by Tim Parks
Agnolo Acciaiuoli, like Cosimo, had been exiled in the 1430s for his opposition to Rinaldo degli Albizzi and had been in the Medici regime from the beginning. But in 1463 Acciaiuoli’s daughter-in-law abandoned her husband Raffaello. He preferred boys and old Agnolo was violent, she complained. She wanted her dowry back. Being a Bardi girl, this was big money, 8,500 florins. Called in to arbitrate, Cosimo had said the young wife should be guaranteed her dowry, after which she could decide of her own free will whether or not to return to her husband. Agnolo was not happy with this. And he was particularly unhappy when Cosimo, having promised that another son of his, Lorenzo Acciaiuoli, would be given the next available bishopric in Tuscany, in the event preferred his own relative, Filippo de’ Medici, when that bishopric turned out to be in the sensitive subject town of Pisa. “Cosimo and Piero are cold men,” Agnolo wrote in one of many letters to Duke Francesco Sforza. “Sickness and age have made them such cowards that they run away from everything that bothers them or requires any effort.” Ever since Milanese troops had presided over that parliament of 1458, everybody, it seemed, was eager to present himself to Sforza as the next leader of the regime.
Everybody except Luca Pitti. Pushing seventy, Pitti had always been one of the most authoritarian and antidemocratic members of Cosimo’s coterie. As gonfaloniere della giustizia, he personally had called the 1458 parliament that put an end to republican opposition. He had suffered no slights from the Medici family, but as an extremely wealthy banker in the process of completing a palazzo that was intended to surpass any in town, Luca had no intention of bending a knee to anyone now that Cosimo was gone. In November 1465, when Piero de’ Medici insisted that he had Sforza’s blessing for running Florence, Pitti replied that he would rather be governed by the devil than by Milan. All at once he became the figurehead of an opposition, which, however, didn’t seem entirely consistent on foreign policy.
Niccolò Soderini, the fourth man, the most charismatic, may indeed have been a fervent republican. Or perhaps all he wanted was to reorganize those electoral bags to guarantee an upper-class oligarchy in which no single family would dominate. The Florentine patriarchy had always loathed Cosimo’s sly habit of bringing in “vile new men” who gave him a power base beyond and potentially opposed to the older families’ interests. Niccolò may also have resented the fact that his younger brother, Tommaso Soderini, was a major figure in the Medici faction. As always in Florence, there was a thick web of family relations straining this way and that. Cosimo, for example, had always thought Agnolo Acciaiuoli a bad influence on his (Cosimo’s) nephew, Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who was married to Agnolo’s daughter Laudamia. Pierfrancesco was important; as the only son of Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo, he held fifty percent of the Medici stake in the whole bank, though he didn’t work for the bank or seek important roles in government. With Cosimo’s death, Pierfrancesco was theoretically an equal partner with Piero. Having spent a great deal less on gathering allies about him, he possessed a great deal more ready cash.
NOW THAT HE was gone, it soon became clear how much Cosimo had relied on consensus for his authority. The special powers of the eight police chiefs, the so-called otto di guardia, were due to lapse. Piero wanted them renewed. The old men of the regime opposed him. The powers were not renewed. Piero wanted the accoppiatori to keep choosing a safe, pro-Medici signoria. The old men insisted on a return to random election. They had their way. And surprise, surprise, the first randomly chosen gonfaloniere della giustizia was Niccolò Soderini, one of the four. His two-month spell of government in late 1465 achieved nothing, but it left the town aware of being radically split. “We have divided the earth,” Acciaiuoli would later say, “and division breeds leaders, leaders get nervous.”
Piero had every reason to be nervous. Taking over the bank from Cosimo, he had found it undercapitalized, overstretched. He called in debts. Was it his covert enemy Dietisalvi Neroni who advised him to do this? In Florentine Histories, Machiavelli claimed it had been a ruse on Neroni’s part to make Piero unpopular. Successful godfathers do not resort to credit squeezes. Many companies failed. People were resentful. All at once the Palazzo Medici was attracting fewer petitioners. Everybody was paying respects to Luca Pitti in his even-grander palazzo. A rival mesh of patronage was gaining ground.
