With his mind thus troubled and his body wracked with pain, Piero, like his father before him, had himself carried to his villa at Careggi. Outside his window the bare branches rasped in the chill autumn breeze, and as the nights grew long and bitter, Piero tried to free his mind of earthly cares. Stories of the blessed saints and of the equally stoic philosophers provided more comfort than the potions of doctors. Friends and family kept a constant vigil at his bedside. Here, far from the noise and distractions of the city, he would compose his soul for its final journey, trusting in God, if not his feckless colleagues, to care for his wife and children.
Lorenzo, however, was trusting his fate to powers nearer at hand. Grieved by his father’s suffering and oppressed by the difficulties he faced, he turned to those who had been his family’s most stalwart patrons in times of trouble—the Sforza of Milan.* Unfortunately for Lorenzo, now desperately in need of friends abroad, he could no longer count on their automatic support. Differences arising over the prosecution of the Rimini War between Naples and Milan left Florence caught awkwardly in the middle and the Florentine government seriously divided.
In August, allied forces under Federico da Montefeltro and King Ferrante’s son, Alfonso, duke of Calabria, routed the combined armies of Venice and the pope and succeeded in lifting the siege they had placed on Rimini. But no sooner had this victory been won than the divergent aims of the allies became apparent: Galeazzo Maria Sforza, harrassed by his northern neighbor Savoy, hoped to conclude a quick peace with the pope so he could attend to business closer to home; Ferrante, by contrast, wished to use the recent momentum to achieve a more decisive victory, believing that a weakened papacy would permit Neapolitan expansion in the south. Milan needed a strong ally in the Palazzo della Signoria, but it was just this kind of forceful leadership that the ailing Medici patriarch was unable to provide. Trying to steer a middle course between the two quarreling parties, Piero managed to displease both. The extent to which Piero’s authority had slipped is revealed by an exchange between the Signoria and Luigi Guicciardini, the republic’s ambassador in Milan. Guicciardini was instructed to abandon Milan should the duke persist in pursuing a policy of appeasement, a policy that placed Piero, who wished to maintain amicable ties with the Sforza, in an untenable position. Filippo Sacramoro, the Milanese ambassador to Florence, spoke ominously of secret meetings “of the enemies of Piero and…those who favor Venice.”
The rifts were so pronounced that Agnolo Acciaiuoli, Dietisalvi Neroni, and the rest of the exiles of 1466 seemed ready to pack their bags for a triumphal return to the native land. Neroni in particular was full of grandiose plans, writing to his son that upon Piero’s death the pope should hurry an ambassador to Florence with an offer of peace as soon as they resolved to mend their wicked ways and “to live in a manner in which they would no longer be the cause of every scandal in Italy, and that their citizens would live freely as citizens, and not as despots.”
In October, the Milanese ambassador confided to the duke that he feared the ailing Piero was losing his grip. Given this crisis of confidence in his leadership there was a real danger that Milan would look for a more reliable ally within the city. It was up to Lorenzo to prove to the duke and his ambassador that the Medici could still be counted on,* a strategy that required him to distance himself from his father’s policies and to demonstrate that, whatever Piero’s failings, he was still fully behind the Milanese alliance. It must have been painful for Lorenzo to so openly question his father’s judgment, particularly when Piero could do little to defend himself. But the strategy apparently worked, for Sacramoro shortly wrote to the duke predicting that Lorenzo “will show himself to be of a different nature from his father.”
By early December it was clear that Piero’s illness had entered its final phase. A flurry of letters back and forth between Florence and Milan records Lorenzo’s anxiety for his own future. Over the course of three days, from December 1 to 4, 1469, Lorenzo wrote three letters to Galeazzo Maria Sforza (the final one signed as well by Giuliano), each one more fawning than the last. “I would like to declare myself as the devoted servant of Your Excellency, and to recall the ancient devotion of our house and myself in particular toward Your Illustrious Lordship,” he wrote on December 1. This reminder of past friendship became all the more urgent the following day when Piero’s health took a sudden turn for the worse: “My Most Illustrious Lord. Yesterday I wrote to Your Excellency of the illness of my father. Subsequently he deteriorated to such an extent that I have little hope for his recovery, and again assure Your Illustrious Lordship that all my hope resides in you, and that I pray you know, as I already said, that my preservation derives from Your Excellency alone, to whom I humbly recommend myself.”
