Medici Money

by Tim Parks

  And he is praised for his diplomacy. He became “almost the balance of all Italy,” said Guicciardini, meaning that Lorenzo preserved the balance of power. Later biographers take up the expression without the almost. Lorenzo opposed Venice in its expansionist assault on Ferrara in the early 1480s; he opposed Pope Innocent VIII’s expansionist assault on Naples in the mid-eighties; but he moved more carefully now, choosing to alienate no one over the long run, offering favors to everybody. As the weakest of the five Italian powers, Lorenzo had an obvious interest in maintaining the status quo. Unable to shine militarily, his city must stand out for its artistic achievements. What was expedient then is understood as virtuous now.

  Or the biographies are written in indignant opposition to the hagiographies, in much the same way that many citizens of Florence hated Lorenzo more intensely the more the world praised him. On his return from Naples, almost the first thing Lorenzo undertook was another and final reform of the state. A new constitutional body of only seventy chosen Medici supporters was given huge powers. Every vote against Lorenzo was always a personal affront. Every picture commissioned took into account the political loyalties of the painter, the propaganda value of the image. Speaking of the need for peace, Lorenzo missed no opportunity to expand Florence’s borders. In 1484, on the slightest of pretexts, the garrison town of Pietrasanta was seized from the Genoese. Writing convincingly of the need for free choice in marriage, he imposed brides on reluctant spouses. He betrothed his fourteen-year-old daughter Maddalena to the illegitimate, debauched, and drunken son of Pope Sixtus’s successor, Innocent VIII. The rhetoric of fiscal equality ever on his lips, he introduced a new coin, the quattrino bianco, in which all customs duties must be paid. The silver picciolo had long been losing value. The new money effectively increased those taxes paid by the poor by 25 percent. It did not alter their incomes.

  Complaining of the heavy responsibilities of power, he exercised it ever more determinedly, “holding the city completely in his will as if he were a prince waving a baton,” says Guicciardini. Rushing out of the Palazzo della Signoria one January morning in 1489, four days after his fortieth birthday, Lorenzo waves his nowgouty arm to silence the crowd. They are demanding that a certain criminal should be spared execution. Hang him now, Lorenzo orders, here. The man had killed a police agent. The man is hanged. Four protesters are whipped and banished. Lorenzo has a considerable investment in the powers of the police. He goes nowhere now without an armed bodyguard of a dozen men, paid for by the state.

  Lorenzo is a tyrant and the Pazzi conspirators were republican martyrs. Such was the burden of Alamanno Rinuccini’s Dialogue on Liberty, written, in the classical style, when its author retired to his country villa in 1479, during the war with Naples and the pope. With the state of Medici tyranny, he wrote, the only thing an honest man can do is to withdraw from public life. Rinuccini had a long record of holding high offices under the Medici, to whom he dedicated various translations from the Greek; but he had fallen out with Lorenzo and his life savings had been held in the Pazzi bank. Nevertheless, shortly after writing the dialogue, which he was wise enough not to publish, he went back to Florence and served the Medici regime in a variety of public offices for many years.

  The ambiguity of the case is emblematic. Was the core of Rinuccini’s personality in his denunciation of the Medici? Or was there an element of sour grapes and rhetorical exercise? Was the man’s public service a sad charade that served to prop up a dangerous tyrant? Or was it honorable and a pleasure? “So many men on the councils denounce the Medici over dinnertime discussion at home in their villas,” wrote Marco Parenti, “then vote as they’re told when they are back in Florence.” It seemed a new sort of personality was in the making: that of the man who does not find it too much of a problem to be liberal and virtuous in private while toeing an authoritarian line in public. And perhaps this had come about in response to a new kind of society where public life would always involve a surrender of honesty, if only because the basis of power would always be suspect, always require a constant effort of propaganda to assert its legitimacy. In these murky circumstances, hardly unfamiliar to us today, to write hagiography or its opposite is to miss the point.

