Medici Money

by Tim Parks

  With the quarrel between the mining consortium and the town’s ruling faction deadlocked, the Volterrans appeal to Lorenzo to arbitrate. Predictably enough, Lorenzo decides that the alum consortium, which includes two prominent, pro-Medici Volterrans, should keep its concession. The opposing faction rebels, riots, kills the two prominent Lorenzo supporters, and declares independence from Florence. Nevertheless, the aging counselor Tommaso Soderini tells Lorenzo that there really is no need to send an army. A crisis like this can be solved with patience and negotiation.

  Soderini, who had remained faithful to the Medici throughout his elder brother’s rebellion in 1466, was now pushing seventy. He was married to Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s sister, Lorenzo’s aunt, and, as the regime’s most senior man, he no doubt expected to exercise a certain influence over his young nephew. But this was precisely the kind of presumption that Lorenzo would not accept. Less like his grandfather Cosimo than he claimed, Lorenzo was determined not just to be in charge, but to be seen to be so. He, a Medici, a man married into the Orsini family, a man who had hosted the duke of Milan in his palazzo, had been insulted, his friends killed.

  Lorenzo hires and sends an army. After a month’s siege, the Volterrans surrender on the understanding that their lives and properties will be spared. Entering the town, the mercenaries sack, rape, and kill. It is the right of a mercenary army to sack the town they have taken. Everybody knows that. From now on, the Volterrans will be Lorenzo’s implacable enemies. Appalled by the bloodshed resulting from his decisions, Lorenzo tries to make amends with a personal gift to the Volterrans of 2,000 florins. It is less than a fifth of what had been spent on his famous marriage tournament three years earlier. Even before the material damage to the town can be repaired, the recently discovered alum mine is closed down. The deposit turns out to be scanty and the quality poor. The whole brutal affair has been completely unnecessary.

  “LORENZO’S GREATEST FAILING,” wrote the historian Guicciardini in 1509, “was suspicion.” First of a new species—the aristocrat by education, marriage and money, rather than hereditary right—Lorenzo was afraid that others wouldn’t recognize his superiority, then afraid, when they did, that they would try to bring him down. A pattern of behavior emerged: imagining himself threatened, or offended (it was the same thing), he would overreact and bring about the clash he feared. That was how the massacre in Volterra was provoked. There was worse to come.

  Pope Sixtus, who had been so generous to Lorenzo with the chalcedony cups at his coronation, who supported him over the Volterra affair and even granted him and his mother and brother a plenary indulgence—a place in heaven no less—now tries to regain control of Città di Castello in the northern Papal States, not far from the southern borders of the Florentine Republic. The signore of the town—or usurper, as Sixtus sees it—is a friend of Lorenzo’s and appeals for his help. Lorenzo immediately takes the pope’s campaign as a personal affront and sends troops to help his friend, though not enough troops to do anything more than alienate the pope, his bank’s most important client. Despite all the diplomatic missions in adolescence, Lorenzo is still a very young man to be running a state.

  Pope Sixtus announces that he wants to buy the lordship of Imola, a town northeast of Florence, for his nephew, Girolamo Riario. Almost everything Sixtus does, he does for his nephews. To secure the deal, however, he needs to borrow more than 40,000 florins. From his banker, obviously, who else? But Lorenzo feels that Imola should be in Florence’s sphere of influence, not the pope’s. Looking at the map, one can’t help but agree. He refuses the money. He warns another Florentine bank dealing with the pope to refuse too. The Pazzi are an ancient and highly respected family—one old uncle and a dozen adult nephews—with an international bank similar in structure to that of the Medici. Not only do they go ahead and lend the cash to Sixtus, but they actually inform him of Lorenzo’s attempt to stop them, as if the Medici were the merest commercial competitors and not the rulers of Florence. This is a major insult, and a big risk for the Pazzi. Clearly they feel that Lorenzo hasn’t been giving their family the honors it deserves—for example, in the scrutiny of 1472 when the Pazzi got very few name tags in the electoral bags. Well, they certainly wouldn’t be getting any more now.

