Medici Money

by Tim Parks

  Already men wrote to him begging favors: stonecutters, farmers, painters, poets. And Lorenzo interceded with his father on their behalf: I trust you will “honor me in this,” the Medici heir solemnly writes, when gouty Piero is no more than a couple of rooms away. Other people’s anxieties prompt exercises in style. Surrounded by some of the finest minds of the time, the young man discussed the consolations of philosophy, the nature of good government. “He stays out late,” complained his tutor in a letter to the boy’s parents, “flirting with the girls and playing pranks.”

  Formal visits to other courts began when he was in his early teens. Aware of that ugly face, that grating voice, he dazzled with an extraordinary intellectual energy. In Milan, he threw parties in the bank’s magnificent premises and met Ippolita Sforza, the duke’s daughter, who was about to marry the son of the king of Naples. The two adolescents exchanged letters, on literary matters, and later Ippolita asked for a loan of 2,000 ducats. “I promise on my honor I will pay it back.”

  In 1466, now seventeen, he was sent down to Rome to sign some dull contract regarding the merchandising of alum, a mineral essential to the wool trade. It is his first involvement in banking business. Fortunately, the death of Francesco Sforza turns the trip into a dramatic diplomatic mission. He must convince the pope that the duke’s son should be allowed to succeed as lord of Milan. Sforza had been a usurper. Sforza is the Medici’s main ally. Lorenzo must hurry down to Naples to check that King Ferrante has no alternative arrangements in mind.

  Returning to Florence in time for his father’s showdown with the anti-Medici conspirators—Pitti, Acciaiuoli, Dietisalvi, and Soderini—Lorenzo makes his dramatic appearance together with the troops from Milan, armed and on horseback, at the parliament in the Piazza della Signoria. It is a gesture at once of seduction and coercion. Florence must love me. An artistic gesture. The young man dismounts and stands together, as an equal, with the priors in their red robes as the request for a balia with unlimited powers is read out, and the people, surrounded by armed men, vote away their republican rights. It is in the nature of every artist to combine seduction and coercion. The public must succumb to my point of view, to the point of my sword. There is no radical split between Lorenzo the poet and Lorenzo the politician. Way below the eligible age for public service, he was nevertheless given a place on the balia, which, with its unlimited powers, would once again put the city firmly in Medici hands.

  Lorenzo de’ Medici, in a bust attributed to Verrocchio. Hardly Adonis, Lorenzo was obliged to master other forms of seduction. He remains one of the finest of fifteenth-century poets.

  Alum, one suspects, was not on Lorenzo’s mind as he faced the Florentine people in the piazza at that moment of crisis. But it was present everywhere. It was with alum that raw wool from England was cleansed of its grease. Everyone in the square was wearing wool. It was alum that fixed the dyes in the priors’ crimson gowns and alum that cured the leather on the horsemen’s saddles. And three years later, in 1469, when Lorenzo married Clarice Orsini by proxy and, in her absence, celebrated this great step from merchant to aristocrat with a lavish tournament in Piazza Santa Croce, alum was present again in another way. This gritty white sulfate was largely responsible for paying the 10,000 or more florins that the event is reputed to have cost.

  Pearls and velvet abounded at that expensive celebration. Young Lorenzo carried a standard given to him not by his new wife but by his old girlfriend, Lucrezia Donati. It showed a woman twining a laurel crown, for her poet. And since Lucrezia was queen of the tournament, it was she, and not Lorenzo’s new but absent wife, who placed a silver helmet on the warrior’s head when, inevitably, the family who had financed the event had its boy win. What Lorenzo had signed down in Rome in 1466 was a contract giving the Medici the total monopoly over all sales of alum throughout Christendom. There is no indication from his writings that Lorenzo had grasped the importance of this. Perhaps what mattered more was that Lucrezia too was married now, though her husband was abroad on business. People were gossiping. Meanwhile, Clarice, married and virgin, wrote from Rome to say that the mere thought of Lorenzo’s being involved in a tournament had given her a migraine. From a family of real soldiers, and with no experience of Florence and its amorous ways, she could be forgiven for mistaking the real source of danger. “All libidinous and venereal,” as Guicciardini described him, “marvelously involved in things of Venus,” as Machiavelli added, Lorenzo continued to write poetry. To Lucrezia.

