His sense of isolation was magnified by the death of his mother in March of 1482. “Still burdened with tears and sorrow,” Lorenzo wrote to Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara, “I cannot but inform Your Excellency of the grievous death of my most beloved mother, Madonna Lucrezia, who today departed this life. I am more unhappy than I can say, because in addition to losing a mother, the mere thought of which breaks my heart, I have lost someone who lifted from me many a care.” Lorenzo had always thrived under the nurturing care of the women in his life, but with Lucrezia gone he lost a vital female presence in his life. Clarice, it was true, was a devoted wife—far more patient with him than he probably deserved—but she lacked the understanding of the ways of the world that could help Lorenzo significantly in his public role.
To both friends and enemies alike Lorenzo appeared a far different person than he had been only a few short years ago. Those who had worried that he was not ready to take over from his father had been reassured by his strong, steady hand at the rudder. Complaints, in fact, were now far more likely to come from those who felt his hand was all too firmly steering the ship of state. His evolving role required changes in the way he presented himself to the people, particularly given the fact that he was still a relatively young man in a society with an inborn mistrust of youth. Shortly after taking over from his father, Gentile Becchi had advised him “to seem older in appearance, in dress, and in habits,” and Lorenzo now put this advice into practice every day. He no longer tried to be the center of attention on ceremonial occasions, putting aside the armor, jewels, and silk brocade of his joust and adopting instead the less glamorous lucco, the crimson mantle denoting a man of substance.* He also understood that behavior tolerated in an adolescent would not so easily be forgiven in the leading man of the republic, a role that required him to set an example for his fellow citizens.
Some of the change, however, was more apparent than real. As a young man of twenty-two his carousing had become such a scandal that his old tutor rebuked him for “behaving disgracefully with women and engaging in frivolities that shame those who must have dealings with you by day.” It is difficult to imagine Becchi or anyone else speaking to him this way after his return from Naples. This is not to say that Lorenzo had decided to deny himself the diversions to which he had grown accustomed, but only that he had learned to be more discreet. In fact he justified his philandering, and the poetry inspired by his sexual adventures, on the grounds that he needed to relieve the tensions brought on by the burdens under which he labored. “Being then placed by Fortune in this darkness, among such great shadows, sometimes the amorous ray, now of the eyes, now of the thought of my lady, brought light,” he confessed. That these amorous adventures were more than a literary conceit is suggested by Francesco Guicciardini, who passed along the common gossip of the time: “His last love, which lasted for many years, was for Bartolomea de’ Nasi, wife of Donato Benci. Though she was not beautiful, she was gracious and charming, and he was so obsessed with her that one winter when she was in the country he would leave Florence at the fifth or sixth hour of the night on horseback with several companions to go and see her, and would start back so early that he was in Florence again by morning.”
These nocturnal journeys added to his exhaustion, particularly since his daytime duties had not diminished with the return of peace.* Gone was the careless swagger of his youth when a misplaced faith in his own powers caused him to dismiss out of hand rumored plots against his life. Challenges to his authority that would once have been shrugged off were now met with savage force. Some of these fears were well founded: between October of 1481 and March of 1482 alone, three new plots on his life were uncovered with savage efficiency by the vigilant Eight of the Watch, the most serious of which involved two Florentines from well-known families armed with poisoned daggers.† The need for vigilance took its toll. He became wary of colleagues and more guarded in his friendships. The twelve-man bodyguard that now surrounded him as he made his way through the streets of the city was merely the outward manifestation of an inner darkness.
The easy give-and-take with the people of Florence that had been an important element in his charismatic rule was replaced by an increasing distance and formalized ritual. It is significant that at this time even his closest intimates, including Gentile Becchi and his uncle Giovanni Tornabuoni, stopped using the familiar tu and started employing the formal voi in their correspondence. This transformation, subtle as it was, ran against the grain of Florentine history. The people of the republic demanded that their leaders respect the forms of the city’s traditions even when they eviscerated the substance. Cosimo had recognized this and his apparent modesty in dress and habits was an important ingredient in his success. In his youth Lorenzo had been careful to maintain that delicate balance between his role as citizen and as the glamorous prince of the city, but after 1480 the need to avoid offending the sensibilities of his fellow Florentines diminished while his willingness to assert his authority in its rawest form increased.
