Impressive as was the cardinal's entry into Florence in 1512, it faded into the commonplace when compared with the grand spectacle which the city mounted when, three years later, he returned from Rome as Pope Leo X. His election as Pope Julius II's successor had been greeted in Florence with the wildest excitement. There had been firework displays and processions; cannon had fired from the forts in the city's wall to be answered by the deep and distant boom of guns from the surrounding hills; crowds had paraded through the streets shouting, ‘Palle! Palle! Papa Leone! Palle! Palle!’ Soberer and quieter crowds had followed a procession bearing the miraculous statue of the Blessed Virgin from the church of Santa Maria dell' Impruneta. Banquets had been held in palaces; furniture looted from the houses of the mournful piagnoni of Savonarola's day had been thrown upon bonfires in the piazze, together with boards and planks from the establishments of the bankers and merchants in the Mercato Nuovo. In Via Larga tables had been piled high with food outside the Palazzo Medici; and on the Palazzo della Signoria's ringhiera wine had been liberally dispensed from rows of gilded barrels.
For Pope Leo's ceremonial entrance into the city after his enthronement triumphal arches and obelisks were erected; immense screens were painted with allegorical scenes; statues of classical gods were created, emblems and trophies carved. Whole buildings were demolished to open up vistas; an immense castle, resting on columns, was built in the Piazza Santa Trinita, and an obelisk, fifty feet high, was set up in the Mercato Nuovo. The western front of Santa Maria del Fiore was covered by a splendid façade of wood and plaster designed by Jacopo Sansovino and painted by Andrea del Sarto.
Wearing a jewelled tiara and glittering cape, Pope Leo passed through the Porta Romana accompanied by an immense retinue of guards and prelates. He proceeded slowly down Via Maggio, crossed the Arno by the Ponte Santa Trinita and entered the Piazza della Signoria, raising his hands in benediction as his attendants threw silver coins amongst the crowds. Passing the screen before the church of San Felice,2 he caught sight of a bust of his father and, through his spyglass, read the inscription beneath it: ‘This is my beloved son.’ And his eyes momentarily filled with tears. But thereafter he appeared as blissfully content as he had done in Rome during his Sacro Possesso, his formal entry into the Vatican, nodding complacently towards the cheering spectators, raising his plump hands in greeting and blessing, smiling amicably. ‘God has given us the papacy,’ he was reported to have remarked happily to his brother, Giuliano. ‘Let us enjoy it.’
There could be no doubt that he did enjoy it. Yet, after his return to Rome, having entrusted Florence to the care of his nephew, Lorenzo, son of Piero, the Florentines soon lost their enthusiasm for his family. Lorenzo was a good-looking young man like his father, energetic and high-spirited. He was also ambitious and, although only twenty years old, determined to be his own master. Impatient of the advice given to him by his secretary, whom the Pope had instructed to report daily upon his nephew's progress, he was equally dismissive of his two other uncles, Jacopo Salviati, husband of his aunt Lucrezia, and Piero Ridolfi, who was married to his aunt Contessina. Authorized by the Pope to assume the title of Captain-General of the Florentine Republic, Lorenzo became increasingly authoritarian, holding quasi-regal court at the Medici Palace, where he required councils to meet, instead of at the Palazzo della Signoria.
The Pope had great plans for Lorenzo. He had visions of the Medici being once again as dominant an influence in Italian politics as they had been in his father's time, and of a central Italian state, encompassing Tuscany and including the cities of Parma, Modena and Piacenza, as well as the duchies of Ferrara and Urbino. He envisaged the young Lorenzo as master of this state; and, at great expense, he did at least succeed in having him proclaimed Duke of Urbino after an arduous campaign in which Lorenzo was wounded by a shot from an arquebus. Thereafter, however, the Pope's plans began to fall apart: Lorenzo, never fully recovering from his wound, died from tuberculosis aggravated by syphilis at the age of twenty-five, soon after marrying a cousin of Francois I, King of France. Pope Leo's brother, Giuliano, whom King François had created Duke of Nemours, had already died aged thirty-seven at Fiesole, ‘utterly shrunken and spent, like an expiring candle’, leaving an illegitimate son by a sensuous lady from Pesaro.