  In 1474, Pope Sixtus proposes Francesco Salviati as archbishop of Florence. But Salviati is a close friend of the Pazzi. The pope, however, despite Lorenzo’s attempt to stop him from buying Imola, proves amenable to protest and nominates Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, Rinaldo Orsini, instead. Which was generous. Then the archbishopric of Pisa falls vacant, and this time the pope appoints Salviati without consulting Lorenzo. In the meantime, he has ordered an audit on the Curia’s alum accounts with the Medici bank. The price in Bruges and London has plummeted. The forecast income isn’t forthcoming. Lorenzo is deeply offended. It’s a dishonor to audit me! My family has served the pope for decades. And he denies the new archbishop, Salviati, right of entry to Pisa. Pisa is subject to Florence. I should have been consulted. No one can be bishop in Pisa without my consent. The pope threatens Lorenzo with excommunication. And he appoints a Pazzi as bishop down in Sarno near Naples.

  “Puffed up by his Majesty [King Ferrante of Naples] … these Pazzi relatives of mine are seeking to harm me as much as they can.” Thus Lorenzo in a letter to Duke Galeazzo Sforza in Milan, begging him to put pressure on the pope to withdraw the appointment of Salviati to the archbishopric of Pisa. Lorenzo refers to the Pazzi as relatives because his older sister Bianca has long been married to one of the Pazzi nephews, Guglielmo.

  But Pisa is a battle Lorenzo can’t win. The Church is too strong. Not long after Salviati is finally allowed to enter the town and take up his archbishopric, the pope declines to renew the Medici’s alum monopoly and gives it instead to the Pazzi. Again the bank pays the consequences for the politicking that its wealth has made possible.

  Would the tit-for-tat never end? Apparently not. In March 1477, a dispute arose between Giovanni Pazzi, another of the dozen nephews, and the cousin of his wife, Beatrice Borromei. The Borromei family was extremely rich. Beatrice’s father had just died. Since Beatrice had no brothers or sisters, she expected to inherit the old man’s wealth, which would thus enter into the Pazzi family. But her cousin, Carlo, disagreed. He seized part of the fortune and insisted that, being male, he should have it. Lorenzo intervened—Don’t do this! his younger brother, Giuliano, warned him—to get a law passed that would give nephews precedence over daughters. This was a major change in social custom, no doubt affecting hundreds of lives, calculations, prospects. Despite urgent advice to the contrary, Lorenzo went ahead and the money was kept from the Pazzi family. “Giuliano de’ Medici complained over and over to his brother,” writes Machiavelli, “that by wanting too many things, all of them might be lost.” As far as Giuliano was concerned, they were. He was assassinated by the Pazzi during mass in the duomo in April 1478. Lorenzo escaped.

  THE HUMANISM OF the fifteenth century has generally received an enthusiastic press: the enquiring mind turns away from abstruse metaphysics to concentrate on what is human. That must be a good thing. Yet the phenomenon was so various, the human is so various, that it is truly hard to approve of every manifestation of the movement. Unless perhaps what most attracts us to humanism, what makes most of us humanists in fact, is the movement’s greatest outrage: its dismissal of what came before as a thousand years of darkness, as if the middle ages had somehow been inhuman. Why did the humanists have to do that? Why is the dismissal still so important to us?

  Marsilio Ficino, protégé of Cosimo de’ Medici, spoke little of darkness but a great deal about illumination. Sixteen years older than Lorenzo, he made, in the early 1470s, a rather more successful bid than the aging patrician Soderini to influence the young ruler, presenting himself as a philosophical father to a privileged disciple, not an interested party with advice to give on contentious issues. As a thinker, Ficino’s most characteristic gesture was conflation. Reading and translating widely, se
arching back in time long before Rome and abroad far east of the Aegean, he had an uncanny ability to find the same thing wherever he looked and above all to superimpose one tradition on another. The mountain Dante ascends in the Commedia is obviously the Olympus of the Greeks, the Pradesha or “supreme field” of Sanskrit, the Pardes of the Chaldeans, the Arab mountain of Qaf, and even the mons Veneris of sensual delight. The Orphic Hymn to the Sun, which Ficino translated, was clearly akin to Plato’s metaphor of the cave and the light in The Republic, which Ficino translated, to the late classical theologian Proclus’s Hymn to the Sun, which Ficino translated, and to St. Augustine’s notion of God as “the sun of the soul,” which, in the Soliloquia, Ficino both translated and wrote a commentary on. The whole world, it seemed, had always followed a single faith whose ancient priests included Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, St. Paul, St. Augustine.