Then in March 1466, with exquisite bad timing, Francesco Sforza died. The duke’s wife and son immediately begged the Florentine signoria for a loan of 60,000 florins to pay for the military presence that would guarantee the Sforza family’s succession throughout Milan’s subject territories. Dietisalvi Neroni and Agnolo Acciaiuoli immediately changed position on Milan. After years of currying Sforza’s support, they now would not give a loan to his successors, who, of course, represented Piero’s potential army.
The slide accelerates. In May 1465, four hundred leading citizens of Florence swear and sign an oath to uphold the old republican system of government with election by lottery. Piero’s cousin, Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, signs. Has he been pushed to make the gesture by his Acciaiuoli wife, his persuasive father-in-law? Does he perhaps believe the bank would do better if it retreated from politics? The reasons can hardly matter to Piero. He is so paralyzed by gout these days that there are times when the only thing he can move is his tongue. His main business partner is undermining him. Everybody can see how weak he is.
Then in June 1465, the government starts debating the dissolution of the so-called Council of 100, the permanent balia of Medici men set up after the 1458 parliament to ratify everything the Medici governments wanted. With its departure, the return to the old constitution will be complete and the family’s power at an end. The change that Palla Strozzi foresaw after Cosimo’s death is at hand. Piero is beaten, unless … unless he himself can bring about a different kind of change, a metamorphosis of the family and its relationship with the other patriarchal families in the regime. In this long and no doubt suffocatingly hot Tuscan summer, political emergency accelerates a trend that has been underway for decades, and at last creates something new.
THE REAL SCANDAL of money, as we have already said, is that it does not respect traditional hierarchies. The merest artisan can make a fortune and start strutting around in expensive crimson. The feudal order breaks down. But once made, money notoriously seeks that which cannot—supposedly—be bought. Perhaps the first generation is happy to have acquired material wealth, but the second yearns for a distinction that is not based on money, a distinction that in the past only birth could give. In the end, the individual, even the richest, resists the idea that his worth is to be quantified in money terms, especially if it wasn’t he who earned the cash. So we come back to Achilles’s conviction that human uniqueness has no price, and we arrive at the roots of every snobbery: I wish to be distinguished, but how?
Education is a good place to start. Money buys it and it then generates a value that goes beyond money. Art achieves the same alchemy. “Money alone,” remarked the wondering Galeazzo Sforza (Francesco’s son), when shown around the art treasures of the Palazzo Medici, “would not be able to compete with what has been done here.” Yet everything had been bought with money.
What was the proper education for a rich banker? Giovanni di Bicci had done no more than follow fashion when he gave Cosimo his humanist tutors. Steeped in Cicero, the young man was seduced by the ideal of the noble leader. He wanted to be such a man. The Florentine constitution, with its system of election by lottery, forbade these ambitions, yet was so weak that it more or less invited a rich man to spend his way to an ambiguous, covert sort of power. If one of the huge problems of any democracy is what to do with big money and its attendant political ambitions, squalid or noble, Florence had clearly got it wrong.
No doubt aware of the many conflicts within himself, between private and public interest, between moneymaking and getting to heaven, Cosimo decided to educate his three sons for different and separate careers. Piero, the eldest, would be groomed for government; Giovanni, the favorite, for
the bank; Carlo, the illegitimate boy with the foreign features, could go to the Church. It was as if the three strands of Cosimo’s achievements could be separated out. Though Cosimo’s genius had lain in intertwining those strands.
Carefully laid, the plans made no allowance for character and circumstance. Carlo was happy enough as a bishop, but fat Giovanni couldn’t get excited about banking. Jolly, well loved, and vain, he chose the peacock as his personal emblem. “For the view,” he explained to Cosimo, who couldn’t understand why his son was building a villa in Fiesole with no agricultural land around it. A villa was always a farmhouse for Cosimo. You give your children an expensive education and their values start to shift. Cosimo should have been ready for this, since his own education had led to radical departures from his father’s lifestyle.
