by Tim Parks
In fact, for at least the first half of this book—until the mid-1450s, that is—the reader can take it that Florence is always at war, and that these wars have fewer consequences for most people than almost any other war we are used to thinking of. To understand this strange phenomenon and how profoundly it altered the nature of the Medici bank and the destiny of its founding family—for no commercial organization lives in a vacuum—we must get a grip on the state of Italy in the early fifteenth century.
It’s complicated. Because the country was fragmented into a score of small and even tiny states, historians like to say that the name Italy was “nothing more than a geographical expression.” This is quite wrong. Italians were perfectly aware of a shared history, church, culture, and language (however varied its dialects). As a result, they were also aware that it might occur to someone to unite the country, as once it had been united under Rome. This is what they were afraid of. At the local level, they yearned for unity, the better to avoid it at the national level. Group identity and community pride were, and in Italy still are, very much a city thing.
Let us dispense with the “boot” image and imagine a cylinder topped by an inverted equilateral triangle. The cylinder is surrounded by the sea and mostly mountainous, the triangle is generally flat but shut off to the north by the Alps. There are five major players in the game. In the lower part of the cylinder, the Kingdom of Naples; in the middle, Rome and its Papal States; at the conjunction of cylinder and triangle, Florence; toward the top left of the triangle, Milan; at the top right, Venice. In between these larger states is a generous scattering of smaller ones, there to be gobbled up by predators, like fruit in a computer game.
All five larger powers are imperialist by vocation, if only because conquest tends to confer an aura of legitimacy on their leaders. You don’t argue with a winner. Their overseas empire mostly lost to the rampant Turks, the Venetians are looking to expand inside the northern Italian plain (Verona, Brescia) and down the Adriatic coast (Ferrara, Forlì, Rimini). Conscious of the vastness of France to the north, Duke Filippo Visconti of Milan has his eyes on the western port of Genoa and various other towns to the south and east as a counterweight. The duke is rapacious, incorrigible, his emblem a snake swallowing a child. Despite its pacifist rhetoric and republican vocation, Florence has recently captured Arezzo, Pisa, and Cortona, and bought Leghorn (for 100,000 florins) to secure an outlet to the sea. Now the Florentines want Lucca, and perhaps one day Siena too.
In Rome, Pope Martin will be happy if he manages to gain some kind of real control over his small and turbulent client states on the eastern side of the cylinder, the Adriatic coast. Like any other duke or prince, he engages in military campaigns, his army commanders for the most part being bishops. No smiles, please. Just as a vow of celibacy doesn’t stop a man from having children, so cassock and crucifix won’t prevent him from being effective in battle. To the south, Naples is run by the Angevins, a French family whose members are also counts of Provence. Naturally, they are eager to expand northward from Naples and dream of eventually connecting up with their French possessions. Being about halfway between the two, the port of Genoa would seem to be the appropriate link, if only they could get their hands on it before Duke Visconti of Milan does. But meantime the Angevins’ right to the Neapolitan crown is contested by the Spanish royal family of Aragon, which already rules Sicily. There are frequent skirmishes.
Given this play of forces, the pattern that endlessly repeats itself is as follows: One of the “big five” states—say, Milan—attacks a smaller independent town or towns. Inevitable military success arouses the suspicions of the other major players, two of whom—say, Florence and Venice—form an alliance. When Milan’s next victim sends out an SOS, the allies dive in. They too seize a few towns but then get suspicious of each other. Milan strikes directly at Florence to draw off a siege elsewhere. The Venetians move west to grab Verona and Brescia. The pope charges up the Apennines to the east, hopeful of subduing a couple of rebel towns while everybody is too busy to notice. Not to be left out, the Neapolitans march north. To help or hinder? Nobody is sure. Everything is fluid. Everything is up for grabs.
Or is it? Clearly, Rome has a special status. Not just a despot, but God’s vicar on earth, the pope, if seriously threatened, can order an interdiction, as he did in Florence in the fourteenth century. Then the priests won’t perform your marriage ceremony or give you last rites or bury your dead. Without ritual, the world comes to a standstill. Rome, aside from moments of Angevin delirium, or internal republican revolt, is untouchable.
