Magnifico

by Miles J. Unger

  But for all Andrea’s pragmatism and Piero de’Pazzi’s fine manners, one cannot help but feel that something was yet amiss with this family that had once stood at the forefront of the nobility but that now had to play second fiddle to the parvenu Medici. Francesco Guicciardini certainly detected what he considered their fatal flaw: “But although the Pazzi were Florentine nobles with many family connections,” he wrote, “and although the men of that family were magnificent and generous, they nevertheless had never enjoyed much political power, for they were considered too high and mighty—something which men in a republic will not tolerate.”

  Even more intriguing than the historian’s retrospective analysis are Alessandra Strozzi’s contemporaneous comments. A letter she wrote to her son in 1461 includes one of her typically astute observations: “Yesterday Piero de’ Pazzi entered the city in great triumph and magnificence, more than any other knight in recent times. You shouldn’t place much stock in this, however; for in Florence they always show one thing and then do another.” Near the end of the letter she made this startlingly prescient dig: “Remember, according to what I have observed, that he who sticks with the Medici has always done well, while with the Pazzi it is always the opposite—they are let down.”

  Hints of an incipient rivalry between the two families are tantalizing, though one has to sift the evidence carefully to discover traces of a bitterness that remained deliberately hidden from view. Later accounts, like that of Niccolò Valori, give events the quality of a Greek tragedy: “There was in Florence in those days a family, the Pazzi, who had grown most powerful, both because of their incomparable riches and because they were related through ties of blood and marriage to most of the city’s nobility. And as often happens among the great, they, wishing to alter the state of things, set themselves against the house and family of the Medici; they thought of nothing but of how to diminish the authority and supremacy of Lorenzo.”

  But at the time the antipathy of the two great families was harder to discern. As a teenager Lorenzo was close with his brother-in-law Guglielmo, but he seems to have regarded the family with suspicion, particularly old Jacopo, who had succeeded his father, Andrea, as the family patriarch. According to Machiavelli, Jacopo and his relatives felt insufficiently honored by the regime, though, at least in the case of Jacopo, it was as much a matter of perception as reality. In 1468, after serving as Gonfaloniere di Giustizia, Jacopo was knighted by Tommaso Soderini for services rendered to the republic. But despite this mark of official favor there are indications that Lorenzo made sure that Jacopo never rose to a position from which he could pose a real threat. During the attempted reforms of 1471, Lorenzo’s friends had advised him to exclude Jacopo and his followers from the new Balìa, treating them as if they were “mezo amoniti,” that is, half excluded from office. But the Pazzi were already so prominent that they could not be completely cut off without stirring up the resentment of other aristocratic clans. Lorenzo’s advisors proposed replacing Jacopo’s name with another, more pliant member of the family. “[T]hey will put in his place his relative Guglielmo instead of the said Jacomo [sic] to his greater discomfiture,” reported Sacramoro. Ultimately, however, Lorenzo decided not to oppose Jacopo’s nomination to the all-important council, explaining to the Milanese ambassador that one man could do him little harm.

  In other words, Lorenzo would do as he so often did with families with the wealth and prestige to offer a legitimate alternative to Medici rule: he would draw their fangs by heaping them with meaningless honors while at the same time restricting their access to real power. Benedetto Dei lists Jacopo as one of the leading men of the government but relegates him to the “second tier.”

  Aiding Lorenzo in this difficult juggling act was the fact that each of the prominent families of the regime was as jealous of each other as they were of the Medici themselves. Lorenzo pursued a cautious course with Jacopo de’ Pazzi, allowing him to serve on occasion in honorable positions but never giving him a central role in the government to which he felt his wealth and status entitled him.* Unlike their peers, however, the Pazzi chafed against the invisible yoke that kept them in their place. Jacopo was so frustrated that he considered abandoning the city for Avignon, a threat made but never carried out.

  The competitive world of business offered more opportunities for conflict. In the 1440s, the Pazzi bank had been one of the few sufficiently trusted by the Medici to be extended unlimited credit, but in more recent decades the Pazzi had become competitors rather than collaborators. As the Pazzi bank continued to prosper in Rome, it became the principal rival to the Medici; managers of the two banks vied for accounts and for favors from the papal court. The Pazzi made significant inroads into the Medici’s once unassailable position at the Vatican, and in the mercantile towns of Bruges and Lyons the Pazzi threatened to overtake the more established bank.

