Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  Piero died at Careggi on 2 December 1469. He was buried next to his brother, Giovanni, in the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo. His sons called upon Andrea del Verrocchio, who had designed their grandfather's memorial, to create the tomb of porphyry, marble and bronze which honours their father's remains.

  The day after Piero's death some seven hundred members and supporters of the Medicean party gathered at the convent of Sant'Antonino. It was decided at this meeting that his son, Lorenzo, although not yet twenty-one years old, should be asked to assume the leadership of the party and of the government of Florence. A delegation accordingly called at the Palazzo Medici and asked Lorenzo to take upon himself the task of ‘looking after the city and the government as [his] father and grandfather had done’.

  Lorenzo had already written to the Duke of Milan, ‘You have been the bulwark of our government and our greatness. May you now assure my protection and preservation.’ He was, however, anxious not to appear unduly eager to assume the responsibilities which his acceptance of the leadership of the party would entail; and, indeed, he seems to have been genuinely reluctant to undertake duties which would hinder his enjoyment of a less demanding life. ‘Their proposal was naturally against my youthful instincts,’ he wrote, ‘and, considering that the burden and danger were great, I consented to it unwillingly. But I did so in order to protect our friends and property, since it fares ill in Florence with anyone who is rich but does not have any share in government.’

  With his sensible mother to guide him, as well as the heads of such influential families as the Soderini and the Pitti, now anxious to make amends for their part in the attempted coup against Piero, Lorenzo proceeded cautiously in his moves to establish himself as what Francesco Guicciardini was to describe as ‘a benevolent tyrant in a constitutional republic’.

  Although officially debarred by his youth from membership, he had himself elected to such councils of state as his new authority required; and important matters of both foreign and domestic policy were brought for discussion and decision to the Palazzo Medici. Yet both he and the Signoria were anxious that Florence should be seen not only by its citizens but also by the world at large as a democratic republic. When Francesco della Rovere became Pope Sixtus IV in 1471 and a delegation was sent to Rome to offer the city's congratulations, Lorenzo de' Medici accompanied the delegation but was accorded no higher rank in it than any of its other members.

  He had, however, no sooner assumed his responsibilities as head of his house than he demonstrated a firmness and decisiveness that was to mark his future rule, although in this case his resolution was to lead to disaster. On his return from Rome there was trouble in Volterra, where the authority of the Florentine Capitano had been threatened in a violent dispute over the working of an alum mine. Alum was essential to the Florentine textile industry, being used in the dyeing of wool and silk; and when the dispute threatened to get out of hand, with unforeseeable consequences in other Tuscan towns, Lorenzo, contrary to the advice of both a majority in the Signoria and the Bishop of Volterra, decided to use force. An army of 5,000 mercenaries was raised and the condottiere, Federigo da Montefeltro, was employed as its commander.

  As Federigo marched towards the turbulent town, the Volterrans issued pleas for help to governments all over Italy, going so far as to offer the town to the King of Naples in exchange for his support. No effective help was forthcoming, however, and after a month's siege Volterra surrendered. Lorenzo wrote to the Florentine observers attached to the mercenary army to express his satisfaction that the city had been regained without suffering damage.

  But, as it happened, the city had already been ransacked unmercifully. No one knew how it had happened. Some said the mercenaries employed by Florence had entered the town after the peace negotiations had been concluded, perhaps let in by Volterra's mercenaries to share in the plunder. In any case the subsequent pillage had been appalling. After several hours of murder, rape and looting, and a landslip caused by torrential rain, much of the town lay in ruins. Lorenzo rode over from Florence to convey the city's profound regret for what had happened, and to distribute compensation to the surviving victims. But he was never to be forgiven in Volterra; and in Florence, his impetuous decision to use force, when patient negotiations might well have concluded in a peaceful settlement, brought his judgement and his capacity to undertake the responsibilities which had so recently been bestowed upon him sharply into question. He knew that he must not make such an error again; he handled the next crisis, which was soon to threaten, much more skilfully.

  11

  THE PAZZI CONSPIRACY 1478

  ‘My Lords, beware of what you do. Florence is a big affair.’

