It was all very fine, the Florentines conceded, but they were not unduly impressed. They could have put on a much better show themselves, one of them commented, had they wanted to. And even the Duke himself had to admit that, although the Medici lived in much simpler style that the Sforzas, although Lorenzo chose to wear such plain, dark-coloured clothes, there was little in Milan to compare with the treasures assembled within the walls of the Medici Palace. For, despite all his arrogance and outbursts of psychopathic inhumanity, Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza was a man of some learning and much discernment. He had a genuine regard for the arts and scholarship for which Florence was so justly renowned; he also developed a deep respect for his young host who was already doing so much to foster them.
It was a respect that others were being taught to share. Piero had no sooner died when yet another attempt had been made to destroy the power and influence of the Medici. Thinking to take advantage of the youth and inexperience of the new head of the family, the conspirators who had attempted to overthrow Piero in 1466 and had since been living in exile assembled an army and, under the leadership of Dietisalvi Neroni, seized Prato. But that was the limit of their success. Their hopes of help from clandestine supporters in Florence and from Ferrara dwindled away as Lorenzo, and a Signoria well disposed towards him, acted as quickly and decisively as Piero had done under the earlier threat. A force of Florentine mercenaries was immediately dispatched to retake Prato; the conspirators were dispersed; and the authority of the Medicean regime was once again secure.
Lorenzo’s personal position in that regime was not yet openly acknowledged. When, for instance, Pope Paul II died the next year, a deputation was sent to Rome by the Signoria to offer his successor, Sixtus IV, the city’s congratulations. Lorenzo was invited to be one of the delegates, but he had no greater privileges nor higher status than any other member of the embassy: Florence was still, in name, a republic; and its citizens remained anxious that it should continue to appear to be so. It was recognized nevertheless that Lorenzo, by his birth, merited special treatment. Too young to be a member of the Cento, he was admitted as a member by special decree. He was also admitted to the Balià and kept busy with important affairs of state as though he were already a highly experienced politician, writing numerous letters to foreign ambassadors and princes and playing a leading part in the deliberations of the councils.
The influential position he had already achieved for himself by 1472 was demonstrated well enough when there was trouble in Volterra, one of the most restless and independent of those Tuscan towns which, while self-governing except as regards foreign policy, still had to render an annual tribute to Florence. The trouble arose over a contract for mining alum in a cave in the neighbourhood of Volterra; the contract had been granted to a consortium comprising three Florentines, three Sienese and two Volterrans. There was strong feeling amongst the people of Volterra that this consortium had gained its profitable contract by fraud. They therefore elected magistrates who seized the mine and dismissed the men who were operating it. Lorenzo was not a member of the consortium nor does he appear to have had any control over it; but when the commune of Volterra asked him to arbitrate in the dispute, he was sufficiently well disposed towards the consortium to decide that control of the mine must be handed back to its members. The two Volterran members, Inghirami and Riccobaldi, delighted and encouraged by his decision, promptly marched back to the mine with an armed escort and declared themselves representatives of the rightful owners. It was an invitation to violence, and violence immediately broke out. There were savage riots in which several people were killed; the dead body of Inghirami was thrown out of a window onto the square below; and the Florentine Capitano of Volterra had cause to feel grateful that he had not been thrown out with him.
Lorenzo was now determined that the uprising must be put down by force. His orders had been disobeyed. Some of those in whose favour he had pronounced had been savagely murdered, and the Volterran rebels had been joined by Florentine exiles who were urging them to join them in an attack on the Medici. A majority of the Signoria were of the opinion that to use force was both provocative and unnecessary. This was also the opinion of the Bishop of Volterra. But Lorenzo would not listen. The Volterrans were notoriously turbulent and should be taught a lesson; if they were not, other Tuscan towns might follow their example. His advice was taken. An army, led by Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and composed of mercenaries in Florentine pay, marched towards Volterra, whose citizens looked frantically about for allies, but in vain. They even went so far as to offer their town to the King of Naples if only he would save them from Florence, but apart from a little help from Siena and Piombino no comforting response was received from anywhere. After a month’s siege the town surrendered. Lorenzo wrote a letter expressing his relief that it had all ended so satisfactorily; but he wrote too soon.