  The rivalry only sharpened when Guglielmo’s younger brother Francesco left Florence to take over management of the Roman branch. Francesco’s departure, like his grandfather’s threatened departure for Avignon, was a form of self-imposed exile prompted by the daily humiliation of living in Florence under the Medici. “He was incredibly angry that the Medici outshone him,” wrote Angelo Poliziano, who knew him well. “He spent some years at the Pazzi bank in Rome, for he felt that in Florence he had no standing compared to the Medici brothers.”

  Though one should take Poliziano’s description of Francesco de’ Pazzi with a pinch of salt because when Poliziano wrote he had good reason to hate him, his is still the most vivid contemporary portrait of the man who was to bring the Medici family and regime to the brink of disaster. “His stature was short, his body slender, and his color pale,” he recalled. “He had blond hair, which he was overly concerned to keep well groomed. The mannerisms of his face and body revealed his prodigious insolence, and his great efforts, especially in first encounters, to cover this up were not very successful. He was a bloodthirsty person, besides, and the sort who, once he desired something in his heart, would go after it undeterred by considerations like honor, piety, fame, or reputation.”

  According to Lorenzo’s friend, Francesco de’ Pazzi was also “naturally stubborn” and had “grown fixed in his passion and his arrogance.” He was, in other words, a typical representative of the family, sharing “the peculiar Pazzi irascibility to a surprising extent.” Biased as his account surely is, it has the ring of truth, particularly since it conforms with the few known facts of his short, violent career. Guicciardini’s more measured description of Francesco—“a very restless, spirited, and ambitious man” he called him—still suggests someone seething with barely suppressed rage.

  An intriguing insight into Francesco’s character comes from the pen of another poet, Luigi Pulci. His references to Francesco’s role in the joust of 1468, while more oblique than Poliziano’s since they are disguised by the conventions of chivalry, are all the more suggestive for having been written at a time when the Pazzi and Medici were still closely allied. Pulci’s epic poem reveals that years before his open breach with Lorenzo the two had met on the field of battle. Even Pulci’s flowery language cannot conceal the ferocious spirit that drove the diminutive “little Francesco” to deeds beyond his physical abilities. It was he who dealt Lorenzo such a blow during his joust that he not only unhorsed him but caused his friends such concern that they almost called off the tournament. And, if Pulci is to be believed, of all the competitors that day it was only Francesco who felt cheated, “believing that Fortune did him a thousand wrongs.” It must have been galling to a Pazzi that while he received little recognition for his feat, the man he sent sprawling into the dust walked away with the trophy.

  It was not just Lorenzo’s undeserved victory that stuck in Francesco de’ Pazzi’s craw. Ceremonial events like this were intended to make visible through glorious pageantry the pecking order in the city, and it was clear to those who watched from the grandstands that the Pazzi were but one of many minor satellites in the great
family’s orbit. Thus it would always be in Florence, Francesco concluded, as long as the Medici lived. Even Francesco’s older brother had allowed himself to be drawn inside the magic circle, until Guglielmo could be seen tagging along in Lorenzo’s train like any other servant or bootlick. Francesco was made of different stuff; he was no toady born to bow and scrape. In Rome, whence he now fled, the Medici writ was no longer law. In the Eternal City he no longer had to hold his tongue while the Medici and their hangers-on strode about the streets like young princelings. In Rome he would not be reminded at every turn of how his once proud family had to scrounge for crumbs from the Medici table. And, not least of all, in Rome, he was in a position to hurt his rivals where it counted.

  At first Pazzi’s rivalry expressed itself in perfectly legitimate ways. Despite his volatile temper, he was a shrewd businessman and through his efforts the Pazzi bank in Rome prospered. In boldness and energy he proved more than a match for the cautious and cantankerous Giovanni Tornabuoni. While Tornabuoni fretted over the growing debt run up by the pope, Pazzi was ingratiating himself with the papal family. Soon he could be seen in the company of Girolamo Riario, a man whose star was on the rise and whose influence over his uncle was growing. To what extent Pazzi’s profits were made at the Medici’s expense is unclear, but it is perhaps no coincidence that in the very years that the Medici branch began its steep decline the Pazzi branch was moving in the opposite direction.