  GIAN BATTISTA DA MONTESECCO

  Soon after the sack of Volterra, the Medici bank in Rome received an embarrassing request: would the bank advance 40,000 ducats for the purchase of Imola, the strategically placed small town on the Santerno river in the Romagna. The request came from the Pope, Sixtus IV, the son of a poor fisherman from Liguria, a big, blunt, toothless man whose two principal aims in life were the aggrandizement of the Papal States and the advancement of the fortunes of his family. Six of his nephews were, or were to become, cardinals, one of them also Archbishop of Florence and one Pope Julius II; another nephew, appointed Prefect of Rome and Lord of Mondovi in Piedmont, was married off to the eldest daughter of Federigo da Montefeltro, now Duke of Urbino, thus transferring one of Italy's most talented condottieri from the service of Florence to that of the Pope; and it was for yet another nephew, who was perhaps really a son, a rough and rowdy young man, Girolamo Riario, that the Pope wanted to buy the town of Imola and thus establish a base from which his family could extend their power in the Romagna.

  The request for the loan troubled Lorenzo deeply. He was anxious not to offend the Pope, with whom his relations up to now had been perfectly friendly; but Imola was a strategically placed town dominating the road from Rimini to Bologna, and Lorenzo had had thoughts of arranging its purchase for Florence, well aware that a Romagna in control of an unfriendly power would threaten Florence's trade routes to the Adriatic coast. So when the application for the loan was referred to him he told his manager in Rome to prevaricate. Impatient of delay, the Pope turned to another Florentine banking house, that of the Pazzi, a family for long commercial rivals of the Medici, the manager of whose branch in Rome, Francesco de' Pazzi, a small, fidgety young man of ‘great arrogance and pretensions’, saw an opportunity not only of obtaining the coveted curial account but perhaps even, with the Pope's help, of displacing the Medici as the leading house in Florence. The required loan was authorized by the Pazzi bank without hesitation.

  The Pazzi were an ancient family, owning much property in what is now the Borgo degli Albizzi. One of their forebears, Pazzo di Ranieri, had been among the first to enter Jerusalem on the First Crusade in 1088 and had returned to Florence with some flints from the altar of the Holy Sepulchre, which were placed in the church of Santi Apostoli1 and subsequently used in an annual ceremony, the Scoppio del Carro, performed in the cathedral at midnight mass on Easter Saturday.2 For long disdaining commerce, the family had eventually become extremely successful bankers and by the time of the sommario (the list of taxpayers) of 1457 they had become the richest family in Florence after the Medici, well able to afford to build the lovely chapel at Santa Croce which they had commissioned from Brunelleschi, as well as their palace in Via del Proconsolo.

  This palace, which discreetly but clearly declared itself a Pazzi building, has the same strongly rusticated ground floor as the Palazzo Medici; but above this floor the wall is stuccoed, an unusual feature in Florence at this time except where the stucco was decorated with sgraffito. The Palazzo Pazzi also differed from the Medici in the form of its windows, which in the Palazzo Pazzi are highly decorative, with vines and pruned branches elaborately carved in stone, with wreaths and the Pazzi emblem of sails billowing fully in a strong wind. There are further Pazzi emblems in the courtyard, sails in
the spandrels and dolphins on the capitals of the columns, the columns also being carved with vegetation and with urns pouring forth flames, an allusion to the Scoppio del Carro. And in the design of the building itself, so Professor Andres has suggested, there may be an overt reference to the family's anti-Medicean politics:

  The series of oculi [round windows] beneath the eaves of the main façade is an unusual motif in Florentine domestic architecture. Nevertheless, the oculus and the framed roundel were favourite devices of Brunelleschi, ones he used above arched windows in the Pazzi Chapel and in the great hall that he began, probably in the early 1420s, for the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa. This palace, a monumental symbol of the city's mercantile oligarchy and traditional alliance with the papacy, had been left unfinished, deprived of funding and attention as a result of Medicean politics. It is interesting to see the motif of its distinctive façade echoed in two separate projects of the Pazzi family. In the Pazzi Chapel one would be inclined to explain the reappearance of the oculus and framed roundels merely as a favourite motif of Brunelleschi. On the much later palace, however, so public an invocation of Guelph-associated imagery seems charged with political significance, especially given the fact that the upper façade was not by Brunelleschi, and may well have been constructed after the Pazzi had aligned themselves with Sixtus IV in opposition to Lorenzo.

