Of course this was not simply a matter of altruistic patriotism, nor were Lorenzo and his forebears above using the instruments of government for their own private gain.* But the insecurity and irregularity of Lorenzo’s position meant that he was more sensitive to changes in public opinion than a monarch whose right to rule was sanctioned by God and tradition. The peculiar nature of Medici power, and the difficulty Florentines had in distinguishing between private interest and the public good, caused no end of perplexities for Lorenzo. Political power, originally built on the foundation of financial power and pursued in order to protect those interests, had gradually taken on a life of its own until the current head of the family was often forced to neglect the very thing that first brought his ancestors to prominence. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, that is, investing ever larger portions of his capital to the cause of shoring up his political fortunes, was a strategy that could not long be sustained and one that gives Lorenzo’s later career the desperate quality of an acrobat juggling too many balls. As the Imola crisis well illustrates, reconciling the needs of the state with those of the bank was a puzzle not even a man as resourceful as Lorenzo could solve.
Thus far the dispute over Imola remained a little more than a minor irritant. Few could have imagined—least of all Lorenzo—that this obscure international incident would touch off a crisis serious enough to threaten not only his regime but his life. Just as the crisis of Volterra fed off internal divisions in Florence, the crisis of Imola would expose deep wounds within the body politic. The rivalries that characterized Florentine society, sometimes suppressed but never completely eradicated, awaited such moments of stress to reassert themselves, often with shocking ferocity, so it is not surprising that there were among the citizens at least a few willing to exploit Lorenzo’s difficulties for their own ends. As Lorenzo flailed this way and that in an attempt to defend the interests of the republic while protecting the assets of the bank, his policy was undercut by another Florentine family, one whose name was even more prominently featured in the storied annals of the republic. This was the ancient and noble family of the Pazzi, a proud and vigorous lineage who saw in Lorenzo’s quarrel with Sixtus the opportunity they had long been seeking to profit from their rival’s troubles and to place themselves once again in their rightful place at the pinnacle of Florentine society.
Workshop of Luca della Robbia, Pazzi Arms, 16th century (Art Resource)
XIII. UNDER THE SIGN OF MARS
“…that noble city, in the province of Tuscany, built under the sign of Mars…”
—DINO COMPAGNI,CHRONICLE OF FLORENCE, BOOK I
“And so it is clear that this life-destroying enmity comes from no other source than the sin of the pagan Florentines themselves who in ancient times worshipped the idol of Mars, since at his feet they committed the murder from which so much evil followed.”
—GIOVANNI VILLANI,CHRONICLE, VI, XXXVIII
When Florentines looked back on their troubled history they located the source of their suffering in an ancient act of betrayal. According to legend, the city had been founded in the century before Christ by the legions of Caesar’s army. At the very heart of the new city, built to guard a narrow crossing of the Arno River, these soldiers raised a temple dedicated to the terrible deity to whom they owed their allegiance—Mars, the Roman god of war. When Christianity displaced the old forms of worship the shrine was not destroyed but simply reconsecrated, this time to that most gentle of men, the desert preacher John the Baptist.*
Like most legends, however, this is not a simple story of a triumphal march from barbarism to enlightenment, but rather a cautionary tale about the dangers of courting and then abandoning the vengeful spirits that inhabit the dark corners of the world. Neglected but not entirely forgotten, the angry god who had been present at the city’s birth still exerted his malevolent influence over future generations. It was he who for centuries set Florentine against Florentine, who saw to it that the streets ran red with blood and that such madness filled the minds of men that whole neighborhoods were put to the torch. Even that most pious of Christians, Dante Alighieri, testified to the ineradicable power of the bloodthirsty deity: “I was of the city that changed for the Baptist its first patron,” he wrote in Inferno, “who for this will always afflict it with his art; and were it not that at the passage of the Arno there yet remains some semblance of him, those citizens who afterwards rebuilt it on the ashes left by Attila would have labored in vain.”
