That Lorenzo regretted the passing of his youth is clear from his own poetry in which he revels in sensual pleasures even as he mourns their passing. “How beautiful is youth,” he wrote in his most famous Carnival song, “that quickly flies away. / He who would be happy, let him, / Since of tomorrow none can say.” Written after many years in which he was burdened by having to care for both his family and the state, these lines record his resentment at time stolen from him, at the devouring of irresponsible youth by the demands of adulthood. The hedonism of his nature was always clouded by mortal thoughts, as if he knew that the enjoyment of life’s carnal delights came at a cost.
For Piero, Lorenzo’s entry into adulthood could not come quickly enough. At twenty Lorenzo might have anticipated many more years of carefree bachelorhood, but this was not a luxury permitted the Medici heir. With the survival of the entire clan resting on his procreative powers and its fortune dependent on his political and financial skills, it was vital that Lorenzo establish himself immediately as a full-fledged member of the community.* Not only would the upcoming union with the Orsini secure the Medici’s position among Europe’s ruling elite, but it was hoped married life would also serve as a steadying influence. A man with a family to care for was a man focused on the important things of life. It was marriage, above all, that marked the passage from youth to manhood, and though few expected the married man to completely discard the vices of his irresponsible adolescence, he was permitted to indulge in them only as long as doing so did not interfere with the crucial task of producing heirs and providing for their future.
It was Archbishop Filippo de’ Medici who broke the welcome news from Rome. “I know not where I shall begin in order to inform your Magnificence that I have today espoused the noble and illustrious Madonna Clarice degli Orsini in your name,” he wrote to Piero: “according to my opinion, a maiden of such physical gifts, appearance, and manners, that she deserves no other bridegroom than him whom, I believe, heaven has destined for her.” While it might seem strange that Lorenzo was not present at his own wedding, this was not unusual in cases where the bride and groom came from different cities. The espousal was a formal contract with the bride’s family, not to be confused with the wedding feast, which would be celebrated in the groom’s hometown. When Galeazzo Maria Sforza married Bona of Savoy, the wedding was “consummated” by Galeazzo’s half-brother Tristano, who ceremonially kissed the bride and climbed into her bed where they “touched one another’s bare leg…according to the custom.” A similarly quaint ceremony, with Filippo doing the honors, probably also solemnized Lorenzo’s marriage.
The legal niceties observed, Lorenzo’s new mother-in-law wrote to him: “How glad I should be to see you before sending my daughter, I cannot express, but I am sure the Magnificent Piero knows best…. At all events I hope you have the wish to know me and all your relations here.” But despite repeated pleas, Piero decided he could not afford to be without Lorenzo for any extended period. Instead, in May 1469, he sent a distinguished delegation of fifty citizens—led by Giuliano, along with his cousin Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, brothers-in-law Bernardo Rucellai and Guglielmo de’ Pazzi, and the faithful Gentile Becchi—to Rome to fetch Clarice and escort her back to her new home. By the beginning of June she had arrived in Florence, where she was lodged at the house of the merchant Benedetto degli’ Alessandri.
If Clarice had any concerns that this less-than-triumphal entry was a signal of Lorenzo’s continued indifference, the next few days allayed her fears. However tepid his feelings for his bride-to-be, neither he nor his parents would let such an important occasion pass without extracting the maximum propaganda benefit. A few days before the festivities were set to begin, the streets were crowded with columns of mules and carts bearing gifts from the principal towns, villas, and castles of Tuscany. “Calves 150,” recorded one anonymous chronicler. “More than 2000 couples of capons, geese, and fowls. Sea fish and trout in large quantities. I do not yet know how many. Sweet things in abundance; sugar plums as big as artubus berries, almonds, pine-seeds, sweetmeats.” This bounty from the cities and territories subject to Florentine rule was an impressive display of the power of the Medici name.
