For those who wish to understand these features in detail, I recommend Tim Parks’ Medici Money for an outstanding and clearly-written overview and Raymond de Roover’s The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank 1397-1494 for a detailed textbook analysis.
What I have tried to do in the series The House of Medici is to tell the story from a human point of view. What was it like to live through these great events, to face the great opportunities offered to successive Medici sons, but also to manage the problems that regularly occurred in a rapidly changing world and to suffer the disappointments when people let you down?
And in all of this, to try to answer the question: ‘How did it all go so disastrously wrong?’
The problems the Medici faced were not only concerned with running the bank. Running the country was also troublesome and unlike the bank, gave little reward. Once again, the problems faced by those who sought to govern the Republic of Florence in the 1400s were remarkably similar to those that politicians all over the world face today. The people wanted provision of services but moaned and pleaded poverty when they had to pay for them. And when one of the rich families, such as the Medici, did fund civic activity, the people turned on them for trying to become princes and take over the much-lauded Republic.
The early Medici played reluctant saviours, pretending they had become drawn into this position; whilst in reality, behind the scenes, they had always sought power and influence. But for the reason described above, they always worked hard not to appear as princes, and instead, always presented themselves as members of the common popolani.
Cosimo’s father, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, had drilled into him a series of mantras on this subject, and these were in due course passed on to his sons and to his grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent. This framework of thinking, accompanied and influenced by Cosimo’s enthusiastic adoption of the new humanist ideas—ideas that were beginning to form the birth of what we later named the Renaissance—made the Medici advanced and creative thinkers; and that, combined with hard work and a little sprinkling of good luck, resulted in immense financial success.
But as The House of Medici: Inheritance of Power shows, whilst Cosimo passed on the rules given to him by his father, his own actions seemed to break those rules more often than they reflected them.
The new partnership structure introduced in 1455 no longer protected the maggiori from losses incurred within the widely-spread branches. Cosimo’s choice of managers broke all his father’s rules of promoting the best and not necessarily just the family. The new partnership agreements with the branches motivated the branch managers to act foolhardily and in their own local interests, whilst slippage in maintaining Giovanni di Bicci’s strict systems of annual audit meant that the centre did not recognise problems until it was far too late.
It was the same with politics. Cosimo presented the family as commoners, yet he married ‘Contessina’—not only a Bardi but (as her common name tells us) the daughter of a Count. Later, he did it again, marrying his elder son Piero to Lucrezia Tornabuoni. She was of good family: major land and property owners, active in the wool trade between Florence and Bruges; and in due course, members of her family successfully held important jobs in the bank for many years.
Lucrezia herself was not only a poet but also a successful businesswoman in her own right; owning shops and a hotel in Pisa, and the medicinal baths at Bagno a Morba, south of Volterra. Uncomfortably for both her and her husband, she was considerably brighter and more able than Piero. Not only that, but she was in love with his younger brother—her childhood hero, Giovanni—and this was to have dramatic consequences, as we shall see in The House of Medici: Seeds of Decline.
Later, Piero and Lucrezia were to break one of the golden rules again—marrying their son, Lorenzo the Magnificent, to Clarice Orsini; not only from the nobility, but from the Roman nobility.
To be fair to Cosimo, he had seen much of this coming and as this series of stories describes, he hid a fortune—200,000 Florins—deep beneath a convent, in order to bypass his useless son and to give his grandson, Lorenzo, the opportunity to salvage something from the mess he knew Piero would inevitably leave behind.
Raymond de Roover quotes the weight of a single Florentine Florin as 0.1143 Troy Ounces, making the hoard 22,860 Troy Ounces of gold. At the time of writing the world gold price is £1,055 per Troy Ounce. This values the hoard in 2013 at over £24 million.
What Cosimo was not to know, was that in her resentment over her marriage, Lucrezia would bring up her precocious son, Lorenzo, in direct opposition to the Medici Creed. She used all her power openly to make him a Great Prince; and between them, in the process, they let the family bank go to the dogs.
But that, as they say, is another story.
The House of Medici Page 31