by Tim Parks
The contrast alerts us to a condition essential to the development of international banks of the Medici variety: a certain laxity in the application of religious law, or, better still, a complete separation of church and state. In short, there is an affinity between money and eclecticism. “No man can serve two masters,” says Jesus. But money can serve any number. It is no respecter of principles. Broken up into discreet and neutral units, value flows into any cup, a shower of gold into any coffer, be it in Constantinople, Rome, or Jerusalem. The alum merchant trades with the Turk. The silk manufacturer is happy to sell provocative clothes to the pretty ladies of Florence. The idealist, whether Christian or Muslim, Communist or No-Global, must always be suspicious of money and banking. But the idealist is not to be confused with the ideas man. Quite the contrary. Admirably flexible, the humanist thinkers with their eclectic reading were notorious for finding authorities to justify whatever form of government best suited their paymasters. In 1471, Bartolomeo dedicated his treatise, “On the Prince,” to Federico Gonzaga. In 1475, the same text reappeared as “On the Citizen,” dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici. In the same period, depending upon which patrons were paying him, Francesco Patrizi wrote “On Republican Education” and then “On the Kingdom and Education of Kings.” Both systems were best. Money has a way of being right. Only popular government by the poor is unforgivable.
Savonarola, as portrayed by Fra Bartolomeo. The austere lines and sharp contrasts underline the man’s unswerving devotion and refusal to compromise. Finally, the Medici had met someone who could not be bought.
Spiritual renewal can only come through poverty, Savonarola preached, through an end to the clergy’s collusion with wealth and power. His would not be a church that worked with banks. Largely ignored, the monk left Florence in 1487. Meanwhile, the great political upheavals of his career behind him, Lorenzo was writing poetry again: cycles of love poems, dense with labored references to classical myth but lightened by marvelous landscape description. Busy with his verses, Il Magnifico ignored a proposal from Lorenzo Spinelli, the new director in Lyon, to revive the Medici bank’s old holding structure. Lorenzo himself was one of the bank’s main debtors now, one of the political leaders who would never repay. In 1488, a ban on public festivities in Florence, something that had been in force since the Pazzi conspiracy ten years ago, was finally lifted. Is it a coincidence that Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice, had succumbed to tuberculosis that same summer? Lorenzo was away at the thermal baths when she died. He wrote no poem for her. But for the first celebration of Carnival after a decade’s break, he produced some new Carnival songs, and some moving lyrics about youth. The loves of Bacchus and Ariadne are evoked to remind the adolescents of Florence to seize the day:
Quanto è bella giovinezza,
How fine youth is
che si fugge tutta via
Though it flee away
Chi vuole essere lieto, sia,
Let he who wishes, enjoy
di doman non c’è certezza
Nothing’s certain tomorrow
Stiff in the joints though he now was, Lorenzo practiced what he preached and got on his horse at night to visit Bartolomea de’ Nasi when she was away from her husband in her country villa. “Crazy,” writes Guicciardini, “to think that a man of such reputation and prudence, forty years old, was so taken by a woman, hardly beautiful and full of years, as to do things that would have seemed dishonest to every youngster.”
Yet eclecticism and promiscuity are always vulnerable to a nostalgia for rigid principles, as the moneyed classes yearn for a value that can’t be counted. The brilliant Pico della Mirandola, master of many languages, lover of the mystics and the Kabbalah, was impressed by Savonarola’s preaching, by his strict attention to the words of the biblical text. Bring him back to Florence, he told Lorenzo, he’ll be an asset. Suffering severely from gout, aware that his own death couldn’t be far off, Lorenzo was persuaded. He and Pico couldn’t have known that Girolamo was now in a decidedly visionary mood, having convinced himself he was a reincarnation of the Old Testament prophets he had studied for so long. On August 1, 1490, in San Marco, the monastery that Cosimo had had rebuilt, Savonarola began his series of sermons on the Apocalypse. He had three basic themes: The need for Church renewal; the belief that before renewal God would punish all Italy with some terrible catastrophe; the conviction that this must happen soon.