Determined to please, perhaps precisely because he was not the favorite, Piero was most at home overseeing Cosimo’s commissions of buildings and works of art. An avid collector, in love with lavish furnishings and beautiful domestic interiors, he would spend hours gloating over stacks of illuminated manuscripts, or collections of antique coins. He slept on silk sheets embroidered with the family coat of arms. But you must train for government, his father insisted. And train Piero dutifully did. He held a number of government posts: prior, accoppiatore, even gonfaloniere della giustizia. As his personal emblem, he chose the falcon, which always returns faithfully to its master. “Honored, like your father,” was how people addressed him in their begging letters. “A most careful imitator of his father’s admirable virtues,” wrote Donato di Neri Acciaiuoli in a dedicatory preface to his Life of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus. But imitate as he might, Cosimo’s role wasn’t available to Piero. Because Cosimo hadn’t succeeded anyone.
Accusations that Cosimo had been eager to become a prince were off the mark. He thrived on the complications, the ambiguities, the idea that his fellow Florentines had elevated him despite the constitution. Florence had stripped its feudal nobles of their privileges and didn’t want a return to the past. Yet education was breeding aristocratic presumptions in the banker’s children. Their life began to resemble that of noblemen. Is it possible, they must have started to wonder, to invent an aristocracy, a new, more sophisticated version of the crude old birthright—not simply and brutally to seize power but to create, over two or three wealthy and well-read generations, a new hereditary privilege?
The future of Europe for centuries to come would depend on the answer to this question. And that answer, of course, is no. Money and culture do not amount to a divine right to pass on political power to one’s heirs. And yet … if sufficiently enlightened, if supported by effective propaganda, if interminably intermarried with others who had similar pretensions, or who had once been recognized as royal, perhaps the world might be convinced by an expensive parody, an ersatz aristocracy—especially if, at the end of the day and in the teeth of the evidence, the people enjoying the privileges were always willing to declare themselves ordinary citizens. Paralyzed on silk sheets through the summer of 1466, Piero de’ Medici could hardly be likened to a chrysalis turning into a butterfly. But before the year was out, he would have freed the Medici family from the sticky limitations of the old Florentine oligarchy. With wings bought from usury, the Medici bankers would soar above their station at last. The gouty man was plotting a marriage that would turn those republicans green with envy.
Like art and education, marriage was something that involved an exchange of money but also had the potential for distinctions that went beyond money. These are the interesting things in life, where countable and uncountable values rub and spark together. Traditionally, it was the bride who had to purchase, with her dowry, the right to her husband’s protection. Piccarda de’ Bueri’s 1,500 florins had been crucial for husband Giovanni di Bicci’s initial investments. The Bueri were solid Florentine merchant stock; no more. A distant cousin of Piccarda’s would serve the Medici bank as an agent in Lubeck, collecting papal dues from Scandinavia; trading in furs, amber, and linen; keeping all his accounts in Italian to baffle the local taxman.
But a future husband, or his negotiating parents, also had the option of accepting less money in return for more prestige. Her branch of the family being out of luck, Contessina de’ Bardi didn’t bring Cosimo much cash, but she was still a Bardi. It was a valuable alliance. The wife chosen for Cosimo’s son, Piero, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, brought even less money, a mere 1,000 florins, but in return for even more prestige. Once aristocratic, Lucrezia’s family had changed its name from Tornaquinci to Tornabuoni to avoid the ban on noblemen participating in public life. The girl had blue blood. How strange that the Florentines had banned the nobles from exercising political power but were still impressed by their pedigrees. Many modern democracies are still tensed by this contradiction. Lucrezia, however, legitimized her special status by being nobly educated as well as nobly born. But can one really say, “nobly educated”? Doesn’t such an expression mean we’ve accepted the premise that education can buy certain rights? In any event, Lucrezia was well read. She wrote devotional poetry, of the kind sung by religious confraternities. She made her own small venture into business, redeveloping some rundown sulfur baths, no doubt with her menfolk’s gouty joints in mind.
Accepting Piero’s illegitimate daughter, Maria—these little trials came with the territory—Lucrezia produced two daughters, Bianca and Lucrezia, and two sons, Lorenzo and Giuliano. Most of all, she presided over Lorenzo’s extremely noble education and, when his turn came, played an important role in choosing his wife. With Piero’s health so feeble, Lorenzo would have to marry young, while the family still had clout. In Rome, Medici banking agents were already negotiating for the hand of an Orsini. This was a family of feudal lords, cardinals, condottieri. A family with a private army, no less. Inevitably, news of the possible marriage fed the Florentine opposition. Why was Piero looking outside his hometown for his son’s wife? People started complaining, remarks Machiavelli, “that he who does not want citizens as relatives wants them as slaves.” Before bankers and feudal lords could mix, Piero de’ Medici would have to survive this dangerous summer of 1466.
