The House Of Medici

by Christopher Hibbert

  From such households as these came the men who ruled Florence. Theoretically every member of the city’s several guilds, the arti, had a say in its government; but this was far from being the case in practice. There were twenty-one guilds in all, seven major ones and fourteen minor. Of the seven major guilds that of the lawyers, the Arte dei Giudici e Notai, enjoyed the highest prestige; next in importance were the guilds of the wool, silk and cloth merchants, the Arte della Lana, the Arte di Por Santa Maria and the Arte di Calimala which took its name from the streets where the cloth warehouses were to be found.5 Emerging as a rival to these in riches and consequence was the Arte del Cambio, the bankers’ guild, though bankers still suffered from the condemnation of the Church as usurers and felt obliged to adopt certain customs and euphemisms in an attempt to disguise the true nature of their transactions. The Arte dei Medici, Speziali e Merciai was the guild of the doctors, the apothecaries and the shopkeepers, of merchants who sold spices, dyes and medicines, and of certain artists and craftsmen, like painters who, buying their colours from members of the guild, were themselves admitted to it. The seventh major guild, the Arte dei Vaccai e Pellicciai, looked after the interests of both dealers and craftsmen in animal skins and fur.

  The minor guilds were those of such relatively humble tradesmen as butchers, tanners, leatherworkers, smiths, cooks, stonemasons, joiners, vintners and innkeepers, tailors, armourers and bakers. But while a member of the Arte della Lana would look down upon the Arte dei Fabbri, the smiths, in their turn, could feel superior to tens of thousands of those ordinary workers in the wool and silk trades, the weavers, spinners and dyers, the combers and beaters who, like carters and boatmen, labourers, pedlars and all those who had no permanent workshop, did not belong to a guild at all and – though they constituted more than three-quarters of the population of the city – were not allowed to form one. Such deprivation had in the past caused bitterness and occasional outbursts of violence. In the summer of 1378, the lowest class of woollen workers, known as the ciompi – because of the clogs they wore in the wash-houses – rose in revolt, protesting that their wages were scarcely sufficient to keep their families from starvation. Shouting, ‘Down with the traitors who allow us to starve!’ they sacked the houses of those merchants whom they condemned as their oppressors, forced them and their elected officials to flee for their lives, and demanded the right to form three new guilds of their own. The right could not in the circumstances be denied them; but they did not enjoy it for long. The jealousy of their fellow workers in other trades, combined with the power and money of their employers, soon destroyed the ciompi’s short-lived guilds. By 1382 the twenty-one original guilds were once more in undisputed control of the city; and by the re-enactment of the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, which had defined the constitution of Florence as an independent republic, these guilds resumed their manipulation of the government.

  The government was formed in this way: the names of all those members of the guilds aged thirty or over who were eligible for election to office were placed in eight leather bags known as borse. Every two months these bags were taken from the sacristy of the church of Santa Croce where they were kept;6 and, in a short ceremony to which any citizen who cared to watch it was admitted, names were drawn out at random. Men known to be in debt were declared ineligible for office; so were those who had served a recent term or were related to men whose names had already been drawn. The citizens eventually selected were known for the next two months as Priori; and the government which they constituted was known as the Signoria. There were never more than nine men in the Signoria, six of them representing the major guilds, two of them the minor guilds. The ninth became Gonfaloniere, temporary standard-bearer of the Republic and custodian of the city’s banner – a red lily on a white field. Immediately upon their election all the Priori were required to leave their homes and move into the Palazzo della Signoria where they were obliged to remain for their two-month term of office; they were paid a modest salary to cover their expenses and enjoyed the services of a large staff of green-liveried servants as well as a Buffone who told them funny stories and sang for them when they were having their excellent meals. They wore splendid crimson coats lined with ermine and with ermine collars and cuffs, the Gonfaloniere’s coat being distinguished from the others by its embroidery of golden stars.

  In enacting legislation and formulating foreign policy, the Signoria were required to consult two other elected councils known as Collegi, one the Dodici Buonomini, consisting of twelve citizens, the other, the Sedici Gonfalonieri, comprising sixteen. Other councils, such as the Ten of War, the Eight of Security and the Six of Commerce, were elected from time to time as the circumstances of the Republic demanded. There were in addition various permanent officials, notably the Chancellor, who was customarily a distinguished man of letters; the Notaio delle Riformagioni, who promulgated the decrees of the Signoria; and the Podestà, a kind of Lord Chief Justice, a foreigner usually of noble birth who lived at the palace, which was also a prison, later known as the Bargello.7

  In times of trouble the great bell of the Signoria would be tolled in the campanile of their Palazzo. Because of its deep, mooing tone it was known as the Vacca; and as its penetrating boom sounded throughout Florence all male citizens over the age of fourteen were expected to gather in their respective wards and then to march behind their banners to the Piazza della Signoria to form a Parlamento. Usually on such occasions the citizens, having affirmed that two-thirds of their number were present, were asked to approve the establishment of an emergency committee, a Balìa, which was granted full powers to deal with the crisis.

