But this apparently solid structure was built on shaky foundations. A few years after the move to their new home, the Medici were struck by a series of painful blows that threatened the future of the family and subtly altered Lorenzo’s own prospects. The first was the sudden death in 1461 of young Cosimino. The death of a child was not uncommon in fifteenth-century Florence, but coupled with the unexpected death of Giovanni two years later, these tragic events shook the family to its core. “[I]n the last years of his life,[Cosimo] felt very grave sorrow because of the two sons he had, Piero and Giovanni,” wrote Niccolò Machiavelli. “The latter, in whom he had more confidence, died; the other was ill and, because of the weakness of his body, hardly fit for public or private affairs.” Now the palace that was meant to signal a vigorous and thriving dynasty seemed sadly depopulated; a once proud symbol of a vigorous lineage had become, at least to Cosimo, an empty shell. Among those trying to restore the grieving father to his accustomed vigor was Pope Pius II, who opined, “Mourning accords not with your age; it is contrary to your health, and we ourselves, your native city, and all Italy, require that your life should be as far as possible prolonged.” To which Cosimo responded: “I…strive to the best of my power, and so far as my weak spirit will permit, to bear this great calamity with calmness.”
Cosimo’s distress involved more than just the understandable feelings of a father losing a much beloved child. For the aging leader of Florence the death of his younger son threatened his dreams for the future of his family. He knew he had not long to live himself; at seventy-four he had already far surpassed the norm, and the family disease of gout had rendered him increasingly feeble. His former allies, once deferential, now circled like vultures around a dying animal. Agnolo Acciaiuoli, Dietisalvi Neroni, and Luca Pitti filled the ears of foreign ambassadors with complaints of Medici weakness and unreliability.
The death of his grandson, followed soon after by that of his son, sent the aging patriarch into a depression from which his aging body and flagging spirit never recovered. When his wife, Contessina, chided him for spending his hours in silent meditation, Cosimo responded, “When we are going to our country-house, you are busy for a fortnight preparing for the move, but since I have to go from this life to another, does it not seem to you that I ought to have something to think about?” In July of 1464 Cosimo left the palace on the Via Larga for the last time. As he was carried by litter through the gates of the city and up the hills to his beloved villa at Careggi, those who watched the procession knew he would never return to the city he had dominated for more than three decades. Among those summoned to the dying man’s bedside was Ficino. To ease his pain, Cosimo had his friend read him passages from Plato, whose writing had given him comfort on many trying occasions.
Piero, too, came to his father’s bedside, while Lorenzo and Giuliano were sent away to Cafaggiolo, perhaps to keep them from disturbing the dignitaries come to pay their last respects. In a letter to his sons, written during Cosimo’s final hours, Piero tried to prepare them for the trying times ahead. “[Cosimo] began to recount all his past life, then touched upon the government of the city and then on its commerce, and at last he spoke of the management of the private possessions of our family and of what concerns you two; taking comfort that you had good wits and bidding me educate you well so that you might be of help to me. Two things he deplored. First, that he had not done as much as he wished or could have accomplished; secondly that he left me in such poor health and with much irksome business.” Finally, he urged them to “take example and assume your share of care and trouble as God has ordained, and being boys, make up your minds to be men.”
Five days later Cosimo was dead. Not long after, Piero penned the following tribute to his father: “I record that on the 1st August 1464…Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici passed from this life, having suffered greatly from pains in his joints…. He was seventy-seven years old. A tall and handsome man, he was possessed of great wisdom and kindness…and for that reason was trusted and loved by the people.”
Cosimo’s death, though not unexpected, was a blow not only to Piero but to the extended Medici clan and to the reggimento that had depended for three decades on his wise counsel and forceful leadership. The exiles of 1434 continued to stir up trouble from abroad, while within the reggimento itself many feared that their former colleagues had set out on a path that would lead to the kind of despotism that had long since overtaken most of their neighbors.* As early as 1458, a conspiracy led by Girolamo Machiavelli had sought the overthrow of Cosimo’s government. Though quickly discovered, it pointed to a festering discontent within the body politic. One of those approached by Machiavelli was Palla Strozzi, at one time the richest man in Florence.† Strozzi declined to join with the rash Machiavelli, but the reasons he gave could hardly have given comfort to Piero. He had refused, according to the Milanese ambassador (who certainly passed this information along to Piero), only because “these were vain hopes, since while Cosimo was yet living such a thing was impossible, but as soon as he was dead things would of their own accord and in few days turn in their favor.” Now that Strozzi’s wish had come to pass, many predicted the Medici government would not long outlive its preeminent leader.
