by Tim Parks
But it’s not enough. Yes, there are plenty of piccioli people, but as we recall, it takes 80 or 90 piccioli to make a florin. And quite a few thousand florins to pay a mercenary army. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, since the wealthy really did not want to give anything away, the government experimented with loans. The merchant, or banker, puts a handsome sum in the public coffers and collects a handsome interest rate (or gift) in return. Officially, it is just 5 percent, but as an incentive to lend to the state, you get 300 florins’ worth of debt certificates for every 100 florins paid. So really you’re earning 15 percent. The indirect taxes that the plebs are paying on salt and eggs and meat and wine and fats and oils are now funding the interest rates of the better folk who put down their lump sums years before. It’s charming but it can’t last. It doesn’t add up. Mid-fourteenth century, the public debt has to be consolidated. The government announces that from now on, interest returns on tax loans will only be paid when and to the extent possible. As a result, disappointed lenders in need of ready cash start selling their debt bonds to those speculators who can wait. The Dominicans say this is usury and the Franciscans say it is not. What do we have different religious orders for, if not for a second opinion?
In the early fifteenth century, the Florentine branch of the Medici bank became a major dealer in debt bonds, which by 1426 were trading at only 20 to 35 percent of face value. Clearly, the idea of the government’s ever paying the interest was now considered a very long shot. The days of the willing lender were over. The government did try to raise money through forced rather than freely granted loans. The trick here was that if you agreed not to collect the interest, the amount you were asked for was drastically reduced. But in the end, these makeshifts just weren’t enough. When people paid the full amount and wanted interest, the government couldn’t pay. When they took the cheaper option, the income wasn’t enough. And now there really is no more money to be squeezed out of the plebs. People are starving. The time has come to make the rich pay.
Two figures are presently manipulating the officially republican government: Rinaldo degli Albizzi, head of a rich landowning family, and the aging, highly respected Niccolò da Uzzano. Together they introduce the so-called catasto, or register. Every three years, every family in Florence will present a declaration listing all property, investments, and incomes. Certain deductions are allowed, certain complex calculations are made of the value of land worked by tenant farmers who pay rent in kind. For each declaration, a so-called sovrabbondanza—or excess of what is strictly necessary for staying alive—is established, and when the government needs money it taxes everybody 0.5 percent of that value. This wouldn’t be too much if it were only collected once a year, but it could be demanded twice, or even three times a year. In 1427, 10,171 families make declarations and 2,924 are immediately exempted from any payment at all because miserabili.
The poor are thrilled. Taxation in proportion to ability to pay! At last. The big landowners complain that just because they hold property does not mean that they have the florins ready to pay the taxes on it. Many landowners do indeed find themselves having to sell land to pay what’s asked of them. The merchants, on the other hand, are furious about having to declare liquid assets. Cash is here today, gone tomorrow, and easily hidden, they point out. All the law does is encourage evasion and the flight of capital—through the Medici bank, for example—while discouraging local investment. As soon as the law is enacted, almost all Florentine businessmen set about making false declarations. “For love of the taxman,” a silk merchant’s accountant writes ironically on the opening page of some rigged books. One Medici director invests sums in his own bank under three false names.
In the 1427 catasto, the first, Cosimo de’ Medici declares possession of two factories turning raw wool into cloth. Opened in 1402 and 1408, these businesses employ a great many more people than the bank ever will but never make really significant profits. They serve to give the Medici a more solid and visible role in society. Florence, after all, is primarily a cloth town. The factories produce things people can see and hold in their hands and wear. They employ poor people. In 1433 a silk factory will be added.
The family also declares ownership of a villa at Careggi, just outside the town to the north, and a fortified villa at Trebbio, some miles farther north in the low hills of the Mugello, where the family also owns a great deal of agricultural land and again employs many poor people. A possible private army perhaps. In fact, it’s time to stop thinking of the Medici, as just one family, or just a bank. Cosimo’s older cousin, Averardo di Francesco de’ Medici declares possession of Cafaggiolo, another fortified villa near Trebbio. The extended family controls important official appointments in the nearby towns of Scarperia, Borgo San Lorenzo, and Marradi. There are family chapels in the churches. Averardo also has a bank, albeit not as big as Cosimo’s. The Rome branch is losing money, his 1427 declaration claims. A likely story.