On Sunday morning, June 4, Clarice, dressed in a white, hooded gown sparkling with gold thread and riding Lorenzo’s horse Falsamico, proceeded from the Alessandri palace to the Via Larga, accompanied by trumpeters and fifers along with thirty matrons representing the leading families of Florence. As she dismounted before the palace, decorated with tapestries and awnings displaying the Medici and Orsini crests, a live olive tree was hoisted into the palace through a second-story window to serve during the feast as a symbol of abundance and fertility.
The marriage festivities, though not officially a public occasion, managed nonetheless to embrace the entire city. During the three days of banqueting more than a thousand people passed through the doors of the palace, though there were limits to the Medici’s hospitality: “In the house here, where the marriage feast was, every respectable person who came in was at once taken to the ground-floor hall…. The common folk were not invited.”
For those not fortunate enough to be allowed inside, there was plenty to see on the streets surrounding the palace. The eating, drinking, and dancing spilled out onto the Via Larga, where a platform had been set up to accommodate the overflow guests. For the most part the weather cooperated, allowing the family to seat the crowds in the open air, though a sudden downpour on Monday turned expensive silk and brocade gowns, worked on for months, into damp, unsightly rags—much to the delight of those censorious moralists who felt that Florentine women spent too much money on their clothes and far too much time before the mirror.
Most Florentines of the better sort clamored to be included on the guest list, but the honor could also have its drawbacks. Alessandra Strozzi recounted how her daughter-in-law, the attractive Fiametta, had been repeatedly importuned by Lucrezia Tornabuoni to attend, but had tried to excuse herself on the grounds that she had recently given birth. “She doesn’t want to go,” Alessandra wrote to her son Filippo, “first because you’re not here and also because if she does go we’ll have to spend several hundred florins. I must tell you that they are having a lot of brocade gowns and robes made, and we’d have to have them made for her as well, and she doesn’t have much jewelry.”
Others, however, were only too happy to make it inside the palace where they could gawk at the damask-covered tables piled high with roasts, trays of sweetmeats, marzipan, jellies, and sugared pine nuts. Donatello’s bronze David served as the centerpiece of an elaborate refreshment stand with four huge copper vessels filled with iced water and wine ladled out by a team of liveried attendants. In the adjacent garden, where Donatello’s Judith stood as a model of female virtue, Clarice dined with fifty maidens chosen for their beauty and grace. Older matrons, less able to withstand the June sun, dined in the loggia above at tables presided over by Lucrezia.
Much of the information on Lorenzo’s wedding comes from an anonymous chronicler who heard it, he tells us, from “Cosimo Bartoli, one of the principal Directors of the Festival, particularly as regards Sweetmeats and sugar-plums, and also what I saw myself.”* Despite the five banquets spread over three days, served up on gleaming silver and glittering crystal and staffed by an army of servants, musicians, and entertainers, Lorenzo’s wedding was in fact deliberately understated. “[T]here was never more than one roast,” the chronicler noted approvingly. “I think it was done…as an example to others not to exceed the modesty and simplicity suitable to marriages.” Given the opulence he describes, such a comment might strike one as facetious until one considers other fifteenth-century banquets that rivaled the worst excesses of pagan Rome.† In fact, Lorenzo’s wedding was a relatively low-key affair. Particularly when foreigners were present, Florentines went out of their way to demonstrate their republican austerity. When Galeazzo Maria Sforza stayed at the Medici villa at Careggi in 1459, for instance, he was particularly struck
by the fact that Giovanni, Cosimo’s younger son, did not dine with him but waited on tables, and that after dinner Lucrezia herself joined some local peasant girls to perform a charming rustic dance. Foreigners often misunderstood the Florentine taste for simplicity. Years later, when Lorenzo’s son-in-law Franceschetto Cibo paid a visit, he was insulted by the frugality of the repast; Lorenzo was forced to explain that far from being an insult, this meant he was to think of himself as a member of the family.