  If the rivalry between the two banks went beyond the usual competition of two firms vying for a single market, Lorenzo himself showed no signs of apprehension. Indeed the Medici bank’s troubles, which grew increasingly apparent throughout the 1470s, took a back seat in his mind to political matters. Many decisions Lorenzo made regarding the bank were in fact driven by political necessity, a complicating factor that never bothered the Pazzi. Consider, for instance, the Medici bank in Milan, which seemed to have little purpose except to supply luxuries to the ducal court. Even as the debts run up by the duke and his entourage threatened to swamp the bank, Lorenzo felt he could not shut it down for fear of alienating his friend and political ally. He faced a similar predicament in regard to the pope’s account in Rome.* By the time of the Imola crisis, Lorenzo found himself pulled so hard in opposite directions by political and financial imperatives that the entire Medici empire threatened to burst at the seams.

  The Pazzi were well aware of the precariousness of Lorenzo’s position. In fact, Francesco de Pazzi’s cousin Renato claimed that they need only wait a few years for Lorenzo’s financial troubles to lead to the collapse of the bank, which, inevitably, would be followed by a loss of power in Florence. In cozying up to the pope and his relatives, Pazzi was doing his best to hasten that happy day.

  It was the crisis over Imola that brought the rivalry between the two families out into the open. Up to this point Lorenzo had treated the Pazzi like any other potential rival, permitting them to accumulate minor honors while denying them any real share in power. On the business front, his policy of containment was far less successful. Lorenzo’s defiance of the pope provided Francesco de’Pazzi and the Pazzi bank the opportunity they had been looking for to reverse the course of history. “Lorenzo asked [the Pazzi] not [to] supply the money,” wrote Francesco Guicciardini, “for if the pope could not buy it, Imola would come into our hands. But soon afterward, they provided the pope with 30,000 [sic] ducats for the purchase, and they revealed to him and to Count Girolamo the request Lorenzo had made.” By this single move Pazzi not only earned Pope Sixtus’s gratitude, but, equally important, exposed the extent to which Lorenzo had been working against the Holy Father. In Rome, Francesco de’ Pazzi’s stock soared, while Lorenzo’s plummeted.

  After Andrea del Verrocchio, Bust of Lorenzo il Magnifico, 1478 (National Gallery of Art)

  XIV. CONSPIRACY

  “But after the victory of ’66, the whole state had been so restricted to the Medici, who took so much authority, that it was required for those who were malcontent at it either to endure that mode of living with patience or, if indeed they wanted to eliminate it, attempt to do so by way of conspiracy and secretly.”

  —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI,FLORENTINE

  HISTORIESVIII, 1

  “The Count [Girolamo], who regarded Lorenzo as his great and secret enemy, was at the time on the most intimate terms with Francesco de’ Pazzi; wherefore he explained to him what he had in mind, and the two conferred with Francesco Salviati, who was likewise ill disposed towards Lorenzo whom he blamed for denying him the archbishopric of Pisa.”

  —NICCOLÒ VALORI,LIFE OF LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO

  GIROLAMO RIARIO AND FRANCESCO DE’ PAZZI WERE NOT the kind of men one would expect to strike up an intimate friendship. Both were wealthy and powerful, but they had come to prominence following very different paths, and in a society attuned to every nuance of culture, breeding, and pedigree, the gulf between them might in normal circumstances have proved unbridgeable. Girolamo carried himself with all the ostentation of someone only recently vaulted into the first ranks of society—the epitome of the parvenu. His clothes were of the finest silk brocade, his manicured fingers sparkled with gold and gemstones. Francesco, small, pale, and filled with a nervous energy, dressed with the understated elegance of one with nothing to prove. One had been born into an obscure family from a provincial fishing village, a former customs clerk who owed his high position to the talents and energy of his uncle; when he spoke it was in the harsh, untutored syllables of the Ligurian coast where he was born. The other was the bluest of blue bloods, an aristocrat intensely conscious of his family’s contribution to the glorious history of Europe’s most glittering and cultured metropolis.

