The House Of Medici

by Christopher Hibbert

  Yet although he spent long evenings at the dining-table, long mornings discussing the several arts in which he took a lively interest, and long afternoons hunting and hawking in the Campagna – explaining that such exercise, incongruous though it might be for a cardinal, was a necessary duty for one so corpulent – Giovanni was far from content to devote all his life to the pleasures he so obviously enjoyed. He seemed always to have one pale, short-sighted eye turned in the direction of the thin, bearded, restless figure of the newly elected Pope.

  Julius II, who after the twenty-six-day Papacy of Alexander VI’s successor, the decrepit Pius III, had been elected Pope in November 1503, was the grandson of a fisherman, a tall, handsome, rough, talkative, syphilitic, irascible man. He was much given to boasting of his poor childhood – when he had sailed with cargoes of onions down the Ligurian coast – of his lack of scholarship and of his taste for the life of a soldier. ‘I am no schoolman,’ he said once when asked to suggest a suitable emblem for a statue of him being made by Michelangelo. ‘Put a sword in my hand, not a book.’

  Julius delighted in the sword. Not long after his elevation he set off, with twenty-four cardinals in unwilling attendance, to reduce the rebel cities of Perugia and Bologna whose obedience to the Church he was determined to compel. Shaken by the news of his approach, Gian-Paolo Baglioni, the ruler of Perugia, surrendered the city into his hands, kneeling before him and begging for mercy. The Pope forgave him but added, ‘Do it again and I’ll hang you.’ Then, leaving his cardinals no time for rest, he marched them through the marshes of the Romagna to Bologna. The city having been deserted by Giovanni Bentivoglio, they entered it on 11 November 1506, exhausted and peevish, their hands and faces red and lumpy with mosquito bites.

  Having regained Bologna and Perugia for the Church, Julius now determined also to recover Rimini, Faenza and Ravenna, which had fallen into the hands of Venice. To do so he called into existence the League of Cambrai, allying himself not only with Louis of France and Ferdinand of Spain but also with the Emperor Maximilian who were all to take a share of the Venetian dominions. The combination was far too powerful for Venice whose troops were routed at Aguadello near Cremona on 14 May 1509. Yet the Pope, having so successfully extended the dominions of the Church, could not but regret that this had entailed foreign powers gaining footholds in Lombardy. He determined to drive them out, repeatedly declaring, ‘I will not have these barbarians taking over Italy.’ He called upon all Italy to drive them back once more across the Alps, beginning with the French. ‘Let’s see,’ he said riding off to turn a French garrison out of Mirandola, ‘Let’s see who has the bigger balls, the King of France or I.’ Inspired by his relentless determination his troops captured Mirandola, through whose shattered walls he scrambled by means of a wooden scaling ladder. But it was to be many months before he was able to achieve a more significant success, for most Italian states, including Florence, showed little inclination to respond to his call.

  France was the Florentines’ traditional friend. The friendship had, admittedly, been placed under severe strain by Charles VIII, but the war with Pisa which the French had provoked was now over. The Pisans had been forced to sue for peace after the defeat of their supporters, the Venetians, at Aguadello. The Florentines, therefore, decided to remain neutral – ‘a bad example’, the Pope declared angrily; but it was one which other Italian states thought it prudent to follow. So Julius, unable to rouse Italians by his call for a crusade against the French, turned to the Spaniards, now in firm possession of Naples. With them he formed a new Holy League whose forces marched north to Bologna which, having been retaken with French help by Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, had been returned to Bentivoglio. At the same time, Julius announced that once Bologna had been recaptured his Legate there would be Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici. Julius had been much impressed by Giovanni’s good-natured acceptance of the discomforts of campaigning and had already rewarded him with the see of Amalfi and the promise of further preferment. In Florence, the Signoria heard of Giovanni’s ascendance with alarm.