While he remained attuned to Florentine sensibilities—as his displeasure with Piero’s tactlessness demonstrates—he was not shy about the blunt exercise of power. One particularly well-documented event that provides a glimpse into Lorenzo’s methods is the general scrutiny of 1484, the latest of those periodic surveys to determine which citizens were eligible for political office. Here Lorenzo’s fingerprints are clearly visible in almost every aspect of the complicated procedure. According to Piero Guicciardini (the historian’s father, who was a member of the scrutiny council), “the first list was drawn up by Lorenzo and Ser Giovanni [Giusti] alone,” and Lorenzo continued to pull strings to achieve the desired result at every step along the way. But Guicciardini’s account, for all that it reveals about the way Lorenzo was able to interject himself into the electoral process, does not support the claim that he was the tyrant of Florence in all but name. Lorenzo, in fact, had to tread carefully, balancing the claims of ancient, aristocratic families with those of the new men, members of the greater guilds with those of the lesser, even diluting the ranks of his supporters by including known opponents—and all the while keeping in mind the myriad political debts he had to repay. Though Florence was far from a perfect democracy, the constant horse-trading and negotiation involved in the scrutiny reveals the survival of a lively political process.
Contemporaries offers vivid, if sometimes contradictory, glimpses of an influence that was pervasive but never absolute. Florentines employed various imprecise terms to convey the nature of their relationship to the first citizen. They called Lorenzo maestro della bottega (master of the shop) and sometimes simply il padrone, the boss. Unlike the first term, which emphasizes the benevolent, paternalistic nature of his role, the second conveys a certain toughness appropriate to those less squeamish times. It conjures up gangs of enforcers roaming the streets, of rough justice meted out in dark allies, of secret torture cells in the palace of the Podestà, of bruises and broken bones. This is not an entirely inaccurate picture. There is no doubt that Lorenzo, backed by the secretive Eight of the Watch (not to be confused with the Otto di Pratica, which conducted foreign affairs), intimidated his opponents. “That office,” explained Guicciardini, “had been created long ago and given great authority in criminal affairs. In its judgments, though not in its procedure, it was subject to the laws and statutes of the city; but in crimes concerning the state it had free and absolute powers, beyond all laws. This freedom had been given to it by the men who were in power back at that time, in order to have a stick in their hands with which to strike down those who wanted to criticize or overthrow the government.” But Guicciardini, while uneasy about the Eight’s unrestrained power, believed they were a necessary evil, concluding: “Although its origin, then, was in violence and tyranny, it turned out to be a most salubrious measure. For, as anyone expert in the affairs of this country knows, nobody could live in Florence if evil minds were not restrained through fear of the Eight—a fear born of their promptnes
s in finding out and punishing crimes.”
It is clear that Renaissance Florentines, like Americans today, struggled to find the right balance between security on the one hand and civil liberties on the other, and though there were many who applauded the strongarm tactics of the government, there were perhaps an equal number who feared that their ancient liberties were under assault. Many Florentines noted the chilling effect of Lorenzo’s network of spies and informers and waxed nostalgic for an earlier age, only partly imagined, when Florentines were free to speak their minds. But some of the disaffection was less a matter of basic principles than disagreement over who should wield the club and who should receive the blows. Many of those who criticized Lorenzo, for instance, would not have hesitated to use the most brutal means to suppress any impoverished worker who had the temerity to strike for higher wages.