  LORENZO WAS NOW so suspicious of all and sundry that he routinely had official Florentine ambassadors in foreign courts shadowed and duplicated by his own personal spies. Yet his trust in his bank managers seemed unbounded. The overall director, Francesco Sassetti, a man quite incapable of taking unpleasant decisions, was left entirely to his own devices, despite the fact that he worked from Lorenzo’s house in Florence. In Rome, Uncle Giovanni Tornabuoni swung from gloom to optimism with no long-term vision, no flexibility. “The pope is as stubborn as a corpse,” he complained of Innocent’s unwillingness to repay his debts. Yet Tornabuoni continued to tie up most of the bank’s capital with the Curia. In Bruges, before the final showdown, Tommaso Portinari had actually managed to persuade Lorenzo to form a separate company for the only profitable business the branch was doing, the occasional importation of English wool. Since Portinari had a larger share in this company than in the bank, he took a bigger slice of the gains, while losing a smaller percentage on the branch’s overall losses. “He took advantage of my inexperience,” Lorenzo later complained. But Il Magnifico had been running the Florentine Republic for years at the time, and a child would have understood the mathematics of the deal.

  An atmosphere of farce hangs over these last years of the Medici bank. A second generation of untouchables and prima donnas was now being trained up beneath the first. In Bruges, Antonio de’ Medici, a distant cousin of Lorenzo’s, was so arrogant that when the family promoted him to deputy director, the other employees threatened a walkout and he had to be recalled to Florence. Later, Antonio would be sent to Constantinople to negotiate, successfully, the extradition of Giuliano’s assassin, Bernardo di Bandini Baroncelli. In Lyon, Lionetto de’ Rossi, Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, was convinced that one of his staff, Cosimo Sassetti, son of the general director, had been sent to spy on him. Most likely he had; Lionetto, after all, had been writing the most insulting things about the boy’s father in vitriolic letters to Lorenzo. Fortunately, the young Sassetti was as credulous as he was offensive. Overwhelmed by losses from bad loans, Lionetto sent Cosimo back to Florence with a balance sheet reporting profits. The director’s son was the only one taken in. Arriving in Lyon to investigate, in 1485, a certain Lorenzo Spinelli wrote to Lorenzo to say that Lionetto was completely out of his mind.

  The bank was paying the price for its fatal attraction to political power. To lend to people whose reputation and position do not depend on honoring their debts will always be dangerous, but to give huge sums to people who actually feel it is undignified to repay is madness. These were not the kind of people you could take to court. They were the court. Often a condition of lending to one of them was that you must not lend to another. Louis XI of France was furious that the Medici were financing his enemy Charles the Bold, and so took measures against the bank in Lyon. Tornabuoni, angry that the French branch wasn’t sending him the money for papal bulls, refused to honor an important letter of credit from Lyon. The bank’s reputation could only plummet. The Florence branch started trading silk with a separate, non-Medici agent in the French town. At least they knew they would be paid. Lionetto was furious. How can I ever get my branch back into profit if the others take their business elsewhere? Far too late, Lorenzo sweetly invited his brother-in-law back to Florence to discuss matters, and on his arrival had him arrested and thrown in a debtors’ jail.

  Hans Memling’s The Last Judgment (detail), commissioned by Tommaso Portinari. Despite losing 100,000 florins for the Medici bank, Tommaso instructs the great painter to imagine how the Angel of Death will weigh him in the balance when the bottom line is finally drawn.

  It wasn’t the first time. Returning to Florence after the closure of the London office in 1480, Tommaso Guidetti had been arrested on the request of the Venice branch of
the bank. He had not paid them for a shipload of currants. The debt amounted to more than 3,500 florins. I paid Tommaso Portinari in Bruges, was Guidetti’s claim. It was feasible. All the same, he had to flee from Florence, leaving behind a teenage wife, pregnant. The case was still unsettled more than thirty years later.