The Medici were always most successful when they maintained the proper balance between ostentation and simplicity. Everyone knew they could have done more, and appreciated the reserve that paid homage to their communal traditions. The wedding was elegant but not excessive; in distributing alms they were generous, but never to the point that their generosity could be construed as a demagogic attempt to purchase the loyalty of the masses.
But if none could fault them in the way they conducted the ceremonies, there were many who grumbled that they had erred in their choice of a bride. On Tuesday morning, as Clarice brought the festivities to a close by attending Mass in San Lorenzo, the populace awoke to the uncomfortable fact of a foreign bride in the Palazzo Medici. Her simplicity of manner and modesty of demeanor could not conceal the fact that she was the daughter of a haughty, aristocratic, and, most damning of all, foreign family; the Orsini name would be a constant reminder of the Medici’s dynastic ambitions. Years later, when considering a match for one of his own children, Lorenzo remarked, “It would be a burden and a danger to me if I were to contract a marriage, so contrary to custom, with great lords and men, whose condition in life is quite different from mine.” Guicciardini later attributed the arrogance of Lorenzo’s firstborn son to his “bastardized” blood that made him “too insolent and haughty for our way of life.” Who among the prominent families attending the banquets at the Via Larga could have failed to conclude that none had been judged good enough to furnish a bride for the Medici son? To even the most loyal of followers, the snub must have left a bitter taste that no amount of sweet wine could wash down.
At the time, however, Piero and Lucrezia appeared well pleased with the match. Of more immediate concern was Piero’s steadily declining health. Wracked by pain in his joints, he was now barely able to lift himself from his bed. Foreign ambassadors and leaders of the reggimento who shuttled back and forth between the Palazzo della Signoria and the Palazzo Medici now openly prepared themselves for a future without Piero.
Foremost among the supporters of the regime, and a man who over the years had built a following second only to Piero himself in the government, was the sixty-five-year-old Tommaso Soderini, whose loyalty in the crisis of 1466 had earned him a place at the Medici leader’s right hand. Known as a man of ability, but also disliked by many for the ruthlessness with which he exploited his position for personal gain, his voice would carry enormous weight in the period of transition.* Would he stick by the Medici as he had done in the past or would he follow the example of men like Luca Pitti, Dietisalvi Neroni—or even his own brother, Niccolò—whose pent-up ambition had burst forth after the death of their leader?
As the torpor of the Tuscan summer gave way to the bustle of fall, time for the harvest of the grape and olive, Piero’s hold on the affairs of state began to slip. The “absent senator,” once consulted on every important matter, was largely sidelined as the more vigorous members of the reggimento jockeyed for position or tried to squeeze out one last florin of profit before Piero’s death threw everything into confusion.
Instead of a peaceful interlude in which to prepare his soul for its final journey, Piero’s last days were troubled by dissensions within and the rumblings of war without. In Machiavelli’s account of Piero’s final days, the dying leader brought together his most powerful associates and chided them for their pursuit of selfish ends:
I would never have believed that the time would come when the modes and customs of my friends would make me bitter and desire enemies, and victory make me desire defeat; for I thought I had in my company men who had some limit or measure to their cupidity and for whom it would be enough to live safe and honored in their fatherland and, besides that, to have had revenge on their enemies. But I know now how greatly I have deceived myself as one who knew little of the natural ambition of all men and less yours…. You despoil your neighbor of his goods, you sell justice, you escape civil judgments, you oppress peaceful men and exalt the insolent…. I promise you, by the faith that ought to be given and received by good men, that if you continue to carry on in a mode that makes me repent having won, I too shall carry on in a manner that will make you repent having ill used the victory.
