Medici ~ Ascendancy

by Matteo Strukul

  Drenched with sweat and gore, he swung his sword downwards from right to left, severing an opponent’s limb, then pirouetted and swung again, horizontally this time. A trail of blood sprayed through the air. It was becoming impossible to move because of the corpses crowding the floor of the bridge, which was covered with a streaming broth of blood and bowels. The stench – of death and of excrement of those whose intestines had emptied themselves in terror – was repulsive. The fiery disc of the sun beat down relentlessly.

  Ludovico dodged a sword and at the same moment an arrow whistled by a few inches from his eyes and stuck into the chest of one of the duke’s men who had been sneaking up behind him.

  In his attempt to hold off the enemy, he had unwittingly ventured from his half of the bridge. He dared not hope to force Astorre Manfredi’s men back – especially now that he saw a face as familiar as it was terrible appear in front of him.

  It belonged to a man wielding a halberd whose razor-sharp blade was plunging between the hardened steel plates of his opponents’ armour. The warrior manipulated it with incredible skill, whirling it through the air like the vanes of a windmill and smashing his way through the defences as though it were a ram, taking advantage of its length to shred his opponents.

  At first, Ludovico did not realize who it was, but then that face, with its thick blond moustache and light-blue, almost liquid, eyes took him back to a few years earlier: to a party in Venice – and to the man who had defended the woman who had tried to take Lorenzo de’ Medici’s life.

  And in that moment, when Ludovico understood for certain whom he was facing, the Swiss mercenary was already upon him.

  When Schwartz saw him, he smiled and threw the halberd aside, drawing another sword – a gigantic Zweihänder which he swung through the air with superhuman strength.

  When their blades made contact, Mocenigo had to summon every ounce of strength he still possessed not to relinquish his grip on the hilt and be thrown over the parapet of the bridge.

  A murderous rage blazed in the man’s eyes.

  ‘You!’ he shouted at him when he recognized him. ‘Curse you, Mocenigo! You will fall by my hand today, or my name’s not Schwartz.’ And so saying, he swung the gigantic sword upwards. Both hands tightly grasping the grip of his own weapon, Mocenigo parried. His face was dripping with sweat and his arms trembled under the impact of Schwartz’s blade. He knew that this duel would require everything he had – and he was already exhausted.

  He tried, though, to show contempt for the risk and for his adversary.

  ‘We’ll see about that!’ he shouted, and swung twice at him. Schwartz parried easily and responded with a flurry of rapid slashes. Mocenigo was forced to retreat and realized that it was not only he who was retracing his steps – so was the entire company of Attendolo, who was leading his men in an attempt not to cede too much ground. The ranks were thinning and there were now more dead than you could count in the ranks of the Venetians. But looking behind him, he saw a river of iron and leather flowing from the camp towards the bridge.

  ‘Hold steady!’ he shouted, knowing how ridiculous his order was, since the Visconti militias far outnumbered them and were wading across the stream to cut them off at the same time as they were crowding the bridge. They were a ring of armour, blades and leather that threatened to crush them like a pincer.

  It was only a matter of time. And Mocenigo knew that there was very little of it left.

  ‘You have no hope,’ shouted Schwartz, as though reading his thoughts. Illuminated by a cold light, his terrible face was covered with blood, and saliva sprayed from his mouth as he swung the deadly Zweihänder down upon him once more.

  One parry, then another. Their blades clashed and Mocenigo found himself with one knee on the ground. Schwartz was wearing down his resistance. His strength almost entirely gone, Mocenigo attempted a final, desperate thrust, which he seemed to rip from his very soul.

  But the Swiss, who now towered over him, parried it with ease, knocking his sword out of his hands. It flew through the air, spinning like a pinwheel until it landed blade down, sticking out of the soft, sodden earth and vibrating like some ribald cross. Mocenigo threw open his arms and waited.

  The blow came soon afterwards.

  *

  Cosimo galloped desperately towards the bridge. Bernadetto de’ Medici and Simonetto of Castel Pietro were racing ahead, their horses fresher than his. He was tired, and barely lucid now. The men of the league were approaching the Forche bridge and he saw the vanguard collide with the enemy, their swords clanging against those of their adversaries, the cavalry in a fierce melee cutting down the infantry and engaging Astorre Manfredi’s men in battle.

  All around was only blood, dust and sweat.

  Suddenly, he heard a shout that froze his soul. He looked around him, searching for the source of that cry. It echoed across the battlefield as though emanating from some god of war.

  Then Cosimo saw him.

  With one hand, Reinhardt Schwartz was leaning on the hilt of a giant sword whose tip rested upon the ground.

  In the other he held the head of Ludovico Mocenigo.

  For a moment, Cosimo couldn’t understand what was happening. When he did, he cried out in anguish.

  At that moment, a hail of arrows came from somewhere to the side of him, mowing down Visconti’s men.

  Hell had arrived upon the earth.

  51

  Shame

  Cosimo had never seen anything like it. The quarrels rained down from the heavens as though a legion of warrior angels had launched a storm of bolts upon them.