  But a considerable number of court cases were now underway. Lorenzo was being pursued for the money he had taken from his young cousins, the two sons of Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. In 1485, the precious country villas had to be sold to make amends. It was a huge loss of prestige. The legal battle over the seizure of the Bruges galleys would go on into the second decade of the next century. With justice on his mind, Tommaso Portinari had Hans Memling paint him kneeling, naked, on one side of a pair of giant weighing scales held up by a great black Angel of Death. It is extraordinary that the Last Judgment scene, the final assessment of a man’s moral worth, something that had been so disturbing to the merchants of Cosimo’s time, should have become a vehicle for this sort of confident exhibitionism, as if the man were quite sure he was on his way to paradise. Weighing up Portinari’s performance in Bruges, Lorenzo calculated a loss of 70,000 florins. “Such are the great earnings that the management of Tommaso Portinari has brought,” he noted ironically. He was wrong. Losses were well over 100,000 florins.

  Avignon closed down in 1478. Likewise Milan. The famous palazzo was sold. One of the two wool workshops had already gone. The silk workshop closed in 1480. That same year, the London and Bruges branches with all their debts were formally handed over to Portinari. Venice closed in 1481. In 1482, a proposal for restructuring the whole bank was drawn up. There would be two holdings, one under Tornabuoni, running Rome and Naples, the other under Sassetti, running Florence, Lyon, and Pisa. Two barons, two entirely separate entities to satisfy two considerable egos. Total capital would be only about 52,000 florins, of which Lorenzo’s part was under 20,000, the merest trifle compared with the vast sums he had inherited. Nothing became of the plan. Nothing was done to coordinate the remaining branches or to have their directors care about each other’s losses. Making no serious contribution to economic activity, serving only to finance wars and the consumption of luxury goods on the part of a debt-ridden aristocracy, the Medici bank continued its inglorious decline through those years that would soon be referred to as “golden.” Pisa closed in 1489. Which left just Florence, Rome, Naples, and Lyon.

  FORTUNATELY, THERE WERE other things for bankers to do aside from banking. Cosimo had used his staff to hunt down ancient manuscripts. Piero had bought paintings, tapestries, ponies for the kids. After 1483, Lorenzo began to send his bank managers on a hunt for lucrative Church appointments for his fourth child and second son, Giovanni, who had just received the tonsure and ordination into the priesthood. He was eight years old. Almost immediately, the Lyon branch of the bank entered into negotiations that would make the boy abbot of Fontdouce in western France. Later he acquired the priory of Saint Gemme, near Chartres. Ecclesiastical incomes were steady and risk-free. The monks of the Abbey of Le Pin, near Poitiers, barricaded themselves inside when Cosimo Sassetti arrived with orders to take possession in the name of the infant bishop. Having lost so much through banking, Lorenzo had finally found a way of making money in which he excelled. It was a question of connections, favors, gifts, promises. One by one the Church benefices fell into his son’s lap: the Abbey of Passignano on the road to Siena, churches in Prato, the Arno Valley, the Mugello; the Abbey of Monte Cassino near Naples, Morimondo, near Milan. By the time the bank collapsed, the Church incomes would be there to give the family a new economic base.

  It was a policy that required the investment of whatever resources Lorenzo could muster. As with every project, he was ambitious. Shortly after marrying off his young daughter Maddalena to the pope’s dissolute son, he had the bank lend the Curia 30,000 florins. This was stretching credit to the limit. He accepted alum instead of cash for arrears repayments on papal loans, though the Medici no longer held the monopoly on merchandising alum and had few outlets from which they could sell the mineral. Every diplomatic courier traveling from Florence to Rome starts to bring gifts for Pope Innocent. Apparently the pontiff loves to eat game. Then ply him with game. He loves wine. Here are eighteen flasks of finest Vernaccia. And beautiful fabrics. And the best artists. Anything that will make His Holiness happy. “The pope sleeps with Lorenzo il Magnifico’s eyes,” commented a delegate from Ferrara. Until at last the seduction was complete. In 1489, the pope caved in, waived age restrictions, and made the thirteen-year-old Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici a cardinal. Now he could accumulate even more benefices. “The greatest honor ever conferred upon our house,” Lorenzo announced. Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, later Pope Leo X, would keep the Medici fortunes alive after their expulsion from Florence in 1494 until their return in 1512.