  MONOPOLIES, LIKE USURY, were illegal under Church law. Because unnatural. God had given the natural world to all mankind, not to a chosen few. Denying people liberty and keeping prices artificially high, monopolies were obviously a form of stealing and could only lead to perdition. As with usury, the Church insisted that only full restitution of ill-gotten gains could make amends and get you to heaven, though it is difficult to see how, after exercising a monopoly for some years, you could ever calculate the exact amount of what had been stolen, or from whom.

  The Church’s concept of the monopoly was not restricted to the situation where a single organization had control over the sale of a particular product. To form a workers’ union, for example, was also a monopoly, and of the most pernicious variety: It restricted freedom of labor and the right of an employer to hire any worker on any terms. A union was unnatural. Any association of wool-workers, for example, in this cloth-manufacturing town of Florence, was immediately condemned and crushed.

  Despite this exemplary strictness, in 1466 Pope Paul II declared that the Church, in alliance with the Medici bank, would now operate a monopoly on the sale of alum throughout Europe. After salt and iron, alum was the most important mineral of the time. Without it, the cloth trade could hardly have functioned. But how could the Church justify such a flagrant breach of its own laws? The profits from this ambitious commercial venture, said the Holy Father, would go toward a new crusade against the Turks. This made the monopoly not only legal but virtuous. It was a case of the desirable end justifying the otherwise-sinful means. A dangerous precedent for a religious organization.

  Here are the circumstances. The annual European market for alum was worth something in excess of 300,000 florins, almost ten times what the king of England owed the Medici bank. Only a very small amount of the mineral was actually mined in Christendom, on the island of Ischia at the northwest entrance to the Bay of Naples. The quality of this deposit was poor, so poor that in some northern European markets its use was banned, because potentially harmful to the wool it was supposed to treat. Hence most alum had to come from mines in the Gulf of Izmir, on the eastern shores of the Aegean, now under the control of the Turks, and hence Islam. These mines had been developed for the most part by the Genoese, who thus controlled most of the trade in alum, paying taxes and customs duties to the Turks and thus helping to finance the constant Turkish expansion into Christendom, through Eastern Europe.

  In 1460, the Italian merchant Giovanni da Castro, whose father had been a close friend of Pope Pius and who had recently escaped from creditors in the Eastern Mediterranean to live under the pontiff’s protection in Rome, discovered a huge deposit of high-quality alum in the mountains of Tolfa, northeast of Rome. Understanding the importance of the discovery, Pius at once declared this barren area of land to be Church property. Castro would mine and refine the alum and the Church would market it, thus gaining a huge income for themselves and taking away a huge income from their enemies, the Turks.

  To market the mineral on a wide scale, however, both credit and commercial expertise were necessary. Hence in 1466, Pius’s successor, Paul II, decided to make a contract with the Medici bank that allowed them to use their Europe-wide trade network to sell whatever the Italian mine produced. At the same time, Pope Paul announced that any merchant found to be purchasing Turkish alum would be punished with excommunication, since buying from the Turks what could be bought from the pope amounted to aiding the attack on Christendom. All this came as very bad news for the Venet
ians, who had recently taken over from the Genoese the concession to work the alum mines in the Gulf of Izmir.

  In 1470 the papal monopoly was firmed up by establishing an alum producers’ cartel with the owners of the mine in Ischia and with the king of Naples, to whom those owners paid a duty on whatever they produced. Under this agreement, the entire volume of alum mined and refined for the European market would be controlled by the Church in such a way as to keep the prices as high as possible, a sort of fifteenth-century OPEC. Only a year after signing up to the cartel, however, the Medici and Pope Paul pulled out when it became clear that Ischia would never be a dangerous competitor, and this for the simple reason that wool manufacturers much preferred the better-quality alum from Tolfa.

