IN HIS PHILOSOPHICAL DIALOGUE, DISPUTATIONESCamaldulenses, the humanist Cristoforo Landino includes an idealized portrait of Lorenzo shortly before his assumption of power. The setting is the cloister of the Camaldoli, an isolated monastery on the wooded slopes of the Apennine foothills; the time is the autumn of 1468; and the conversation revolves around the rights and responsibilities of a citizen in a free republic.* The conversation, which involves many of Florence’s leading intellectuals—including both Lorenzo and Giuliano, the expatriate Leon Battista Alberti, Marsilio Ficino, Donato Acciaiuoli, and, intriguingly, Lorenzo’s secret enemy Alamanno Rinuccini—takes place in the kind of rural setting Lorenzo loved and often wrote about himself, a fragrant meadow shaded by a beech tree overhanging a clear spring. The idyllic surroundings provide a perfect foil for the ensuing debate over the relative merits of the active and contemplative life, though the attractions of this rustic spot might seem to tip the balance in favor of the latter.
Landino’s narrative does not pretend to provide a realistic portrayal of the young Lorenzo. His presence in this gathering is plausible enough since he often enjoyed such learned discourses and preferred to engage in them in the midst of natural beauty. But the real reason for his inclusion is to provide dramatic context for what might otherwise seem to be an abstruse philosophical debate. For someone about to take over the government of a powerful city-state, the question Landino raises is of more than academic interest. Should one retire from the hustle and bustle of civic life, with its perpetual quarrels and inevitable compromises, in order to attain true wisdom, as Alberti urges? Or, in the words Landino puts in Lorenzo’s mouth, is it one’s obligation to use the wisdom thus acquired for the benefit of one’s compatriots? For no one were these questions as pressing as they were for the young man on the verge of taking his place as the first citizen of the republic.
While Landino gives to Lorenzo the role of advocate for the active life, it is Alberti who strikes a balance between the two worlds more in keeping with Lorenzo’s own sense of himself:
But if [philosophy] be an occupation suitable for all men of learning, it is more particularly so for you, on whom the direction of the affairs of the republic is likely, from the increasing infirmities of your father, soon to devolve. For although, Lorenzo, you have given proof of such virtues as would induce us to think them rather of divine than human origin; although there seems to be no undertaking so momentous as not to be accomplished by that prudence and courage which you have displayed, even in your early years; and although the impulse of youthful ambition, and the full enjoyment of those gifts of fortune which have often intoxicated men of high expectation and great virtue, have never yet been able to impel you beyond the just bounds of moderation; yet, both you and that republic which you are shortly to direct, or rather which now in a great measure reposes in your care, will derive important advantages from those hours of leisure, which you may pass either in solitary meditation, or social discussion, on the origin and nature of the human mind. For it is impossible that any person should rightly direct the affairs of the public, unless he had previously established in himself virtuous habits, and enlightened his understanding with that knowledge, which will enable him clearly to discern why he is called into existence, what is due to others, and what to himself.
In practice Lorenzo found it far more difficult to find the leisure necessary for intellectual growth in his increasingly hectic schedule. His long philosophical poem The Supreme Good, whose title echoes the second part of Landino’s dialogue, includes a passage in which his old friend and mentor, Marsilio Ficino, scolds him for frittering away the afternoon in the countryside when he should be in Florence attending to his duties. “It does amaze me greatly, though, to find you, Lauro, on this wooded mountain slope,” the philosopher gently chides his pupil,
“not that your presence doesn’t bring me joy.
Who counseled you to leave your native city?
You know the burdens your familial
and civic duties put upon your shoulders.”
To which Lorenzo responds:
“The things of which you
speak bring on such agony that the mere thought
of them enfeebles me and makes me grieve.
I’ve fled, a while, those vexing public cares
in order to refresh my soul by pondering
the pastoral way of life, a life I envy.”