What could such a prediction mean but the end of Medici rule? In Lent of 1491, Savonarola preached what he himself described as terrifica praedicatio—a terrifying sermon. Despite invitations from both the signoria and the Church authorities to take it easy, he repeated his themes again and again. This disaster will happen very soon. Had he seen the Medici’s balance sheets? Cardinal Giovanni was already living far beyond his means, borrowing from the bank to the tune of 7,000 florins. Sassetti was dead. Tornabuoni and Spinelli were desperate. With the general decline of trade, the English refusal to export their raw wool, almost all the other Florentine banks had gone under.
In April, Savonarola preached to the priors in Palazzo della Signoria. He condemned Lorenzo’s tyranny. He condemned corruption. Those on the losing side of the Medici regime flocked to hear him. The poor were enchanted. Oppressed by asthma and arthritis, Lorenzo couldn’t persuade the priest to compromise, or even to talk to him in person. The eclectic tries to include the fundamentalist in his collection, his entourage of artists, philosophers, poets; the banker seeks to finance him, to count him among his debtors; but the fundamentalist won’t have it.
In July 1491, Savonarola is elected prior of San Marco. He takes the cell at the opposite end of the monastery from Cosimo’s. There are no pretty paintings. “The real preacher,” he says, “cannot flatter a prince, only attack his vices.” Clearly this man is an opponent of a quite different caliber from the debt-ridden Innocent, the murderous Sixtus. Even good Archbishop Antonino, in Cosimo’s time, was always open to compromise. But Savonarola preaches values that are beyond money’s grasp. He yearns for poverty, even death. It’s a showdown.
Near death himself, Lorenzo begins to write religious hymns. As always, he is master of form and content, conversant with his predecessors, intimate and seductive. Some of the hymns are written to be sung to the same tunes as the bawdy Carnival songs. At the same time he presses on with his Commentary on My Sonnets, a long work in which he rearranges the old love poems to Lucrezia in a prose analysis that offers an imaginary autobiography of unhappy love and Platonic transcendence. Supremely self-conscious, even in the grip of terminal illness, Lorenzo is still performing.
On April 5, 1492, lightning strikes the dome of the duomo. “Behold,” preaches Savonarola, “swift and sudden the sword of the Lord upon our land.” Only three days later, religious prophecy and Renaissance theatricality come together in the perfect deathbed scene. At his last gasp, kissing a silver crucifix encrusted with precious stones, Lorenzo calls for Savonarola.
Was this a victory or a defeat? From Giovanni di Bicci’s first contracts with the Curia, Cosimo’s supervision of the design of Giovanni XXIII’s tomb, the history of the Medici bank had always been intertwined with that of the Church. They were two institutions that repelled and attracted each other, came together and fell apart, in one drama after another. Exiled, Cosimo had hidden his money in churches; almost all his patronage had favored religious buildings, devotional paintings. The same was true of his great director Giovanni Benci. “Should pay up by John the Baptist’s Day,” was a typical comment in bank correspondence. Interest on loans accumulated from one martyr’s festival to the next. “In the name of God and of Profit,” announced the account books. And as the decades passed, Medici employees all over Europe had poured the bank’s money into chapels and churches. Lorenzo had almost been murdered in church. Wounded by two priests, he had fought one pope, flattered another, and finally brought family and church together in a son who was already on his way to squandering what was left of the family resources, as one day he would ru
in the finances of the Curia.
Now Savonarola meets Lorenzo at death’s door. Lorenzo has already been granted extreme unction—the last rites of the Church—so the priest has no power over his eternal soul. On the other hand, he can hardly refuse the invitation to speak to a dying man. If you recover, you must change your life, Savonarola says. Knowing there is no recovery, Lorenzo agrees. Savonarola gives his blessing. It’s a standoff, a stalemate, an insoluble antagonism: money and metaphysics, eclectic humanism and rigid fundamentalism. The wonder is that history should offer us an encounter so emblematic of the forces whose clash will decide the future of Europe. Twenty-five years later, Giovanni de’ Medici’s frank enjoyment of the papacy would be challenged by the revolt of Martin Luther. Banking would be profoundly affected. Protestant England was the first to legalize usury. Catholic Italy, under the Counter-Reformation, reimposed the old laws that bred the old subterfuges.
