful woman in the city. The dazzling armour and plumed helmets of the knights shimmered in the sunlight as they rode to their stations, raising their heraldic shields to the cheering crowds. But none appeared more superb than Lorenzo on his white charger bedecked with red and white velvet, a white silk cloak lined with scarlet flowing from his shoulders, his Medici shield studded with a glinting diamond. Then the jousts began, each with one knight riding against another until the winner unseated his rival. The roar of the crowd rose as the horses’ hooves thudded over the sanded stone and the two competing knights rode towards one another . . .
Achilles’ rage their lances’ clash inspires,
Their sparkling armour rivals Etna’s fires.
The actual details of the tournament were recorded by Lorenzo’s friend, the poet Luigi Pulci, in his poem The Joust of Lorenzo de’ Medici, which would become one of the best-known ballads of the period. Yet despite the bravado and excitement, it was mainly show; no one was meant to get hurt, least of all Lorenzo. However, accidents did sometimes happen, for during an earlier tournament the great condottiere Montefeltro, Lord of Urbino, had accidentally lost an eye. But on this occasion there were to be no accidents; and there was no doubt about who was going to win, yet as Lorenzo graciously conceded: ‘I was given the first prize, even though I was not well versed in the use of weapons or skilled in how to inflict blows on my opponent.’ The event was a huge success, and the citizens of Florence went away happy – a lesson that Lorenzo would take to heart. It hardly seemed to matter that afterwards the whole thing was found to have cost the equivalent of more than 8,000 florins – 2,000 florins more than Clarice’s promised dowry!
Four months later Clarice Orsini arrived in Florence for her wedding, and rode to the church on Lorenzo’s white charger – the one on which he had won the tournament, a gift from the King of Naples. The ceremony was followed by three days of banquets at the Palazzo Medici; in the courtyard and the gardens, tables of wild boar and suckling pig were laid out beneath the colourful canopies, minstrels played from the balconies, and the guests danced on a raised stage beneath the entwined arms of the Orsini and Medici families. By the end, more than 300 barrels of the finest Tuscan wine had been emptied.
Once again, everyone went home happy – with the possible exception of the bride and groom, for it soon became evident that Lorenzo and Clarice were an ill-matched couple. Lorenzo would have been a difficult man to live with at the best of times, his charismatic ugliness proving an almost animal attraction to some women, though to be fair he did not make as much use of this as he might have done. He seemed to expend more energy on writing amorous sonnets of a strictly platonic nature, in the long-established Italian tradition; every poet was expected to have his ‘love’ – just as Dante had his Beatrice, and Petrarch had his Laura. Such relationships were often not even personal ones, remaining strictly a matter of poetry; in this way, Lorenzo wrote love poems to Lucrezia Donati, the ‘Queen of the Tournament’, and would continue to write sonnets to her successors as the Beauty of Florence.
For her part, Clarice proved to be a somewhat frumpy young woman of pedestrian intelligence, but convinced of her own superiority. The sophisticated merry-go-round of Florentine society bewildered her, and she defensively looked down upon it. Her attitude to Lorenzo would sometimes become similarly disapproving, though for the most part this remained muted. The fact is that both of them seem to have made a considerable effort to keep up the appearance of a normal Italian marriage of the period; and as was often the case, the appearance soon became much of the reality – Lorenzo and Clarice would eventually have no fewer than ten children (three of whom died in childhood). They were often apart, but their letters to one another reveal a neutral chattiness; she writes: If you have any news which is not a state secret, do write and tell me. It would give us all here great pleasure.’ Though she frequently nagged Lorenzo about his friends, who considered her dull and were inclined to slight her when he was not around.
Within months of the church bells of San Lorenzo ringing out to celebrate the wedding of Lorenzo, they were tolling for the death of his father Piero, and the twenty-year-old Lorenzo then assumed the role for which he had been groomed. Like his father before him, he began by totting up the accounts and ‘found that we possessed 237,988 scudi’ (at the time probably around 200,000 florins). His father’s short period in charge had not diminished the family fortune; and the overall profits of the Medici Bank would have appeared similarly healthy, buoyed up as they were by the alum monopoly.
Yet trouble was not long in coming, and in the spring of 1470 alarming news reached Florence. One of the conspirators who had been banished by Piero the Gouty along with Neroni and Acciaiuoli, a vindictive and unscrupulous man named Bernardo Nardi, had launched an invasion. Leading a column of armed men, he had marched into Prato, just ten miles down the road, where he was said to be waiting for military backup led by Neroni, before marching on Florence itself. The Signoria immediately summoned the city’s militia, which was ordered to march post-haste for Prato.
Fortunately this event would peter out into an anticlimax, for by the time the Florentine soldiers arrived at Prato, they found that the revolt was over. The local mayor Cesare Petrucci had summoned the Prato militia, captured Nardi and his rebels, and publicly hanged all the ringleaders. Lorenzo was particularly pleased by Petrucci’s swift action; not only had it saved Florence, but it had also shown that the population in the countryside was firmly behind Medici rule. In keeping with the policy instigated by his grandfather Cosimo on his return from exile, Lorenzo earmarked the country mayor for future promotion. Such men often proved even more loyal than long-term members of the Medici faction, and Petrucci would prove no exception. (He would eventually become gonfaloniere, and as such it was his timely action during the Pazzi conspiracy that would save the day for the Medici.)