Workshop of Agnolo Bronzino, Cosimo de’ Medici, 16th century (Art Resource)
IV. HOPE OF THE CITY
“Lorenzo demonstrated, from his first years, signs of his future greatness and generosity.”
—NICCOLÒ VALORI,VITA DI LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO
“Lorenzo was endowed by nature, education and training with such great genius and foresight that he was in no way inferior to his grandfather Cosimo, certainly a most able man; and he was of such a subtle and versatile mind that every youthful endeavor he tried his hand at he perfected so that he surpassed all others. From the age of five he learned to dance, shoot arrows, sing, ride, play any number of games, perform on numerous musical instruments, and to do many other things that graced his youthful years.”
—ALAMANNO RINUCCINI,HISTORICAL MEMOIRS
AMONG THE PAPERS COLLECTED AT THE STATE ARCHIVES of Florence is a document in Piero’s hand setting down the costs associated with his father’s funeral: twenty-five braccie* of cloth in mourning black for Lorenzo and Giuliano; another thirty for Contessina, while his wife, Lucrezia, required only fourteen, along with two veils. Nothing was too insignificant to be set down, including the ten braccie of black woolen cloth for each of Cosimo’s four slave girls (one of them, perhaps, the mother of Cosimo’s illegitimate son, Carlo). It details such trivial expenditures as 431/2 lire for wax candles and additional outlays to pay for thirteen small torches to be carried by priests attending the body. The neat columns in which expenses were parsed to the last soldo offer a revealing glimpse into the mind of the man who would now lead the government of Florence. Piero was a Florentine merchant through and through, and the frugal, orderly habits of the species showed even in moments of great emotional turmoil. These qualities could prove to be a virtue, as they were during his father’s lifetime, when his organizational skills were placed in the service of a regime that had at its head a shrewd and charismatic leader. But in times of crisis simple competence was not sufficient.
After three decades of Cosimo’s rule there was a restlessness among the populace, a desire for change that was held in check only by fear of the chaos change might bring. Cosimo had ruled the city well but at the expense of the people’s cherished liberties. The always well-informed Alessandra Strozzi noted that “this death has given many of the citizens some new ideas about how the land should be governed,” innovations that could come only at the expense of the Medici and their cronies.*
Whatever their political affiliation, all Florentines could agree that one age had come to an end and another was about to begin. Some found this prospect disconcerting, while others saw in Cosimo’s passing a golden opportunity to restore republican institutions that had long been supressed. A typical representative of this latter group was Marco P
arenti, who, after admitting that his native city was rarely more peaceful or more prosperous than it had been under Cosimo, concluded that “despite this, upon his death there was universal rejoicing, such is the love and desire for liberty, because it seemed to them that they were under subjugation and servitude in government and that his death would set them free.”
It was not, however, from modest merchants like Parenti that Piero had most to fear. These small-time merchants and artisans could not hope to wrest the government from the grasp of the narrow directorate that had grown up around Cosimo. The ranks of the disenchanted had recently been swelled by a general economic downturn brought about largely by Turkish advances in the Mediterranean and the subsequent disruption in international trade. Many businesses went under; prosperous merchants saw their capital vanish, while their employees, barely scraping by in the best of times, were forced to beg or to starve. That the causes of the economic downturn were beyond the control of anyone in Florence was beside the point. The ruined and the hungry are never the most dispassionate judges of their circumstances, and in their suffering they turned against those in power. Piero was the most obvious target of the people’s wrath; protestations that he, too, was hurting were met with derision, and when he announced (possibly on the advice of Dietisalvi Neroni) that his own losses would force him to call in many of the loans his father had made, that laughter turned to outrage.