Lorenzo's bossy and interfering mother, Alfonsina, had also died; and the Medici heir was now Lorenzo's daughter, a half-French baby girl, Caterina, the only boys on the Pope's side of the family being his nephew, Ippolito – his brother Giuliano's illegitimate son – and Alessandro, presented as the son of Lorenzo, the dead Duke of Urbino, but rumoured to be the natural son of the Pope's cousin, Giulio de' Medici, either by a Moorish slave from Naples or by a peasant woman from the Roman Campagna.
Giulio, appointed Archbishop of Florence by his cousin the Pope in 1513, was a prevaricating man with a cold manner and saturnine appearance. Much disliked in Florence, he was ‘morose and disagreeable’, Francesco Guicciardini wrote, ‘disinclined to grant a favour, reputedly avaricious and very grave and cautious in all his actions. Perfectly self-controlled, he would have been highly capable had not timidity made him shrink from what he should have done.’
It had to be conceded that when he arrived in Florence to supervise the government of the city after Lorenzo's death, Giulio did his best not to offend the citizens' susceptibilities. Retiring and conciliatory, he reorganized the state's finances so successfully that, despite the mismanagement of Lorenzo and his advisers, Florence enjoyed a brief period of prosperity. But when Pope Leo died and Giulio returned to Rome in the hope of being elected Pope himself – a hope realized in 1523 – he made the mistake of leaving Florence in the hands of the bastards, Ippolito and Alessandro de' Medici, as nominal leaders of the Medicean party. These two young men, the unprepossessing, swarthy and fuzzy-haired Alessandro, and the gregarious, extravagant and quarrelsome Ippolito, soon became as much disliked in Florence as Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, had ever been.
*
When Cardinal Giulio de' Medici became Pope Clement VII at the age of forty-five, after the longest conclave in living memory, he dispatched Cardinal Silvio Passerini to Florence as his representative in the city and adviser to Ippolito and Alessandro. Cardinal Passerini was a grasping, charmless and ill-natured man who immediately aroused the dislike of the citizens. Joined in Florence by two other equally resented strangers foisted upon them by the authorities in Rome, Cardinal Innocenzo Cibò, Archbishop of Turin and Genoa, and Niccolò Ridolfi, he was soon in serious trouble. After an alarming riot in the city a report was sent to Rome by the Pope's confidential adviser, Francesco Guicciardini: ‘In the short time I have been here I have seen a thousand things like [this riot], and they all derive from the ignorance of this eunuch [Passerini], who spends the whole day in idle gossip and neglects important matters… He does all he can to fill himself and everyone else with suspicion. He makes everyone despair; and has no idea himself what he is up to.’
Passerini's authority was short-lived. For months Pope Clement's vacillating and devious policy had been exasperating the Emperor Charles V, whose viceroy at Naples was eventually instructed to ‘teach the Pope a lesson he would never forget’. Even more alarming threats had come from Germany, where the old warrior, Georg von Frundsberg, had assembled an army of Landsknechte, mostly Lutherans, fired with a missionary zeal to dispose of the Roman anti-Christ and with a no-less-intense desire to relieve him of his possessions. Swelled by large numbers of Spanish troops from Milan and soon to be joined by men from the estates of the Pope's inveterate enemy, Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, the Emperor's polyglot army of some 30,000 men marched upon Rome. The city came under attack on 6 May 1527 and the next day – after the Pope himself had run for safety to the massive Castel Sant'Angelo – it was sacked and its inhabitants murdered and mutilated with appalling ferocity.
The news of this catastrophe was greeted in Florence with the utmost excitement. The church bells were rung; bonfires blazed; crowds marched through the st
reets shouting anti-Medicean slogans. An effigy of the Medici Pope was hurled through the door of the church of Santissima Annunziata and torn to pieces in the piazza. Cardinal Passerini and his young charges, Alessandro and Ippolito, fled from the Medici Palace, on which someone had painted a picture of Pope Clement ascending a ladder to the gallows. In the time-honoured way a Parlamento was summoned and a Balia elected; the Maggior Consiglio and the militia were re-established; and a respected anti-Medicean, Niccolò Capponi, whose father, Piero, had stood up so bravely to the French King Charles VIII, was appointed Gonfaloniere for a year.
