† Eyewitness accounts vary, but the majority recall this as the moment when the assassins struck. The most valuable account, because it seems the most objective, comes from the diary of the apothecary Luca Landucci. Among the other useful accounts are those by Filippo Strozzi, the Milanese ambassador (who believed the attack coincided with the Agnus Dei), one by the Medici partisan Giusto Giusti, and that of Angelo Poliziano, though, as has been pointed out, his narrative is marred by its propagandistic function. The memoir of Philippe de Commynes, emissary of the French king in Italy, also provides a useful contemporary account though he himself was not an eyewitness to the day’s events. The diary of the apothecary Luca Landucci, while giving no details of the attacks themselves, offers invaluable insight into the reaction of the average Florentine. The narratives of both Machiavelli and Guicciardini, while based in part on eyewitness testimony, add little new information to contemporary accounts.
* These doors, completed in 1466, were the work primarily of Luca della Robbia, one of the artists most beloved by the Medici. In fact the room where Lorenzo now took refuge, which was used to house the vestments worn during the Mass, was filled with reminders of his family’s past generosity, including an inscription that read “con Piero di Cosimo” (with Piero son of Cosimo), an indication that his father had been prominent among those who had paid for and overseen its decoration.
* Known as La Vacca (the cow) for its great mooing sound, the bell was sounded in moments of greatest peril.
† The old Republican Alamanno Rinuccini noted that no one cried out Marzocco! the lion that was the traditional emblem of the state. The fact that the citizens declared their loyalty to the Medici family rather than the republic was for him a source of shame, revealing how thoroughly the people of Florence had been corrupted (see Ricordi Storici, cxxviii).
* Rinuccini gives his most cogent critique of Lorenzo’s government in his “Dialogue on Liberty,” written in secret the year following the Pazzi conspiracy. Among other things he praises the Pazzi for their principled stand: “[F]or to me it is clear than an honorable death is preferable to a life of disgusting shame. This truth did not escape the truly magnanimous mind and noble character of Jacopo and Francesco de’ Pazzi and of the various heads of that family. Though they were flourishing, possessed ample wealth, had intimate connections with the most eminent citizens, and enjoyed popularity and the good will of the people as a whole, they scorned all these advantages in the absence of liberty. Thus did they undertake a glorious deed, an action worthy of the highest praise. They tried to restore their own liberty and that of the country.”
* Luxury in the fifteenth century meant something rather different from what it does today. In an age before machine production, items like clothing—even for a family as wealthy as the Medici—were scarce and precious commodities. Garments were sumptuously produced, with intricate patterns picked out in gold and silver thread, fur lining, and colors created from dyes derived from products halfway around the world. But the Medici possessed fewer items than even an average middle-class family today. In 1456 Piero made an inventory of Lucrezia’s clothing and listed only thirteen garments. Presumably she possessed additional garments too ordinary and inexpensive to be listed, but this is far from the closetfuls of designer clothing any modern socialite would possess. Clothes were expected to last for years and were mended rather than discarded.
* The letter, dated April 26, 1478, is addressed to “Bona and Gian Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan,” but it was Bona and her chief minister, Cicco Simonetta, who were the real power in the state.
* Vasari, in his “Life of Andrea Verrocchio” confirms the incident, if not the exact words. Friends and relatives commissioned the artist to create effigies of Lorenzo in wax to be set up around the city in thanksgiving for his deliverance from the assassin’s dagger. One of these, set up in the nunnery of San Gallo, was described by Vasari as “clothed exactly as Lorenzo was, when, with his wounded throat bandaged, he showed himself at the window of his house before the eyes of the people, who had flocked thither to see whether he were alive, as they hoped, or to avenge him if he were dead” (Vasari, “Lives…, I, 556).
† Some have seen Lorenzo’s speech as disingenuous, but there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his calls for calm. His desire to see the guilty punished was real enough, but he had no desire to see an explosion of indiscriminate violence engulf the city. Many times in the coming days he tried to douse the flames his brother’s murder had kindled.
* Thomas Harris re-creates this gruesome scene in his book Hannibal when Francesco’s distant relative, a police inspector, undergoes a similar fate at the hands of Hannibal Lecter.
* Among the latter was Renato de’ Pazzi, Francesco’s cousin, who though not directly implicated, was executed for having failed to inform authorities of the plot.
† Guglielmo was placed in effect under house arrest. He retired to his villa and was required to remain within a zone of from five to twenty miles from Florence (see Landucci, Florentine Diary, chapter 1).
* Sacramoro describes the “demonstrations of love shown by everyone towards Laur. o” in a letter to the duke and duchess of Milan, April 27, 1478 (Lettere di Lorenzo de’ Medici, iii, 4). Poliziano recorded: “Since the public was anxious about his health, he had to appear often at the windows of the palace. Thereupon the whole people would acclaim him, cheer and wave, rejoice in his safety and revel in their joy.” (Poliziano, “The Pazzi Conspiracy” in Humanism and Liberty, chapter 9.)
