Thus Savonarola’s name became inextricably bound up with the progressive movement in Florence. But while he became a hero to the little people, he made many enemies among the former ruling elites. The general disgust with Piero’s high-handed ways that led to a wholesale dismantling of the Medicean system did not translate into social harmony. The loss of Pisa, combined with the instability ushered in by the French invasion and years of economic decline, heightened tensions in the city and contributed to bitter political factionalism. Savonarola’s followers, known as the Piagnoni (weepers), frequently clashed with the Arrabbiati (the angry ones) and the Compagnacci (the companions), made up largely of aristocrats who agitated for a return to the ancient oligarchy.
From the beginning Savonarola was a divisive figure. With the zeal of a visionary, he sought to turn the city from its wicked ways and set it on the path of righteousness, a course that discomfited many who preferred to wallow in their vices rather than adopt the friar’s austere virtues. Savonarola’s attacks on the decadence of his adopted compatriots, and his even more bitter denunciations of the Church, kept passions boiling and created a climate of perpetual crisis in which his millennial pronouncements gained greater force.
As Italy descended into chaos, the preacher’s apocalyptic vision fell on receptive ears. A wholesale dismantling of the previous age began as men and women examined their uneasy consciences and discovered that in pursuing material things they had neglected the word of God. The worst excesses of the prior age were embodied in Lorenzo’s Carnival, and Savonarola set about eradicating the memory of those almost pagan bacchanals through a ritual purging. Instead of joining in suggestive songs and revels, Savonarola commanded the citizens of Florence to march into the Piazza della Signoria, where huge bonfires had been kindled. Into these “Bonfires of the Vanities” they tossed their jewels and silks in a symbolic rejection of the snares of the world. But Savonarola had more ambitious goals. “My lords of the Eight,” Savonarola declared, “I would like to see you make a lovely fire or two or three there in the piazza, of those sodomites male and female—women too pursue that criminal vice. Make, I say, a sacrifice to God, which He will accept as incense [honoring] His life. Make a fire which the whole of Italy will smell.” These flaming pyres came to embody the Savonarola era as surely as the great jousts and pageants had symbolized that of Lorenzo—an age of ash to follow an age of gold.
In order to enforce his austere ideal, the Dominican monk organized bands of fanatical youths who roamed the streets seeking out those who had violated the strict sumptuary laws. “Here come the boys of Fra Girolamo!” went the cry when one of these gangs approached, and women covered up their jewels and lace frills. Savonarola’s efforts were not all pernicious. He worked hard to feed and clothe the poor and his religious fanaticism was combined with a genuine zeal for democratic reform. “We must…conclude,” he wrote, “that…civil government or democracy is the best government for the city of Florence.”
But Savonarola was a man of passionate faith not reason, a man who courted martyrdom and welcomed cataclysm, and a state that took its cues from such a mystic could never know peace. The representative government he established proved unstable, prone to faction, and woefully inefficient. As the years passed, citizens looked back nostalgically on the days when Lorenzo had ruled with such skill and tact.
Savonarola might have averted disaster had he been willing to make the compromises required of a politician. With every passing year, however, he grew more convinced of his divine mission; he welcomed the French army as the instrument of God sent to punish the sinning Italians, only to hurl bitter denunciations at them when they failed to chastise the wicked as he had hoped. His insistence on backing Charles long after the rest of Italy turned against him left Florence diplomatically isolated, and his campaign to reform a corrupt Church—in which the City of the Baptist, now purified under his ascetic rule, was seen as a new Jerusalem—inevitably put him on a collision course with Rome. He began to see himself in messianic terms and to rail ever more bitterly against clergy in the Vatican, now led by the sensual Alexander VI, the epitome of the worldly Renaissance prelate, who openly acnowledged his children, the infamous Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia. For a time the pope tried to seek an accommodation, but when Savonarola defied his order that he cease his preaching, a confrontation was inevitable. In April 1498, the people of Florence, now thoroughly fed up with his histrionics, arrested the friar and many of his followers. On May 23, after enduring weeks of torture, Savonarola and his chief lieutenants, Fra Silvestro and Fra Domenico, were led to a scaffold erected in the Piazza della Signoria and hanged before a bloodthirsty crowd. In order to prevent their bodies serving as the focus of a martyrdom cult, their still suspended corpses were consumed by flames in a gruesome reenactment of the bonfires that they themselves had made a symbol of their rule.