Several months after the events in Prato, the well-ordered Medici political machine encountered unexpected opposition within the city. The standing council refused to appoint the Medici recommendations, put forward by Tommaso Soderini, for the committee that oversaw the voting for members of the Signoria. This resulted in a return to more democratic election by lot, ironically the very system that had led to Soderini’s brother, the conspirator Niccolò Soderini, being elected as gonfaloniere. Lorenzo bided his time, waiting till the balance again fell in the Medici favour, before installing a system that left the Medici even more firmly in control. He justified his action by insisting that Florence needed a ‘constant government’ when dealing with its enemies. From this time on, all major councils – whether of war, finance or public order – would retain a functional Medici majority.
Lorenzo was now free to consolidate Florence’s foreign policy, and in 1471 the touchy Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, was invited on a state visit to Florence, along with his wife Bona, a member of the House of Savoy. (The Sforzas had continued the Visconti tradition of marrying a Savoy, thus protecting Milan’s northern alpine frontier.) Galeazzo’s visit was another occasion for pageants and celebrations, enjoyed by the public and much appreciated by the distinguished visitor – who brought with him a 2,000-strong retinue of brocaded knights, liveried soldiery, falconers and even 500 hunting hounds. Florence was impressed, but nonetheless its citizens, and especially its leader, took delight in quietly displaying its cultural supremacy. Galeazzo’s stay in the Palazzo Medici, with its superb paintings and sculptures, so inspired the visiting duke that on his return to Milan he too began commissioning artists and architects to adorn his city.
Galeazzo’s father Francesco, the burly ex-condottiere, had been urged by Cosimo de’ Medici to commission buildings and statues; this early Renaissance period in Milan had also been assisted by Pigello Portinari, the important local manager of the Medici Bank, which did so much to support Francesco Sforza. Yet in many ways Milan still lagged behind Florence in such cultural matters. Indicative of this was the cathedral that was being built in the city, which was unmistakably Gothic – a great medieval building, complete with spires and flying buttresses, which could have been built in France or Germany in previous centuries. Even so, the full flowering of the artistic Renaissance in Florence, assisted so strongly by Medici money, was now beginning to spread to its neighbouring Italian states.
Despite this, the relationship between these states did not improve: Italian politics remained as difficult and devious as ever, and the most insignificant act could provoke a diplomatic contretemps. Lorenzo’s lavish public display for Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, was regarded with jealousy by Ferrante, King of Naples, who, after all, had sent a magnificent white charger for Lorenzo’s wedding – the young ruler of Florence was meant to be his friend.
In 1471 Pope Paul II died, and was succeeded by Pope Sixtus IV; the sophisticated Sienese humanist had been succeeded by an altogether more difficult and determined character. Sixtus IV had been born on the Ligurian coast near Genoa; entering into a Franciscan monastery in his youth, he had shown a precocious, if hard-headed, intellect. This, allied to piety and ambition, had enabled his rapid rise in the Church; by the age of fifty-seven, when he was elected pope, he presented a formidable figure. A tall, stocky man with a huge head, a flattened nose and no teeth, he was determined to recuperate the political power of the papacy. His first aim was to gain control of the central Italian Papal States, many of which were now independent in all but name.
In 1471, Lorenzo de’ Medici headed the Florentine delegation to Rome to congratulate the new pope on his succession; and to all appearances, Sixtus IV was deeply impressed by his important young visitor. He agreed to continue the papal account with the Medici Bank, but was unwilling to make Lorenzo’s younger brother Giuliano a cardinal; despite their marriage into the Orsini family, the Medici were not yet able to make their way into the hierarchy of the Church. (Unbeknown to Lorenzo, Sixtus IV already had plans to appoint no fewer than six of his nephews as cardinals.) As a consolation, the pope presented Lorenzo with an Ancient Roman marble bust of the Emperor Augustus. This time it was Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, who was jealous, and this news was accompanied by reports of a sinister development concerning the ruler of Florence’s main ally. Word from Accerrito Portinari, who had suceded his brother Pigello as manager of the Medici Bank in Milan, suggested that Galeazzo was now becoming dangerously deranged. His increasingly exotic behaviour had recently included bricking up his astrologer (a priest) in a cell with a glass of wine and a chicken leg, after he had predicted that Galeazzo would reign for fewer than eleven years.
Yet there was little time for Lorenzo to ponder this ominous development, for he was now faced with a full-blown crisis. Further deposits of alum had recently been discovered outside Volterra, a town in southern Tuscany under Florentine rule; and the authorities of Volterra granted the mining concession to a company with three Medici supporters as major stockholders. Yet it soon became clear that the alum mine contained much larger deposits than had previously been thought, whereupon the Volterra authorities decided to withdraw the mining concession and place it in the hands of their own citizens. The move was countermanded by the authorities in Florence, but when news of this reached Volterra, a riot broke out and several Florentines were killed. One of the Medici stockholders was thrown from a window, and the local mayor, appointed by Florence, escaped only by barricading himself in his palazzo.
Against the advice of Tommaso Soderini and the Signoria in Florence, Lorenzo decided that a show of force was necessary; if Volterra broke from Florentine rule, other Tuscan cities might easily follow. The condottiere Montefeltro, Lord of Urbino, was hired to march with his mercenary army on Volterra, which immediately sent out vain appeals for help to Venice and Naples. After a four-week siege, the city surrendered and the gates were opened; but at this stage Montefeltro lost control of his mercenaries, who went on the rampage, murdering, looting and raping. When news of this reached Florence, Lorenzo was horrified and set out at once for Volterra; in an attempt to make amends, Lorenzo himself rode amongst the population, handing out money to the distressed citizens. He was genuinely repentant – but it had been his decision to send in the troops. He may have been groomed for the leadership from an early age, but he had yet to acquire the practical expertise of his grandfather or his father, who would certainly have attempted to defuse the situation first, resorting to violence only as a last measure.