Averardo is in partnership with a Bardi who runs things for him in Rome. On taking over the main Medici bank in 1420, Cosimo moved Ilarione de’ Bardi up from Rome to Florence to be the bank’s new general director and brought in a distant Bardi cousin, Bartolomeo, to manage things in Rome. These men are paid-up partners. Bartolomeo’s brother, Ubertino, runs a bank in London that regularly serves as the Medici’s English agent.
Then there is the Portinari family. Again in 1420, Cosimo fired the head of the Florence branch and replaced him with Folco d’Adovardo di Portinari, brother of Giovanni d’Adovardo Portinari, who is running the Venice branch. These two men are great-grandsons of the brother of Dante’s Beatrice Portinari.
So now we have three powerful old Florentine families—the Medici, the Bardi, the Portinari—tightly knotted together in and through the bank. Or rather two banks. And actually it’s four families, if we count Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo’s marriage to a Cavalcanti. Lorenzo himself is also a director of the bank. This is more than a financial institution. It’s a political entity, a clan, a party even, in a city where to form a political party is treason. By law, there can be no declared divisions in this most divided of towns. No political campaigning. The government has recently banned the meetings of various religious confraternities. All that whipping and singing and praising God has often been used as a cover for political conspiracy.
Overjoyed to hear the wealthy whine, the plebs start to demand that the new tax system be applied retroactively. We’ve been paying too much for too long, they complain. For centuries, in fact. They look to Giovanni di Bicci for support. It would be a mistake to ask too much, he warns. Giovanni is good at playing wise peacemaker, at deferring the crisis, at having it both ways—the rich man with the poor on his side. Behind his bent old shoulders, Cosimo and Averardo are alert and ready.
Meanwhile, the papacy has at last brokered a peace treaty among Florence, Milan, and Venice. No sooner has he signed it than Duke Visconti goes on the warpath again, only to be soundly beaten by Carmignuola at Maclodio, near Brescia. Clearly, the turning point of this whole war was the failure to poison that condottiere. When peace is finally concluded in 1428, the Venetians get Brescia and Bergamo—a great leap westward for them—while Florence merely recovers the peanuts they had lost. There is no territorial acquisition to pay off a towering war debt.
Perhaps it was precisely this frustration that prompted the sheer madness of Florentine policy in the five years to come. In any event, departing this life in 1429, Giovanni di Bicci was choosing a good time to go, a rare moment of peace. Thirty family members (all male) followed the coffin, plus a long procession of officials and ambassadors, lenders and account holders. He was buried in San Lorenzo, a northerly stone’s throw from the duomo, in a sacristy he had commissioned from the great Brunelleschi. Later, Cosimo had this most elegant of spaces decorated by Donatello. At the four corners of the chapel, he hung shields showing eight red balls on a field of gold, the Medici family’s insignia, sign of things to come. From now on, San Lorenzo wou
ld be the Medici church.
“PEACE HAVING BEEN achieved outside, war began again inside,” Machiavelli observes. As if this were some logical necessity. People were still fighting over the catasto, the wealth tax. Discrimination! the merchants raged. Our books are being checked by government inspectors who actually work for rival companies. As always, their strategy was to have the new tax so brutally and extensively enforced that its enemies would multiply. You’ll have to register all the property in all the outlying territories too, they insisted. Some of it is owned by Florentines. You’ll have to register every loom, every mill.