Florence’s experiment in democracy lasted another fourteen eventful years. Whatever the defects of the Medicean system, the more representative government that replaced it proved incapable of managing the affairs of state. In the chaos that followed the French invasion, the quarreling factions that made up the new Great Council found it impossible to pursue coherent policies. Florence’s standing in the world plummeted. In 1502, in order to stabilize the chaotic situation, Piero Soderini—son of Tommaso and Lorenzo’s aunt Dianora Tornabuoni—was appointed Gonfaloniere for life, the very title that Lorenzo’s critics accused him of aspiring to. In ridding themselves of a potential tyrant, Florentines now granted to one man sweeping powers that Lorenzo never possessed.
The troubled times that nurtured Savonarola’s unique gifts also gave rise to another remarkable figure, but one whose understanding of the world could not have been more at odds with that of the Dominican friar. No one worked harder on behalf of the republic than Niccolò Machiavelli, who served for much of the period as the secretary for the Ten of War and who struggled, ultimately without success, to make the government work. Years of thankless toil on behalf of weak, corrupt, and vacillating leaders, as well as his exposure to some of the most ferocious tyrants of the age—including, most notably, Cesare Borgia—gave Machiavelli a thoroughly jaundiced view of the human condition. But it was only after the collapse of the republic to which he had dedicated himself heart and soul that, in bitterness and defeat, he wrote his most notorious work, The Prince, a treatise for the would-be despot on how to achieve and retain power. It is above all this tract that has made this Florentine civil servant’s name synonymous with cynical scheming and deviousness. But this label is largely undeserved. Machiavelli was in fact a disappointed idealist. His unsparing vision of human nature scandalized his own and subsequent generations, but he understood that only by depicting men as they really were could any progress be made toward building a better form of government. Strip-ping away all pieties to lay bare the darkest recesses of the soul, Machiavelli took the first halting steps toward modern political theory, in which society is viewed as the product of fallible human beings rather than the elaboration of a divine plan.
The republican experiment came to an embarrassing end in 1512 after Piero Soderini had made the unlucky decision to back the French in their struggle against the armies of Spain. The Spaniards, combined with the Holy Roman Empire, Venice, and the pope (now Julius II, formerly Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere), ultimately routed the French forces, and when the victorious army marched on Florence, the government quickly capitulated. After putting up little or no resistance, Piero Soderini, Gonfaloniere for life, threw off his ceremonial robes and fled the city. Machiavelli was so disgusted with Soderini’s cowardice that he penned this epitaph for his former boss:
On the night when Piero Soderini died, his soul descended
to the mouth of hell; at which Pluto snorted: Silly soul, hell is
no place for you; your place is in the limbo of babies.
On September 14, 1512, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici returned in triumph to his native city, backed by the might of Spa
nish arms. Taking up residence at the now desolate palace on the Via Larga, he set about restoring the political machinery that had served his father so well, placing in key positions only those of proven loyalty to his family. Giovanni might have remained the de facto ruler of the city but for the death in February 1513 of Julius II. Hurrying back to Rome for the conclave, Giovanni was elected pope on March 11. Taking the name Leo X, the thirty-seven-year-old finally fulfilled his father’s greatest dream, vaulting the once humble family into the stratosphere of European nobility.
As great a coup as this was for the Medici, it seemed equally propitious for the Florentine people, who gave themselves over to delirious celebrations. Leo was the first Florentine to sit on St. Peter’s throne and his elevation augured well for City of the Baptist. Rome, her ancient rival, was now bound to Florence by ties of blood and history, and the hope of Florence was that the centuries-old struggle for hegemony would now make way for an era of peaceful and prosperous coexistence.
