The House Of Medici

by Christopher Hibbert

  In his cell in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria, Cosimo had been allowed to see a few selected visitors, in addition to Ambrogio Traversari. He had also been permitted to have his meals brought over from the Palazzo Bardi as he was afraid of being poisoned. But the greatest care was taken to ensure that he neither received nor gave any messages, and that no communications passed between him and his bank: an official watched over the cooking, carrying and serving of his food, while a guard remained within earshot when he was talking to his visitors. But the guard, Federigo Malavolti, was sympapathetic: messages did pass out of the cell, and bribes were offered and accepted. The Gonfaloniere himself, the impecunious Bernardo Guadagni, readily pocketed a thousand florins as soon as they were offered to him – he was a feeble fellow, Cosimo afterwards commented derisively, as he could have had ten thousand or more if he had asked for them. Anyway, in return for the relatively modest bribe, Guadagni announced that he had suddenly been taken so ill that he could no longer participate in the council’s deliberations; he delegated his vote to another Priore, Mariotto Baldovinetti, who, equally impecunious, had also received a bribe from the Medici coffers.

  As well as having to contend with former supporters who had now been suborned, with powerful foreign customers of the Medici bank, with faithful friends of the Medici family who were growing more outspoken every day, and with the gradual desertion of such influential moderates as Palla Strozzi, the Albizzi had also to face the possibility of an armed uprising. For as soon as he heard of the arrest, Cosimo’s brother, Lorenzo, and various other members of the family had rushed out to the Mugello to raise troops to release him. At the same time preparations had been made to assemble a small army of Medici adherents at Cafaggiolo; and the condottiere, Niccolò da Tolentino, believed to have received money through Cosimo’s friend, Neri Capponi, had moved down with a band of mercenaries from Pisa to Lastra. Niccolò da Tolentino remained at Lastra for fear that his further advance would result in a tumult in Florence during which Cosimo might be assassinated; but there could be no doubt that he played an important part in Rinaldo degli Albizzi’s ultimate decision to abandon hope of having his tiresome prisoner condemned to death.

  On 28 September it was decided that Cosimo should be banished for ten years to Padua, that his wily cousin, Averardo, should be sent to Naples, also for ten years, and that his brother, Lorenzo, a quieter and less offensive figure, should be exiled for five years to Venice. All of them, together with the rest of the family, excepting only the Vieri branch, were declared to be Grandi and thus excluded from office in Florence for ever. Subsequently the leaders of their party in Florence, Puccio and Giovanni Pucci, were banished to Aquila for ten years;6 while the two Priori who had not followed the Albizzi line during the meetings of the Signoria were denied the rewards, in the way of sinecures and appointments of both profit and honour, that were given to all the rest.

  When Cosimo, whose many virtues seem not to have included physical courage, was summoned before the Signoria to hear the decree of banishment read out to him, he evidently made a rather abject reply. He protested that he had never frequented the Palazzo della Signoria except when summoned, that he had ‘always declined to be nominated an official’, that far from inciting any Tuscan city to rebel against the government of Florence he had helped to buy several by providing loans to raise troops to conquer them. However, he declared,

  As you have decided I am to go to Padua, I declare that I am content to go, and to stay wherever you command, not only in the Trevisian state, but should you send me to live among the Arabs, or any other people alien to our customs, I would go most willingly. As disaster comes to me by your orders, I accept it as a boon, and as a benefit to me and my belongings…Every trouble will be easy to bear as long as I know that my adversity will bring peace and happiness to the city…One thing I beg of you, O Signori, that seeing you intend to preserve my life you take care that it should not be taken by wicked citizens, and thus you be put to shame…Have a care that those who stand outside in the Piazza with arms in their hands anxiously desiring my blood, should not have their way with me. My pain would be small, but you would earn perpetual infamy.

  Anxious as he was himself that there should be no uncontrollable violence, the Signoria gave orders that their prisoner should be spirited from Florence under cover of night through the Porta San Gallo. He was to be escorted by armed guard to the frontier, and there left to make his own way to Padua by way of Ferrara.