  The forces of the Holy League, however, were far from successful. They had failed to take Bologna; and, on Easter Saturday 1512, they were stopped in their tracks on the banks of the Ronco on their way to the relief of Ravenna. In the ensuing savage battle – in which the Spanish and French cannon, roaring ceaselessly in the smoke, sent their balls bouncing and ploughing through whole rows and columns of men-at-arms – the losses on both sides were so enormous that scarcely ever before in the history of Europe had so many men been left dead upon the field. Almost ten thousand soldiers of the Holy League are said to have been killed, and nearly as many men in the French army.

  Cardinal Giovanni, who had ridden along the Spanish ranks on a white palfrey before the battle began, exhorting the troops to fight well and praying to God for victory, had been captured as he gave comfort to the dying amidst the littered corpses of the dead. He was escorted to Bologna where his stout figure in scarlet robes and his sweating face beneath the broad-brimmed tasselled hat were exposed to the taunts of the populace. The Bentivogli, however, treated him with kindness. He was also treated well upon his removal to Modena where Bianca Rangone sold her jewels to provide him with food and clothing. At his eventual destination, Milan, he was provided with comfortable lodgings in the house of Cardinal Federigo Sanseverino.

  The French, so Giovanni then believed, had gained an undoubted victory outside Ravenna from which they had forced the cruelly mauled forces of the Holy League to withdraw. The Florentines thought so, too, and lit huge bonfires to celebrate the Pope’s defeat as they had done to celebrate the rout of the Venetians at Aguadello. But it proved to be an immensely costly victory from which the winning side could reap no advantage. In the closing stages of the battle, the talented young French commander, Gaston de Foix, had been knocked from his horse by a stray shot and, spattered with blood and brains, had been hacked to death by Spanish infantrymen. Moreover, a large Swiss army had marched down towards French-occupied Lombardy to take advantage of the confusion, while France itself was threatened with invasion by both England and Spain. The French forces, running short of provisions, were obliged to withdraw from Ravenna and Bologna, then from Milan, and finally from Lombardy altogether.

  Cardinal Giovanni, far too valuable a hostage to leave behind, was compelled to go with them. But determined to decamp long before he reached the Alps, he feigned illness at a village on the banks of the Po, where a priest who was accompanying him managed to slip away from the French guard and to enlist the help of two local landowners in a plan of escape. As the cardinal was about to step into a barge at the river bank the following morning, a band of armed peasants from the landowners’ estates burst out of the reeds and, in the ensuing uproar, hustled the captive away. Improbably disguised as a soldier, Giovanni was then taken to a pigeon-house in the courtyard of a castle belonging to one of the landowners’ kinsmen, then to Voghiera, then to Mantua where he learned that preparations were already far advanced to use the army of the Holy League, now free of the French, to enforce a change of government in Florence. His arrival in Mantua ensured that there could be no doubt what form that new government would take.

  Since the execution of Savonarola, Florence, no longer an important power, had failed to regain the vitality and gaiety of the golden age it had enjoyed during the last years of Lorenzo the Magnificent. A series of financial crises had brought several guilds almost to the verge of ruin. The long, exhausting, humiliating war against Pisa, incompetently conducted by treacherous condottieri, had drained the Signoria’s resources. The French King’s representative in Tuscany, Robert de Balzac Entragues, had sold Sarzana to Genoa and Pietrasanta to Lucca. Gloom descended over the city, a gloom which was reflected in the final paintings of Botticelli, a prematurely old man now, limping through the streets, ‘unable to stand upright and moving about with the help of crutches’.2

  Four years after the death of Savonarola, an attempt had been made t
o strengthen the government of the city by appointing a Gonfaloniere for life. The man chosen for this appointment was Piero Soderini, an honest, hard-working but unremarkable administrator whose fame has been eclipsed by that of the relatively minor official in the government whom he came to consult on all matters of importance, Niccolò Machiavelli.