  Supremely eclectic, Ficino’s humanism annihilated all divisions—this in stark contrast to the Christianity of the previous centuries, which had followed a single tradition, concentrated on an established canon of authors, yet managed to divide the world very sharply, perhaps depressingly, into good and bad, true and false, right and wrong, heaven and hell. This was why, for the humanists, the recent past had to be not so much argued with as surpassed, forgotten. It would not permit the thrill of the exotic, or a more personal selection of what to read and think. From now on instead, any argument would take place within a new zona franca where ancient met modern, East met West, and the excited mind was free to try out what it liked. Humanism, in short, unlocked the door to that supermarket of ideas we live in today.

  There were aspects of Ficino’s thought that were extremely attractive to Lorenzo. One of his conflations was the fairly common one of the authoritative father figure with the prince or political leader. Following the birth of his daughter Maddalena in 1473, Lorenzo was now a father three times over. Father is a more positive word than tyrant. Never one to leave anything out of an equation, Ficino brought in God and artists too, as analogous to fathers and princes: “The son is the work of the father, and there is nothing that man loves more than his own work. And this is why God loves human nature and authors their books, and painters the people they have painted.” By the same mental process, Lorenzo would eventually be able to think of Florence as becoming—through his government, his marriage-arranging, his manipulation of available patronage to painters, poets, sculptors, and architects—his own personal work of art. He loved it because he was making it what it was. At which point, whether money flowed out of Lorenzo’s purse toward the town or, more likely, with the bank’s now-rapid decline, out of state coffers and into the Palazzo Medici, was unimportant. Father and son keep their money in common.

  Nor was Ficino’s eclecticism alien to elitism. The world had always been as he described it—the soul of man yearning for the divine light—yet it was not given to everybody to understand that. Most people would remain in ignorance. And this was how it should be. Ficino translated into Latin, after all, not into the vernacular. Only the best educated could read Latin. “Religious mysteries,” wrote Pico della Mirandola, another disciple of Ficino’s, “would not be mysteries if they did not remain occult.” A fair point. The deeper truths could thus only be written about “under enigmatic veilings and poetic dissimulations.” This explained the complex, often ambiguous nature of myth, and indeed many of the somewhat puzzling paintings of nymphs and satyrs that were beginning to flow from Sandro Botticelli’s workshop. Only those already in the know, those who could afford to commission a painting, were to understand.

  Certainly, after drawing close to Ficino, Lorenzo’s sonnets to Lucrezia had changed. They became densely enigmatic. Old and obvious sensual urges (once they had been called sins) must now be conflated with mysticism’s ancient ecstasies and the yearning for truth and beauty. This wasn’t always easy. And as Lorenzo’s rule over Florence progressed, the habit of political secrecy intensified too; “the secret things” grew more secret. The regime’s leaders, it seems, had begun to think of themselves as initiates in a cult, of philosopher kings perhaps. A cult of power.

  The longer Lorenzo ruled Florence, the less documentation we have of the deliberations of the various government committees. Only a few fragments of the bank’s accounts remain from this period. What we do have instead, in refreshing contrast to the by-now-arcane love sonnets, are all the bawdy songs Lorenzo composed for the town’s popular Carnival celebrations. Here the only conflation, as interminable as it is scabrous, was that of the double entendre. “Oh pretty women,” ends his “Song of the Bakers,” “such is our art: if you’d like something to pop in your mouths, try this for a start.” The working men of the town must have loved it. Quite probably the women, too. One of the tenets of Ficino’s Platonism was that you draw other souls to your position through song, as Orpheus drew Eurydice from the darkness with his lyre. You don’t try to convince with reasoned argument. Here is Lorenzo’s “Song of the Peasants”:

  Cucumbers we’ve got, and big ones,

  Though to look at bumpy and odd

  You might almost think they had spots on

  But they open passages blocked

  Use both hands to pluck ’em

  Peel the skin from off the top

  Mouths wide open and suck ’em

  Soon you won’t want to stop.