  IV

  EXILES AND MASTERS

  ‘He is King in all but name’

  ON HIS journey into exile, Cosimo was met with compliments rather than reproach. At Ferrara he was warmly welcomed and splendidly entertained by the Marquis; at Padua he was greeted as an honoured guest by the authorities who were obviously delighted to have so distinguished and so rich an exile amongst them. For rich he still certainly was, all the attempts of Rinaldo degli Albizzi to bankrupt him while in prison having failed. ‘One should either not lift a finger against the mighty,’ Rinaldo commented gloomily to his friends, ‘or, if one does, one must do it thoroughly.’ He was forced to recognize that, although he had succeeded in temporarily removing his enemy from Florence, his own position in the city was now far from secure.

  After spending two months in Padua, Cosimo secured permission to join his brother in Venice where he was offered rooms in the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. Here he settled down comfortably and, no doubt influenced by the knowledge that it was a monastery for which Pope Eugenius – having once been a friar there – had much affection, he announced that he would pay for a much-needed new library.1 He commissioned a design from the young Florentine architect, Michelozzo Michelozzi, who had accompanied him to Venice, the buildings in Florence on which he was working for Cosimo having been brought to a temporary halt.

  While in Venice, Cosimo was kept fully and regularly informed of the changing situation in Florence where his supporters were continually plotting the downfall of the Albizzi. At the beginning of February 1434, the eloquent and highly cultivated Agnolo Acciaiuoli,2 who had criticized the Albizzi’s dictatorial methods, was arrested and sentenced to ten years’ banishment to Cosenza. A few weeks later a distant relative of Cosimo, Mario Bartolommeo de’ Medici, who was suspected of trying to undermine the Albizzi’s foreign policy, was also arrested and banished for ten years.

  Cosimo himself warily avoided implication in these conspiracies. He knew that every month the Albizzi were becoming more and more unpopular in Florence and that both Venice and Rome favoured the return of the Medici. He was comforted to learn that since the Medici’s departure no other bankers could be found to supply the government ‘with so much as a pistachio nut’. By the late summer of 1434, after a decisive defeat by Milanese mercenaries of Florentine troops at Imola, feelings against the government had run so high that a majority of known Medici supporters were elected to the Signoria. One of these, Niccolò di Cocco, became Gonfaloniere.

  Had it not been for the objections of the immensely rich Palla Strozzi, who, since the death of Niccolò da Uzzano, had been the most respected and influential of the moderates in the oligarchy, Rinaldo would have used violence to prevent this new Signoria meeting; but he was persuaded to allow the members to enter into office on the understanding that they would be forcibly ejected from the Palazzo della Signoria at the first suggestion that the Medici should be asked to return. Determined not to be browbeaten, the Signoria took advantage of Rinaldo’s temporary absence from Florence in September to issue the invitation which he dreaded; and, upon his return to the city, they summoned him to their Palazzo. Suspecting that he would be arrested and thrown into the Alberghettino as Cosimo had been, and believing that he had the support of several prominent citizens – including Palla Strozzi, Giovanni Guicciardini,3 Ridolfo Peruzzi4 and Niccolò Barbardori5 – Rinaldo ignored the summons, hurried to his palace, called his remaining adherents to arms and gave orders to the captain of his five-hundred-strong bodyguar
d to occupy the church of San Pier Scheraggio6 opposite the Palazzo della Signoria and to prepare to take possession of the Palazzo itself. The guard on the door of the Palazzo was offered as many ducats as would fill his helmet to open the door for Rinaldo’s men should the Signoria instruct him to lock it.

  On the morning of 25 September, Rinaldo’s troops began to take up their positions. But the Signoria were not to be caught unawares. They brought their own troops into the Piazza, ordered others to march up and down through the streets, and made preparations to withstand a siege by having provisions brought into the Palazzo. They then shut and barricaded the gates, and summoned reinforcements from the surrounding districts. To gain time while these reinforcements were being assembled, they also sent two Priori to enter into negotiations with the Albizzi and called upon the services of another far more powerful intermediary who had now arrived in Florence, Pope Eugenius IV.