By the time his letter reached Volterra the town was being wildly plundered. No one afterwards discovered how it was that the terms of surrender were so blatantly violated. Some said that the mercenaries employed by the Volterrans had opened the gates to the Duke of Urbino’s men in order to help them plunder the town. By whatever means they entered it, the Duke’s men were soon pillaging Volterra, breaking into houses and shops, murdering men and raping women. Some reports had it that the Duke himself, having found and stolen a rare polyglot Bible, made no efforts to control them; others claimed that he did have several of his soldiers hanged but that this was no deterrent. In any case, it was many hours before the uproar died down and by then hundreds of people were dead or mutilated, and whole streets were ransacked and in ruins. The horror of the scene of devastation was heightened by the effects of a landslip caused by torrential rain.
On learning what had happened Lorenzo immediately rode over to Volterra. He did what he could to reassure the people that his fellow citizens in Florence profoundly regretted the outrages, and he distributed money to those who had suffered loss. His regret was obviously sincere; but it was impossible to overlook the fact that it was he who had advocated the use of force, that it was he who had employed the Duke of Urbino, that it was he who had approved the restoration of the mines to the original concessionaires, and that it was he who had pressed for the withdrawal of Volterra’s rights of self-government. And in Volterra these things are not forgotten even to this day.
X
THE POPE AND THE PAZZI
‘Do what you wish provided there be no killing’
FRANCESCO DELLA Rovere, to whom Lorenzo had offered Florence’s congratulations on his election in 1471 as Pope Sixtus IV, was a big, gruff, toothless man with a massive head, a small, squashed nose and an intimidating expression. Born in a poor fishing community near Savona, he had entered the Franciscan order at a very early age and, thanks to a highly developed gift for preaching, a taste for learning and piety, some charm and much ambition, he was made general of the order before he was fifty and a cardinal three years later. Since then he had been unremitting in granting favours, offices, money, lands and power to innumerable relations of dubious merit of whom his sister’s family were the most demanding. Six of his nephews were made cardinals, and for those who were not in the Church he endeavoured to find profitable lordships in the Papal States.
One of these nephews, the witty, amiable and ostentatious Piero Riario, was created Patriarch of Constantinople, Abbotof St Ambrose, Bishop of Treviso, Mende, Spalato and Senigallia as well as Archbishop of Florence. Another nephew, Girolamo Riario, whom many believed to be, in fact, his son, was even more importunate. A fat, uncouth, rowdy young man, Girolamo had his eye on Imola as a base from which to build up larger estates in the Romagna. This small town between Bologna and Forlì had recently been sold by Taddeo Manfredi to the Duke of Milan whose natural daughter, Caterina Sforza, seemed to the Pope an ideal bride for Girolamo. Negotations were immediately opened and the Medici bank in Rome was asked to raise the 40,000 ducats necessary for the purchase of Imola.
Lorenzo was much disturbed by this request. So far, his relations with the Pope had been perfectly cordial. He had been greeted ‘very honourably’ in Rome where he had been assured that the Medici were to remain bankers to the Curia and agents for the alum mines at Tolfa. He had been presented with two marble heads, one of Augustus, the other of Agrippa; and he had been offered various treasures from the collections of Paul II, including intaglios, cameos, vases and cups in semi-precious stones, which he was able to buy at a most reasonable price. Lorenzo was naturally anxious that this promising start to his association with the new Pope should not be undermined; but he also recognized that the strategically placed town of Imola, which dominated the road from Rimini to Bologna and which he had hoped to buy himself for Florence, must on no account fall into the hands of the Pope. So when the application for a loan was placed before him he made excuses for not granting it. Undeterred, the Pope turned to the Medici’s leading rivals as Florentine bankers in Rome, the Pazzi, who were delighted to be of service and to obtain the coveted Curial account.
