which had been attained through a variety of causes, by a number of circumstances, but among these by common consent no little credit was due to the industry and virtue of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a citizen so far above the rank of private citizen that all the affairs of the republic were decided by his advice…. Knowing that it would be very dangerous to himself and to the Florentine Republic if any of the larger states increased their power, he diligently sought to maintain the affairs of Italy in such a balance that they might not favor one side more than another.
In pursuing this course Lorenzo was greatly aided by the recent governmental reforms. The establishment of the Eight gave the government, for the first time in its history, a permanent body dedicated to the conduct of foreign policy. The council’s small size allowed it to deal with delicate matters in secret and Lorenzo’s presence gave it enormous clout. It was in concert with the Eight that Lorenzo now began to organize a semiprofessional cadre of diplomats at all the major courts of Europe, a development that made him, perhaps, the best informed of European leaders.
But even with this streamlined organization there was no substitute for Lorenzo’s personal involvement in almost every important foreign policy decision. The relationships Lorenzo had built up over time with various world leaders meant that Florentine interests were taken into account even when her military forces were negligible. These relationships, which he had begun to nurture even before his first trip to Milan in 1465 as he played host to visiting dignitaries in the Via Larga or at the villa of Careggi, in turn depended on maintaining a reputation for integrity and good judgment. It is telling that when the king of France wished to test the possibility of marriage between his heir and a daughter of King Ferrante, he went first to Lorenzo. On another occasion, King Louis, hoping to obtain an ecclesiastical appointment for one of his favorites, recruited Lorenzo to plead his case. Lorenzo duly passed along the request to his ambassador in Rome, adding, “not only do I want your prompt assistance in this, but I wish it known that it was through my help that it was accomplished, since it will greatly enhance my reputation and my honor.”
Lorenzo cultivated his image assiduously. “I believe I have the reputation of being a man of integrity and good faith,” he wrote to his friend Baccio Ugolini, “and I can be believed…as much as anyone in the world, both for sincerity and for being without passion.” Here Lorenzo was not simply boasting (though it is clear he had a high opinion of his own abilities) but reminding his agent to protect his image, which was one of the few effective weapons Florence had in her arsenal.
Throughout the remaining years of his life, Lorenzo’s fame as a mediator continued to grow, but it is at Cremona that he began to stake a claim to being the foremost statesman of the age. Luca Landucci noted with evident satisfaction how at Cremona, Lorenzo was “honorably received as a man of merit,” no trivial matter in the eyes of Florentines, who were always conscious of their lowly bourgeois status in settings where dukes, cardinals, and marquises were wont to lord it over their social inferiors. But in spite of the glowing reviews for Lorenzo’s performance, he did not achieve everything he had hoped for. The assembled dignitaries were impressed by Lorenzo, but his attempts to restore some of the territory lost in the Pazzi war came to nothing. It was also clear that the negotiations could not bring about an immediate cessation of hostilities, since the Venetians, who felt they were near to achieving military success, refused to cooperate. Still, the main objective of driving a wedge between the pope and the Most Serene Republic was easily accomplished. In this case it was not so much Lorenzo’s eloquence that did the trick as fear of growing Venetian power. It was a general rule of Italian politics that when one state seemed poised to dominate the peninsula, the rest forgot their own quarrels to gang up on the pretender. This is what happened at Cremona. Sixtus, showing once again he was not a man for half measures, excommunicated the Venetians when they persisted in their attack on Ferrara and then urged his new friends, Milan, Florence, and Naples, to join him in a Holy League to punish those who had demonstrated their wickedness by ignoring him.
Even with the pope’s defection the war dragged on in desultory fashion until the Peace of Bagnolo finally brought an end to the fighting in August of 1484. Though this time Florence had not suffered the worst of the destruction, the news was received in the City of the Baptist with gratitude, because as Landucci lamented, “Many were afflicted and worn out by so many wars.” After two years of fighting the situation was pretty much as it had been before, causing many to vent their anger at those who had wasted so much blood and treasure to achieve so little. One of those most responsible for the war was now the least satisfied with the results of peace. Upon hearing the terms agreed to at Bagnolo, Sixtus complained bitterly, “Up to this time we have carried on a dangerous and difficult war, in order, by our victorious arms, to obtain an honorable Peace for the security of the Apostolic See, our own honor, and that of the League…. This peace, my beloved sons in Christ, I can neither approve nor sanction.” Fortunately for the rest of Italy, by now Sixtus’s disapproval was beside the point. These belligerent words, which at other times might have condemned Italy to further years of war, were uttered as the pope lay on his deathbed. Still raging at the perfidy of both friend and foe, the man who had sat on St. Peter’s throne for thirteen unlucky years breathed his last on the morning of August 13, 1484. According to a popular couplet it was peace itself that killed Sixtus: “Nothing could daunt the ferocious Sixtus; but as soon as he heard the word of peace, he died.”
For Lorenzo the death of Sixtus closed a particularly unhappy chapter in his life during which he had suffered severe financial reverses, years of war and tribulation, and, most painfully, the loss of his beloved brother Giuliano.* But he was not the only one who felt relief at the pope’s passing. There were many throughout the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula who shared the feelings of the anonymous poet who rejoiced,
Sixtus, at last you’re dead: unjust, untrue, you rest now,
you who hated peace so much, in eternal peace.