The Pope was powerless to prevent or reverse this coup d'état in Florence. After months of incarceration, he had succeeded in escaping from the Castel Sant'Angelo wearing the clothes of his major-domo. But he was still virtually a prisoner in the remote fastness of the episcopal palace at Orvieto – which could be reached only by a mule track from the valley of the Paglia – where he was endeavouring to rebuild his shattered power and reputation.
After characteristic hesitations and tergiversations, he had come to terms with the Emperor, who, on the understanding that the Pope would recognize imperial authority in Italy and crown him on his arrival there, agreed to return the Medici to Florence, if necessary by force.
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SIEGE AND MURDER 1527 – 37
‘Everyone was beside himself with fright and bewilderment; no one knew… what to do or where to go.’
BENEDETTO VARCHI
Rather than risk an assault by foreign armies, several of the older citizens of Florence recommended appeasement and compromise. These included the Gonfaloniere, Niccolò Capponi, who, entering into secret negotiations with papal representatives, was summarily dismissed from office when these were discovered. He was replaced by Francesco Carducci, leader of the extreme anti-Medicean party whose members were now known as arrabiati, the name formerly given to the rabid opponents of Savonarola's theocracy. The idea of a surrender was, of course, rejected by the arrabiati as well as by the majority of the people, who urged the new government to take all necessary means to resist attack. The city's defences were accordingly strengthened and manned; ten thousand militiamen were called out; four thousand young citizens, previously excluded from the militia, were enrolled in sixteen companies. Money was voted for mercenaries; and a Perugian condottiere, Malatesta Baglioni, whose father had fought against the Medici, was appointed commander-in-chief. Several villas beyond the city walls which might have offered cover for advancing troops were demolished or turned into blockhouses; new strongpoints were built; and the ingenious Michelangelo, whose gifts were deemed to extend to a mastery of military engineering, was summoned to supervise the works of defence.
Michelangelo, whose statue of David outside the Palazzo della Signoria had been damaged in a recent riot,1 was then at work in Florence on a Medici family chapel at San Lorenzo.2 He had also been asked by the Medici to design a library at San Lorenzo.3 He was, therefore, loth to take up his new duties when appointed procurator-general of the city's fortifications. He did go to Bologna and Ferrara to examine the fortifications there, made several drawings of proposed defences, and advised that the defences of Florence should be extended to circumvallate the hill of San Miniato and that the belfry on the church should be protected from artillery fire by mattresses. But then, suspecting treachery and pleading that his life was in danger, he ran away to Venice by way of Ferrara, taking a large sum of money with him. Messengers were sent galloping after him and he was induced to return, his conduct being forgiven and attributed to artistic temperament. By the time the imperial forces, mostly Spanish, appeared before the walls of Florence in the early autumn of 1529, the defences of the city were almost complete.
The enemy army, commanded by a young adventurer in the Emperors service, Philibert, Prince of Orange, was estimated as being 40,000 strong. Confident of a quick victory, some of the soldiers, so it was said, called out derisively, ‘Get out your brocades, Florence. We are coming to measure them with our pikestaffs.’ But the Prince of Orange held back from a direct assault: scouts reported the city's defences to be exceptionally strong; his soldiers, though numerous, were far from disciplined; the Florentines were clearly determined to resist; patrol after fighting patrol crept out into the contado bent upon keeping their supply routes open.
Many of these patrols were led by Francesco Ferrucci, who had sworn to keep the enemy at bay from the city of his birth. He was given the important command of the garrison at Empoli, a small fortified town on the Arno between Florence and Pisa; and from here, with ruthless energy, he directed operations against the besieging forces, hanging a messenger sent to him with a white flag of surrender. For months on end, inspired by Ferrucci's tireless efforts, the Florentines maintained their resistance; but by the summer of 1530 the former high spirits of the citizens had given way to gloom. Many families were on the verge of starvation; mice were sold for high prices in the market; there had been an outbreak of plague. ‘Everyone was beside himself with fright and bewilderment,’ recorded Benedetto Varchi; ‘no one knew what to say any more, what to do or where to go. Some tried to escape, some to hide, some to seek refuge in the Palazzo della Signoria or in churches. Most of them merely entrusted themselves to God and awaited resignedly, from one hour to the next, not just death but death amidst the most horrid cruelties imaginable.’