Unfortunately reality did not meet expectation. Leo was a cultured and intelligent man but his intellectual gifts were not matched by equal energy or commitment to a larger cause. Upon his accession he was reported to have said, “As God has seen fit to give us the Papacy, let us enjoy it,” words that sum up his rather negligent approach to his duties as the leader of the Christian flock. In 1517, four years into Leo’s reign, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the castle church of the University of Wittenberg, ushering in the Protestant Reformation. But Leo was far more concerned with ensuring that his family retain its hold on his native land than he was with the rantings of an obscure German cleric. For this purpose he installed as his representative in Florence his nephew Lorenzo, son of the unfortunate Piero, who had drowned in 1503 while retreating along with the French army in which he was serving.
The restored Medici rule, carried on after Lorenzo’s untimely death by his cousin Cardinal Giulio, did not lead to a renewed era of Florentine greatness. Nor did a second expulsion of the Medici, followed by a second restoration of republican rule in 1527 reverse the inexorable slide of the once great city into oblivion. The truth, from which most Florentines shrank, was that her glory days were behind her. In the dawning age of the nation state, the puny city-states of Italy could no longer count themselves among the great powers. They were prizes to be fought over by their more populous neighbors, and few were more attractive or more defenseless than Florence. The last spasm of that fiercely independent and democratic spirit that had sustained Florence for centuries ended in 1530 when Pope Clement, backed by the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V, reasserted Medici control over the city. In 1532 the republican constitution was officially abolished when Clement named Alessandro, son of Lorenzo (and great-grandson of il Magnifico), Duke of Florence. With Alessandro, and with his successor, Grand Duke Cosimo I, the Florentine republic finally became the hereditary possession of the Medici family.
The realm over which these later Medici ruled, while encompassing more territory than the earlier city-state, was a shadow of its former self. After 1494, Italy entered a period of decline from which it never recovered, and Florence declined along with it. That remarkable moment in which a city of under fifty thousand souls sheltered the greatest geniuses of Europe came to an abrupt end once Lorenzo’s protective aegis was withdrawn. The poets, philosophers, painters, and sculptors who flocked to the city in the knowledge that il Magnifico would reward their genius found other more promising venues in which to ply their trade. Rome, rather than Florence, became the magnet for artistic genius as the great Renaissance popes—Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo X—spent lavishly in an effort to create a city to match their outsized egos. Michelangelo was one of the many artists who fled Florence for Rome (though only after sculpting a monumental Hercules in tribute to his deceased patron) where he worked for many unhappy years, carving figures for Julius II’s monumental tomb and painting the Sistine ceiling.* Of those who remained, many succumbed to the new pessimistic spirit of the times. This spirit is easiest to trace in the work of Sandro Botticelli where the pagan hedonism of his Birth of Venus and Primavera is replaced in his final paintings by the religious mysticism and apocalyptic visions of the Dominican friar under whose spell he had fallen.
Florence’s eclipse was part of a larger transformation. As France, England, and Spain rose to greatness, and as the discovery of the New World shifted the focus of the great powers away from the Mediterranean and toward the world’s oceans, Italy lost its central role as the economic engine and cultural beacon of Europe. For centuries, Italy, and Florence in particular, continued to capture the imaginations of cultivated men and women, but her lingering prestige as a home for the muses was no longer matched by political or military power.
As the reality of their own impotence slowly dawned on the Italian people, and as each year brought renewed terror and humiliation, men began to look back on the age of Lorenzo with increasing nostalgia. His genius as a diplomat, holding together the fractious powers of the peninsula through the force of his personality, was never more appreciated than in the following decades when the lack of a comparable statesman doomed Florentines and Italians generally to suffer the agony of war and chaos. While some Florentines continued to look on his reign as a period of corruption and tyranny, the subsequent failure to arrive at a workable alternative made these aspects of his rule seem less distasteful. Seen through the haze of memory, which softens all harsh angles and ugly realities, the age of Lorenzo appeared suffused in a golden glow. The durable monuments of the age—the unsurpassed works of art and architecture, of music, philosophy, and poetry, all propelled by a fervent belief in man’s unmatched power—shone brighter in memory as the gloom of the present deepened. And at the center of this brilliant constellation, a sun encircled by glittering planets, was the uncrowned ruler of Florence, whose effortless command of all the graces of life seemed to sum up a bygone age of unsurpassed magnificence.