  Roundels in the Pazzi Chapel, probably designed by Brunelleschi and glazed by Luca della Robbia, depicting the evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

  The head of the family when the Pazzi Palace was nearing completion was Jacopo de' Pazzi, a mean and ill-tempered old man who was ‘colder than ice’ when his young relative Francesco, the manager of the Rome branch of the bank, came to Florence to tell him what he was planning to do. Francesco told him that, having approved the loan to the papacy for the purchase of Imola, he was preparing an anti-Medicean conspiracy in which he had already enlisted not only the Pope's nephew, Girolamo Riario, the new Lord of Imola, but also Francesco Salviati, the Pope's nominee as Archbishop of Pisa, whom Lorenzo de' Medici – not having been consulted in the appointment as custom required – declined to admit into Tuscany. Jacopo de' Pazzi listened to Francesco with evident disapproval. Even when he was told that the conspirators had the support of a trustworthy condottiere, Gian Battista da Montesecco – who could be relied upon to enlist good troops to back the proposed coup d'état – he held back. ‘They are going to break their necks,’ he told the condottiere. ‘I understand what is going on here better than you do. I don't want to listen to you. I don't want to hear any more about it.’

  The condottiere himself had been reluctant to involve himself in the affair at first, even though the conspirators had assured him that Medici rule was detested by the Florentines and that they would rise up in arms against their present rulers at the slightest encouragement. ‘My Lords,’ he had said dubiously, according to his own account, ‘beware of what you do. Florence is a big affair.’ But after an audience with the Pope, who, while refusing specifically to authorize a violent attack upon the Medici, gave the impression that he would condone murder if murder were done, Gian Battista da Montesecco agreed to help the conspirators, provided he were not required to strike a blow himself against Lorenzo, whom he liked. When informed of the Pope's attitude, Jacopo de' Pazzi also changed his mind and, from being an opponent of the coup, soon became an enthusiastic conspirator himself.

  It was planned that the attack on the Medici should take place in the cathedral during High Mass on Sunday 26 April 1478. Upon the ringing of the sanctuary bell at the elevation of the Host, when the eyes of the congregation would be cast down reverently, two embittered priests, one a Volterran, the other tutor to Jacopo de' Pazzi's illegitimate daughter, were to snatch daggers from their robes and stab Lorenzo de' Medici to death, while two further assassins, Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli, an adventurer deep in debt to the Pazzi, and Francesco de' Pazzi, the banker from Rome, would at the same time dispose of Lorenzo's brother, Giuliano.

  These last two murderers were all too successful. At the agreed signal, Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli, crying, ‘Take that, traitor!’ brought his dagger down in so ferocious a blow that Giuliano's skull was almost split in two. At the same time Francesco de' Pazzi stabbed their victim so ferociously and wildly that he drove the blade of his dagger through his own thigh and went on stabbing relentlessly until Giuliano's corpse was rent with nineteen wounds.

  Lorenzo, however, contrived to escape with a cut in the neck from his two less competent attackers, who were driven off as their intended victim leapt away from them. Drawing his sword, Lorenzo then vaulted over the altar rail and made a dash for the north sacristy, the heavy bronze doors of which were slammed shut behind him by several of his quick-witted friends, one of whom sucked the wound in his neck in case the priests' daggers had been poisoned. ‘Giuliano? Is he safe? Where is Giuliano?’ Lorenzo kept repeating; but no one answered him.

  Someone clambered up the ladder into Luca della Robbia's choir loft to look down into the cathedral, where Giuliano's blood-splashed, mutilated body lay sprawled by the door that leads into Via de' Servi. All around it the congregation was in uproar, as shouts rang round the walls that Brunelleschi's dome had collapsed. The priests who had attacked Lorenzo, as well as Giuliano's assassins, appeared to have escaped in the confusion. Lorenzo was hurried away by his friends to the Medici Palace.