The greatest threat to the Medici, however, came from among those principali whom Cosimo had lifted from obscurity to the heights of power, but who, forgetting what they owed the family, now hoped to supplant them. Only an alliance between the disenfranchised many and the discontented few would be sufficiently powerful to drive the Medici from their perch—though, once this was accomplished, it was not at all clear whether men like Marco Parenti and Luca Pitti could agree on anything else. It was in an attempt to effect just such an alignment that the city’s religious confraternities became the rallying point of secret cabals. In interludes between prayer and the singing of hymns, men plotted strategy and debated the future of the republic.
Piero was hard pressed to halt the momentum for change. His first task as the presumptive head of the reggimento was to lay to rest its former leader. The manner in which he orchestrated Cosimo’s funeral reveals not only his cautious nature but an understanding of the public mood. Now was not the time to offend his fellow oligarchs by a lavish public display; modesty and understatement would soothe bruised egos and win him much needed friends. It had been his father’s dying wish, he announced to the world, “to be buried without pomp or show” in the family’s private crypt in San Lorenzo, wishing “neither more nor less wax torches than were used at an ordinary funeral.” He airily declined any special consideration from the government, since, for all his services to the republic, his father was merely a private citizen. Though Machiavelli later claimed that all the citizens of Florence poured out onto the streets to follow Cosimo’s coffin, eyewitnesses describe a much more modest affair. On the second day of August 1464, accompanied only by the priests and friars from the churches and monasteries he had patronized and a few close relatives and friends, Cosimo was lowered into his unpretentious tomb beneath the tribune of San Lorenzo.
No native-born Florentine would have viewed this understated affair as a sign of weakness, any more than he would have regarded a grander spectacle as a guarantee of strength; Medici power was often most effective when least visible. “[Cosimo] refused to make a will and forbade all pomp at his funeral,” Lorenzo later recalled. “Nevertheless all the Italian princes sent to do him honor and to condole with us on his death; among others H. M. the King of France commanded that he should be honored with his banner, but out of respect for his wishes our father would not allow it.”
Piero could expect to ride the swell of sympathy for a short while, but it was clear that the struggle for power could not be long delayed. Thus it was more important than ever that Lorenzo be ready to take up his role as First Citizen of the Republic. Among Medici partisans Lorenzo was now referred to openly as “the hope of the city,” suggesting both the promise they saw in the boy and their less than sanguine expectations for the sickly Piero.
While Piero was referred to as “the absent senator,” a man rarely seen but whose opinion needed to be canvassed on any important matter, his son was increasingly the public face of the regime. Lorenzo took responsibility for many of the ceremonial functions that were critical to maintaining the family’s prestige. In 1465, while Lorenzo was out of town on an important diplomatic mission, Piero wrote to him, “I have consulted with the citizens here, and they all agree I must receive the princes in our house on their return, and the Signoria has commanded me to do so: I obey willingly, but it would have taken much trouble off my hands had you and Guglielmo [de’ Pazzi] been here; however, we will do the best we can.” Lorenzo had the gift for social occasions that his father lacked; throughout his life he would be a master at staging brilliant spectacles that enhanced his reputation for magnificence and added luster to the Medici name.
Increasingly, Lorenzo and Giuliano became the center of a society of boisterous adolescents who imparted to the regime a youthful tone, much to the chagrin of the conservative elite, who thought they brought shame to the city. All those who wished to be close to the center of the action flocked to the Medici heir. To be a member of Lorenzo’s brigata was to enjoy a privileged place in the city; to be seen in his company was as good as credit in the bank. The various Medici villas were the site of frequent gatherings of young men brought together to hunt or to indulge in less strenuous pastimes. Braccio Martelli records a visit in the spring of 1465 to the villa of Lorenzo’s reputed mistress, the beautiful Lucrezia Donati, where she and the young men of his brigata passed the time listening to the music of the famous lutenist known as “the Spaniard” and dancing the gioiosa, the chirintana, and the moresca. It is a scene straight out of Boccaccio, filled with good cheer, good food, and ripe sensuality. On this occasion a certain decorum was maintained until one unnamed youth, undoubtedly under the influence of too much wine, emerged from Lucrezia’s chambers dressed al travestito in one of her gowns, a performance that sparked much juvenile hilarity.