Crowds marched through the streets shouting for bread, for surrender, for a return of the Medici as the only means of relief from their present miseries. The Perugian commander, Malatesta Baglioni, though he still rode about the streets with the word Libertas embroidered on his hat, was already conducting secret negotiations with the enemy. And then, on 3 August 1530, Francesco Ferrucci was captured by Spanish troops in the mountains near Pistoia and hacked to death in the piazza of the village of Gavinana.4
A week later a delegation of Florentine citizens agreed to the terms of surrender demanded by the Emperor and the Pope. Although they provided for the payment of a massive indemnity and the handing over of fifty hostages until the money was paid, the terms imposed upon the Florentines were not unduly harsh. Once Medici rule had been re-established under papal authority in Florence, however, those who had opposed it in the past were treated with the greatest severity.
Various leaders of the anti-papal party were executed after torture. Many other opponents of the new regime were imprisoned or banished from Florence for life. Many others went into voluntary exile; and some went into hiding in Florence. One of these was Michelangelo, who, with the help of one of the canons, seems to have concealed himself for two months in the Medici Chapel at San Lorenzo, where drawings attributed to him can still be seen on the walls.5
Francesco Guicciardini, who had left the city for Rome on the approach of the imperial army and had now returned as papal representative, considered the punishments inflicted upon the opponents of the Pope and the Medici only just. He found Florence devastated by her people's resistance and all the houses for many miles around Florence, his own villa among many, destroyed. Indeed, ‘in many towns of the Florentine dominion the peasant population was immeasurably decreased and the common folk disappeared entirely’. Only a strong government, Guicciardini believed, could restore the damage; and that government must now be exercised by the nineteen-year-old Alessandro de' Medici, to whose service he was assigned as legal adviser.
At first, following his mentors' advice, Alessandro was a firm but not tyrannical ruler. He was created a duke but, in deference to the republican traditions of Florence, he agreed to consult the city's councils and to listen to their advice. After the death of his supposed father, the Pope, however, he abandoned all pretence of constitutional rule, indulging his taste for authoritarian decrees and outraging the citizens not only by his sexual escapades and his constant public quarrels with his cousin, Ippolito, but also by his repeated provocation of republican idealists. He now made a mere show of consulting the councils and committees which had been set up to replace the old gov
ernment of Gonfaloniere and priori. He ordered the construction of an immense new fortress, the Fortezza da Basso, a forbidding symbol of despotism on which three thousand workers from the contado were put to work, given their meals and lodging but no wages;6 and he saw to it that the guns of this fort could be as easily trained upon the citizens of Florence as upon a foreign invader. He had his coat of arms carved prominently over the gateway of the recently enlarged fort at the Porta alla Giustizia. He issued instructions for the impounding of all weapons in private hands, even those which were hung as votive offerings in churches; and he had the great bell of the Palazzo della Signoria, which was sent crashing down into the piazza to symbolize the death of the old republic, melted down and recast as medals glorifying the Medici family.
Reluctant to rise up against him for fear lest another imperial army should be sent against them, the Florentines rested their forlorn hopes in Ippolito, so constantly at odds with Alessandro, and now a cardinal. Before he could intercede on their behalf with the Emperor, however, Ippolito died at Itri of what was said to be malaria, but many naturally believed was poisoning.
There were others, though, only too willing to take Ippolito de' Medici's place in presenting the case against Alessandro at Charles V's court. One of these, an exile from Florence, was Jacopo Nardi, who had been one of Savonarola's leading supporters and whose Istorie della città di Firenze was harshly critical of the Medici. His native city, he told the Emperor, had now become a place of terror and repression, in which men went in daily fear of their lives and women were in constant danger of dishonour, a city overawed by a ‘great fortress, built with the blood of her unhappy people as a prison and slaughterhouse’.
Francesco Guicciardini, speaking to the Emperor on Alessandro's behalf, strongly rebutted these charges, concluding his address, at once evasive and high-flown, with the totally misleading words, ‘One cannot reply in detail to the accusations of rape and similar calumnies uttered in general; but His Excellency's virtue, his fame, the opinion of him held throughout the city, of his prudence, of his virtuous habits, are a sufficient reply.’
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