  He turned his horse around and sought shelter. Only a fool would remain in the middle of the fray and risk being skewered by a stray missile.

  Wave followed wave of quarrels, ceaselessly, slaughtering the Visconti soldiers.

  Sheltering further back, Cosimo watched as the Genoese crossbow squads unleashed a storm of steel spikes from the slopes of the Anghiari hill, filling the valley with death.

  *

  Laura stared at the battlefield as tears streamed down her face. In the midst of the bloodshed she saw Reinhardt fighting like a lion. Instead of running away, it seemed that he actually sought death, dancing with it, attempting to seduce it, begging to be taken along with it.

  At the end of that accursed story, it was death that he loved more than anyone else.

  More than her.

  She had hoped to have a chance to speak with him, and find a way to spend those last moments together, because she had sensed that he would not return in one piece from that fateful battle.

  It was a foreboding – one which she could not explain but which she felt clearly and desperately. Something that she wished she could have prevented yet which was taking place before her eyes.

  And she stood watching helplessly, a profound feeling of guilt growing within her like malignant ivy, its stems stretching out until they stifled her breathing.

  When he had told her the truth she had felt overwhelmed. How could he have kept silent about it all that time? She had loved her tormentor and persecuted the wrong people. The Medici were not innocents, but they had become the targets of her hatred for a reason that was false – and even, in its tragic way, comical.

  And yet Reinhardt had defended her. In the drama of her life, he had been the only one who had stood by her. He had protected her; he had stayed at her side.

  Had he done it out of pity? Out of compassion? Out of lust?

  In spite of the questions that tormented her, Laura knew the answer. She harboured it in the bottom of her heart and, in some strange way, she had always known it: there was something so perverse in their relationship that it could only have belonged to two lost souls like them.

  And yet it was the most beautiful thing that destiny had offered her.

  There were sparks of love, though, she was sure of it, and she missed those moments terribly. Despite his being a violent, black-hearted man, he hadn’t been in his right mind when he
had done what he had done. His fault lay in the omission, in the lie, in the silence. But were the other men she had known in her life better than him? Rinaldo degli Albizzi? Palla Strozzi? Filippo Maria Visconti? The monsters who had been treating her like a whore since she had first worn the leash of that accursed merchant? And the lords of Florence, who didn’t hesitate to bribe and scheme to get their way? Who bought men to get them on their side? How much honour was there in their behaviour?

  For this, Laura was now repentant.

  Repentant that she had not accepted that broken love. Repentant that she had hated a man for his silence and his fears. Repentant that she had not known how to take back her choices.

  She looked at the battlefield and felt her bitterness grow.

  She wept then, because she realized she had thrown the better part of her life away. She cared not whether it had been a lot or a little – as far as she was concerned, it had been too much.

  And now she didn’t even have him any more, and she never would again.

  She stared at the steel glinting in the sunlight. Reinhardt swung his sword, ending the lives of his opponents. She didn’t care – let him kill a hundred more. That was the way things had gone. She had chosen to go up against the Medici, and now the Medici were killing her lover.

  Was that what she wanted?

  To stand there and watch?

  She was sick of it.

  Sick of being the courtesan of a man she despised.

  Albizzi stood with the duke’s commissaries, well protected among the supplies and careful to keep as far away from the battlefield as possible. Lying in the bed of a nearby cart was a stack of swords. Laura took one, slipped it into a scabbard, secured it to her belt and then, turning her back on that gang of cowards who stood there watching, she ran towards the battlefield.

  Towards her lover.

  And towards the dream of being a different woman.

  *

  Lorenzo watched as the hail of missiles filled the heavens, a dark cloud that blotted out the blue of the sky before it rained down upon the battlefield, mowing down their enemies.

  It had been a worthwhile attack. Under the aerial barrage, the ranks of the enemy were thinning out.

  At that moment, the first bombards – iron cannisters which, once they had been positioned in the ground, were capable of unleashing hell on earth – roared angrily from the rear.

  And he saw it.

  Hell on earth. He watched the artillerymen loading them and the projectiles flying in a terrible parabola that, after sketching a deadly arc through the blue sky, struck among the ranks of Astorre Manfredi’s men.

  Upon contact with the ground, they exploded, tearing the soldiers apart, raising red towers of lightning and fire where they fell. Grass, mud and flesh flew through the air, turning it into a tempest of pain.

  Lorenzo stood immobile while the deafening roars echoed across the battlefield.

  The soldiers faced one another as they tried to take the bridge, fighting in a wild melee, the frightened enemy ranks backing away from the devastating explosions.

  The banners were covered with dirt and blood.

  Standing with the rearguard and the reserves, Lorenzo fell to his knees. He could not believe what he was seeing, because it was unthinkable.

  No plan for hegemony could justify the genocide of these men who were being slaughtered in the name of union.

  In the heat of that cursed afternoon, he struggled to breathe.

  Seeing death so close at hand was something that could not be described, let alone understood. All they could do was stand there and watch, while Lorenzo’s disgust filled him with a burning shame.