At the same time as he was stroking the vanity of the duke, Lorenzo was trying to shore up domestic support. “[W]hile certain of having here the support of many good friends,” he explained to Galeazzo, “it seems to me it would do little good without the favor and aid of Your Illustrious Lordship.” Fortunately, the Milanese ambassador was now fully behind Lorenzo. “I can report,” wrote Sacramoro to the duke on December 1, “that [Lorenzo] has so arranged and secured his affairs in the city in regard to the leading citizens, that he seems to be squarely in the saddle.”
But was Lorenzo as fully in control of the situation as both he and Sacramoro implied? Despite their bold predictions, the situation was still volatile. Niccolò Roberti, the Ferrarese ambassador to Florence, was far less certain of Lorenzo’s success, predicting that after Piero’s death the old oligarchy would reassert control and that “all business will once again return to the palazzo [Publico].” In truth, the government was split, the normal divisions exacerbated by the lack of a strong leader and by the growing dissension between Florence’s two principal allies over the conduct of the Rimini War. Both Naples and Milan had their adherents in the reggimento, while others hoped to overthrow the triple league altogether in favor of a rapprochement with Venice.
Much would depend on Tommaso Soderini, now the most powerful man in the state. Despite Soderini’s long service both to the Medici and in promoting the interests of Milan, Sacramoro distrusted the wily Tommaso, whose relations with the duke had been strained in recent months by the marriage of his son Piero to the daughter of a nobleman who was a rival of the Sforza. Among other things, this marriage into foreign nobility bespoke vaunting ambition; perhaps Soderini hoped through this connection to outshine the Medici themselves. Also troubling was the fact that at the very same time Soderini was protesting his loyalty to the ruling dynasty of Milan he was expressing admiration for their Venetian rivals.
On the morning of December 2, Soderini—who had been following the course of Piero’s illness so closely that he seems to have been as well informed as Lorenzo himself—called for a meeting of 150 of the leading friends of the reggimento. Even before they had a chance to assemble in the small hall they had reserved near the butchers’ guild, news reached Soderini that Piero was only hours from death. Given the gravity of the situation Soderini thought it prudent to transfer proceedings to the more commodious convent of Sant’Antonio, conveniently located a few blocks west of the Palazzo Medici, so that all those “well respected but of varying views” might attend the extraordinary nighttime meeting.*
Even before the citizens had assembled, the news came from Careggi that Piero had died. “At the twenty-third-and-a-half hour [about 4:30 in the afternoon] there came upon him a sudden fit of pain in his limbs and seizures that the Magnificent Piero passed from this life,” reported Sacramoro to Duke Galeazzo; “he showed with gestures and squeezings of the hand, since he could no longer speak—so impetuous was the onset of this catarrh—that he wished to place his sons in the care of Your Highness; he died with a great show of contrition and, like his father, ordered a funeral without pomp.”
It was thus with a heavy heart and fears for the future that the leading men of Florence made their way through darkened streets to the monastery cl
ose by the Porta Piacenza.†
“Messer Tommaso Soderini took the word as eldest, and explained how Piero had left his sons already grown up and gifted with good judgment and intellect,” Niccolò Roberti reported the dramatic scene:
Out of regard for their predecessors, and especially Cosimo and Piero, who had always been friends, protectors, and preservers of the commonwealth and benefactors of the State, for which reason they had taken the first rank and borne the whole weight of government wisely and with dignity, always displaying courage and mature judgment, it seemed to him that they should leave to Piero’s family and sons, notwithstanding their youth, the honorable position which he himself and Cosimo had enjoyed. He added that he saw the two no less considerate and desirous of winning the good opinion of the commune, and of all the Florentine citizens, than their grandfather and father. This was confirmed by three or four of those present, by Messer Manno [Temperani], son-in-law of Messer Luca Pitti, who was not himself present, by Messer Giannozzo Pitti, and Domenico Martelli. The last two remarked that a master and a head was needed to give the casting-vote in public affairs.