  Machiavelli was a thin, neat, pale man whose sparse black hair was brushed straight back from a high and bony forehead. In the only portrait of him that survives he returns the spectator’s gaze with a look at once amused, questioning and sardonic. The son of a lawyer from an old Tuscan family, he had been appointed to his present post at the age of thirty following the execution of Savonarola, whose ideas and methods he had disdained. One of the concerns of Machiavelli’s department was war; and it was his strongly held view, as it had been of other Florentines before him, including Leonardo Bruni, that the Republic’s traditional system of hiring troops to fight its battles would have to be abandoned in favour of a national militia. It had been found so often in the past that condottieri were utterly untrustworthy: sometimes they declined to fight alongside other bands hired to co-operate with them; at other times they refused to fight against condottieri with whom they were on friendly terms; occasionally they accepted money from both sides; always they were unwilling to risk the lives of their men and thus waste their assets. Soderini agreed to have the formation of a national militia approved by the Signoria and he entrusted Machiavelli with the task of organizing it. Machiavelli began to do so with energy and enthusiasm, and by February 1506 he was able to hold a parade in the Piazza della Signoria of the first recruits. They were mostly peasants from the outlying country who were, so Landucci recorded,

  each given a white waistcoat, a pair of stocking, half red and half white, a white cap, shoes, and an iron breastplate. Most also had lances; some of them had arquebuses. They were soldiers but lived in their own homes, being obliged to appear when needed, and it was ordered that many should be equipped in this way throughout the country, so that we should not need any foreigners. This was thought the finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence.

  Landucci’s confidence in the militia was not dispelled when the Spanish forces of the Holy League began to march for the Florentine frontier from Bologna under command of Raymond de Cadorna. Even when the Spaniards, repeatedly demanding a change of government in Florence, reached Barberino and advanced on Campi and frightened peasants ran in from the hills to seek shelter behind the walls of the city, it seemed to Landucci as to all ‘intelligent people’ that there was ‘no need of fear. On the contrary it was rather for the enemy to fear, because if they came down into these plains, they would fare badly. Many battalions of militia had been levied, and all the men-at-arms were eager to encounter the enemy’.

  Although Machiavelli, who had been busy organizing the defences of the Mugello, took a more realistic view of the situation, Soderini in Florence shared Landucci’s confidence. He had nine thousand men under arms; he knew that the Spanish army was much smaller, and that, although the Medicean party in Florence were growing stronger as the Spaniards advanced on the city, their hopes of a revolution in Florence were ill-founded.

  Cadorna himself was not at all sure that his army was large enough to reduce Florence if threats proved not enough to gain the ends of the League. He had been reluctant to advance into Tuscany at all. The Pope’s nephew, the hot-tempered Duke of Urbino, had also disapproved of the expedition. But Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici was insistent. When the Duke of Urbino declined to supply Cadorna with artillery, Giovanni offered the money to buy two cannon himself. When Cadorna complained of a lack of provisions, he paid for these also himself. And when a Florentine delegation approached the Spanish army with an offer of reasonable terms, it was Giovanni who insisted that no terms could be accepted which did not provide for the restoration of the Medici. The Cardinal was already in touch with sympathizers in Florence, sending messages to them by means of a peasant who deposited them in the wall of a cemetery in Santa Maria Novella. His cousin, Giulio, had arranged a secret meeting at a country villa with Antonfrancesco degli Albizzi, one of their most influential supporters, who assured him that, while Soderini would put on an act of defiance, the spirit of his supporters would collapse as soon as they heard the roar of the Spaniards’ cannon.

  Faced with the cardinal’s demand that he should deliver up the city, Soderini gave orders for the imprisonment of all known supporters of the Medici; and in an eloquent speech before the assembled citizens in the Piazza della Signoria he gravely warned of the dangers of allowing the Medici to return to Florence even though they professed themselves anxious to do so only as private citizens. After all that had happened, they could not possibly remain private citizens; they would certainly set themselves up as tyrants. It was true, Soderini continued, that Lorenzo di Piero had never made an ostentatious display of power but had covered his real prerogative with a mantle of private equality; but his son had never done so; and his young grandson, Lorenzo, whom Cardinal Giovanni represented, could remember nothing of the traditions of the family. ‘It is therefore for you to decide whether I am to resign my office (which I shall cheerfully do at your bidding) or whether I am to attend vigorously to the defence of our country if you want me to remain.’ The people loudly voiced their support of Soderini; and preparations for the defence of Florence were continued with renewed vigour.

