Significantly, the implementation of this decree depended entirely on the goodwill of the parties involved since the government lacked the power to compel obedience. And, in fact, when Lorenzo returned home to inform his father of the Signoria’s demand, Piero dismissed it out of hand. Piero’s refusal to disband his forces, a departure from the path of strict legality he had so far adhered to, was viewed by his critics as a sign that he possessed “the soul of a tyrant rather than that of a good citizen.” But from Piero’s point of view, the demand, eminently evenhanded on its surface, was altogether unacceptable, since as matters currently stood his forces in the city and the surrounding countryside were clearly superior to those of his opponents. In insisting on the disarmament of both sides, the Signoria was in fact adopting a policy Neroni had urged upon them in his earlier visit to the palace.
In any case, Piero now had another option, one that might allow him to achieve his objectives without forcing him to rely on the honor and good intentions of his enemies. Returning from the Palazzo della Signoria, Lorenzo carried not only the government’s public pronouncement but also a private message. It was this second message that would ultimately provide the key to a peaceful resolution of the crisis.
The secret communication came, perhaps surprisingly, from Luca Pitti. Shortly after their joint appearance before the Signoria, Pitti and Lorenzo held a private meeting in which Lorenzo dangled the prospect of political rehabilitation for the old man were he to turn his back on his fellow conspirators and throw in his lot with the resurgent Medici. “In part through persuasive words and entreaties, and in part with promises of bonds of family,” wrote Niccolò Valori, “[he] began to pacify the leading rebels among whom the chief was Luca Pitti, such was the genius and art of Lorenzo, who could turn the most implacable foe into a friend.” In fact, Pitti’s sudden change of heart probably had less to do with Lorenzo’s eloquence than with his desperation to turn back from the brink of the precipice he now saw yawning before him.
Shortly after this meeting negotiations between Messer Luca and Piero’s agents began in earnest. The cagey Francesco Sassetti, general manager of the Medici bank, took charge of the delicate proceedings, crossing hostile lines for a meeting with Pitti in his palace. The agreement as it was finally hammered out between the two men captures Florentine political scheming at its cynical worst; Pitti’s loyalty was purchased through the promise of material benefits and, since loyalty in his case was an apparently mercurial substance, fixed more permanently through the extension of bonds of kinship. In return for abandoning both friends and principles, Luca’s brother Luigi was to be named one of the Eight of the Watch (the Otto), the city’s feared secret police commission, while Luca himself would be assured a permanent place in the upper echelons of the government as one of the Accoppiatori, the officials whose job it was to go through the electoral purses and remove the names of anyone unfriendly to the regime.* With a place in both these critical bodies, Luca Pitti’s position in Florence would be assured. As for those marriage ties that were the glue of party affiliation: “Messer Luca had a daughter of tender age whom he wished to see married, and Piero had his son Lorenzo, who was eighteen [sic]. It was messer Luca’s understanding that these two were to be wed, but out of delicacy he was not explicit. With these arrangements he believed himself secure and as exalted in the state as he had been previously.”
On this last point Francesco Sassetti was deliberately vague, and Pitti apparently did not press him, perhaps fearing that to insist on Lorenzo as a son-in-law might jeopardize a deal he was ever more desperate to conclude. Whatever Lorenzo’s virtues as a prospective son-in-law, they were not, apparently, worth risking his life for. (Ultimately, Piero fulfilled the letter of his promise to Pitti by arranging a marriage between his brother-in-law, Giovanni Tornabuoni, and Pitti’s daughter.)
The following morning the pact was sealed when Pitti rode to the Via Larga and embraced his former rival, “declaring himself,” said Piero, “ready to live or die with me.”