Lorenzo ruled Florence with a firm hand but, as Guicciardini suggests, Florentines, particularly after the revolt of the Ciompi in the mid-fourteenth century, generally preferred authoritarian rule to chaos. This was an age when violence, both criminal and state-sponsored, was commonplace. Luca Landucci records the hanging of a man for the crime of removing silver ornaments from a statue of the Virgin and the execution of a Venetian accused of stealing a few florins off a money-changer’s table. In a society where torture was routinely practiced in the city jails and where brutal executions were carried out for relatively minor offenses, the tactics Lorenzo used against his political enemies were unremarkable. The ambassador from Ferrara recalled one striking scene in which Lorenzo faced down an angry crowd intent on saving the life of a young man who had killed one of the servants of the Eight. To those who begged for clemency
[Lorenzo] offered them consoling words, but then saw to it that the man was hanged in the piazza, dangled from the window of the Podestà’s palazzo. He then commanded that four of those who had been shouting “Escape! Escape!” be seized and each given four strappados, after which they were banished from the city for four years. This was how the mutiny was put down, and at no point did the Magnificent Lorenzo want to leave the scene until he saw that the crowd had calmed down.
Nowhere is there a suggestion that Lorenzo had acted improperly; indeed the ambassador seems to admire his courage in confronting the dangerous mob and defusing their anger. Evidence suggests that if his fellow citizens were inclined to criticize Lorenzo in such matters it was because he was sometimes perceived as being too lenient. Alamanno Rinuccini, for instance, complained that men “condemned by the Committee of the Eight to perpetual imprisonment are removed from jail on the whim of a private person, or rather of a tyrant.”
Unlike modern democracies with their anonymous bureaucracies and mass media, Florence was a state in which all politics depended on personal relationships. If his father’s authority suffered because of his inability to get along with his fellow oligarchs, Lorenzo owed much of his success to what we today would call “people skills.” Without the support of a working majority within the reggimento, an inner circle consisting of forty or fifty men from prominent families, Lorenzo could not have dominated the state.* Behind each of these men, in turn, lay a dense but largely invisible web of mutual obligation, of clients and patrons, of debts owed and debts paid, of loyalties going back generations and tied to neighborhoods and to rural homesteads, that formed the basis of his standing in the community. Lorenzo, as the uncrowned head of state, could not stand aloof from politics at this grassroots level. Indeed, as his power increased, more and more of the patronage upon which the Florentine political system floated now streamed through the Via Larga.
In 1465 one of the signs of his father’s political jeopardy was the dwindling crowd outside his palace and the growing throng outside Luca Pitti’s. Lorenzo never had to worry that the entrance to his house would be deserted. As the preeminent figure in the government he was constantly hounded by office-seekers and petitioners, as well as those in need of advice on business or personal matters. Some of those filling the courtyard and anterooms of the palace came because they genuinely valued Lorenzo’s wisdom, but many came out of fear of offending the powerful boss of the city. A vivid account of Lorenzo’s modus operandi was left by Tribaldo de’ Rossi, a businessman who owned a small copper mine in the countryside. Fearing his isolated property was an easy target for roaming bandits, he wished to place himself under the great man’s protection. “It occurred to me to reveal [the existence of the mine] only to Lorenzo de’ Medici,” he wrote, “and not to trust a single other father’s son, and to commend myself freely to him, in his hands only.” After collaring Lorenzo’s assistant, Ser Piero da Bibbiena, in the cathedral one day, he managed to extract an invitation to meet with Lorenzo at his palace.† But when he arrived he found “such a large group of citizens waiting to talk to him” that he was forced to return home. His second attempt, six days later, was only slightly more satisfactory. “Lorenzo put on his coat and came down into the courtyard and gave audience,” Tribaldo recalled.
Ser Piero told me repeatedly to stay close to him, and that he would tell [Lorenzo] I was there, [we] being at the gate of the courtyard leading out [into the street]. Then ser Piero showed me to [Lorenzo]. Lorenzo called to me. I began to tell him: “I gave ser Piero the sample of copper…” And I had just said a little, and we were going hand in hand together up to the gate of the palace on the street side, when Lorenzo said to me: “Let me give audience to them”—for there were more than forty citizens there—“and then you will come with me.” With that I removed myself down the street a few steps.