Nor, aside from brief interludes of Visconti aberration, do Milan, Venice, and Florence really believe they could conquer and absorb one of the others, since that would provoke an unstoppable alliance against them. Begun with great energy and straightforward goals, these wars immediately complicate. The combatants suffer a loss of faith. Armies get bogged down and confused. Winter comes. People are tired and cold. Eventually, they make peace and the prewar situation is reestablished, give or take a citadel or two. Even where a large city is captured, it is rarely integrated into the conquerors’ territory. The Pisans, for example, conquered in 1406, do not enjoy the benefits of Florentine citizenship. Pisa is a subject town, a cow to milk, an outlet to the sea. Hence the Pisans are determined to rebel the moment circumstances are favorable. Gobbled up, the fruit is never properly swallowed. The game can start again, and always does.
Looking back on it all from the vantage point of the 1520s, Machiavelli was disgusted: “One cannot affirm it to be peace where principalities frequently attack one another with arms; yet they cannot be called wars in which men are not killed, cities are not sacked, principalities are not destroyed, for these wars came to such weakness that they were begun without fear, carried on without danger, and ended without loss.” Without much loss of life and territory, that is. But not without the loss of huge sums of money. This is where the Medici came in. Even when it most resembles a sport, even when it is most futile, war is always cruelly expensive. And where war is never conclusive, a constant supply of money becomes absolutely essential.
BUT HOW WAS it that so few people were killed? Machiavelli puts it down to the tendency of the states involved to use mercenary troops led by professional condottieri. By-product of a decadent feudalism, the condottiere is a warlord with a private army. Many signori of small towns and citadels find that renting out themselves and their soldiers is the only way to stay solvent and independent. A condottiere without a small town has no scruples about acquiring one. An army needs a base. For the big players who hire the mercenaries, there is the advantage that few of their own citizens need risk death when war is declared. People can get on with business as usual. Also, there is no danger that some parvenu commander from their own ranks will attempt a coup. The last thing a state with a fragile government needs is some home-bred, charismatic military leader.
The Italians were more advanced in the art of warfare than the other states of Europe and as a result their condottieri were much in demand in other countries. These men deposited their earnings with their preferred Italian bank—in Bruges or Geneva—and had the money sent home. However, since the mercenary soldier had nothing to gain from putting himself out of work, there was the drawback that the condottieri, particularly in Italy where they all knew each other, were notoriously disinclined to finish a job. “Enemies were despoiled, but then neither detained nor killed,” complains Machiavelli, “so that the conquered only put off attacking the conqueror again until such time as whoever was leading them could refurbish them with arms and horses.” Which meant spending a great deal of money, of course. Not to mention the fact that even when they lost, mercenary troops still demanded their wages. When they won, on the other hand, they had a habit of taking all the booty for themselves. In fact, in a certain sense, when you used condottieri, even when you won, you lost. In 1427, having spent the vast sum of 3 million florins in five years of war, Florence was plunged into an eco
nomic crisis that wonderfully clarified the political situation in the town. There was a dominant faction, headed by the Albizzi family, desperate to raise new taxes, and there was the immensely wealthy Medici family who, without actually proposing anything, had become a nucleus for discontent.
A state’s ability to wage war is largely determined by its people’s willingness to pay their taxes. That is a truism. “What was this wealth for?” Sultan Mehmet II would inquire of Constantinople’s first minister after the great city finally fell in 1453. House after ransacked house yielded treasures withheld from the taxman. “What good are they now?” The first minister hung his head. “No price is too high for our liberty,” Cosimo de’ Medici liked to say; and he may have meant it, but when a wealth tax was imposed, he gave orders to the bank’s directors to create fake accounts to limit the damage. “Most of the time tax returns are of no use at all for statistical purposes,” regrets the historian Raymond de Roover.