This speech is largely Machiavelli’s invention, but it reflects the very real divisions between the leader of the party and his various lieutenants who took advantage of his debility to pursue their own agendas. The very thoroughness of the victory of the Plain in 1466 had fostered corruption. In the time-honored fashion of Florentine politics, one faction, having swept all opposition before it, used its authority to tax and spend to enrich friends and ruin enemies, thereby consolidating its hold on power. So distraught was Piero over dissension and mismanagement among his associates that he contemplated allowing the return of some of the exiles—particularly Agnolo Acciaiuoli, with whom he was said to have met secretly at his villa in Cafaggiolo—to act as a counterweight to the more arrogant and ambitious members of the reggimento.
But Piero was ultimately too crippled in mind and body to effect the necessary reforms, and the threat to recall the exiles was too weak a club, and too uncertainly wielded, to frighten those grown fat on the spoils of victory. Adding to his dismay was the fact that dissension within the reggimento came at a particularly inopportune moment. Even as Piero tried to rein in his unruly lieutenants, ominous clouds had begun to gather in the ever tempestuous Romagna.
The Romagna, a region bordering Tuscany to the north and east, made up part of the territory under the nominal rule of the leader of the Church known as the Papal States.* Here in central Italy the decay of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages had left a patchwork quilt of petty states and competing jurisdictions; the removal of the papacy to Avignon in the fourteenth century had further eroded centralized authority. But with the restoration of the popes to their traditional capital in Rome at the beginning of the fifteenth century, successive occupants of the throne of St. Peter sought to reassert their authority over vassals accustomed to treating their territories as hereditary possessions. Each successful extension of papal authority, however, threatened the fragile balance of power within Italy, which was predicated in part on depriving Rome of her traditional role as the mistress of Italy. This was particularly problematic for Florence, surrounded as she was by territories claimed by the pope.
The current crisis originated in Rimini, a city on the Adriatic coast some sixty miles east of Florence. The despot of Rimini, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, had died in October of the previous year, leaving behind him his widow, Isotta, and an illegitimate son, Roberto. In theory the Malatesta ruled Rimini only as the vicars of the Holy Father, but like many of their colleagues they treated the city as their private domain, leading lives of violence and dissipation and virtually ignoring their titular overlord.† Paul II’s predecessor, Pius II, had been so fed up with his vassal’s wayward behavior that he took the unusual step of burning him in effigy and condemning him to the deepest pits of hell: “Until now, no mortal has been solemnly canonized in Hell. Sigismondo will be the first man worthy of this honor. By edict of the Pope, he will be condemned to the infernal city where he will join the damned and other devils. He is hereby condemned, while still alive, to Orcus and eternal fire.”
Following Sigismondo’s death, Paul went in search of a more pliant servant. He found just such a candidate in Isotta, Sigismondo’s widow, and stiffened her resolve by installing at her side a Venetian commissioner. Not surprising, Sigismondo’s bastard son, Roberto, who had inherited his father’s temper if no
t his title, reacted to this attempt to disinherit him with vehemence. With the secret backing of the duke of Urbino, he raised an army and proceeded to march toward Rimini with the intention of reclaiming his patrimony by force. On October 20 he entered the city and proclaimed himself signore.
This petty squabble would hardly have been worth notice except for the fact that, as in the Balkans on the eve of the First World War, the slightest tremor in this fractured corner of the globe threatened to drag the regional powers into the maelstrom. The Venetian-born Paul naturally turned to his native city to help him assert his feudal rights, while Naples, Florence, and Milan, wishing to chastise the arrogant Venetians and fearing the pope’s ambition, came in on the side of Roberto Malatesta. (It didn’t hurt Malatesta’s prospects that he was currently employed as a general in the pay of the triple alliance).*
For Lorenzo, the pressures of war added to the uncertainties of his succession. An already difficult situation was made infinitely more complex when disagreements broke out among the allies over the war’s prosecution and ultimate aims—disagreements that soon split the Florentine reggimento into quarreling factions. At a time when Piero needed the government to come together, its leaders were too busy attacking each other to think about rallying behind his chosen successor.
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