With Soderini’s statesmanlike speech and its endorsement by other powerful members of the regime, most in the hall quickly rallied behind the Medici until, according to Sacramoro’s report, a consensus quickly emerged that all would “work together for the good of the state and the preservation of the house of the Medici and the maintenance of the league.”
While many historians, including Machiavelli, have assumed that the outcome of this meeting was a foregone conclusion, subsequent events reveal that Soderini had at least considered briefly taking the opposite course. Indeed, in supporting Lorenzo’s claim, he had not renounced his personal ambition. As late as December 1, Sacramoro was fretting about the possibility that Soderini would betray the cause, concluding, however, that he lacked the popular following to strike out on his own: “The common people don’t believe he is so good as he is clever, and therefore I don’t think that he can expect all the spices to be sold at his house.” The colorful turn of phrase captures the shrewd calculation behind Soderini’s decision, which was based less on personal loyalty than on a clear-eyed assessment of his market value. He was smart enough to know that without a popular following he could never rally the leadership behind him, much less the city as a whole. Like the leaders of the Hill in 1466, he could only unseat the Medici by posing as the champion of democratic reform, a role to which his past history made him singularly unsuited and that might unleash forces he would be hard pressed to control. By standing before the assembled leaders of the state and urging them to throw their support behind Lorenzo and Giuliano he hoped to retain, and even to strengthen, his role as the éminence grise of the regime. It was a role to which he was eminently suited and, as subsequent events were to reveal, it is clear he now thought of himself as, in effect, the regent to the young and inexperienced Medici heir.
Thus it was that the following morning a delegation of “leaders, knights and citizens,” led again by Tommaso Soderini, called upon Lorenzo and Giuliano at the Via Larga, to pay their respects and to place control of the state into their hands.* Lorenzo, though outwardly unchanged from the youth of yesterday, would have grown enormously in their eyes. From the dutiful son ably helping his father he had become overnight the pater familias, the lord of his household with almost unlimited powers beneath his own roof. The palace through which these distinguished gentlemen walked—the most magnificent in all of Florence and filled to the rafters with works of art and antiques that would turn many a king green with envy—was now his personal property. Though only a youth of twenty, the riches at his disposal, the vast estates and far-flung business enterprises that he now commanded, gave him a gravitas that yesterday he lacked.
Lorenzo received the delegation dressed in mourning black in the great hall beneath the enormous canvases by Pollaiuolo representing the labors of Hercules, a hero to whom another great artist would one day compare him.† He responded to the delegation’s offer with words of admirable humility. Unworthy as he was of the honor, and aware of how much he would still have to rely on the wisdom of those older and wiser than he, he would, for the sake of his family and his country, accept what was so generously proffered:
The second day after [my father’s] death, [he wrote many years later] although I, Lorenzo, was very young, being twenty years of age, the principal men of the city and of the State came to us in our house to condole with us on our loss and to encourage me to take charge of the city and of the State, as my grandfather and my father had done. This I did, though on account of my youth and the great responsibility and perils arising therefrom, with great reluctance, solely for the safety of our friends and of our possessions. For it is ill living in Florence for the rich unless they rule the state. Till now we have succeeded with honor and renown, which I attribute not to prudence but to the grace of God and the good conduct of my predecessors.
The picture of the reluctant prince taking up the burden of rule with a heavy heart strikes many as disingenuous at best. His critics point out that days, and even years, before, Lorenzo had been preparing himself for this moment. His letters to the duke of Milan do not show someone taking up the scepter only grudgingly but, on the contrary, reveal someone who desperately sought power. It is also certain that Lorenzo was deeply involved in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that culminated in the mass meeting at Sant’Antonio; his agents were heavily represented in the crowd and, like party bosses at a convention, labored diligently to ensure a successful outcome. Even before the crowd had dispersed Lorenzo knew he had prevailed.