Sixtus, at last you’re dead: and Rome is happy,
for, when you reigned, so did famine, slaughter and sin.
Sixtus, at last you’re dead, eternal engine of discord,
even against God Himself, now go to dark Hell.
The crowning of a new pope on September 12, 1484—the Genoa-born Giovanni Battista Cibo, who took the name Innocent VIII—did not resolve the outstanding problems between Florence and Holy See. Florence and Rome remained natural rivals in the struggle to dominate central Italy, and Lorenzo could not single-handedly change the underlying dynamic.* Fortunately for Lorenzo, the fifty-two-year-old Giovanni Battista Cibo was a man of vastly different temperament than his predecessor. When Francesco della Rovere had been elected in 1471, reformers rejoiced that a man of unimpeachable character had ascended the throne of St. Peter. But after more than a decade of turmoil the cardinals may perhaps have felt that they would be better served by someone whose human frailties were more apparent. Innocent, though touchy on matters of papal prerogative, proved far more easygoing than Sixtus—a man more in the mold of Paul II, who cared too much for his own comfort to pursue megalomaniacal schemes of conquest. True, Innocent’s moral weaknesses were an embarrassment to a church in need of moral regeneration, but he was a basically kindly man and his vices were garden-variety sins of a kind that threatened his own immortal soul more than the peace of Italy. Worldly, sensual, and corrupt, he had fathered so many illegitimate children that one satirist jested,
One must give praise, my fellow Romans, to Innocent
as his progeny in the tired motherland grew in number.
Eight bastards and eight maidens did he father;
Innocent will be called father of his country.
In other words this was the kind of man with whom Lorenzo might well be able to do business, given a chance. The Medici had shown themselves adept at turning Paul’s passion for jewels and antiquities to
their advantage and Innocent appeared equally susceptible to the kinds of enticements the Medici could dangle. Much as he would have liked to take the measure of the man himself, however, Lorenzo was too ill to make the journey to Rome, sending in his stead the thirteen-year-old Piero. This was the first important diplomatic mission for Lorenzo’s eldest son and heir, a crucial test for a boy who was already showing signs of the arrogant, self-indulgent man he was soon to become.
Lorenzo’s intense desire to restore himself in the good graces of the pope is evident in instructions contained in a letter he sent to his son in Rome. “[Y]ou will inform His Holiness that I am firmly resolved not to transgress his commands,” he wrote to Piero, “because besides my natural devotion to the Holy See, my devotion to His Beatitude himself arises from many causes and from obligations which ever since I was a child our house has received from him. Add that I have experienced how hurtful it has been to be out of favor with the late Pontiff although, as it seems to me, I was unjustly persecuted rather for others’ sins than for any insult or offense to him of holy memory.” Though Lorenzo’s friendly words did not immediately thaw the pope’s heart, it was the beginning of a campaign that would ultimately bear fruit.
Knowing his son’s character, Lorenzo also felt it necessary to remind him, in words reminiscent of his own father’s injunctions: “Be careful not to take precedence of those who are your elders, for although you are my son, you are but a citizen of Florence, as they are.” It should have come as no surprise that Piero was spoiled. To many Florentines his flaws were carried in his mother’s blood. “What could one hope for from Piero?” asked Guicciardini rhetorically. “Not only did he not have the greatest prudence, as you know; he was also not of that good nature and sweetness [common to] his father and grandfather, and ordinary in our nation. Nor is this any wonder, for being born of a foreign mother, the Florentine blood in him was bastardized. His external comportment was degenerate, and [he was] too insolent and haughty for our way of life.” It did not help that he was a remarkably handsome youth, vain and anxious, as his father had been at his age, to cut a fine figure as he paraded about the streets of Florence. “Lorenzo declares (and it makes me laugh) that he will not have Piero bothered,” wrote Lorenzo’s intimate Matteo Franco, “the poor lad cannot go outside the door without all Florence running after him.” Such constant adulation would have gone to the head of a more sober boy, and there was no indication that Piero had the moral fiber to resist even lesser temptations.
Rather than instilling in him a greater sense of responsibility, Piero’s Roman journey seems instead to have exaggerated his worst traits. This was confirmed on his return when he entered Florence so gaudily outfitted that he ran afoul of the city’s sumptuary laws. One contemporary declared disgustedly that Piero’s arrogant behavior “made the whole city want to throw up.” Lorenzo himself was no more pleased with his son’s tactlessness. Such displays of princely hauteur were exactly the wrong note to strike for a family already suspected of harboring dynastic ambitions. Lorenzo’s anxiety about his son’s character is attested to by the numerous queries he sent to Niccolò Michelozzi (from Bagno a Morba where he was taking the waters). Michelozzi was finally forced to admit, “Piero has not seemed to me the person he was before his departure. He has need of your authority and it is time that you returned to Florence.”