  Having quarrelled with the powerful Colonna family, to which his predecessor, Martin V, had belonged, Pope Eugenius had been driven from Rome by a rampaging mob and had fled to Florence where he was given shelter in the monastery of Santa Maria Novella. Here he was known to have spoken sympathetically of the Medici and to have entertained the hope that a strong government in Florence might ally itself with Venice and help him return to Rome, backed by Medici money. On the afternoon of 26 September, the Pope’s representative, Cardinal Vitelleschi, left Santa Maria Novella to find Rinaldo and to bring him back to the monastery for discussions with his Holiness.

  By now Rinaldo’s situation was becoming desperate. He had succeeded in occupying the Piazza Sant’ Apollinare and in closing all entrances to it as preliminary measures before seizing the Bargello, attacking the Piazza della Signoria and burning all the houses of the Medici as well as those of their principal supporters. But although numerous mercenaries, promised the prospect of plunder rather than pay, had been enlisted outside Florence, they were slow in arriving; and many of Rinaldo’s troops already inside the city were gradually deserting him. Worst of all, Giovanni Guicciardini, whose support he had deemed essential to his success, now declared that he was prepared to do no more than ensure that his brother, Piero, a known Medici adherent, would not back up the Signoria; while Palla Strozzi, who had previously indicated that his five hundred personal men-at-arms would be at Rinaldo’s disposal, changed his mind, rode into the Piazza Sant’ Apollinare with merely two servants in attendance and then, having spoken briefly to Rinaldo, rode quickly off again. Rinaldo’s main supporter, Ridolfo Peruzzi, also began to waver, accepted a summons to appear before the Signoria and, having wasted time in fruitless discussions with them, urged Rinaldo to accept Cardinal Vitelleschi’s invitation to go to talk to the Pope at Santa Maria Novella.

  Accompanied by Peruzzi and Barbadori, and followed by a disorderly squad of armed supporters, Rinaldo rode off to see the Pope soon after six o’clock in the evening. As they approached the houses of the Martelli family, whose senior members were close friends and sometimes business associates of the Medici, an attempt was made to block their way. Fighting broke out, several men were badly wounded, and after the Martelli’s guards had been driven back inside their walls, Rinaldo had the utmost difficulty in inducing his men to follow him to Santa Maria Novella rather than to break into the Palazzo Martelli and plunder it.7 When at last they arrived grumbling before the monastery they sat down in the Piazza, obviously unwilling to wait there long.

  Few of them did wait long. Night had long since fallen when Rinaldo emerged from the monastery to find only a small group of them still sitting in the Piazza. It was clear that his spirit was broken. The Pope, so commanding in appearance and manner, so skilled in argument, had persuaded him of the futility of further resistance to the wishes of the Signoria which were also, so Rinaldo was informed, the wishes of the Curia. Little reassured by the Pope’s promise to do what he could to protect the Albizzi from the vengeance of their opponents, Rinaldo returned to his palazzo.

  Two days later, for a full hour, the huge Vacca in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria was tolled to summon the citizens to a Parlamento. As the people gathered in the Piazza, which was ringed by troops, Cardinal Vitelleschi and two other representatives of the Pope appeared on the ringhiera. Soon afterwards, to the clamorous welcome of fanfares, they were joined there by all the members of the Signoria and the officials of the Republic, including the Notaio delle Riformagioni who in the time-honoured way called out, ‘O, people of Florence, are you content that a Balìa shall be set up to reform your city for the good of the people?’ The crowd obediently gave their consent; and a Balìa of three hundred and fifty citizens was accordingly elected. The sentence of banishment passed on the Medici was immediately revoked, and the family were commended for their good behaviour during the time of their exile from which they were now formally recalled.

  On the same day, 28 September 1434, Cosimo left Venice with an escort of three hundred Venetian soldiers; and a few days later, cheered by the peasants in the villages through which he passed, he arrived at his villa at Careggi in time for dinner.8 The grounds were crowded with welcoming people. There were crowds, too, along the road leading into Florence, and in the city itself masses of people were waiting in the streets, hoping to witness the triumphal return of the Medici to their palace. For fear of uproar, the Signoria sent an urgent request to Cosimo not to enter the city that day, but to wait until nightfall. So, after sunset, accompanied by his brother, Lorenzo, one servant and a mace-bearer from the city, he re-entered Florence by a small gateway near the Bargello. He spent the night in a room which had been specially prepared for him in the Palazzo della Signoria; and the next morning, after visiting the Pope to thank him for all he had done for him, he returned to the Palazzo Bardi to the tumultuous cheers of the crowds gathered in the streets ‘as though he were returning from a great victory’.