There were those in the government who felt that extending the tax was not a bad idea. The Florentines had a flair for bureaucracy, which is why we now have so many records of the city’s history. So the process of bringing all the outlying towns into the tax register began. In protest, an eighteen-man delegation arrived from the small subject town of Volterra. We can’t pay, they complain. They are arrested. On release, one of the men returns to Volterra and starts a rebellion. Niccolò Fortebraccio, a now out-of-work condottiere, is engaged to go and sort things out. Before he and his mercenaries arrive, the Volterrans have already rebelled against the rebels and the town is in Florentine hands again. But Fortebraccio doesn’t want to be unemployed. In November 1429, he marches into the territory of Lucca northwest of Florence and, acting on his own initiative, captures a couple of small citadels. Suddenly, the Florentines are unanimous in deciding that the capture of Lucca is absolutely indispensable. Wealthy Lucca will be their compensation for the disasters of the previous seven years. As always when there is a war, the city forms a ten-man committee to decide military strategy, the so-called Ten of War. Now undisputed head of the Medici clan, Cosimo is on it.
A cloud of ambiguity hangs over these crucial years that bring Cosimo to power. But then a cloud hangs over everything to do with him: the bank, his patronage of the arts, his relationship with slaves, his foreign policy. When Rinaldo degli Albizzi proposed that the other patrician families get rid of him, the now-decrepit Uzzano is reported by Machiavelli to have pointed out how difficult this would be: “The deeds of Cosimo that make us suspect him are these: he helps everyone with his money, and not only private individuals, but the state, and not only Florentines, but the condottieri; he favors this or that citizen who has need of the magistrates; by the good will that he has in the generality of people he pulls this or that friend to higher ranks of honor.”
Did Uzzano really say these words? Commissioned to write the Florentine Histories for a later Medici and a grand duke at that, Machiavelli admitted in a letter to a friend that he couldn’t honestly say “by what means and tricks one [Cosimo] arrives at so great a height.” Hence: “That which I don’t want to say myself, as coming from me, I will make his [Cosimo’s] adversaries say.” And he makes Uzzano conclude: “So we will have to allege as the causes for driving him out that he is merciful, helpful, liberal, and loved by everyone.” In a cash-starved town, Cosimo had for some years now been using his wealth to gather political consensus. To what end?
“It is hard for the rich to live in Florence, unless they rule the state.” Such would be the comment of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Cosimo’s grandson. And the implication was, if you don’t control the state, the state will ruin you. You will become the object of punitive taxation deliberately aimed at confiscating your fortune. But was this just an excuse? Would it have been possible for the Medici to run a spectacularly profitable bank and to stay out of government? In Rome or Milan, perhaps it would. One can become only so powerful in the shadow of a despot. Insist on a loan repayment from a prince and he arrests you. A pope excommunicates you. Even in republican Venice, the doge was elected for life and that was that. You couldn’t take his place, so you could hardly be feared either.
But Florence worked like this: To prevent anyone from ever becoming a tyrant, a new government of eight priors plus one gonfaloniere della giustizia was elected every two months. To prevent divisive election campaigns on party lines, the names of possible priors—men who met certain restrictive financial and family criteria—were written on tags and placed in a series of leather bags representing different quarters of the town and different guilds. Then nine names were selected at random, two priors for each of the four quarters of town, six from the seven richer guilds, two from the fourteen artisans’ guilds, and one man, always from the richer guilds, to be gonfaloniere della giustizia, the head of government. That is, in order that no single man might rule, everyone must rule, or at least everyone in the wealthiest classes, but briefly. It was an idealistic solution but hardly practical when it came to deciding policies for the long term.
For two months, nine men who perhaps didn’t agree with each other and were no doubt concerned about abandoning their businesses for so long were obliged to live together (waited on hand and foot) in the Palazzo della Signoria and run the town. They were not allowed to leave their posts. The ruler must be seen to be a public servant. This was the spirit of the constitution. But temporary and unprepared as these men inevitably were—who knew I was going to be elected prior until just a week ago?—the person whom they tended to serve was the leader of whichever family and faction was dominant.