  The Florentines were inordinately proud of this system which, upheld by them as a guarantee of their much vaunted freedom, they were ever ready to compare favourably with the forms of government to be found in other less fortunate Italian states. Venice, admittedly, was also a republic, but it was a republic in which, so its detractors soon pointed out, various noble families played a part in government which would have been impossible for such families under the constitution of Florence. Florence’s great rival, Milan, was under the firm rule of a tyrannical duke, Filippo Maria Visconti. The Papal States, a disorderly array of petty tyrannies which sprawled across the peninsula from Rome to the Adriatic, were in a condition approaching anarchy; while the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily was being torn apart by the rival factions of the Houses of Anjou and Aragon.

  Compared with these other states, Florence certainly seemed fortunate to enjoy so commendably stable and democratic a government. But in practice the government was not democratic at all. Not only were the ordinary workers, the Minuto Popolo, successfully excluded from it; not only were the nobles, the Grandi, similarly denied representation in the councils of the Republic; but the whole process of election to those councils was controlled by a few of the richest merchant families who contrived to ensure that only the names of reliable supporters found their way into the borse, or, when this proved impossible, that a Parlamento should be summoned and a Balìa appointed to ‘reform’ the borse, thus disposing of any unreliable Priori who might have been elected to the Signoria. In fact, it was a government carried on mainly by the rich and almost exclusively in their interests.

  To the Florentine merchant, money had a quite extraordinary significance. To be rich was to be honourable, to be poor disgraced. According to that characteristic Renaissance man, Leon Battista Alberti, the philosopher, poet, athlete, painter, musician and architect, who came from one of Florence’s oldest merchant families,8 no one who was poor would ever ‘find it easy to acquire honour and fame by means of his virtues’; poverty ‘threw virtue into the shadows’ and subjected it to a ‘hidden and obscure misery’. Matteo Palmieri, another Florentine philosopher of old merchant stock, agreed with this view. In his opinion only the successful merchant who traded on a large scale was worthy of regard and honour: provided the lowest orders of society earned enough to keep them in food from day to day, then they had enough
and should not expect to have more. Gregorio Dati, one of Florence’s international silk merchants, went so far as to say, ‘A Florentine who is not a merchant, who has not travelled through the world, seeing foreign nations and peoples and then returned to Florence with some wealth, is a man who enjoys no esteem whatsoever.’

  By common consent it was agreed that the trade from which the merchant’s riches were derived must be both ‘comely and grand’. Quickly made fortunes were highly suspect; so were those made from dealing in ‘ugly trades’, from ‘socially inferior skills’, from ‘low callings, suitable for wage earners’. Trade on an imposing scale and in fine merchandise, however, was not only a credit to the merchant who carried it on but also to the Republic itself which derived such benefit from it.

  Having acquired riches the merchant must not be chary of spending them. He must have a fine palazzo and a commodious family loggia, a pleasant country villa and a private chapel. He must provide his family with suitably expensive if not unduly flamboyant clothes, and be ready to provide his daughters with handsome dowries. He must be generous in his donations to the building of churches and convents not only for the glory of God but also for the honour of his descendants and of Florence. If he were rich enough he would gain additional prestige by lending money to the Republic. Giovanni Rucellai, whose enormous fortune was based on the famous Florentine red dye, the oricello, from which his family derived their name, declared that he had done himself much more honour ‘by having spent money well than by having earned it’; he had also derived deeper satisfaction in spending it, especially the money he had spent on his palazzo, a splendid edifice designed by Alberti.9

  But to be a rich and munificent merchant in a respectable way of business was not in itself sufficient to gain esteem in Florentine society. Ideally a good marriage was also required; so was a tradition of family service to the Republic. Indeed, no one could pretend to high social rank who did not hold or had not held some public office. This was impressed upon the sons of merchants from their earliest years; and a family whose name did not feature on the parchment lists of former Priori, all of whom had been carefully recorded since 1282, was almost beyond the pale. The venerated and enormously rich patrician, Niccolò da Uzzano, kept one of these lists hanging on the wall of his study so that, when the candidature of someone unknown to him was canvassed, he could immediately satisfy himself that he was not a parvenu.10

  The Medici were not parvenus. Yet, compared with many of their rivals, they were not an ancient family either. In later years all manner of legends gained currency.

  II

  THE RISE OF THE MEDICI

  ‘Always keep out of the public eye’

  IT WAS said that the Medici were descended from one Averardo, a brave knight who had fought under the banner of Charlemagne. This Averardo had once passed through Tuscany on his way to Rome, and in the district to the north of Florence known as the Mugello he had come upon a savage giant, the terror of the poor peasants of the neighbourhood. He had done battle with the monster and had killed him. In the fight his shield had been dented in several places by the heavy blows of the giant’s ferociously wielded mace; and Charlemagne had rewarded Averardo’s bravery by allowing him to commemorate his great victory by representing the dents on his coat-of-arms by red balls or palle on a field of gold – ever afterwards the insignia of the Medici.1 More prosaically, and rather more probably, others maintained that these red balls represented pills or cupping-glasses, the Medici – as their name suggested – having originally been doctors or apothecaries, descendants of a charcoal burner who had moved into Florence from the Mugello. Yet others had it that the balls represented coins, the traditional emblems of pawnbrokers.