  Ascending the Platonic categories of the spirit in his esoteric love sonnets, Lorenzo seduced his less-educated Florentine subjects with rhyming obscenities. Everyone agreed he was a genius. Who, one wonders, was using Cosimo’s prayer cell in San Marco?

  LORENZO HAS LEFT his infantile “games”—meaning his profane poems—to concentrate on “the Supreme Good.” Thus Ficino, rather optimistically, in a letter to a friend in 1474. Lorenzo had now started a long and solemn work called The Supreme Good, which paraphrased Ficino’s views. At the same time, the argument with the pope over the appointment of Francesco Salviati had begun. Ficino was a good friend of Salviati’s. This was embarrassing. And though the would-be archbishop was no Platonist, the Church as a whole was not hostile to the new humanist eclecticism. At one party thrown by Cardinal Pietro Riario—another friend of Salviati’s and another of the nephews whom Pope Sixtus had elevated to high office—a poem was read out about how the gods of Olympus had refused to answer Jupiter’s summons because they were busy serving the cardinal and his guests with, among other things, cakes designed to represent scenes from classical mythology. It’s curious how this vertiginous mixing of traditions and upsetting of hierarchies (a god serving a cardinal!) always seemed to go hand in hand with the feeling that all the traditional codes of behavior could be broken. No pope had ever appointed so many members of his family to positions of power, whether spiritual or secular, as did Sixtus. Later, knowing full well that the plan was to kill Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano, the Holy Father would nevertheless give his blessing to the Pazzi conspiracy to oust the Medici, “so long as death doesn’t come into it.”

  But the codes you broke depended on who you were and which of the classics you were reading. While Lorenzo and Ficino and friends were spending pleasant afternoons in Medici country villas playing Socrates and Alcibiades, while Giovanni Tornabuoni and Tommaso Portinari were having their images superimposed on various biblical scenes, a young man called Girolamo Logiati was reading Sallust’s account of the conspiracy of Catiline in 63 B.C. In December 1476, imitating antique role models, Logiati and two fellow conspirators assassinated Galeazzo Maria Sforza, duke of Milan, at high mass on St. Stephen’s Day. Perhaps one becomes aware that one has entered the modern world when even the most courageous of actions seem wrapped in a sticky film of parody, of inappropriate repetition. Sforza was a loathsome man, he had raped and tortured. But this was not republican Rome. The common people had not been reading Sallust. They did not rise up to celebrate their freedom. Instead they went after the conspirators. All three were executed.

  When the grand v
irtues risk appearing as charade, or as borrowed from a different drama, the one sure value that remains is money. You can count it. You can weigh it. You can check it with your teeth. In Rome, Francesco Pazzi, head of the family’s bank there, took note of how easy it was to see off a political leader. Republican values might have more pull in a town like Florence, which already enjoyed the collective illusion that it was the modern manifestation of antique glory. So small in stature that he was generally known as Franceschino, this particular Pazzi was renowned for his bad temper and good luck. The Medici had already alienated their main client, the pope. They had alienated the king of Naples. They had alienated all those republican Florentines who believed in the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune. Most of all, Lorenzo de’ Medici would never let the Pazzi family back into public life in Florence. If Lorenzo and his brother were killed, the Pazzi bank—which, like so many others, was going through hard times—would be in a position to take over a large part of the Medici’s business. Money would bring power.

  Franceschino drew in Archbishop Salviati in Pisa and Girolamo Riario, the pope’s nephew, now running Imola and eager to build up a serious dukedom before his uncle departed this world. The conspiracy could count on the military support of the Papal States and of Naples. Uncle Iacopo, however, the patrician head of the Pazzi family, a great blasphemer and gambler but highly respected all the same, was reluctant. The stakes were high and the odds poor. For a long time he argued against the assassination attempt. But eventually he came on board. Hadn’t Franceschino, he later justified himself, always been the lucky one?