HOW DIFFICULT TO be Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici! “I have three sons,” Lorenzo is reputed to have said, “one dumb, one smart, one sweet.” Piero was the dumb one, Giovanni the smart. If the authority of Lorenzo had depended first on wealth, later on charisma, Piero possessed neither. The money had mostly been spent, and there are cases where even the best education is just wasted time. Piero was good at sports, particularly an early form of football. But the era of the sports celebrity had not yet arrived. He had inherited Lorenzo’s suspicious nature but not his charm. And yet, remarks Guicciardini, the succession was so smooth, “the good will on the part of people and princes so great, that had Piero had even an ounce of wit and prudence, he could not have fallen.” He didn’t and he fell.
Throughout the fifteenth century, it had been the habit of the Italian city-states, at some crisis point in their internal struggles, to play the threatening card of calling on a foreign ally to tip the balance in the peninsula. In desperate straits against Rome and Naples in 1480, Florence had invited the French to reconsider their claims to the throne of Naples. In 1482, during the Venetian assault on Ferrara, Florence and Milan had encouraged the Turks to step up their attacks on Venice’s maritime possessions. Venice had replied by inviting the duke of Lorraine to consider his claim to Naples, the duke of Orleans his to Milan. In a pointless war against Naples in 1483, Pope Innocent VIII had again suggested that the duke of Lorraine might want to take the kingdom. Dangerous games. Nobody seems to have considered what might actually happen if a foreign army did push into Italy. It was Piero’s bad luck to find out.
Ignoring the bank, rapidly alienating Florence’s patrician families, Piero also infuriated Lodovico Sforza, now duke of Milan, by appearing to prefer the city’s other ally, Naples. All too soon, Sforza was inviting the king of France to consider himself king of Naples. In Paris, young Charles VIII had only just shaken off an oppressive regency and come into his own. He wanted to do something bold. And he did. He gathered 30,000 men and marched over the Alps, down through Lombardy, heading south.
Allied to Naples, Florence was a potential target for this campaign. Suddenly an army far bigger than any the Florentines had had to deal with in recent decades was heading toward the city, an army with a foreign king at its head, not a paid Italian condottiere who might be bribed. In desperation, as the French approached and with the city’s political class almost entirely against him, Piero tried to repeat the gesture his father had made when he went to Naples to deal face-to-face with King Ferrante more than a decade ago. But the boy was only twenty-two. He hadn’t prepared the ground. It was the gesture of a novice trying to copy the maestro’s masterpiece. He even repeated the same charade of leaving the town first and sending back a letter to be read to the signoria.
I won’t sack Florence if you hand over Sarazana, Sarzanello, Pietrasanta, and the ports of Pisa and Leghorn: those were the French king’s conditions. He was demanding more or less all of Florence’s gains over the last century. To everybody’s surprise, Piero agreed. The signoria was furious and refused to recognize the agreement. It was a crucial break, a reminder that constitutional power did not lie with the Medici. The signoria sent out Savonarola to talk to Charles, the irony being that Savonarola actually welcomed the French arrival. This foreign army was the fulfillment of all his prophecies of doom.
Piero returned to Florence on November 8. The next day, in an apparently unplanned incident, someone decided to bar the doors to the signoria when he arrived there with a number of armed men. In a matter of hours, the town was in an uproar, the cries of “popolo” and “libertà” had begun. Piero panicked, got on his horse, and headed out of town. The Palazzo Medici was sacked. Suddenly the silk sheets, the precious sculptures, the painted reliquaries were being dragged out into the street. A hundred years of careful accumulation was lost in a matter of hours. On November 10, the very day after Piero’s departure, all Medici innovations in the republic’s constitution were dismantled, all Medici enemies exiled since 1434 were recalled; the hated new heavyweight coin for customs taxes was abolished, and, of course, the Medici bank and all its assets were confiscated. To have moved so fast, there must have been those who couldn’t wait to see the back of the family. A month later, Savonarola declared Jesus Christ king of Florence, as if the Savior himself had pushed over the bank’s changing tables.