Having settled Girolamo comfortably at Imola, the Pope now turned his attention to another nephew, Giovanni della Rovere, who, although Prefect of Rome and Lord of Mondovi in Piedmont, was still anxious to get the same sort of foothold in the Romagna as his cousin had done. Sixtus obligingly fixed this for him by arranging a marriage with the eldest daughter of Duke Federigo of Urbino, which not only brought the territorial influence of the Pope closer than ever to the Florentine frontier, but also detached a highly successful condottiere from Florentine service.
By now, relations between Lorenzo and the Curia were growing excessively strained; and when the Pope endeavoured to dislodge Niccolò Vitelli from Città di Castello, a town near the Florentine outpost of Borgo San Sepolcro – which had been bought in Cosimo’s day with funds confiscated from a Jewish pawnbroker – Florence and the Papacy came close to war. Lorenzo raised 6,000 men to help defend Vitelli, which the Pope considered the grossest effrontery; and after Vitelli, despite this assistance, had been forced to surrender, he was given an honourable welcome in Florence, which antagonized Sixtus even more.
There was yet further trouble in 1474 when Piero Riario died, worn out by his relentless enjoyment of the rich benefices his uncle had bestowed upon him; and the Archbishopric of Florence became vacant once more. Lorenzo succeeded in having his brother-in-law, Rinaldo Orsini, appointed Riario’s successor; but he could not prevent the Pope nominating Francesco Salviati as Archbishop of Pisa, even though an undertaking had been given that no appointments to ecclesiastical benefices within the Republic should be made without the agreement of the Signoria. Since the Pope chose to ignore this undertaking, Lorenzo declined to admit Salviati into Tuscany; and for three years Salviati was kept waiting in Rome, frustrated, embittered and ready to lend his support to any anti-Medicean plot which might be proposed to him.
Lorenzo had other dangerous enemies in Rome. In order to maintain the uncertain peace in north Italy, he had proposed a mutual alliance between Florence, Milan and Venice. But, far from achieving peace, the proposal almost provoked another war, for the Pope angrily condemned the new league as aimed at himself, while King Ferrante of Naples was deeply suspicious of an alliance which had been formed without his being consulted and which seemed to threaten his interests in the Adriatic. The Pope and the King of Naples, whose traditional antagonism to the Papacy had been noticeably softened by the marriage of one of King Ferrante’s illegitimate daughters to Leonardo della Rovere – another nephew from the Pope’s seemingly inexhaustible supply – were now thrown closer than ever together in mutual distrust of the young upstart from Florence.
Lorenzo’s difficulties were made all the more complicated when, on St Stephen’s Day, 1476, his firm ally, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, was stabbed to death by three young assassins on his way to Mass. For Galeazzo Maria’s son was a small boy of seven. His mother declared herself Regent; but a disorderly gaggle of uncles clamoured for their brother’s succession. And until their quarrel was settled, Lorenzo could hope for no help from Milan against the conspirators now gathering to destroy him.
Three of these conspirators met in Rome during the early weeks of the new year, 1477. They were Girolamo Riario, whose ambitions were far from satisfied by the lordship of Imola; Francesco Salviati, the disgruntled Archbishop-designate of Pisa, who hoped to obtain the more distinguished Archbishopric of Florence; and Francesco de’ Pazzi, manager of the Pazzi family bank in Rome, a small, fidgety young man of ‘great arrogance and pretensions’, who thought that the time had now come for the Pazzi to take over as rulers of Florence from the Medici.
The Pazzi were a much older family than the Medici.1 One of their forebears, Pazzo de’ Pazzi, had been on the First Crusade and had returned to Florence with some flints from the altar of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem which were deposited in the church of Sant’ Apostoli.2 They had loftily scorned trade up till the beginning of the thirteenth century; but in 1342 they had renounced their ancient lineage so as to be declared popolani and thus render themselves qualified for government office. They had subsequently made a fortune in banking. The head of the family in the early fifteenth century was Andrea de’ Pazzi who spent a sizable part of that fortune in commissioning Brunelleschi to build the Pazzi Chapel next to Santa Croce.3 His son, Piero, spent a good deal more of it on a fine library. But Piero’s brother, Jacopo, who succeeded him in 1464, was not so concerned to spend money as to conserve it.