Medici Family Tree
(Showing Relationship to Royal House of France)
Note on the Government of Florence in the Age of Lorenzo
The basic form of the Florentine government was established by the Ordinances of Justice in 1293. These laws disenfranchised the feudal aristocracy and gave power to the merchant and artisan classes by making participation in the political process contingent on membership in one of the major or minor guilds. Multiple overlapping councils and committees and rapid rotation in office were intended to ensure that no group monopolized power, but the inefficiencies of the system worked to the benefit of families like the Albizzi and the Medici who were able to create coalitions strong enough to dominate the elected government. The following is a brief summary of the traditional structure of the Florentine government and of Medici innovations.
Tre Maggiori: The “three major” offices of the state, selected on a bimonthly basis. To have one’s name drawn from the purses (to be veduto or “seen”) for one of the Tre Maggiori automatically meant inclusion in the political elite. The Tre Maggiori included:
Signoria (the Lordship), the chief executive body of the state comprised of eight Priors—two for each of the quarters into which Florence was divided—and the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia (the Standard-Bearer of Justice), the official head of state. They in turn were aided by two advisory committees (also known as “colleges”):
Dodici Buonuomini (the Twelve Wise Men) and the
Sedici Gonfalonieri (the Sixteen Standard-Bearers), one for each of the sixteen districts, or gonfaloni, that formed the traditional neighborhoods of the city.
Consiglio del Popolo (Council of the People) and the Consiglio del Commune (Council of the Commune): the two traditional legislative assemblies of the republic. Their role was to ratify legislation initiated by the Signoria and the two colleges. It was in these more democratic, representative bodies that opposition to the regime was most openly expressed. The two councils were slowly marginalized by Medici reforms.
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br /> Elections: Florentine elections were designed to spread the burden and the privilege of office holding to a broad cross-section of the citizenry. Elections followed an elaborate three-step process:
1) Squittino (the scrutiny)—The periodic canvass to determine those eligible for office. To qualify, a candidate had to be enrolled in one of the city’s seven major or nine minor guilds. Nominations for the Tre Maggiori were made by the Gonfalonieri for each district and vetted by a variety of different councils. Priority was given to members of prominent families whose relatives had already served in high office, thus ensuring the oligarchic nature of the government, but a small percentage of offices was also set aside for shopkeepers and artisans. The squittino was always a tumultuous event, since a family’s status in the city hierarchy was largely determined by the number of successful candidates.
2) Sortition—Names of those selected in the squittino were sorted into various bags or purses designating the offices for which they were eligible. Most important were those purses for the Tre Maggiori, which included a separate bag for the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia. It was at this point that the electoral process was most easily manipulated. Throughout much of the Medici era a body known as the Accoppiatori (see below) selected a mano (by hand) the name tickets distributed into each bag, giving the regime considerable control over who would ultimately serve in office.
3) Extraction—The actual drawing of the names from the purses. For the Tre Maggiori the extraction took place every other month in a ceremony at the Palazzo della Signoria. It was at this ceremony that Florentines learned who would actually be seated in office. But even those whose names were drawn from the purses but who were ineligible to serve—either because they had already served within the past five years, a close relative was currently serving, they were not old enough, or they owed back taxes, and so forth—gained a great deal. To be seen (veduto) even if not actually seated (seduto) conferred considerable prestige. In fact, membership in the important councils and committees was often determined by whether or not one’s ancestors and relatives had ever been veduto or seduto for one of the Tre Maggiori.
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