  At first glance, such a coup seems to put the Medici bank in a league of its own. They now have sole rights to sell one of the most important industrial products of their time. Those rights are backed up by the threat of excommunication. In Rome, Giovanni Tornabuoni is absolutely convinced that all the bank’s problems are now solved. This is the dream deal that everybody has been looking for, the deal that will take all the tedium and risk out of banking and allow important people like himself and Tommaso Portinari to spend more of their time building up their libraries, commissioning paintings, attending lavish functions at court, and, in general, behaving more like their Medici masters.

  Alas, it was not to be. In England, in Burgundy, in Venice—the main markets for alum—monarchs and merchants were not as impressed as they had once been by the threat of excommunication. It was hard to feel that what you had been doing in good conscience all your life had suddenly become a mortal sin. They employed local theologians to argue the case against the papal monopoly. A sin (like a monopoly) is always a sin, these wise men decided, even if the profits from it, at least as far as the pope was concerned, were indeed being used to pay the Hungarian king to fight the Turks. In Bruges, Tommaso Portinari counseled and counseled rash Duke Charles of Burgundy, begging him to impose the alum monopoly throughout his dukedom and ban sales of the mineral from any source other than the Medici bank. Offered a cut on profits, the duke at first agreed. But however rash he might have been, Charles recognized the signs of rebellion when he saw them. The local merchants, both importers and end users, were furious. The wool trade was at risk, they said. In the end, the duke backed down. Turkish alum continued to arrive in the port of Bruges.

  When planning production at the mines in Tolfa and Ischia, the monopolists had imagined they would have the market entirely to themselves. They aimed to meet the entire European demand in just a few years. So when the threat of excommunication failed to stop the Venetians and Genoese from dealing in Turkish alum, the sudden glut caused by supplies from both sources made it hard to maintain old prices, let alone increase them as the monopolists had planned. Bulk buyers of alum in London and Bruges formed associations and lobbies to increase their negotiating power. The papal percentage on incomes from sales had to be halved, which soon meant less money to fund the Hungarian king.

  To make matters worse—at least as far as the Medici bank was concerned—this venture into merchandising alum represented another blow to the already-precarious balance of trade and movement of money among the bank’s various branches. Here was yet another product moving north from Italy. Once again cash would have to be collected in London and Bruges and sent south. Why couldn’t the alum have been discovered in the Cotswolds, for heaven’s sake, to replace the wool the English were now so reluctant to sell? That would have been so convenient. Unwisely, in return for its rights of monopoly, the bank had agreed to pay the pope his cut on whatever was mined before the product was shipped and sold.

  Given the tensions between the Bruges and Rome branches of the bank, particularly since Giovanni Benci’s death in 1455, the problems arising from the alum monopoly were predictable enough. As always, Bruges and London were slow to send money down to Rome. As always, Tornabuoni, in Rome, was impatient, suspecting as he did that Bruges and London were squandering the incomes from alum sales in loans to dukes and duchesses. An employee from the Rome branch was sent north to see what was going on. Then the pope sent his own negotiators to tackle the duke. But if there was one thing Tommaso Portinari loathed, it was interference. Papal spies! he complained in a letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici. If I can’t counsel the duke, what chance has a bishop got?

  As the years pass, the situation deteriorates. A Florentine galley sinks. The cargo is lost. Then two galleys arrive simultaneously from Genoa and Venice, bringing Turkish alum. At this point, the port of Bruges is warehousing a three-year supply of the mineral all at once. Needless to say, the price collapses. More and more, the alum deal comes to assume the function of a chimera; if only the bank could really impose this monopoly, everything would be okay. But in the meantime, there are shipping costs and warehousing expenses and very little income. On March 18, 1475, Tornabuoni tells Lorenzo de’ Medici that between paying the producers and the papal dues and the galleys, the bank is actually losing money on alum. Meantime, there was the Volterra affair.