The situation was clearly frustrating for the petitioner, but how much more taxing for Lorenzo, who could not leave his house without running a gauntlet of needy citizens. His writ extended from the courthouse to the bedchamber. No prominent citizen who hoped to climb the social ladder could think of marrying off his daughter without first consulting Lorenzo. “In making marriages you should incline towards citizens who are in the reggimento,” advised Giovanni Morelli in his memoirs. “You should always attach yourself to those who have influence in the halls of government and in the Signoria.” While some citizens, like Lorenzo’s great-grandfather Giovanni di Bicci, preferred to avoid political entanglements, most took this advice to heart. Thus, for instance, when Averardo Salviati wished to find a husband for his daughter, he first sought out Lorenzo. The father of the bride first suggested the groom—Filippo, son of Bartolomeo Valori, an ally of Lorenzo’s—but it was Lorenzo who made the arrangements and set the dowry (at 2,000 florins). The term “father of his country,” originally applied to Cosimo, became almost literal with Lorenzo. “No one so much as moves a piece of paper without the consent of the Master,” wrote a foreign observer.*
Politics in Florence, as Lorenzo understood as well as anyone, was not confined to the Palace of the Priors. It shaped every human transaction in the city, from the social networks of neighbors built around the local parish church to more mercenary arrangements involving the exchange of financial or political favors. Neither the great merchants, who kept an anxious watch on the gyrations of tax policy, nor the poorest of the poor, who depended on the charity distributed by religious confraternities that were often political parties in disguise, were above the fray. The authority Lorenzo wielded in the Palazzo della Signoria radiated outward into the streets and piazzas of the city, and beyond the walls to the various communes subject to Florentine rule, through the kind of retail politicking that we see in the cases of Tribaldo de’ Rossi or Averardo Salviati. There were literally thousands of citizens, both rich and poor, whose livelihoods depended on Lorenzo’s ability to find government or ecclesiastical sinecures for them or their relations. The reggimento was kept in a constant state of agitation by bitter turf wars because one’s standing ultimately rested on how many followers could be provided for. Much of Lorenzo’s earliest correspondence concerns matters of patronage—often involving even menial jobs that would seem to be beneath the attention of the Medici heir—and the number of th
ose looking to him for support merely increased with time. These “creatures” of Lorenzo multiplied in the corrupting, hothouse climate of Florence, but they were a hungry breed whose loyalty to their master would continue only as long as they were fed.* Lorenzo regarded the whole process with distaste and viewed many of his most loyal servants as little better than leeches. It is not surprising if there were moments, and more of them every day, when he felt like fleeing the “narrow seas and storms of civic life” for “some clear and running water…in the shadow of some lovely tree.” It was in one such fit of exasperation that Lorenzo wrote to his secretary, “Get these petitioners off my back, because I have more letters from would-be Priors than there are days in the year and I am resolving not to want everything my way and to live what time I have left as peacefully as possible.”
For Lorenzo, power alone could not bring contentment. At best, the successful conclusion of the Pazzi war and elimination of most internal opposition provided the security that allowed him to pursue the things that mattered to him most. “For when the arms of Italy, which had been stayed by Lorenzo’s sense and authority, had been put down, he turned his mind to making himself and his city great,” wrote Machiavelli. Ultimately Lorenzo could not become the man he wished to be through statesmanship alone, but it is certain that without the blessings of peace and prosperity he worked so hard to achieve, he would not have earned the title by which he is known to history—il Magnifico, the Magnificent.
Michelangelo, Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs, 1492 (Art Resource)
XIX. THE GARDEN AND THE GROVE
“For when the arms of Italy, which had been stayed by Lorenzo’s sense and authority, had been put down, he turned his mind to making himself and his city great.”
Magnifico Page 41