  While Machiavelli’s militia manned the city’s strong-points, the Spanish army approached the gates of Prato, twelve miles north-west of Florence, where, so the hungry troops had been promised, they would find food enough to spare. When Giovanni himself had entered Prato twenty years before a triumphal arch created to welcome him had crashed down into the street killing two children dressed as angels in his honour. This tragic event was remembered now when, at the cardinal’s second coming, even more dreadful events were foretold by the old men standing beneath the city’s high, brown, crumbling walls.

  A hole in these walls was soon torn out by Cadorna’s cannon. It was scarcely bigger than a window, Jacopo Nardi recorded. Behind it was a high monastery wall, and behind that again were pikemen and bowmen who could perfectly well have covered the breach. But at the approach of the Spanish infantry, they all ‘ran away, scandalously throwing their arms to the ground, as though the enemy had suddenly jumped on their backs’. ‘The Spaniards, amazed that military men as well as humble inexpert civilians should show such cowardice and so little skill,’ Guicciardini recorded,

  broke through the wall with scarcely any opposition, and began to race through the town, where there was no longer any resistance but only cries, flight, violence, sack, blood and killing, the terrified Florentine foot soldiers casting away their weapons and surrendering to the victors.

  For two days the Spaniards raged through the city, raping, killing priests at their altars, ransacking churches, burning monasteries, breaking into convents. The inhabitants were tortured to disclose the hiding places of their treasure chests; they were then killed, stripped of their clothes, and their naked bodies flung into ditches or wells already choked with severed limbs. ‘Nothing would have been spared the avarice, lust and cruelty of the invaders,’ Guicciardini added, ‘had not the Cardinal de’ Medici placed guards at the main church and saved the honour of the women who had taken refuge there. More than two thousand men died, not fighting (for no one fought) but fleeing or crying for mercy.’

  As yet unaware of the worst of what Machiavelli was later to describe as ‘an appalling spectacle of horrors’ and afterwards unable to prevent them, the Cardinal wrote blandly to the Pope on 29 August 1512:

  This day, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the town of Prato was sacked, not without some bloodshed such as could not be avoided…The capture of Prato, so speedily and cruelly achieved, although it has given me pain, will at least have the good effect of serving as an example and a deterrent to the others.

  Certainly it had this effect. Even as the reports of
the sack of Prato were still coming into Florence, a party of Medici supporters marched to the Palazzo della Signoria demand that Soderini should resign. He was fully prepared to do so, and thought it as well to escape while he still could. So, having sent Machiavelli to ask for a safe passage for him, he was escorted from the city on his way into exile on the Dalmatian coast.

  Later the Florentines were required to agree to the return of the Medici, to join the Holy League and to elect a new Gonfaloniere. The militia was abolished; and in the purge of Soderini’s officials, Machiavelli was replaced by a Medicean. Soon afterwards, denied the opportunity of serving the Medici which he would have welcomed, Machiavelli left Florence for his country house at Sant’ Andrea in Percussina where, the following year, he wrote The Prince.

  XVII

  ‘PAPA LEONE!’

  ‘God has given us the papacy. Let us enjoy it!’

  ON THE day that Soderini left Florence – 1 September 1512 – Cardinal Giovanni’s younger brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, entered it. Having shaved off the beard he had grown in exile and dressed himself in an inconspicuous lucco, he walked unattended through the streets. Workmen were already busy removing the crimson cross of the Florentine citizens which had replaced the Medici palle on various buildings in the city, and, to the cheers of a crowd of onlookers in the Via Larga, painters and masons were hard at work restoring the Medici emblems on the family palace. But Giuliano did not go to the palace. He went instead to the house of Antonfrancesco degli Albizzi, seeming anxious by the modesty of his demeanour to demonstrate his willingness to be accepted as a private citizen of Florence with little interest in the control of its government.