In part Lorenzo is simply poking fun at himself. Despite his frenetic work pace, he liked to portray himself as a man addicted to indolence and only reluctantly shouldering the cares of state. But Lorenzo would never have exchanged his life of privilege for that of a simple shepherd, nor did he really expect his audience to believe him. Nonetheless, the poem reflects a genuine distress at the endless drudgery of his official duties. To exercise power was his birthright but not his passion. He still took his greatest pleasure in vigorous outdoor activities, composing verses on his favorite themes, and in pleasant conversation with his learned and witty friends. The oceans of official correspondence he was now required to wade through with the aid of only a few secretaries, the constant demands made on his time by foreign ambassadors, government officials, and humble petitioners, the obligation to entertain lavishly every visiting dignitary, all stole from him precious seconds that could be better spent on the things he loved. He must often have wondered if the glory of being his father’s son was worth the price.
As Lorenzo prepared to receive the distinguished delegation of leading Florentines the day after his father’s death, he was under no illusions as to the burdens he was assuming. But what, after all, were Tommaso Soderini and his colleagues offering him that December morning? He received no official title from their hands; after their departure he was, as he had been before, a simple citizen of Florence—a particularly rich and prominent one, but one whose name would not appear in the roll of any of the key positions of the government. If asked to name the current head of state, Florentines would have pointed not to Lorenzo but to Piero di Lutozzo Nasi, who, dressed in his ceremonial robes and living in pampered isolation in the palazzo as Gonfaloniere di Giustizia, presided over the deliberations of the Signoria for his two-month term of office.
In fact, as Marco Parenti pointed out, neither the assembly at Sant’Antonio, nor the delegation of principali who conveyed their decision to offer Lorenzo the preeminent role in the governing of the state, had any official standing. “It was merely a ceremony, of little weight.” But it was crucial nonetheless, for it provided Lorenzo a legitimacy his father had lacked. The absence of a similar consensus at the time of Cosimo’s death led directly to the crisis two years later, and it was in order to avoid such confusion that Tommaso Soderini and his fellow magnates had convened the meeting at Sant’Antonio. It was a clever move, for it bound Lorenzo to them even as it raised him to a position of authority. The agreement among the leading members of the regime to defer to Lorenzo was practically the sole basis of his power, and it imposed strict limitations on his freedom of action. Dependent as he was on their continued goodwill, his policies were likely to reflect the combined wisdom of the men who had eased his way to power.
Some observers even asserted that the city was returning to the kind of collective rule that had characterized Florentine government before Cosimo’s day. Six months after Lorenzo took power, Bartolomeo Bonatto reported to his boss, Ludovico Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua: “Some say that this city is taking a republican path, acknowledging the authority of the Signoria in the Palazzo Vecchio. Not a soul goes to Lorenzo’s house, and he stays there behind locked doors, seemingly interested only in mercantile affairs, and he goes to the palace only when invited.” Bonatto’s comment recalls Marco Parenti’s description of Piero in 1465, but now, as then, the writer underestimated the resilience and resourcefulness of the Medici. Lorenzo knew that at this early stage of his career an appearance of humility was likely to succeed where a brazen display of power would merely offend. Like Cosimo, he was shre
wd enough to know that authority was often most effectively wielded when least visible. Deferring to the duly elected authorities reassured those who had initially feared placing their fates in the hands of one so young and inexperienced.