The “semblance” Dante spoke of was the statue of Mars that the citizens, hedging their bets, had moved to the foot of the Ponte Vecchio when the ancient temple was rededicated. From here his doleful countenance witnessed with grim satisfaction one of the most famous murders in Florence’s bloody history:
on Easter morning [wrote Giovanni Villani in his Chronicle], day of our Lord’s Resurrection, the conspirators gathered in the house of the Amidei of Santo Stefano, while approaching from the Oltrarno was messer Buondelmonte, nobly attired in a mantle of spotless white, his palfrey also covered in snow-white cloth, until he reached the foot of the Ponte Vecchio on the near bank, just beside the pillar where stood the statue of Mars. Here, messer Buondelmonte was pulled from his horse by Schiatta delgi Uberti, and set upon by Mosca Lamberti and Lambertuccio degli Amidei who wounded him grievously, and by Oderigo Fifanti who along with one of the counts of Gangalandi cut open his veins and made an end of him. Hearing of the deed, there arose in the city a great commotion and the citizens gathered up their arms. The slaying of messer Buondelmonte was the cause and the beginning of the accursed parties of Guelf and Ghibelline, the sects that divided the noble citizens one against the other, and the cause of the quarrels between those who favored the Church and those who swore allegiance to the Emperor; because of the death of messer Buondelmonte all the noble lineages and other citizens were drawn into the fray, and of those who called themselves Guelfs the Buondelmonti were their leaders, while the Uberti commanded the Ghibellines; from which dissensions our city derived great evil and ruin, as will be shown, evils that will endure forever unless God himself makes an end of it. And so it is clear that this life-destroying enmity comes from no other source than the sin of the pagan Florentines themselves who in ancient times worshipped the idol of Mars, since at his feet they committed the murder from which so much evil followed.
Mars’s baleful influence, however, did not end with the triumph of the Guelfs, who, having defeated their Ghibelline rivals, immediately split into two warring factions whose hatred for each other was every bit as lively as that for their vanquished foes.
Among the most prominent of the lawless feudal clans who turned the streets of Florence into a perpetual battlefield was the ancient and noble Pazzi.* In 1099, Pazzo de’ Pazzi had been the first knight to scale the walls of Jerusalem when Godfrey of Bouillon’s crusading army wrested the holy city from the infidels. As a reward for his bravery Godfrey presented him with a flint chipped from the tomb of Christ in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, a precious relic that Pazzo brought back to his native land as a souvenir of his adventures. It was through a spark struck from this stone that every Easter evening a new flame was kindled on the high altar of the cathedral, a ritual that is still commemorated in Florence with the great fireworks display known as the Carro de’ Pazzi.
Over the centuries, the Pazzi continued to render distinguished service to their city. Pazzo’s descendant Jacopo de’Pazzi carried the banner of the republic at the disastrous battle of Montaperti (1260), when the Florentine army was overwhelmed by their ancient rival, Ghibelline Siena; such was his courage that even after the traitorous Bocca degli Abati lopped off his hands, Jacopo continued to hold high the banner of the red lily with his stumps, loosening his grasp only in death. When a few years later the Black Guelfs reclaimed the city, Jacopo’s son Pazzino rose to the first ranks as a leader of the Blacks.*
But Pazzino, while belonging to the faction that would ultimately emerge victorious in Florence, had no better luck t
han his father. Dino Compagni’s Chronicle provides a compelling account of Pazzino’s demise, and a chilling glimpse into the ghastly carnival of death staged daily in the streets of the medieval city:
Messer Pazzino de’ Pazzi [wrote the fourteenth-century chronicler], one of the four principal leaders of the city, sought peace with the Donati on his own behalf and that of messer Pino de’ Rossi—even though messer Pino bore little guilt for the death of messer Corso, because he had been messer Corso’s good friend and had cared for little else. But the Cavalcanti, who were a powerful family and had about sixty men who could bear arms, nursed a great hatred for these six leading knights who had constrained Folcieri the Podesta to decapitate Masino Cavalcanti. They bore this without any open display.