Shortly after a disastrous Florentine defeat at the hands of Milanese forces at Zagonara in 1424, an extraordinary sequence of frescoes began to appear on the walls of a chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine on the south side of the Arno River. Masaccio’s The Tribute Money shows Jesus and his disciples being challenged by the tax collector as they enter a town beside a lake. Jesus makes a commanding gesture. In response, the fisherman, Peter, is shown at the left of the picture extracting a gold coin from the mouth of a fish that has generously given itself up at the water’s edge; over to the right, the same disciple is already paying the coin to the taxman. Even Christ pays his taxes, the picture says. Even the Church. Pay up, everybody! On another wall the early Christians are shown sharing out their wealth among themselves in community spirit. But someone is lying face down in the dirt. Ananias didn’t tell the truth about the price he got when he sold his property to pool the money with that of his fellow believers. He held a little back for himself. God struck him dead. The rich silk merchant Felice Brancacci, who commissioned this most beautiful of chapels, was himself a major tax evader. Like Cosimo, he held back a great deal. But then not all of us find gold coins in the mouths of fish. Being struck dead from on high is also rare.
I can imagine no better introduction to Italy and Italian politics than Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, inaccurate and biased as much of the book may be. It is the mindset that counts. To read a few pages describing how tortuous maneuverings were cloaked in noble rhetoric is to be amused. The idea of the spin doctor is not new, it seems. Of every diplomatic policy, the fifteenth-century Italian considered its utile, the hard results, and its riputazione, how it might be presented in the best light. “Then the Pope”—or the doge or the duke of Milan, says Machiavelli—“filled all Italy with letters,” to explain why he had changed sides, perhaps, or why he couldn’t help an ally in difficulty, or that he was fighting on behalf of liberty. It’s a common refrain in Florentine Histories. Whenever somebody “fills all Italy with letters,” you can be sure they are lying.
Masaccio’s The Tribute Money, in Santa Maria del Carmine (the Brancacci chapel). In response to Jesus’ command, Peter, on the far left, recovers a coin from the mouth of a fish and, on the far right, hands it over to the taxman at the city gates. Tax evasion was endemic in fifteenth-century Florence.
But to read perhaps thirty or forty pages is to get a little bored. Isn’t there rather a lot of the same thing, of wars and betrayals and conspiracies? Even Machiavelli is weary. “While these things were toiling on in Lombardy,” he doggedly starts a new paragraph. “While this war was dragging on to no avail in the Marches….” Do I need to keep reading, you wonder? Yes. For at some point or other of the 360 pages you will be overwhelmed by a sense of vertigo, a delirium of treachery, deceit, wasted ingenuity, and inexhaustible avarice. This is the book’s revelation. Absolutely nothing is stable. People seem to be taking a certain pleasure in betrayal and complex trickery, almost as if such vices were a novelty. Yet for all the twists and turns of combat and conspiracy, at a deeper level nothing really seems to change. Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan remain independent from the beginning to the end of the century. As far as the smaller states are concerned, each new military campaign is just another shake of the kaleidoscope. It’s difficult to fix any one pattern on the mind. Here below, tortuous as they will seem, are the events from 1420 to 1434 that catapulted Cosimo de’ Medici from successful banker to political exile, then indispensable leader.
WHILE PRETTY SLAVE Maddalena treats Cosimo to Circassian pleasures in Rome, and Giovanni Benci opens the first Medici branch north of the Alps in Geneva, Filippo Visconti, duke of Milan, attacks Genoa. To avoid intervention from Florence, the Milanese duke has made a preemptive peace treaty establishing two spheres of influence: Lombardy and Genoa for Milan, Tuscany for Florence. The duke captures Brescia to the northeast and Genoa to the southwest. Fine. But all of a sudden he has an army down in Bologna as well, way over to the east, and now he’s getting involved in a succession dispute in Forlì near the Adriatic coast. Fearing encirclement, the Florentines raise taxes and hire mercenaries. The treaty is dead.