* The line, appropriate to the occasion, was “Fate guides the willing man, and drags the unwilling”(Poliziano, The Pazzi Conspiracy, in Humanism and Liberty, chapter 9).
* One of the eyewitnesses to Bandini’s execution was Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched the gruesome scene, including notations on such details as the color of his leggings.
† “Son Bernardo Bandini, un nuovo Giuda / Traditore micidiale a chiesa io fui. / Ribello per aspettare morte piu cruda.” When Lorenzo wrote these verses Bandini had yet to be captured. Botticelli depicted him upside down, the traditional mode of depicting a criminal who had yet to be appehended.
* By the time Lorenzo sold the estate, in 1486, it comprised sixty-seven separate farms.
* These medals contain a good deal of valuable information on the attack. One contains a portrait of Lorenzo with the words “Salus Publicus” (Salvation of the Public); the other medal has a portrait of Giuliano with the words “Luctus Publicus” (“Mourning of the Public”). Both show the moment of the attacks, with Lorenzo parrying the blow and Giuliano falling under the blades of Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini.
* Both Lorenzo’s and Giuliano’s bodies were ultimately moved to a tomb in the so-called New Sacristy of San Lorenzo (to distinguish it from the Old Sacristy designed by Donatello), designed by Michelangelo. Unfortunately the magnificent tombs sculpted by Michelangelo house the remains of two obscure descendants, one Lorenzo’s youngest son, the other a grandson. Both Lorenzo and his brother have to make do with a somewhat unsatisfactory monument tucked into a corner of Michelangelo’s architectural masterpiece.
† The mother’s name, if known at the time, has never been revealed. The young Giulio’ s swarthy features suggest that his mother was perhaps a Circassian slave. This was a common occurrence in Florence where men married so late. Even Cosimo had fathered a child with one of his slaves.
* Riario tried to deny any involvement in the attack on Lorenzo and Giuliano: “That nefarious act that took place in Florence, has caused me such bitterness and displeasure that it practically drove me out of my mind. It is this that has caused me to delay writing until now…that I was unaware that anyone was to be killed, this [most Illustrious Lords] you will discover is nothing but the truth.”(Quoted in Ilardi, “The Assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza,” in Violence and Civil Disorder, chapter 5.)
* While there was much talk of sending troops across the Alps to aid the war effort (see especially, Lettere
, iii, chapter 11), the allies were reluctant to see foreign armies on Italian soil. Louis’s most important diplomatic effort on Lorenzo’s behalf was his call to convene a Church council to look into the pope’s conduct in office.
* Florentine law prohibited a native son from commanding her forces, a precaution against the tendency often seen in ancient Rome of using military success to seize political power.
* Niccolò Michelozzi, son of the architect who built the Medici palace, was Lorenzo’s most important secretary. Most of Lorenzo’s letters from this period are in his hand.
* Among the atrocities Landucci chronicles in the opening months of the war was the destruction of the town of Rencine by Sienese forces, the pillaging of the countryside around Siena by Florentines, the sacking of some fortresses by Niccolò Vitelli with “the burning [of] men, women and children, with every cruelty,” to which papal forces responded tit for tat (see Landucci, Florentine Diary, chapter 2).
* Lorenzo was ultimately forced to pay back the money he had borrowed illegally. Most painfully, he had to sign over the villa at Cafaggiolo to his cousins to make up the difference.
† Lorenzo placed the “new man” Antonio Dini in charge of the Monte. Dini was executed for malfeasance after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494.
* See the series of paintings of the Medici villas made in the 1590s by Giusto Utens. They are now housed in Florence’s Museo di Firenze Com’Era.
* It is perhaps no coincidence that Lorenzo took this high-stakes gamble at a time when his uncle Tommaso Soderini was serving as Gonfaloniere di Giustizia. After his earlier rivalry with his nephew, Tommaso had become one of Lorenzo’s most reliable allies.
* Filippo Strozzi was the son of Alessandra Strozzi and had been exiled after Cosimo’s rise to power in 1434. He had spent most of those years before his restoration in 1466 in Naples where he had established close ties with the king. He was thus an ideal candidate for this delicate mission.
* On March 29, the pope issued another bull of excommunication but this, like its predecessor, was almost universally ignored (see Landucci, Florentine Diary, chapter 2).
* Despite widespread panic, the Turkish invasion ultimately amounted to little. In October, the Ottoman commander, Gedik Ahmed pasha, returned across the straits to his Balkan stronghold, unable to provision his army in the barren lands of the south. By this time Don Alfonso, aided by the pope’s call for a Crusade against the invader, had massed his troops to prevent a return landing. The death of Sultan Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople, in May 1481 and the accession of his son, the more peaceful Bayezid II, precluded a revival of the Turks’ Italian adventure.
† Among them were Luigi Guicciardini, Bongianni Gianfigliazzi, Piero Minerbetti, Guid’ Antonio Vespucci, Maso degli Albizzi, Gino Capponi, Jacopo Lanfredini, Domenico Pandolfini, Lorenzo’s uncle Giovanni Tornabuoni, Antonio de’ Medici, and Antonio Ridolofi—a veritable who’s-who of the reggimento.