  ALONG WITH THE family’s source of wealth, another thing to be got out of the way, in young Lorenzo’s Neoplatonic vision of things, was the regime’s hold on power. It seemed that whatever balia, council, or institution the Medici set up to guarantee their authority, as time passed even the most carefully selected allies began to vote along more republican lines. People have a stubborn bias toward freedom. When Lorenzo took over from his father, the signoria was being selected by nine accoppiatori, who in turn were selected annually by the Council of 100, the sort of permanent Medici balia established after the 1458 parliament. But the council was no longer doing as it was told. Lorenzo found he had to attend its assemblies in person if members weren’t to vote against him. It was irritating. “I plan to behave the way my grandfather did,” he had told the Milanese ambassador soon after his father’s death, “which was to do these things in as civil a way as one can, and as far as possible within the constitution.”

  But how civil and constitutional can one be if one wants to have a rock-solid guarantee of remaining in power? Almost immediately, Lorenzo went far beyond his grandfather. By the end of 1471, the signoria was still being chosen by nine accoppiatori, but now the accoppiatori were chosen every July by their nine outgoing predecessors together with the signoria in office at the moment. Power was thus entirely circular. To console the Council of 100 for their loss of influence over the accoppiatori and hence the government, they were now allowed to ratify the decisions of the signoria directly, without the need of further ratification from the traditional Councils of the Commune and of the People—which more or less ceased to have any reason to exist.

  At this point, the Medici are exercising almost complete control over the affairs of state. And yet a certain façade of constitutionality is maintained: The councils do meet and vote; the selection of the signoria is still recorded as though it were a fair lottery. Such pretenses of constitutionality quickly fell away when both banking income and political authority were threatened by the discovery of alum in Volterra.

  Volterra is a small town some forty-five miles southwest of Florence. In the fifteenth century, it was a subject community, paying a tribute to Florence but running its own government. Naturally, everybody was excited about the alum, then disappointed when the mining concession was given to a private consortium with Florentine backing. It was important, of course, for the Medici bank to bring this new source of the product into their monopoly. The government in Volterra, run by a faction opposed to the consortium, confiscated the mine. Florence intervened to reverse the decision.

  This is June 1471. Lorenzo has had a busy eighteen months since his father died. A rebellion, instigated by the conspirators of 1466, was put down in Prato. There were executions. His first child, Lucrezia, was born in 1470 and his first son and heir, Piero, arrived in February 1471. Clarice was playing her part. In March, Lorenzo was host to Galeazzo Sforza, duke of Mila
n, who brought an embarrassingly large entourage and indulged the scandalous habit of eating meat during Lent. Inevitably, God showed his wrath by having the Church of Santo Spirito burn down, and the frightened Florentines did penance with some strict new laws on luxury clothes and foods.

  Throughout his wife’s pregnancies, Lorenzo continued to write love sonnets to Lucrezia Donati and was simultaneously working on a parodic Symposium of more than eight hundred lines featuring a wildly drunken evening among local philosophers and clergymen. It is hilarious. Certainly more of his time was given to this first experiment in satire than to the reopening of Medici bank branches in Venice and Naples.

  Then, just as the Volterra crisis was hotting up, Pope Paul II died—this in July 1471—and Lorenzo had to hurry down to Rome for the coronation of Pope Sixtus IV. One can imagine how hard it was for a twenty-two-year-old to concentrate on politics, banking, babies, and poetry all at once. In his brief ricordi, Lorenzo describes the trip to Rome thus: “I was much honored, and brought back two antique marble busts of Augustus and Agrippa, that Pope Sixtus gave me, plus an inlaid cup of chalcedony and many other cameos and medals that I purchased.” Though he wrote these memories in 1473, Lorenzo doesn’t mention the most important event of his rule to date, the sacking of Volterra. It was not something to be proud of.