With Pitti’s abject surrender the rebellion effectively crumbled. Those who had opposed Piero now scrambled to salvage what they could from the wreckage. Soon a procession of men with frightened faces could be seen snaking its way along the Via Larga as those of suspect loyalty came to pay homage to the man they recently judged a “vile rabbit.” Among those seeking absolution was Agnolo Acciaiuoli, who, according to Tranchedini, pledged his obedience using “very submissive words.” Neroni and his brothers also came to beg forgiveness, receiving for their pains a tongue-lashing from Piero, who “rebuked them with grave words full of indignation.” Such was the mood among the Medici’s supporters that, according to Machiavelli, “if Piero had not held them back, they would have handled them with arms.”
Luca Pitti, compensating for past indescretions, worked harder than anyone to ensure the triumph of the man he had recently sought to destroy. It was he who in a meeting of leading citizens on September 2—one that took place, significantly enough, not in the Palazzo della Signoria but in the Medici palace—put the final seal on Piero’s victory by calling for a parlamento, an assembly of all citizens held in the great piazza before the palace, that would call on the government to enact sweeping reforms.* Any lingering doubts as to who was now in charge were put to rest by the official account of the assembly, which could have been written by Piero himself: “To establish the peace of the city there gathered in the house of Piero di Cosimo, who, being impeded, could not attend, in which it was decided to ask the Signoria to quell the disturbances in the city by means of a parlamento quickly, and do it today, so that the city gets rid of its arms as quickly as possible.”
On September 2, with three thousand armed men, all Medici loyalists, stationed at the narrow streets leading into the piazza, the citizens of Florence assembled. The Sienese ambassador, Cione de’ Ravi, claimed he had never seen “so many soldiers in one place” and that their “shouts of victory” helped sway the crowd in their favor. Towering above them, resplendent in full armor, rode Lorenzo, the glamourous, glittering symbol of Medici power. Under the circumstances the results were a foregone conclusion. With the Signoria and other high officials lining the podium in front of the palazzo, heralds read a petition put forward by one of the priors, Bernardo di Francesco Paganelli, to request that a special committee (known as a Balìa) be nominated with full powers to reform the government. According to Parenti, who witnessed the scene with a sinking heart, “it was approved with excited and loud voices by the great multitude of people who were in the piazza, both those armed and those unarmed, and having been accepted by two thirds of the people the reforms were thus ratified.”
The triumphant Lorenzo then dismounted and greeted the Signoria, accepting on behalf of his father the congratulations of the duly elected government. While the crowds dispersed, Lorenzo rode back to his palace surrounded by cheering supporters. Few could have missed the significance of the scene. The day had been a demonstration of raw power on the part of the Medici, an affirmation, were any needed, that a single family now dominated the city. While the constitution was not suspended, and in fact the whole charade had been conducted with scrupulous observance of Florentine law, no one doubted that the Medici and their supporters were now in complete control of the levers of government.
Over the next days and weeks the victorious party meted out punishment not only to the ringleaders but to many others whom the government suspected of having been sympathetic to the rebels.* Typical of this latter group was one Carlo Gondi, who was stripped of his rights as a citizen, though he protested he had done nothing more than affix his signature to the oath of May 4. “I knew that in an instant I had lost honor, wealth, friends and relatives,” he wrote despairingly, “and not only me but also Marriotto [my brother] and his and my sons.”
Despite Gondi’s bitter recriminations, the reprisals were moderate by the standards of the day. One eyewitness, the apothecary Luca Landucci, reveals that “after the failure of the plot, ma
ny citizens connected with it were exiled, about twenty-seven of them being restricted within certain boundaries and made ineligible for office.” Benedetto Dei’s chronicle contains the names of twenty-six among the banished or disenfranchised, starting with Agnolo Acciaiuoli, Dietisalvi Neroni, and Niccolò Soderini and concluding with Carlo Gondi. It is true that Piero’s treatment of his foes would certainly not pass muster in a modern courtroom—he himself admitted that Francesco Neroni’s confession, upon which much of our knowledge of the rebellion is based, was extracted after “little torture, or hardly any”—but what struck contemporaries was the mildness of his response. “Unlike his father Cosimo,” concludes Guicciardini, “Piero proved most clement, for he allowed no one to be punished except for those whom it would have been too dangerous not to punish.” Having been ruthless in pursuit of victory, Piero could afford to be generous. His clemency reassured a jittery public and reconciled the majority to whatever loss of liberty his triumph entailed. Having lived in fear of wholesale retribution and feeling relief when the response proved milder than anticipated, the citizens had little to complain of when the electoral bags were again held open to the prying hands of the Accoppiatori.