How was it that a mere handful of men controlled a government that was almost without precedent in the thoroughness of its democratic impulse?* Though by the standards of modern democracies the franchise was restrictive—open only to those male citizens enrolled in one of the major or minor guilds—those eligible citizens were expected not only to vote but to participate actively in their own government. In theory the political class consisted of the entire citizen body, but by the time of the Medici ascendance the reality was far different. While small-scale merchants like Marco Parenti continued to participate in the political system, real power was closely held by the inner circle of the reggimento. According to Benedetto Dei, whose detailed survey of Florence in the year 1472 is an invaluable resource on issues of political, economic, and cultural concern, the effective government rested in the hands of thirty-four men, with Lorenzo’s and Tommaso Soderini’s names topping the list.†
Some sense of the way a small number of leading citizens worked behind the scenes to run things in Medicean Florence is revealed in a letter written by the Ferrarese ambassador, Niccolò Roberti, a couple of days after Piero’s death: “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, for which purposes his friends will take care to procure him credit and reputation from the beginning. They can easily do so, for they have the government in their hands, and the ballot-boxes at their disposal.” Though this letter reflects the foreigner’s tendency to underestimate the difficulty of imposing order on the notoriously fractious Florentines, it accurately describes the manipulation of the electoral process by which the Medici and their partisans controlled the machinery of government.
Though nowhere officially acknowledged, the reggimento was a palpable reality to Florentines. They knew that real power resided within this somewhat ill-defined group whose function was to steer the ship of state that so often in the past had followed an erratic course. They accomplished this, in part, by agreeing amongst themselves upon a single captain, a position that from Cosimo’s day had been unofficially reserved for the head of the Medici household. While there was nothing inevitable about this choice—which, as we have seen, was often challenged by prominent men who felt they had a better claim—history would prove that only the magic of the Medici name could rally sufficient support. As Roberti reported, the consensus reached at Sant’Antonio was to acknowledge “one lord and superior” in the person of Lorenzo, a decision made more palatable to the ambitious because it was assumed that this inexperienced youth would place himself in their capable hands.
When describing Lorenzo’s rise to power it is always important to keep in mind that the alternative to Medici rule was not democracy as we understand it today, but rather a form of oligarchy in which the self-appointed “worthiest” citizens controlled the great mass of the disenfranchised. Many so-called republicans agreed with Giovanni Cavalcanti’s description of the common people as either “the stupid, crazy mob” or “the brutish masses,” and one of the complaints most frequently leveled at the Medici regime was that they tried to dilute the ranks of the aristocracy with common artisans and new men. In Guicciardini’s Dialogue on the Government of Florence, written a few decades after Lorenzo’s death, Piero Capponi states the case for the opposition: “Our intention was to remove the city from the power of one man and restore liberty, as has been done. It is true that we wanted to avoid giving the government absolutely to the people, but rather to place it in the hands of the leading and worthiest citizens, to make it a government of men of worth rather than a totally popular regime. We did not, however, want to restrict it to so few that it would not be free, nor to slacken the bridle so much that it came into the hands of the masses, with no distinction made between one person and another.”
In fact there is plenty of evidence that Medici rule actually encouraged social mobility as the reggimento co-opted members of the artisan class to serve as a counterweight to the older families who were their most intractable enemies. Bernardo del Nero, another speaker in Guicciardini’s Dialogue, makes the case for Medici rule: “I have enjoyed a very long friendship with the Medici and I am infinitely indebted to that family. Not being of noble birth nor surrounded by relations like you three, I have received favors from them and have been elevated and made equal to all those who would normally have preceded me in being awarded political offices and honors in the city.”* Piero Guicciardini, the historian’s father, analyzing the scrutiny of 1484, wrote that the most humble, having once made a respectable showing in one election, “in another gain something better, according to their ability, or their wealth, and in a short time…they ascend from the lowest level and proceed to the next, always rising, and in their place are succeeded by even newer men to fill up the lowest ranks, and thus continually new men make the grade, and in order to give them a place in the governing class it is necessary to eliminate from it long-established citizens; and that is what is actually done.” Indeed it is just this kind of social mobility that Medici critics found so distasteful, believing that under the current regime the social order had been stood on its head.