  What at least was certain was that in more recent years the Medici had been leading lives of quiet respectability in Florence, prospering as the city prospered, and occasionally occupying public office. The first member of the family to become Gonfaloniere was one Ardingo de’ Medici who was elected to that office in 1296. His brother Guccio also became Gonfaloniere three years later and had the distinction of being buried in a fourth-century sarcophagus which was placed outside the black and white octagonal church of San Giovanni Battista, known as the Baptistery. Another Medici, Cosimo’s great-great grandfather, Averardo, was elected Gonfaloniere in 1314; but thereafter the family appear to have suffered a decline. One of Averardo’s grandsons, Filigno di Conte de’ Medici, lamented this decline in a short book of memoirs he wrote for his children. He was pleased to say that the family still owned several small houses in Florence, as well as two palazzi, an inn, and ‘the half of a palazzo with houses round it’ at Cafaggiolo in the Mugello. They were still quite well off, but not nearly as rich as once they had been; while their social position, though ‘still considerable, ought to have been higher’. Gone were the days when it ‘used to be said, “You are like one of the Medici”, and every man feared [them]’.

  A cousin of Filigno, Salvestro de’ Medici, reclaimed the family’s prestige by being elected Gonfaloniere in 1370 and again in 1378, the year of the riots of the ciompi. Salvestro was known to be in sympathy with the ciompi and for a time his reputation blossomed in the light of their success. But their ultimate failure ruined him; and thereafter the Medici, whose name was now inevitably associated with the party of the people, were regarded with suspicion by many of the leading families of the city.

  It was a suspicion which Cosimo’s father, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, had always been anxious to allay. He had not been born rich: the little money left by his own father had had to be divided between a widow and five sons. And having made his own fortune, Giovanni was determined not to put it in jeopardy. His sympathies, like Salvestro’s, were supposed to be with the Minuto Popolo and he consequently enjoyed much popularity with them. Yet he was a man of the utmost discretion, acutely aware of the danger of arousing the Florentines’ notorious distrust of overtly ambitious citizens, anxious to remain as far as possible out of the public eye while making money in his rapidly expanding banking business.

  He enjoyed the reputation of a kind man, honest, understanding and humane; yet no one could mistake the worldly-wise shrewdness in his hooded eyes nor the determined set of his large chin. He was never eloquent, but in his talk there were occasional flashes of wit which were rendered all the more disarming by the habitually lugubrious expression of his pale face. Although his riches had been increased by the handsome dowry which his wife, Piccarda Bueri, had brought into the family, he lived with her and his two sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo, in a modest house in the Via Larga before moving to a slightly larger but still unpretentious house in the Piazza del Duomo not far from the unfinished cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.2 Giovanni would have preferred to avoid public life altogether, as many minor merchants contrived to do; he would ideally have liked to divide his time between his house in Florence and his country villa, between his office in the Piazza del Duomo and his bank in the Via Porta Rossa3 near the present Mercato Nuovo.4 But in Florence, as one of his grandsons was to say, rich merchants did not prosper without taking a share in the government.

  So Giovanni reluctantly accepted office as one of the Priori in the Signoria in 1402, in 1408 and again in 1411; and in 1421, for the statutory two-month period, he occupied the office of Gonfaloniere. For the rest he appeared content to sit in the shadows of his counting-house, contributing generously to public funds and private charities, investing in land in the surrounding countryside, adopting no more definite a political stance than one of moderate opposition to the civic aspirations of the dispossessed Grandi – whose banker he was nevertheless happy to be – and allowing the rich Albizzi family to exercise control of the government through their friends and nominees in the Signoria.

  It had to be agreed even by their political opponents that this period of rule by the Albizzi and their associates had not so far been particularly unpopular in Florence, coinciding as it did with a time of relative prosperity. It had been a harsh rule to
be sure: opposition to it had been rigorously crushed; malcontents and rivals had been arrested, banished, impoverished, even executed. But Florentine territories had gradually and continually expanded. Before the Albizzi came to power these territories already stretched far beyond the walls of the city and included the towns of Pistoia, Volterra, and Prato which was bought from the Queen of Naples in 1351. But since they had successfully taken over the government, the Albizzi had not only gained possession of Arezzo; they had also opened up a passage to the sea by capturing Pisa and its port, Porto Pisano, in 1406, and in 1421 they had bought Leghorn from the Genoese.

  The acquisition of these ports – celebrated at Pisa by the launching of the first Florentine armed galley – immensely increased the wealth of the Republic, and gave a new impetus to the trade in wool and cloth upon which its prosperity had long depended. From England and the Low Countries, as well as from the hills and valleys of Tuscany, vast quantities of wool had for generations come into Florence to be refined, dyed and re-exported. Before the Black Death the industry was believed to have supported as many as 30,000 people. This explained the importance and influence of the Arte di Calimala and the Arte della Lana, the cloth and wool trade guilds, which for so long had played an essential part in the government of the city and had been responsible for the construction of so many of its finest buildings. The building of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, for instance, had been entrusted to officials of the Arte della Lana whose emblem of a lamb was a notable feature on its walls.