One day Paffiera Cavalcanti, a very spirited young man, heard that messer Pazzino had gone to the banks of the Arno near Santa Croce with a falcon and just one servant. He mounted his horse with some companions and they went to find him. When messer Pazzino saw them coming, he began to flee towards the Arno. Paffiera, pursuing him, struck him in the kidneys with a lance. He fell in the water, and they cut his veins and then fled towards the Val di Sieve. And so he died miserably.
The Pazzi and Donati armed themselves and ran to the palace of the Priors. They rushed to the Cavalcanti houses in the New Market with the standard of justice and with part of the popolo, and with kindling they set fire to three of the Cavalcanti palaces. Then they turned towards the house of messer Brunetto, believing that he had instigated this deed.
While the Pazzi were inscribing their names in blood on the pages of Florentine history, the first of the Medici began to trickle into the city from their homeland in the Mugello, hoping to take advantage of the booming economy to lift themselves up from their peasant origins. As families like the Medici clambered up the social and economic ladder by engaging in trade and money-lending, the older landed gentry, represented by families like the Pazzi, were rudely shoved aside. It was “new men” like the Medici, with no pedigree but plenty of cash, to whom the future of the city belonged. With a growing sense of their own power and a growing disdain for their social betters, these citizens of middling rank seized the reins of government in the second half of the thirteenth century. Under the so-called Primo Popolo, the First Government of the People (1250), and even more dramatically with the Ordinances of Justice (1293), all power in Florence devolved upon the tradesmen and professionals organized into the trade associations known as arte, or guilds.
Empty honors continued to come to the older magnate families, but they no longer controlled the city as they had in the past. Self-interest might argue in favor of an outward conformity to the new social order, but around the dinner table, in the privacy of their own homes, aristocrats like the Pazzi continued to vent bitterly against a topsy-turvy world in which they were forced to grovel before money-changers and shopkeepers. The Pazzi made themselves particularly obnoxious through their obvious disdain for democratic forces. Such was their reputation for arrogance that in the revolutionary period of 1378 angry mobs sought out the family palace and burned it to the ground.
Throughout their rise to prominence and power the Medici were most closely identified with “the little people,” the artisans and shopkeepers who vied with the great magnates for control of the government. A distant relative of Lorenzo’s, Salvestro de’ Medici, had been one of the leaders of the rebellion of the Ciompi (when the city’s working poor had seized power in the late fourteenth century) and a contemporary noted that Cosimo had triumphed “because the masses had chosen him as their champion and looked on him as a god.” Even after they had been in power for many years, the Medici could not shake the faint whiff of their disreputable past.
It is one of the ironic twists of Florentine history, then, that among the beneficiaries of Medici rule were the aristocratic Pazzi. In 1458, during a period of political tension, Cosimo arranged to have the magnate stigma removed from the Pazzi and other families, thereby allowing them to participate fully for the first time in over a century in the electoral process.* But while the Pazzi and their peers could now serve in office, the political landscape had changed drastically in the intervening years. The polity they rejoined was one in which a single family, supported by a motley assortment of collaborators and hangers-on, some well-born, others plucked by Medici hands from the mass of the great unwashed, held sway in the city. For the Pazzi to take advantage of their newly won privileges they would have to swallow their pride, roll up their sleeves, and get down to the business of making money, a far more useful commodity in Renaissance Florence than an ancient name.