Preserving the delicate balance between old and new families, great merchants and simple shopkeepers, required all of Lorenzo’s tact. A few days after his accession to power the Milanese ambassador offered Lorenzo these words of advice: “Among other things [he reported to Duke Galeazzo] I told Lorenzo that he must be able to show the leading citizens that he is of a different nature than his father, who wanted always to show his superiority…and to do it in such a way that others will not feel he has his foot on their throats.” Lorenzo had already expressed similar reservations about Piero’s methods, and announced his intention to “follow his grandfather’s example and use, as much as possible, constitutional methods.” But it was more a matter of style than substance. In the intimate world of Florentine politics success depended on one’s ability to cultivate friendships and soothe easily bruised egos. Piero, a man of many virtues, fell short in those vital interpersonal skills. Lorenzo’s future would depend on his ability to cajole, persuade, mollify, and sometimes play off one ambitious ego against another; it was a role that required an ability to judge the strengths and weaknesses of his rivals, qualities that Lorenzo had learned above all from his grandfather. His long apprenticeship as his father’s right-hand man had given him a keen appreciation of the subtleties of politics in Florence, and throughout that period, principali like Manno Temperani, Rodolfo Pandolfini, and Tommaso Soderini had an opportunity to take their measure of the youth and had determined he was someone they could work with.
Perhaps equally important, they had concluded they could not work with each other, preferring to give supreme power to an untested youth than to one of their rivals. Lorenzo was the beneficiary of the mutual jealousies and suspicions that divided the magnates. It was an inherently unstable situation in which coalitions, quickly formed and quickly broken, constantly threatened the fragile consensus that had lifted Lorenzo to power.
There is no single word to describe Lorenzo’s status. Fifteenth-century Florentines sometimes likened him to a “master of the shop,” a familiar term in a city of craftsmen and merchants. The phrase conveys something of the intimate, informal nature of a relationship between a paternalistic boss and his employees. Like any good master, Lorenzo was expected to run the city for the benefit of all and to know each of his underlings by name. Florentines expected to have a personal relationship with their leaders, and even the man at the top could not avoid being collared on the street by the least of his subjects and forced to listen while they filled his ears with a long list of complaints.
Some modern historians have likened the various heads of the Medici household to Mafia
dons,* ruling the city through terror and intimidation while pocketing profits from their corrupt enterprises. Others eulogize the Medici as altruistic statesmen and patrons of the arts, reluctantly shouldering the burdens of government for the sake of their country—less interested in power than in nurturing masterpieces of art and literature.* Those seduced by the glories of Renaissance Florence often paint too uncritical a picture of the family whose name has become synonymous with enlightened artistic patronage (and even here their behavior was hardly disinterested), but the first analogy is clearly inadequate. Unlike the fictional Don Corleone or Tony Soprano, and resembling even less real-life thugs like John Gotti, the Medici were not bosses of a parasitic organization that leeched off the otherwise healthy body politic. Unofficial parties of the kind they set up were essential to the proper functioning of the government. Without the sinew provided by the Medici and their allies—or by the Albizzi and theirs before them—the government lacked the strength to enforce its legitimate will.
The origins of Florence’s weak constitutional government are to be found in the medieval city. The merchants who had established the commune in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been so concerned about the potential for tyranny that they weakened government institutions to the point of debility—making it easy prey for exactly those would-be tyrants they had feared. Rotating men in and out of office before they had a chance to familiarize themselves with their duties made it difficult for them to seize power, but it also made it next to impossible to develop consistent policies or strategies. Foreign ambassadors and heads of state were driven to despair by a government that could not seem to make up its mind or follow through on a policy once adopted. Sacramoro was only one of many ambassadors who complained about the difficulties of dealing with the Florentine government. In the midst of the Rimini War, when the seriousness of the situation demanded swift action, the proposal to renew the contract of the condottiere Roberto di Sanseverino made its leisurely round from committee to committee with no one apparently willing or able to take responsibility. “Today the proposal went before the Signoria and the Colleges according to their constitution and the council of Twenty,” wrote Sacramoro in frustration, “then it was put before the Council of 100…tomorrow it will be attempted to place it before the Council of the People.”
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