  The city too was in uproar. Members of the Pazzi family and their supporters were riding through the streets, shouting, ‘Libertà! Libertà! Abasso i Medici! Abasso le palle! Libertà! Libertà!’ Other, larger groups of Medici supporters were riding and running about, crying, ‘Vivano le palle! Vivano le palle! Palle! Palle! Palle!’

  As previously planned, Archbishop Salviati and the other conspirators, with a large party of armed supporters, mostly Perugian mercenaries, had already marched to the Palazzo della Signoria to seize it in the name of the insurgents, intending to kill any priori who might attempt to resist them. But the Gonfaloniere was too quick for them. Having admitted both conspirators and mercenaries, he contrived to have the Perugians led into rooms behind doors with special catches which could not be operated from the inside; then, grabbing an iron cooking-spit as the nearest weapon to hand, and calling upon the priori to follow him, he lashed out at the Archbishop and his companions, who were soon beaten to the ground.

  As the great bell boomed above their heads, a large party of Medici supporters burst through the palace gates. Joined by the palace guard, they fell upon the Perugians, massacred them all and bore their heads out into the piazza transfixed on pikes and swords.

  The punishments inflicted upon the leading conspirators were exceptionally savage. Francesco de' Pazzi, found in his family's palace still bleeding from the wound in his thigh, was stripped naked and, with a rope tied round his neck, was hurled from one of the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria. Archbishop Salviati was also thrown out. So were three other victims. All five bodies were left dangling beneath the machicolations of the northern wall, where, in a kind of grisly danse macabre, the Archbishop, struggling at the end of his rope, fixed his teeth into Francesco de' Pazzi's bare flesh.

  The elderly Jacopo de' Pazzi, having succeeded in escaping from Florence to a nearby village, was recognized, brought back to the city, tortured, stripped and also strung from a window of the palace. His body was later dug from its grave and dragged through the streets by the mob before being propped up against his palace door, where, to shouts of ‘Open! Your master wishes to enter!’, his decomposing head was used as a knocker. At last the corpse was thrown into the Arno, from whose murky waters it was dragged by a gang of children; before tossing it back again and watching it drift down the river, they tied it to the branches of a willow tree and flogged it with sticks.

  The condottiere, Gian Battista da Montesecco, was beheaded in the courtyard of the Bargello; so, too, was Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli, Giuliano's assassin, who, having escaped to Constantinople, was apprehended t
here and brought back to Florence in chains. The two priests who had tried to kill Lorenzo were castrated before being hanged. Jacopo de' Pazzi's brother, Renato, whose guilt was never established, was also hanged. Several other members of his family were thrown into prison in Volterra. The rest were utterly disgraced: orders were given for their properties to be confiscated; for their palaces to be given other names, their coats of arms and their family symbols to be obliterated, and their papers to be destroyed. No Pazzi was ever to be allowed to hold office in Florence again; nor was any man who married a woman of the Pazzi family. Representations of the Pazzi traitors, and of those of the other conspirators, were painted by Botticelli on the walls of the Bargello, and beneath each portrait was inscribed a suitable verse composed by Lorenzo.

  At the height of the uproar which followed the attempted coup – while gangs roamed through the streets searching for victims, for alleged conspirators and for unpopular citizens who could be accused of complicity – Lorenzo had come out to stand before a window of the Medici Palace, his brocade waistcoat covered with blood, his neck bandaged, as he was to appear in three life-size wax figures subsequently made of him under the direction of Verrocchio. He told the people not to wreak further vengeance, to save their energies for the enemies of the state who had engineered the conspiracy and would now undoubtedly seek to attack the Florentines not only for having thwarted it but also for having taken it upon themselves to punish its perpetrators so mercilessly. His fears were only too well justified.

  12

  LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT 1478 – 92

  ‘Michelangelo always ate at Lorenzo's table with the sons of the family… and