  Already sentences had been passed on his opponents. Rinaldo degli Albizzi, his sons and descendants were all banished from Florence – so were branches of several other families, and, in some cases, families in their entirety, in accordance with the custom of considering a crime as much a collective as a personal responsibility. Included in the decrees of banishment were members of the Peruzzi, Guasconi, Guadagni and Guicciardini families, Niccolò Barbadori, and Matteo Strozzi. Indeed, so many well-known names – over seventy in all – appeared in the list of exiles that someone complained to Cosimo that he was almost emptying Florence of its leading citizens. His typically brusque and sardonic reply was, ‘Seven or eight yards of scarlet will make a new citizen.’

  Rather than risk sharing the fate of the Albizzi upon Cosimo’s return, Francesco Filelfo had already fled to Siena where, in the service of the Visconti, he wrote a stream of slanderous abuse of the Medici, incited the Florentines to rise up against them, and even, so it seems, helped to hire a Greek assassin to murder Cosimo. Few regretted the departure from Florence of this tiresome, vain and cantankerous scholar. But many lamented the banishment to Padua of the revered and honest Palla Strozzi, who had never given his full support to the Albizzi and had ultimately abandoned them altogether. Cosimo, however, recognizing that his position in Florence would be more secure if Palla Strozzi, so enormously rich and so dangerously impressionable, were to be compelled to leave, decided not to risk his being pardoned. When asked to put in a good word for him for the sake of past friendship, he did so in a characteristically ambivalent manner, raising no protest when the decision to banish him was finally taken. He apparently comforted himself with the thought that Palla Strozzi would be much happier in Padua where, free from the temptation to meddle in politics, which were not his métier, he would settle down contentedly – as, in fact, he did – to a life of quiet study, conversation and bibliomania.

  There were to be many times during the next few years when Cosimo had good cause to wish that he could have been left to such a life himself. To assume power in many another Italian state, where executions rather than banishments were
commonplace punishments and where the ruler was supported and protected by a powerful army, would have been comparatively simple. But executions and military dictatorships were not in the Florentine tradition, and Florentine tradition was not to be flouted. If Cosimo were to rule successfully, he must appear scarcely to rule at all; if changes in the political structure were to be made, they must be changes calculated to arouse the least offence. Had it been possible to control and expand his bank without political influence he might, perhaps, have been content to remain even further in the background than he actually contrived to do. For he derived the greatest satisfaction from his business, saying that even if it were possible to procure money and possessions with a magic wand he would still continue to work as a banker. But as his father had been forced to recognize, a rich merchant in Florence was ill-advised to try to avoid public office. Even so, Cosimo succeeded in remaining the most powerful man in Florence for years without ever appearing to be much more than an extremely prosperous, generous and approachable banker, prepared to undertake whatever political or diplomatic duties were imposed upon him, and to help direct the financial policies of the State. He acted with the greatest skill to preserve his power, his friend, Vespasiano da Bisticci the bookseller, wrote. ‘And whenever he wished to achieve something, he saw to it, in order to escape envy as much as possible, that the initiative appeared to come from others and not from him.’ Unable to disguise his enormous wealth, he paid tax at a far higher rate than anyone else in Florence; but, like all rich men of prudence, he kept special accounts which, by exaggerating bad debts, showed his taxable income to be much lower than it was. So no one was quite sure just how rich he was. He was Gonfaloniere no more than three times in his entire life; he never considered the possibility of assuming a more obviously permanent control over the government, nor of offending Florentine susceptibilities by attempting any basic reform of the far from satisfactory constitution, other than by establishing a new council known as the Consiglio Maggiore, which was intended to have absolute control over national security and taxation and which later developed into the Council of One Hundred, the Cento. He scrupulously avoided display and ostentation of any kind, riding a mule rather than a horse, and when it suited him to do so, allowing the vain and talkative, flamboyant and ambitious but not over-intelligent Luca Pitti to appear to be the most powerful man in the Republic.