  BUT THE CHURCH was not entirely rotten. While the Medici were seeking to consolidate the family’s temporal power through acquiring Church incomes, Il Magnifico’s near-contemporary, Girolamo Savonarola, was climbing the ecclesiastical hierarchy in an entirely different spirit. Like the young Giovanni, Savonarola too would one day be offered a cardinal’s hat. And as with Giovanni, the appointment, or rather its offer, came as part of a bargain, an exchange, as though Church appointments were a recognized form of currency. With Giovanni, the honor constituted a payment for favors the Medici had already granted to pope and Church; in Savonarola’s case, the offer of the cardinalship was conditional on his granting a favor to Rome in the future: He must moderate his inflammatory preaching, he must get back into line, he must stop behaving as if he were in direct contact with God and holier than the official Church. Savonarola refused. “I don’t want any hats,” he replied to the pope, “nor mitres great or small; the only thing I want is what you gave your saints: death. A red hat, a hat of blood, that’s what I desire.”

  Savonarola was the antithesis of Lorenzo and of the Medici and bankers in general. Here, at last, was a man who wouldn’t trade, a man who had no use for the art of exchange, who couldn’t be seduced. Yet, like Lorenzo, Savonarola was an artist, and in his own way a showman. His terrifying sermons of gloom and doom, of the need for radical spiritual renewal, transformed the Florence of Lorenzo’s and the Medici bank’s last years, setting Il Magnifico’s ethos and achievements in sharp and twilit relief.

  It had taken medieval Christianity a thousand years to produce the cautious revolution that was humanism, a movement eager to escape Christianity’s straitjacket, but careful never to renounce its principles. It took eclectic humanism only a hundred years to provoke the reaction that was Savonarola. But from the moment the secular began to creep into the sacred space, the bankers to gratify their vanity in altarpieces and tombs, the cardinals to collect their “discretionary” returns on deposits, the popes to mix up myth and prayer book—not to mention holy wars and commercial monopolies—Savonarola and, soon after him, Luther were figures in the making, men formed in opposition to a Church authority that was seen as corrupt; fundamentalists. Unlike the early Christians, they did not call their followers out of the world to a radically separate life. Instead, they demanded that official and powerful Christendom become truly Christian. The political consequences of such a transformation, should it ever take place, were enormous.

  Born in Ferrara in 1452, called away from a career in medicine by a verse from Genesis—“Get thee out of thy country!”—Savonarola first preached in Florence between 1482 and 1487. “He introduced almost a new way of pronouncing God’s word, Apostolic, without dividing up the sermon, not proposing questions and answers, never singing, avoiding ornament and eloquence. His aim was just to expound something from the Old Testament and introduce the simplicity of the early church….”

  Thus the comment of a contemporary. It was not, then, a return to medieval Christian preaching. The negatives in this description tell us that. There would be no old-style scholastic caviling. But neither would there be pretty quotations from clas
sical authors, nor any reference to authorities outside the word of God. In a society buzzing with too many ideas, a Church cluttered with pricey secular bric-a-brac, Savonarola strips his Christianity down to the bare scriptures, the naked crucifix. “I sense a light within me,” he says. It is Christ, the light of the world. But not, as Ficino would have it, Plato’s light, or Proclus’s, or that of some Orphic hymn. “Oh priests, oh prelates of the Church of Christ,” cries Savonarola, “leave your benefices, which you cannot justly hold, leave your pomp, your splendid feasts and banquets.” He might have been preaching directly to Giovanni de’ Medici. Lorenzo also warned his son not to be corrupted by that “pit of iniquity” that was Rome. But there was no question of abandoning the benefices. Why else did one go into the Church?