It wouldn’t last. In 1498, accused of heresy by the official Church and abandoned by much of his congregation, Savonarola was burned at the stake. Fundamentalism is one thing in the pulpit, another in government. And fourteen years later, having finally infiltrated to the highest levels the institution that had been the source of so much of their wealth, the Medici returned to Florence on the back of Vatican power and overturned the republic. In 1529, they were officially recognized as dukes and ready to serve the Counter-Reformation in that long war of retrenchment that would keep an imitation of the older world—complete with those two complicit conundrums, the divine right of princes and the temporal power of the Church—in suffocating place for more than three hundred years.
These new Medici of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ordered monuments of tax-funded magnificence to establish an aura of legitimacy. All the fruitful ambiguity that had characterized old Cosimo’s commissions, all the urgent tension between money and metaphysics, was gone. With the grand dukes of Tuscany, we are in the world of larger-than-life equestrian statues, flattering official portraits, imagined military glory, and extravagant, though always breathtaking mannerism. In such circumstances, there was no need to revive the bank. In fact, the sooner people forgot that the family had ever sat behind their tables in via Porta Rossa, copying down the details of dubious exchange deals, the better.
Bibliographic Notes
Exercising power to which no one in Florence was constitutionally entitled, the Medici of the fifteenth century were obliged to be great propagandists, to present themselves as special, gifted, worthy. Perhaps this is one reason why there is such an extraordinary amount of literature about them. There are those historians who buy into the Medici’s flattering vision of themselves, those who react and reject, and those who try to sort out the wood from the trees. Nothing breeds interest like an ongoing argument.
Most modern readers will come to the subject through the more popular books, such as Christopher Hibbert’s The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, or J. R. Hale’s Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control. Hibbert’s book invests enthusiastically in the Medici myth and is the kind of thing tourists are reading while visiting the Uffizi gallery and generally falling in love with Renaissance Florence. In fact, it can be found stacked up in many of the city’s museum bookshops. It’s fun but not always accurate. Just as readable, but less colorful and more credible, Hale pays the price for his sobriety by not being so widely available.
The more academic the book, the more likely it is to be resisting the myth and looking for an ugly truth. Lauro Martines’s Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy, gives really excellent background to the Medici story, but Martines is not o
ne to allow special pleading and condemns the banking family as the ruin of Florentine republicanism. He has recently tried to popularize this view in the highly readable April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici, where he argues that all in all it would have been a good thing if the Pazzi family had managed to murder Lorenzo il Magnifico in the duomo in 1478. Martines is a moralist who likes to be out on a limb but is nonetheless interesting for that.
Il Magnifico tends to form a subject all on his own, and here the popular books presently in print are Cecilia Ady’s Lorenzo de’ Medici and Antonio Altomonte’s Il Magnifico. Both are in the business of glorification but well worth reading as long as you keep a pinch of salt about you. Jack Lang’s more recent biography, Il Magnifico, is less attractive and even less believable. Once France’s minister for education, Lang seems determined not to consult the vast amount of American scholarship that has been done on the Medici since World War II; as a result, a lot of what he says about the Medici bank’s fortunes under Lorenzo doesn’t add up.
Which brings us to the heavier stuff. The Florentines were committed bureaucrats and the city’s archives still house the tax returns of the fifteenth century, the minutes of thousands of government committee meetings, lists upon lists of those eligible for office at different levels in the different quarters and districts, and so on. The City Council of Florence has recently put all these archives up on the Web for general public inspection, but alas, what you see is facsimiles of the originals. Even if you are familiar with the Italian and Latin of the time, the handwriting is more or less illegible and the material can’t be searched by just typing in a name and calling up all the places it occurs. No, to tackle the archives would require several lifetimes of total dedication. So you’re obliged to go to the scholars.