  He and his brother would found their government on blood. That pain, that massacre, would be an accursed legacy to be reckoned with every day and every night. And they would have to govern with the images of that carnage forever burned in their minds, always aware of an apocalypse that must never again be repeated.

  Never again, he said to himself. Never again. And yet in a way he was grateful to God. In witnessing that slaughter he had become aware of a horror that he and his brother had avoided so many times in the past, protecting themselves through the mechanisms of power – unwilling, almost, to get their hands dirty. Now, though, he had seen the blood, and the lives shattered in the mud of the battlefield, and he could no longer ignore it.

  He prayed in his heart that the battle would end soon.

  His brother had promised that a new unity of kingdoms would emerge from it.

  Lorenzo truly hoped that he was right.

  July 1440

  52

  The Hanging

  The noise was the first thing that struck Cosimo as he climbed the steps up to the platform. He took his place on one of the wooden benches which had been set up for the Eight of Guard and looked down at the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people crowded together before him, their angry eyes full of a desire to see blood shed.

  The crowd’s roar surged when the wagon carrying the prisoner to the gallows entered the square.

  ‘Schwartz! Schwartz! Schwartz!’ shouted male and female voices, as if his name were a curse – and perhaps it was.

  ‘Death to the traitor!’ cried someone else, and the crowd went wild, others shouting insults and threats, or throwing rotten fruit and vegetables at the man on the wagon.

  Cosimo studied Schwartz’s face and was surprised to see an expression of profound peace – of bitter calm, as though he had finally surrendered and, in surrendering, had achieved a tranquillity which could be touched by nothing and nobody.

  Schwartz cared nothing about dying. His arms were bare and tied to a beam of wood and his long, filthy, reddish-blond hair fell in front of his face like dirty twine. He was on his knees, his ankles in chains, and yet he kept his chest puffed out and his back erect.

  He showed incredible strength, given all that he had endured. The gaolers in the dungeons of the Palazzo del Podestà had not spared him punishment and torture: the pale skin of his broad chest was partly covered by a black jacket, now tattered and torn, his face was a mask of cuts and bruises and his lips were swollen and encrusted with congealed blood. His pale-blue eyes had turned dark, like wells whose depths contained the pure essence of pain.

  But none of that diminished the dignity and pride with which the soldier faced death, and Cosimo found himself admiring him. He had fought well. He had lost, but there was nothing dishonourable in that. It had taken at least six men to bring him down on the battlefield at Anghiari.

  What a pointless waste of talent.

  It would have been interesting to have a man like Schwartz in his service, he said to himself. But that was no longer possible.

  He was shocked, though, by the cynicism and indifference he saw in himself. Had he become someone upon whom the death of a soldier made no impression at all?

  When he had climbed the steps to the platform, he had thought he would feel pity and horror but it was as if all the politics, power, suffering and reversals of fortune had changed him more deeply than he had been willing to admit.

  Had he so exercised the art of compromise and calculation that he was no longer even capable of recognizing the value of human life? He, who had known the humiliation of imprisonment and who, in order to escape the death which now awaited the man before him, had not hesitated to bribe his enemies?

  He was not proud of himself, and the courage that Schwartz so brazenly displayed was the keenest humiliation he had ever endured.

  But he was a leader, the lord of Florence, and he must do his duty for the good of his city. Perhaps he was not the best man of his day, but he would have time to expiate his faults and accept the good and the evil that governing Florence imposed on him. He would not shirk his destiny.

  Not now that he had reached that point.

  But he could not allow the execution to turn into a lynching either. For the last few days, Piazza della Signoria had been dominated by a colossal wooden structure: a black g
allows it had taken a team of carpenters over a week to build. The platform was almost ten feet high and the gallows itself measured at least eight more and towered, sinister and terrible, over the ocean of people that crowded the square. Ravens perched upon it as though they too wanted to see the show. A long, thick rope ending in a noose hung threateningly from the crossbeam.

  The executioner was a tall man who wore dark leather armour dotted with studs.

  Schwartz deserved a proper execution, and Cosimo would grant him one. Hangings were a ritual celebration of being liberated from fear, but all too often they were also an occasion for the crowd to unleash its basest instincts. The Florentines – who had silently watched the many defeats their leaders had endured as they failed to take Lucca and fought long and hard against Volterra and Pisa – now saw in Anghiari the triumph that would open the door to further conquests and, more importantly, to a period of peace and prosperity.

  But Cosimo had to govern that human ocean, and could not allow a thirst for revenge to prevail over the concept of justice.

  At his side, the other members of the Eight of Guard, the supreme city magistrates in criminal matters, sat upon their benches. Their faces were blank, and they seemed more interested in the rich fabrics of their elegant robes than in what was taking place before them.

  It was intensely hot.

  The cart had reached the wooden platform and the city guards freed Reinhardt Schwartz’s arms from the beam to which they had been tied and slotted them into fetters.

  His shackles making a sinister jingling sound, the Swiss mercenary climbed the wooden staircase that led to the gallows.

  The executioner pushed Schwartz under the rope and slipped his neck into the noose. He pulled it tight and the crowd roared.