* Landucci claimed that the Twelve were “given powers to act for the whole people of Florence” (Diary, chapter 2). These two committees should not be confused with the older Dodici Buonuomini, now largely ceremonial, or the Otto di Guardia who ran the state police.
† In 1489 the Accoppiatori were once again revived, an indication that the Seventy were not always as submissive as Lorenzo wished.
* The new law claimed the Council of Seventy would last for only five years, but this was, as everybody knew, a fiction meant to make the law seem less of a departure from tradition than it really was.
* The Ordelaffi’s troubles began in the 1460s when a feud erupted between two brothers, Cecco and Pino. It was the kind of tale all too common in the Romagna, involving various stabbings and poisonings. When the sickly youth Sinibaldo Ordelaffi was placed under the protection of papal forces, it was only a matter of time before the city fell into Riario’s lap.
* Machiavelli, who objected to the bloodless wars so often conducted by Italian condottieri in which only civilians suffered, approved of the Battle of Campo Morto, “fought with more virtue than any other that had been fought for fifty years in Italy, for in it, between one side and the other, more than a thousand men died”(Florentine Histories, VIII, 23).
* Visitors to the palace report that father and son often traveled about the house in chairs borne aloft by servants.
* One of the few who truly mourned the death of the irascible pope was Girolamo Riario. Without his uncle’s protection his fledgling possessions in the Romagna were vulnerable to meddling by the more powerful states that surrounded them. Following Sixtus’s death Girolamo was forced to lead the life of an impoverished petty nobleman of the Romagna. In order to stave off financial collapse he tried to squeeze more and more money from his long-suffering subjects. In 1487 he murdered one of his creditors rather than pay back a debt. Adding to his unpopularity with the people of Imola and Forli was his tendency to favor fellow Ligurians at the expense of the natives. All of this eventually caught up with him and on April 14, 1488, four men, with whom he had quarreled over money, stabbed him to death in his palace at Forli. Though shortly after the murder the assassins wrote to Lorenzo asking for his protection, there is no indication that he knew about the plot in advance. No doubt he took a certain grim satisfaction that the count had gotten just what he deserved, a feeling that may have been enhanced by the fact that he did not have to lift a finger to achieve it. For the view that Lorenzo was in secret correspondence with the conspirators, see Martines, April Blood, chapter 1. By the time of his death, in any case, Girolamo had ceased to matter on the wider Italian stage.
* Lorenzo and the new pope got off on the wrong foot when the leader of Florence decided to attack the Genoese fortress of Pietrasanta in retaliation for the seizure of Sarzana during the Pazzi war, an action to which the Genoa-born pope took exception.
* One of those old friendships interrupted by the Pazzi conspiracy was with Marsilio Ficino, who had been close to many of the conspirators, including Francesco Salviati and Jacopo Bracciolini.
* His new eminence could create logistical problems. In one trip to the spa of San Filippo near Siena in 1490, that republic insisted on accompanying Lorenzo with an honor guard of more than five hundred soldiers (see Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, Epilogue).
* One of Cosimo’s famous quips concerned this uniform of a Florentine patrician: “When warned that it was not prudent to exile so many noblemen, and that through lack of men of quality Florence would be ruined, [Cosimo] responded that so many yards of red cloth (panni di San Martino) would make a gentleman; by which he meant that with honors and riches men of low status became noble.” (Guicciardini, The History of Florence). See also Trexler Public Life in Renaissance Florence, note 120, Epilogue, for a contemporary’s description of Lorenzo’s manner of dress.
* Guicciardini claims that in “the opinion of many he was so weakened by his amorous excesses that he died relatively young”(The History of Florence ix). While the claim is perhaps overstated, it is probable that his hectic pace exacerbated his medical conditions.
† The two were Moroto Baldovinetti and Battista Frescobaldi. The latter had helped Lorenzo extradite Bernardo Bandini from Istanbul but felt he had been insufficiently rewarded for his service (see Ross, Lives of the Early Medici, chapter 12).
* Estimates of the number of those whose voices actually mattered in the councils of government varied. It is also not clear that the numbers were a great departure from the Albizzi regime, when power was said to be concentrated in the hands of a few dozen powerful families. At all times Florence was really an oligarchy in which power was held in few hands. Innovations instituted by the Medici systematized and rendered more efficient a form of government already in place. They also gave greater authority to a single man at the top. One aspect that drew the greatest contemporary comment and stirred up the most resentment was that the Medici reggimento had a less aristocratic, more populist flavor, even if the number of families wielding power rem
ained the same. The greatest opposition to Medici rule continued to come from the old optimate families that were no longer close to the center of power.
† One wonders if de’ Rossi slipped some coins into Bibbiena’s hands to arrange the meeting; the narrator never tells us but that was often the way things worked in Florence.
* Foreigners typically exaggerated Lorenzo’s power partly because they preferred to deal with an individual rather than negotiate the myriad councils and committees of the government, and partly out of genuine confusion about how the system worked.
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