IN BED, Piero calls for lists to be made of those for him, those against. Interestingly, the two lists include many of the same names. It’s a good sign: minds are malleable, or susceptible to patronage perhaps. In late August, the sick man precipitates the crisis. An ambush, he claims, was laid to murder him as he was being carried toward Florence in a litter from the family villa in Careggi. The assassins were troops of Borso d’Este, marquis of Ferrara. Could this be true? They were in the pay of Luca Pitti and Agnolo Acciaiuoli. So Piero claims. Anyway, he is taking up arms in response. Suddenly, the whole Medici countryside to the north of the town is on the move. Two thousand Milanese troops are approaching from Bologna. And I need 10,000 florins, Piero tells his business partner and cousin Pierfrancesco. At once!
Despite having sworn that oath to defend the republic, Pierfrancesco obeys. Why? Does he believe this unlikely assassination story? Is he afraid that if Piero were to be murdered, the bank might collapse? Whatever the reason, he produces this vast sum at once, in cash. Hours later, all the bread, wine, and arms in the town have been bought up. These provisions are a magnet to the waverers. Scaffolding appears around the Palazzo Medici, creating vantage points from which to pelt attackers. The nearest city gate is seized to allow friendly troops to enter. So much for the coward who would run away from everything that required effort.
The opposition is thrown. They are indeed in alliance with Borso d’Este of Ferrara, but can they get the condottiere and his army into the town before the Milanese arrive? Are they willing to put their hands in their pockets, or other people’s, as deeply and drastically as Piero has? They hesitate. To arms, Niccolò Soderini insists. They must ride through the streets, now, rousing the common people who are doubtless on their side. They must attack Piero’s house. There is no time to lose. But what, the others ask, if the people, after w
inning, want real power? What if, having sacked Piero’s palazzo, the plebs start attacking other palazzi? In the middle of the night, armed men bang on the gates of the Palazzo Medici. Panic spreads among Piero’s defenders. It’s only Antonio Ridolfi, another supporter come to join them. The opposition has missed its moment. It is never enough just to have money—the Strozzi family, for example had had more money than the Medici in 1433, and they were still in exile—you must know how to use it when it matters. Above all, you can never afford to be tight.
Piero staged this melodrama on August 27, one day before a new signoria was to be elected, by lot. Was this because he feared that he would need to be armed if the draw went against him? Or because he had fixed the election somehow and knew it would be in his favor? As it turned out, the new signoria was decidedly pro-Medici. Fixed or not, nothing could have demonstrated more clearly the need for a less erratic form of election.
There is now a four-day interregnum before one signoria hands over to another. The city is surrounded by foreign troops, from both sides. Anything could happen. Negotiations begin. To discourage rash decisions, Piero makes promises. Behind the scenes, the Medici bank’s general director, Francesco Sassetti, goes to talk to the aging Pitti. Time to change sides, Luca. And Pitti, the figurehead of the opposition, betrays his friends in exchange for three guarantees: the promise of a position as accoppiatore for himself; the appointment of his brother to the otto di guardia (with the power over exile); and the marriage of his daughter Francesca to “someone very close to Piero.” By whom Pitti believes they mean Piero’s eldest son and heir, Lorenzo.
A few days later—and this is a coup within the coup—it is Luca Pitti, not Piero de’ Medici, who proposes the inevitable “parliament.” Two thousand Milanese troops preside. Joining them, armed and on horseback, is Piero’s son, the seventeen-year-old Lorenzo. It’s quite a show. In very short order, all the regime’s old electoral controls are reintroduced. And more. Seeing the makeup of the new police commission, which once again has special powers, Dietisalvi Neroni, Niccolò Soderini, and Agnolo Acciaiuoli flee the city before the inevitable sentence of exile is passed. If the 1458 crisis served to define the relationship between the regime and the institutions, the 1466 parliament settled the Medici’s position within the regime: total domination.