Michelozzi’s plea to Lorenzo to assert his paternal authority is a reminder of Lorenzo’s transformation over the past few years from the brash, irresponsible youth to the sober first citizen of the state—a man who could claim a place alongside his grandfather as not only pater familias but as Pater Patriae. The change was partly institutional, codified in the legislation of 1481 that increased his official role within the state, but also emotional and symbolic, expressed through visible signs and gestures that were always carefully scrutinized in the theatrical arena of Florentine politics. The transformation of his public persona also had deeper psychological roots. Lorenzo himself had returned from Naples a changed man. The anxiety and sorrow of that period had aged him both in mind and body. One of his assistants, Francesco di ser Barone, recorded an extended bout of depression in the summer of 1483 during which he could leave his house only through the greatest effort of will. As Lorenzo himself admitted, he never recovered from the trauma of the Pazzi conspiracy. He felt more isolated as even once trusted friends fell under a cloud of suspicion, and his natural enjoyment of life was often consumed in extended periods in which he preferred to wallow in self-pity.* “We promised in the prologue,” he wrote in his Commento,
that when we came to the exposition of this sonnet, we would tell how great and wicked was the persecution that I bore at that time both from Fortune and from men. But nevertheless I am disposed to pass over this very briefly, to avoid being called proud or vainglorious, since reporting one’s own and serious dangers can hardly be done without presumption or vainglory…. And therefore we shall briefly say that the persecution had been very serious, because the persecutors were most powerful men of great authority and intelligence, and they purposed and were firmly disposed to accomplish my utter ruin and desolation, as demonstrated by their having attempted in every way possible to harm me. I, against whom these actions were taken, was a young private person without any counsel and with no help except for that which from day to day Divine benevolence and clemency administered to me. I was reduced to a state that, being at one and the same time afflicted in my soul with excommunication, in my mental powers with rapine, in my government with diverse stratagems, in my family and children with new treachery and machinations, and in my life with frequent and persistent plots, death would have been no small grace for me, being much less an evil to my taste than any of those other things.
The strain of those years also seemed to have undermined his health. As an adolescent his robust, athletic physique had been proof against the family ills, but the physical ailments from which he had always suffered now threatened to overwhelm him. Gout, which had afflicted Cosimo as an elderly man and his father in middle age, seemed to be stealing from Lorenzo the prime of his life. When he returned from Naples in March of 1480, he was still only thirty-one. But already, excruciating pain in his lower joints forced Lorenzo to curtail the vigorous physical activity he loved, while chronic eczema and asthma added to the daily discomforts of life. When he traveled to the country, instead of rising early for the hunt he sat huddled by the fireplace to ward off the chill that aggravated the aches in his joints; even the palace in the city proved too drafty for comfort. His normal joie de vivre was replaced by stoic endurance, though even when he was laid up he found ways to pass the time. “[T]oday,” wrote one well-informed observer, “the Magnificent Lorenzo didn’t leave his house, since his gout assaulted him. But he gambled and amused himself in the usual way.” Letters from the most famous physicians of Europe attest to his ever more desperate attempts to find some relief. In addition to the conventional remedies—bleeding, purging, the consumption of various mineral waters, and the application of poultices—Lorenzo was willing to try ever more far-fetched solutions. “In order to prevent the return of these pains,” advised one physician, “you must get a stone called sapphire, and have it set in gold, so that it should touch the skin. This must be worn on the third finger of the left hand. If this is done the pains in the joints, or gouty pains, will cease, because that stone has occult virtues, and the specific one of preventing evil humors going to the joints.”
Apparently such bizarre remedies did little to ease his torment since Lorenzo continued to make more frequent and more extended trips to the medicinal spas that dotted the southern Tuscan countryside. Lorenzo’s poor health also had political consequences. His absences meant that legislation was often delayed and diplomatic correspondence left unattended. The government was frequently thrown into confusion while couriers fanned out across the landscape trying to track down the peripatetic lord of the city.* And even when his whereabouts were discovered he usually had little
patience for conducting business. In 1485, while recovering at Bagno a Morba from a debilitating flare-up of gout, he chastised his secretary, Michelozzi, explaining “in order to cure himself and to restore his health he neither could nor would attend to any other matter.”
It is not surprising that these assorted ailments affected his mood. Sometimes he responded to these setbacks with self-deprecating humor, as in August 1489 when he wrote to Giovanni Lanfredini, “my having been ill these days with some leg pain means I have not written you; though the feet and tongue are far apart, one can still get in the way of the other.” More often, though, pain increased his natural irritability. Accustomed to vigorous exercise to improve his mood, Lorenzo now found himself betrayed by an unreliable and increasingly frail body. After 1480 he more often succumbed to his natural tendency to melancholy; the playfulness that had characterized him as a young man was less apparent while flashes of his always fearsome temper became more frequent. Victims of these withering attacks included not only his household intimates but his colleagues. His impatience with the foolishness of others and assumption that he always knew best meant that he was increasingly surrounded by yes-men who feared making decisions on their own. As Machiavelli noted, even as a young man “he wanted to have a say in everything, and he wanted everybody to acknowledge himself his debtor in almost every particular.” This characteristic only grew stronger with time.
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