Chief beneficiary of Piero’s clemency was Luca Pitti. Having been the public face of the rebellion, Pitti was now one of the regime’s most ardent supporters. But Pitti’s last-minute conversion brought him little happiness in the end. Alamanno Rinuccini sums up the attitude of the reformers toward their fickle friend: “From vileness or because he had been corrupted with money or with promises from the other party, he brutally betrayed his allies and himself.” Nor was he fully trusted by those whose cause he now espoused. Abandoned by those who felt betrayed and excluded from the inner circle of the regime, he was now a broken man. “He remained cold and alone at home,” Parenti remarks, believing he got nothing better than he deserved, “and no one visited him to confer on matters of state, where once his house was filled with every kind of person.” This was a kind of living death for a Florentine, shut out from the lively give-and-take that was part of every citizen’s daily life.
For their parts in the rebellion, Dietisalvi Neroni and Niccolò Soderini were banished from Florence, the usual fate of those on the losing side in the periodic struggle for political control; after the two continued to conspire against their homeland from their places of exile death sentences were imposed in absentia. Agnolo Acciaiuoli was also banished from Florence but, unlike his colleagues, he still hoped for a reconciliation, something that, according to Machiavelli, he had almost achieved when Piero’s untimely death intervened. The State Archives of Florence contain a moving exchange of letters between the two former friends that reveals feelings embittered but not entirely extinguished by the events of that summer. First Agnolo, writing to Piero from Naples:
I am laughing at the games of fortune and at how it makes friends become enemies and enemies become friends as it suits it. You can remember when in your father’s exile I considered his injury more than my own dangers, I lost my fatherland and nearly lost my life; nor, while I lived under Cosimo, did I ever fail to honor and support your house; nor after his death had I any intent of offending you. It is true that your bad constitution and the tender age of your children dismayed me, so that I judged it better to give such a form to the state that after your death our fatherland would not be ruined. From this arose things that were done, not against you but for the benefit of my fatherland—which, even if it was an error, deserves to be canceled because of my meaning well and my past deeds. Nor can I believe, since your house found such faith in me for so long a time, that I cannot now find compassion in you and that my many merits will be destroyed by one single mistake.
To which Piero replied:
Your laughing over there is the cause that I do not weep, because if you were laughing in Florence, I would be weeping in Naples. I confess that you wished my father well and you will confess that you received well from him; so much more was your obligation than ours, as deeds must be valued higher than words. Thus, since you have been well recompensed for your good, you ought not now to marvel if your evil brings you just rewards. Nor does love of the fatherland excuse you, because there will never be anyone who will believe that this city has been loved and increased less by the Medici than by the Acciaiuoli. So live there in dishonor, since you did not know how to live here in honor.
With the successful parlamento and the banishing of his principal enemies, Piero’s position as the preeminent citizen of Florence was assured. But even now he was by no means the tyrant of Florence. His own verdict is reflected in the inscription he had placed on the statue by Donatello of Judith slaying the tyrant Holofernes that stood in the garden of his palace: “Pietro de’ Medici, son of Cosimo, dedicated the statue of this woman to the strength and liberty that the citizens, through their constant and invincible spirit, restored to the republic.” While certainly biased, the inscription reflects his own view of himself as the champion of Florentine liberty, not the uncrowned king of the city.