One says the Florentines do this or that, but it must be understood that while the duke makes decisions rapidly and alone, the Florentines have all kinds of republican mechanisms in place that allow them to argue and procrastinate for days and weeks. The dominant Albizzi family is for war. Giovanni di Bicci is against it. Giovanni di Bicci has just been offered the honor of becoming count of Monteverde (a citadel to the south of Florence) by Pope Martin, no doubt in recognition of the very large loan that Martin somehow never gets around to paying back. Giovanni turns down the title. By Florentine law, a titled nobleman and his family are excluded from government. The Medici thus serve notice that they will not renounce their place in public affairs. Since the costs of any war fall mainly on the plebs—which in fifteenth-century Florence means the small-time artisans, woolworkers, shopkeepers, and so on—Giovanni’s antiwar position is popular.
The duke of Milan (or his mercenaries) grabs the towns of Forlì and Imola to the east of Florence. The Florentines besiege Forlì. To draw off the siege, Milan attacks Zagonara. This small town is Florentine property, closer to home. The Florentines abandon Forlì and head for Zagonara. It’s raining heavily. The men march for hours through thick mud and are routed on arrival. Thousands of horses are lost. “Nonetheless, in such a defeat, celebrated in all Italy, no one died except Ludovico degli Obizzi together with two of his men who fell from their horses and drowned in the mud.” Or so says Machiavelli.
Not all condottieri are equal. As with sportsmen, there are regular players and there are stars. The Florentines get serious and hire Niccolò Piccinino. He’s expensive. New taxes have to be raised. This time they begin to hit the rich as well. This wasn’t part of the original plan. “It pained them,” says Machiavelli of the wealthy families, “not to be able to carry on a war without loss to themselves.” To make the tax unpopular and so have it withdrawn, certain subversive citizens insist that it be collected with the utmost severity. More people are killed during the tax collection than at Zagonara. Afraid that their grip on power is weakening, the Albizzi start to plan a coup that would restrict government to an inner circle of the most powerful families. But Giovanni di Bicci refuses to come on board, thus killing the project before it’s off the ground and making himself even more popular among the plebs. Meanwhile, Milan captures all Florentine citadels and outposts in Romagna to the east of the city. The situation is getting desperate.
The expensive Piccinino and his men are sent on a mission to “persuade” the nearby lord of Faenza, ex-ally of Florence, to join them against Milan. Instead, Faenza fights the condottiere and, despite Piccinino’s star status, defeats and captures him. Undismayed, Piccinino the prisoner manages to talk the lord of Faenza round. He will join the Florentine side after all. Rhetoric is an effective weapon. Once released, however, Piccinino himself changes sides and goes off to fight for Visconti, who has of
fered him more money. Money is even more effective. The winter break in hostilities, it should be said, often amounts to a sort of condottiere transfer market. Fees are rising. Some mercenaries hold discretionary accounts with the Medici bank. Or indeed other banks. What’s the point of buying property with booty if someone else can then seize it from you? Money is more easily placed beyond the reach of enemies. The line between war and business is getting blurred.
“Bewildered by their frequent losses,” as Machiavelli says, the Florentines now make the classic step of calling on the Venetians. The Venetians hesitate, unsure whether their preferred condottiere, Francesco Carmignuola, hasn’t perhaps defected to Milan along with Piccinino. When Visconti tries to poison Carmignuola, it’s clear that he has stayed loyal after all, and a deal can go through. Again the world is wishfully divided up: eventual gains in Lombardy will go to Venice, in Romagna and Tuscany to Florence. Having recovered from the attempted poisoning, Carmignuola is in venomous mood and captures Brescia, right in the center of the northern plain. A huge prize, for Venice. The Florentines are not overjoyed.
IT’S 1426 AND once again the coffers are empty, the city’s debt is spiraling. Since the way of the world is that government is in the hands of florin people, it is piccioli people who end up paying most of the taxes. There are more of them. Paying a larger proportion of their wealth than the rich, they are discouraged from social climbing and the natural order of things is maintained. After an attempt to impose direct and proportional taxation a century before, in the idealistic days of the early republic, most taxation is now indirect. Carry a bucket of fish to town, you’re taxed. Bring a cart of wheat to mill, you’re taxed. The city walls are not just there to keep out enemies. As in Masaccio’s, The Tribute Money, the tax collector waits at the gate. And don’t try to hide that goose under your cloak, because he will check!