  Despite the difference in upbringing, they did share one distinctive trait—a prickly sense of their own honor that made them quick to anger and incapable of forgetting an insult. They both were ambitious and intemperate men who tended to view political rivals as mortal enemies. This natural affinity was greatly enhanced by the fact that each felt he had been wronged by the same man—Lorenzo de’ Medici, the tyrant of Florence. A common hatred proved a strong inducement to overlook other differences.

  Precisely when their anger, rising with each new sign of Lorenzo’s deviousness, crystallized into a more definite plan of action is not known. The Imola affair was certainly the prime catalyst, focusing their anger and drawing them closer together, but it is likely that their thinking evolved slowly over the course of months or even years. As outrage followed outrage, the two reached a critical point where it seemed to them that the only solution to their troubles lay in the murder of the Medici brothers and the overthrow of their regime. Niccolò Valori, writing a few decades after the events, claimed it was Riario who first hit upon assassination as the method most likely to achieve their ends, while Guicciardini credited Pazzi.* Most plausibly, Machiavelli gives them both an equal share in the conception of the plot: “And since he [Francesco] was very friendly with Count Girolamo, they often complained to one another of the Medici: so after many complaints they came to the reasoning that it was necessary, if one of them was to live in his states and the other in his city securely, to change the state of Florence—which they thought could not be done without the deaths of Giuliano and Lorenzo.”

  For Riario the elimination of the Medici brothers was a pressing, practical matter. As long as they reigned in Florence, Riario’s fledgling state in the Romagna would be threatened with extinction, squeezed as if between two millstones by the powerful states of Milan and Florence. Riario was haunted by the specter of his elderly uncle’s death, at which time, as he confessed to one of his co-conspirators, “his state would not be worth a bean, because Lorenzo de’ Medici wished him ill, nor did he believe that there was a man in the world who wished him greater ill; and that after the death of the Pope he would not seek anything less than to rob from him his state and finish him off because he felt he had received many injuries from his hands.”

  Pazzi’s motives were at once more pe
rsonal and more abstract. It enraged him to see the Medici receive princes and emperors at their palace on the Via Larga while his more ancient family was left in the shadows. As long as Lorenzo lived, Pazzi would be forced to grovel at his feet or endure the ghostly existence of a rootless exile. Like many frustrated politicians, he transformed his personal disappointment into an ideological crusade.

  Though the unfolding plot has long been referred to as the Pazzi conspiracy, suggesting it was Francesco who took the lead, neither could have done without the other: Riario, one of the most powerful figures at the papal court, had connections and access to money and military muscle, while Francesco de’ Pazzi possessed an insider’s knowledge of Florentine government and, vitally, personal access to the Medici brothers. Pazzi’s hatred of Lorenzo, like his pedigree, was of older vintage—one might say it predated his birth since the chip on the collective Pazzi shoulder went back generations—but Riario’s feelings were no less virulent for their recent origin. Ultimately, Riario comes across as the more calculating of the two, spinning his web from the comfort and safety of Rome, while Pazzi, driven by fantasies of vengeance and of a hero’s martyrdom, would prove himself both more courageous and more reckless.

  From the beginning the conspirators were faced with a major structural difficulty—the lack of meaningful Florentine involvement. The contrast with 1466 is telling: while in that earlier coup the main instigators were Florentines at the highest level of government, men whose faces, characters, and reputations were familiar to the citizens of the city, none of the original Pazzi conspirators was well known or well liked in the community. Francesco, though native-born and from a prominent family, had lived abroad for so many years that he was practically a stranger in his own hometown. Worse still, his recent involvement in the Imola affair had angered his compatriots. Even those ideologically opposed to Medici rule would have a hard time accepting “liberty” from the likes of Francesco de’ Pazzi. Riario was even less acceptable to a Florentine public that bridled at the slightest hint of outside interference in their affairs. However distorted their notions of Florentine opinion, Riario and Pazzi knew that a more respectable, more Florentine, face must be put on the undertaking.