Even after he had succeeded his father as head of the family and of the republic, Lorenzo’s youth and inexperience were a cause for concern. “Lorenzo was young,” wrote a visiting French diplomat disapprovingly, “and he was governed by young men.” The loyal Marsilio Ficino hinted that Lorenzo had perhaps come too far too fast, suggesting at one point that the opposition he faced was due to the envy always aroused by any display of “youthful virtue.”
It was not, however, an excess of virtue that troubled the elderly men who usually ran things in Florence. “[H]e delighted in facetious and pungent men and in childish games, more than would appear fitting in such a man,” scolded Machiavelli. Wild behavior that would hardly have been noticed in his companions generated gossip and reflected poorly on the regime. At one point Alessandra Strozzi complained that while her own exiled son could not return to the city, despite a good word put in on his behalf by the king of Naples, Niccolò Ardinghelli, cuckolded husband of “Lorenzo’s lady,” Lucrezia Donati, magically gained approval on short notice from the Signoria. “Perhaps,” she concluded bitterly, “it is better to have a pretty wife than the prayers of a king.” Such blatant favoritism tended to confirm suspicions that the Medici were beginning to see themselves as royalty rather than as citizens.
While the Medici’s enemies played up Lorenzo’s faults, their friends praised him as a prodigy of wisdom and virtue. Encomiums from Medici partisans, like Nicolò Valori, who concluded that Lorenzo “was worthy of being included among those rare miracles of nature,” must be taken with a grain of salt, but these words found a curious echo even among those with no reason to love him or his family. “No one even of his enemies and critics denied that he had a brilliant and outstanding mind,” declared Francesco Guicciardini.
Intrigu
ing evidence of Lorenzo’s growing reputation comes from Alamanno Rinuccini, a man who outwardly acquiesced in the Medici ascendancy but prayed in secret for their destruction in the belief that the family had usurped the government of his beloved republic.* Like Marco Parenti, Rinuccini idealized a past that was never as democratic as he believed while exaggerating the despotic tendencies of the age in which he lived. Rinuccini denounced Lorenzo because he believed a republic simply could not contain a man of such stature and vaunting ambition. “Lorenzo was endowed by nature, education and training with such great genius and foresight that he was in no way inferior to his grandfather Cosimo, certainly a most able man,” Rinuccini wrote in his secret memoirs. These are words that could have come from the pen of Valori himself. But Rinuccini goes on to form a very different conclusion from the same facts:
[H]e was of such a subtle and versatile mind that every youthful endeavor he tried his hand at he perfected so that he surpassed all others. From the age of five he learned to dance, shoot arrows, sing, ride, play any number of games, perform on numerous musical instruments, and to do many other things that graced his youthful years. And I believe that possessing such great abilities, and finding the citizens of our city already so reduced by the imperiousness of his father to timid and servile ways, he resolved, like those most haughty and ambitious, to gather unto himself all dignity, power and public authority, and in the end, like Julius Caesar, make himself lord of the republic.
To be named a Caesar in a culture filled with would-be Brutuses was disconcerting, even if the accusation was only whispered in private. Learned Florentines had long meditated on the career of the Roman general while drawing opposing lessons from the tale of his meteoric rise to the height of imperial power and his catastrophic fall. A millennium and a half after his death the story of his triumph and violent death at the hands of Brutus and his co-conspirators still aroused passions. Dante, for one, had placed Brutus in the lowest circle of hell reserved for betrayers, but other humanists continued to revere the tyrannicide as a political martyr. As an old-style republican, Rinuccini clearly belonged to this latter school of thought, and events would show he was not above advocating violence against those he regarded as betrayers of the people’s liberty. That he, and at least some of his bookish colleagues, should already be comparing the young Florentine to the Roman dictator foretold disaster.
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