Indeed, Jacopo was a tight-fisted old man, noted throughout Florence for his passion for gambling, and for losing his temper when he did not win. He thought the chances of a successful coup d’état were so slight that he was ‘colder than ice’ when his young relative, Francesco, apprised him of the plot being hatched in Rome. Besides, Guglielmo, one of his ten nephews, was Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, and he himself was on good terms with the Medici, even though Lorenzo’s rule threatened to continue to exclude his family from any real authority in the State. To be sure, like the rest of his family, he had been extremely annoyed when Lorenzo interfered in the matter of Giovanni Borromeo’s fortune. A Pazzi had married a daughter of this Borromeo and had naturally expected to inherit at least a good part of her family’s money; but when the father died a new law was passed – supposedly at the instigation of the Medici – which enabled his estate to pass to his nephews, who were known to be Medici supporters, rather than to his daughter and her husband, who were not. But Jacopo de’ Pazzi did not consider the Borromeo affair sufficient grounds for taking the inordinate risks involved in staging a coup d’état.
Supposing, however, that if he could produce evidence of strong military support the old man might yet be won over, Francesco de’ Pazzi now approached Gian Battista da Montesecco, a condottiere who had done good work in the past in the service of the Curia. Montesecco, a rough soldier not given to intrigue, was not immediately forthcoming. He explained that he was employed by the Pope and his nephew, Girolamo Riario, lord of Imola, and could do nothing without their blessing. Francesco reassured him that it was in the very interests of the Pope that he was acting; as for Girolamo Riario, he was a party to the plot; so was Francesco Salviati, Archbishop of Pisa. Montesecco was still not convinced, neither that day, nor on a later occasion when both Francesco de’ Pazzi and Salviati pressed their arguments upon him again, assuring him that Lorenzo had behaved abominably towards the Pope, that Girolamo Riario’s rule in Imola was ‘not worth a bean’ so long as Lorenzo lived, that the Medici rule was detested by the Florentines who would rise up in arms against their present rulers at the slightest encouragement.
‘My lords,’ said Montesecco dubiously, according to his own account, ‘beware of what you do. Florence is a big affair.’
‘We know the position of affairs in Florence a great deal better than you do,’ the Archbishop objected, evidently growing impatient with the stubborn soldier. ‘There is no more doubt that our plan will succeed than that we are all sitting here now. The firs
t essential is to enlist the support of Messer Jacopo de’ Pazzi…When we have him the thing is done.’
Slowly Montesecco began to give ground, and finally agreed to join the conspirators provided the Pope gave them his blessing. So it was agreed that the Archbishop and Riario should take him to see Pope Sixtus.
At the subsequent audience the Pope confirmed to Montesecco that it was, indeed, his wish that ‘this matter of Florence’ should be taken immediately in hand.
‘But this matter, Holy Father, may turn out ill without the death of Lorenzo and Giuliano, and perhaps of others.’
‘I do not wish the death of anyone on any account since it does not accord with our office to consent to such a thing. Though Lorenzo is a villain, and behaves ill towards us, yet we do not on any account desire his death, but only a change in the government.’
‘All that we can do shall be done to see that Lorenzo does not die,’ Girolamo said. ‘But should he die, will Your Holiness pardon him who did it?’
‘You are an oaf. I tell you I do not want anyone killed, just a change in the government. And I repeat to you, Gian Battista, that I strongly desire this change and that Lorenzo, who is a villain and a furfante [a despicable rascal], does not esteem us. Once he is out of Florence we could do whatever we like with the Republic and that would be very pleasing to us.’
‘Your Holiness speaks true. Be content, therefore, that we shall do everything possible to bring this about.’
‘Go, and do what you wish, provided there be no killing.’
‘Holy Father, are you content that we steer this ship? And that we will steer it well?’ Salviati asked.
‘I am content.’
The Pope rose, assured them of ‘every assistance by way of men-at-arms or otherwise as might be necessary’, then dismissed them.
The House Of Medici Page 13