It was Andrea de’ Pazzi who first began to restore the family’s fortunes. As early as 1422 Andrea was actively lobbying the government to have the magnate label removed, assuring his fellow citizens that “since childhood he has been continually involved in mercantile activities and in honest affairs, and he has tried always to imitate the life and the mores of the people.” This was a far cry from his forebears, who prided themselves on their disdain for business. Like the Medici, the Pazzi would make their money primarily as bankers, following them to Rome where they, too, tapped the lucrative market associated with the papal court. The two families did a good deal of business together. In fact Andrea’s principal partner in the Roman branch of the Pazzi bank was none other than Averardo de’ Medici, Cosimo’s cousin. Andrea de’ Pazzi further consolidated his position in Florence’s ruling class by marrying Caterina Salviati, from a respectable family living close-by in the neighborhood of Santa Croce.†
To advertise their restored standing in the city, Andrea’s son Jacopo began construction in 1462 of a palace that would rival that of the Medici on the Via Larga. Located in their traditional neighborhood in San Giovanni, the gonfalone of the Keys, the Pazzi palace was every bit as elegant as the Medici’s. Today one can still see the palace with its distinctive family crest sporting two savage-looking dolphins whose bellicose appearance mars the otherwise serene and harmonious classical facade.
An even more telling sign of the Pazzi’s growing prominence was the erection of a family chapel in the Franciscan basilica of Santa Croce. It was in the family chapel that the aspirations of Florence’s great clans were most fully realized. Here wealth, culture, and piety came together. Here a man served his immortal soul, providing a focus for prayer and place of burial that would ease his passage into heavenly realms, but here, also, he expressed in fullest his civic pride and worldly ambition. The church in which the family chapel was situated became the focus of patronage and a source of identity. Particular families and particular churches would be forever linked in the minds of Florentines: the Medici with San Lorenzo, the Sassetti with Santa Trinità, the Tornabuoni with Santa Maria Novella, and now the Pazzi with Santa Croce.
The family chapel also served as the most visible expression of a patron’s cultivation. In this, as in many other things, Andrea and his children seemed deliberately to be following the lead of the masters of the city, perhaps even trying to do them one better. It was in Andrea de’ Pazzi’s chapel that the architect Brunelleschi created perhaps the finest expression of the Renaissance ideal of measure and harmonious proportion, employing the classical language he had derived from his study of Roman monuments and that he had already used to fine effect in the Medici chapel in San Lorenzo. Delicate arches and vaults traced in the gray stone known to Florentines as pietra serena play off surfaces of pristine white, with bright accents provided at strategic points through terra-cotta reliefs modeled by Luca della Robbia. It is a space that encourages a serenity at odds with the ferocious reputation of the family that built it.*
The kind of competition embodied in the two chapels, the Medici’s at San Lorenzo and the Pazzi’s at Santa Croce, demonstrates that the rivalry among the great clans of Florence could be a creative as well as a destructive force.* The Medici encouraged such expressions of family pride, particularly among their followers, perhaps to serve as an outlet for ambitions that m
ight otherwise turn violent. Renaissance Florence, like ancient Athens, was a society in which clans and individuals fought over the scarce commodity they called honor. “Life without honor is a living death,” wrote the Florentine Piero di Giovanni Capponi, and most of his compatriots would have agreed. Fifteenth-century Florentines would have recognized themselves in Aristotle’s famous description in the Nicomachean Ethics of the motivation for participating in civic life: “People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honor: for this is, roughly speaking, the goal of political life.” And, as in that ancient city that many held up as a model for their own, honor could be obtained not only through political office but through attaching one’s name to some worthy public project. The Parthenon and the Duomo are both expressions of a fiercely competitive ethos in which men vied with each other for the right to spend for the greater glory of the community.
The new palace and chapel at Santa Croce raised the Pazzi profile in the city, and there were many other signs as well that the family was adapting to new circumstances. It was Piero de’ Pazzi’s friendship with the equally cultivated Piero de’ Medici that truly signaled the Pazzi’s embrace by the city’s elite. Friendship became kinship in 1460 with the marriage of Piero de’ Pazzi’s great-nephew, Guglielmo, to Piero de’ Medici’s daughter Bianca. “Had it not been for this friendship between the two Pieros,” notes Vespesiano da Bisticci, “this kinship would never have come to pass; now, by means of it, the Pazzi recovered their position, and were able to meet their taxation, as they would never have done, but for this marriage. It may be said that this alliance restored their house to prosperity.” By means of this match, the Pazzi, who not long before had been excluded from participating in the government, were now familiars in the Via Larga.
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