As he reasserted his control over the government, Piero came to rely more than ever on his son, who now acted as his eyes and ears in the Palace of the Priors. At his request the Balìa granted that Piero’s “most honorable and famous young son Lorenzo—notwithstanding the fact he is under age, since his outstanding probity and virtue supply his defect in age—to represent his father in the Council of One Hundred.” Here, then, is official recognition of the new role Lorenzo had begun to assume. Though still only a teenager, he was now a fixture in the inner circle of the reggimento.
In addition to playing an ever more visible role on the domestic scene, the events of August and September 1466 raised Lorenzo’s stature in the eyes of the world. He was no longer the awkward son of Florence’s first citizen but a leader in his own right, his father’s right-hand man and the ruler-in-waiting of one of the richest and most powerful states in Italy. The transformation is most clearly marked in a letter to Lorenzo from King Ferrante, dated September 28. “Already,” he wrote, “we loved you on account of your excellent qualities and the services done by your grandfather and father. But as we have lately heard with what prudence and manly courage you behaved in the late revolutions, and how courageously you placed yourself in the foremost ranks, our affection to you has grown remarkably.” At the tender age of seventeen, Lorenzo had marched boldly onto the world stage and grabbed the spotlight. It was a starring role he would not relinquish for the remainder of his years.
School of Giorgio Vasari, Joust in Santa Croce, 16th century (Art Resource)
VII. LORD OF THE JOUST
“To do as others do I held a joust in the Piazza S. Croce at great expense and with great pomp. I find we spent about 10,000 ducats.”
—LORENZO DE’ MEDICI,MEMOIRS
“[H]aving in my youth been much persecuted by men and by fortune, some little solace ought not to be denied me, and this I have only found in loving ardently and in composing and commenting upon my verses…. Such terrible persecutions as I have undergone are very well known because they are public knowledge.”
—LORENZO DE’ MEDICI,COMMENTARY ON MY SONNETS
THE DEFEAT OF THE HILL AND THE EXILE OF THE MOST prominent exponents of reform left the Medici and their friends in undisputed control of the machinery of government. But perhaps Piero’s greatest success lay in securing the acquiescence of the majority of Florentines to the new state of affairs. Over the coming months and years any lingering wounds were healed by a concerted effort to broker marriages between families on either side of the political divide.
Though Piero was more than ever confined to his own bed, this did not mean that he was out of the loop. “[Piero] was crippled with gout like his father,” recalled Marco Parenti, “to such an extent that he could no longer get out of bed. Because of this all those who had need of him went to his chambers, including the magistrates who would take no decision in serious matters without his approval; similarly foreigners, ambassadors and l
ords, who had any business with our city were forced to seek him there, so that his rooms were always crowded with men on diverse errands and it was often difficult to speak with him.”
The job of keeping Piero abreast of what went on in the Palazzo della Signoria fell largely to Lorenzo. A letter written in March 1468 reveals the nature of his role. “Magnificent Lord,” Lorenzo wrote to Cipriano Seregni, then Gonfaloniere di Giustizia, “In obedience to the Signoria I spoke with Piero. He declared himself, in respect to creating a new Dieci [council of war], to be wholly in favor.” Dividing his time between the halls of the Signoria and his father’s private chambers, Lorenzo was the vital link between the elected officials and the effective boss of the city.
Aiding Piero in his efforts to direct the city’s foreign policy were the vast resources of the Medici bank, which maintained, in effect, its own intelligence service; agents in foreign capitals had access to information vital to political decision-making, and well-placed friends in strategic locations reported to Piero directly, rather than through official channels. Much of this correspondence now passed through Lorenzo’s hands. “I have received your letters, both thick and thin,” the nineteen-year-old Lorenzo wrote to Cristofano di Valsvignone, Piero’s private secretary, “filled with news of Flanders, England and of [the castle of] Marradi, of the plague, of the [clerical] benefices, and every other thing.”
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