But for all the hard work that had gone into assuring his succession, his reluctance to take up the burden was very real. To don the mantle once worn by Cosimo, Pater Patriae, and just lately slipped from the shoulders of his father, was the culmination of his ambitions, but he was under no illusions as to the difficulties he would face or the onerous daily pressures under which he would stagger. Already adult responsibilities had begun to squeeze out youthful pastimes; now those burdens would be infinitely multiplied.
The truth was that Lorenzo had no choice but to accept what was offered to him. His explanation that he did so “solely for the safety of our friends and of our possessions” is disarmingly candid. At the tender age of twenty, Lorenzo was now both the patriarch of his extended family and the father of his nation. From the peasants employed on their many estates to the workers in the various factories floating on capital from the Medici bank, there were literally thousands of souls counting on his wise and benevolent leadership. He was sufficiently versed in the ways of Florentine government to understand that he could hardly meet his obligations without a controlling hand on the spigots through which patronage flowed. “For it is ill living in Florence for the rich unless they rule the state,” he wrote, as pithy a critique of the political system as ever penned. But if he recognized the corruption inherent in this system of government, he had no thought of reforming practices hallowed by long usage. His Medici forebears were as adept as any in making sure their friends profited and their enemies suffered, and Lorenzo felt that duty demanded he do no less.
Similar factors motivated those who called on him that December morning. These were men who had prospered both politically and financially under Cosimo and his son and who stood to lose in the uncertainty accompanying a change of regime. Along with, perhaps, genuine sorrow at the loss of a trusted colleague and admiration for Lorenzo, one can sense their hard calculation. Lorenzo, while no doubt moved by their expressions of sympathy, was sufficiently realistic to understand that and self-interest, rather than bonds of affection, was what led these men to his door that day.
Piero’s funeral, like his father’s before him, was an understated affair, the coffin traveling the few blocks from the palace to the church draped in the simple black cloth of an ordinary citizen and escorted by a contingent of priests and monks of institutions blessed by Medici patronage. Ambassadors of both the kin
g of Naples and the duke of Milan formed part of the procession, as did the condottiere Roberto di Sanseverino, but few other dignitaries accompanied Lorenzo, Giuliano, and their family to San Lorenzo. Once inside the church the few guttering candles dimly illuminating the great basilica added to the somber mood of the funeral mass. With the last echo of the concluding Agnus Dei, Piero was laid to rest beside his brother, Giovanni, in the family sacristy.*
Donato Acciaiuoli, who had delivered the eulogy on the occasion of Cosimo’s death, was one of countless distinguished gentlemen who wrote Lorenzo consoling him on his loss: “When shall we find another so reasonable in council, so just, true, mild in character, so loving towards home, relations, friends, so worthy of respect, as your excellent father, who has been taken from us to our great sorrow.” Lorenzo’s comments on his father’s death are unrevealing; the letters he wrote in the following days are filled with conventional expressions of sorrow and a recognition of the heavy responsibilities under which he labored, but they are formal exercises and convey little of the emotional turmoil of the moment. A more vivid testament to Lorenzo’s feelings comes in a letter by Marco Parenti, who witnessed the funeral. Catching a glimpse of the new ruler in a rare moment of vulnerability, he reported that Lorenzo wept openly on his way back from church.
Domenico Ghirlandaio, Annunciation to Zachariah (detail), showing Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano, and Gentile Becchi, 1483–86, Sta. Trinita (Art Resource)
IX. MASTER OF THE SHOP
“They are agreed that the private affairs of the Signoria shall pass through Lorenzo’s hands in the same manner as previously through those of his father.”
—NICCOLÒ ROBERTI, FERRARESE AMBASSADOR
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