Not completely, though. Not slavishly. It was delicate, this mechanism. Anything could tip the balance, especially now that some people had begun to sense the end of an era at hand, to see the Medici as an alternative to the Albizzi. So with each new signoria, some priors might be obeying one camp, some the other. True, the Albizzi family had been running the city very successfully for decades, but thanks to the debts run up in the war against Milan, things were now going seriously wrong. People were unhappy. A power struggle was in the cards. Perhaps the Medici could have kept out of it, but the vastness of their fortune attracted constant attention. Democracy depends on consensus, consensus on persuasion. And what is more persuasive than money? A dramatically successful banker doesn’t even have to open his mouth before people come running. If you give me a little more time to repay this loan, I’ll support you when I’m on the signoria. If you give my son a job, I’ll have a word with the priors about your tax problem. Perhaps this is what lies at the heart of our dislike of banking wealth. We are afraid we can be bought. We are sure others already have been, and that many can’t wait to be. Despite all the taxation and forced loans, Medici wealth continues to grow. Perhaps growth for a bank means growth into politics. A clash between the Medici and the Albizzi seems inevitable. The war committee, with Cosimo sitting, appoints Rinaldo degli Albizzi as war commissioner—the political figure, that is, who follows the city’s condottiere on his campaigns. The boss will be out of town. The Medici camp will take every opportunity to slander him in his absence.
Everything goes wrong. Plundering the countryside around Lucca to starve the town, the mercenaries behave with extreme cruelty. The citizens of Seravezza come to Florence to complain: Despite surrendering, we’ve seen our churches sacked, our daughters raped. Rinaldo, who hadn’t been in Seravezza at the time, is accused. He is only involved in the war for his profit, someone says. This is Medici talk. Furious, Rinaldo abandons his post without orders. The architect Brunelleschi takes time out from building the dome over the duomo to try to flood out Lucca by diverting the river Serchio. The Lucchesi build a dike to block the water; then, one night, they break the ditch that the Florentines have built and flood out the plain where they are camped. Touché!
Inevitably, Lucca’s despotic signore, Pagolo Guinigi, sends an SOS to Duke Visconti in Milan, who dispatches Count Francesco Sforza, star condottiere of all time. Alarmed, the Florentines buy him off. Sforza refuses actually to change sides and actually attack Lucca for Florence—That would be a blot on my honor, he says—but for 50,000 Venetian ducats (perhaps 55,000 florins) he agrees not to defend the town. How can you fight a war without bankers? To sweeten the pill of this treachery for the Lucchesi, Sforza gives them a hand to dump the tyrant Guinigi and turn republican. Now they’
re even more eager to defend themselves. Now the republican Florentines will have to drop their pathetic rhetoric about having started this war as a fight against tyranny. It’s the city they want, the wealth.
Another appeal from Lucca to Visconti produces Niccolò Piccinino. Is there no end to Milan’s resources? This time Florence can’t afford to buy him off. This time Piccinino lives up to his star status by defeating the Florentines at the Serchio. Beaten, they take refuge in Pisa, just in time to stop a rebellion there. Which was lucky. Cosimo meanwhile has taken the very wise step of resigning from the war committee to “give others a chance to serve.” Having rooted for the war like everyone else, the Medici have had the good luck of not actually being responsible for defeats in the field. People are blaming Rinaldo degli Albizzi. Meantime, the highly respected Uzzano has died, depriving the ruling faction of a certain gravitas. When an ignominious peace is made in 1433, the town is bitterly divided. “Every case that came before the magistrates,” says Machiavelli, “even the least, was reduced to a contest between them [the Medici and the Albizzi].”
Is there any legal way to resolve that contest? No. If the real power in a state is unofficial, then any transfer of that power must also be unofficial. This is the modernity of Florence. As with many democracies today, the constitutional mechanism is only half, perhaps less than half of the story when it comes to appointing the executive. Profound shifts of power occur outside the legal framework. The problem for the Albizzi and the Medici is that the moment a real conflict is joined, the unconstitutionality of their positions will be evident. With what results, no one knows. Perhaps a return to constitutional legality, to a truly independent, randomly chosen government. Neither party wants that.