Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  Informed of this proposed revival of the medieval trial by ordeal, the priori were horrified. One of them suggested that if these friars wanted to prove that they enjoyed God's protection why did they not try to walk across the Arno without getting wet. Others protested that the people had by now become so excited by the quarrel and its proposed resolution that nothing less than an ordeal by fire would satisfy them. The ordeal was then authorized; and the Piazza della Signoria was prepared for it, a pathway through a pile of firewood being marked out with sticks soaked in oil.

  On the appointed day, 17 April 1498, the Franciscans marched into the Piazza followed by the Dominicans, all chanting psalms and walking in pairs behind a crucifix. The champions of their respective orders took up position at either end of the Loggia dei Lanzi, while the priori assembled on the ringhiera outside the gate of the Palazzo della Signoria. Every window and roof above their heads was crowded with the expectant faces of the citizens of Florence.

  As arguments raged as to whether the contestants might take a crucifix or the consecrated host into the flames, storm clouds gathered and a heavy rain began to fall. The arguments continued as the afternoon wore on until the priori – who had apparently always intended that the spectacle should be cancelled and the friars blamed for the people's disappointment – announced that it was now too late and too wet for the ordeal to take place that day.

  With the dispute thus unresolved the rows between the prior's supporters and their opponents became more frequent and bitter than ever. On Palm Sunday a congregation assembled in the cathedral to hear a sermon by one of Savonarola's Dominican disciples were chased out of the building by shouting compagnacci wielding sticks and throwing stones. The congregation ran for safety to the buildings of San Marco, which were soon surrounded by a huge mob.

  Savonarola had commanded his fraternity to rely on prayer alone for their protection; but, believing weapons to be of more immediate use, many of the monks had armed themselves with lances and pikes with which they now threatened the mob. They also loosened a pinnacle from the top of the monastery church and sent it crashing down on to the heads of the besiegers who were endeavouring to clamber up the walls.

  ‘The crowd increased all the time,’ Luca Landucci recorded in his diary; ‘and they brought up three stone-throwing machines by which some people were wounded and others killed. At about [two o'clock in the morning] they set fire to the doors of the church and cloister of San Marco and, penetrating into the church, began to fight.’

  The prior ran for safety to Michelozzo's library, where a guard sent by the Signoria to arrest him found him praying at a desk. He was escorted past the jeering crowds to the Palazzo della Signoria and was locked up in the cramped cell known with grim humour as the Alberghettino, the Little Inn. From there, he was taken to be tortured by the city's rack-master in the Bargello, ‘being carried there by two men on their crossed hands because his feet and hands were in irons’.

  Ambiguously he confessed all that was required of him while suffering the dreadful agonies of the strappado but, as soon as the straps had been released, he retracted his confessions. He was tortured again and recanted again. In the end he was found guilty of heresy and condemned to death, together with two of his most devoted disciples. Messengers were sent to Rome for permission to carry out the sentence. The Pope in return sent commissioners to Florence to review the case. The commissioners, in their

  Caption

  The execution of Savonarola in the Piazza della Signoria on 23 May 1498; a painting on the back of a panel of a portrait of Savonarola by an anonymous sixteenth-century Florentine artist.

  turn, ‘arriving in Florence with the verdict in their bosom’, ordered that the accused should be tortured once more to extract further admissions. Their sentences were then confirmed and orders were given for them to be hanged in chains and burned on a scaffold in the Piazza.

  An immense pile of brushwood was prepared; a gallows with three stout arms was erected in its centre; and a high platform built from the gate of the Palazzo to the gallows’ ladder so that all who had been disappointed by the cancellation of the ordeal might be compensated by a view of the three friars being conducted to their death. ‘They were robed in all their vestments,’ Luca Landucci entered in his diary under the heading 22 May.

  These were taken off one by one with the appropriate words for the degradation… Then their faces and hands were shaved as is customary in this ceremony… The first to be executed was Fra Silvestro, who was hung to the post and one arm of the cross, and there not being much drop, he suffered for some time, repeating ‘Jesu’ many times whilst he was hanging, for the rope did not draw tight nor run well. The second was Fra Domenico of Pescia, who also kept saying ‘Jesu’; and the third was [the prior] who did not speak aloud, but to himself, and so he was hanged… When all three had been hanged a fire was made on the platform upon which gunpowder was put and set alight, so that the said fire burst out with a noise of rockets and cracking. In a few hours they were burnt, their legs and arms gradually dropping off. Part of their bodies remaining hanging to the chains, a quantity of stones were thrown to make them fall, as there was a fear of the people getting hold of them; and then the hangman and those whose business it was, hacked down the post and burnt it on the ground, bringing a lot of brushwood, and stirring the fire up over the dead bodies, so that the very last piece was consumed. Then they fetched carts, and carried the last bit of dust to the Arno, by the Ponte Vecchio, in order that no remains should be found. Nevertheless, a few good men had so much faith that they gathered some of the floating ashes together, in fear and secrecy, because it was as much as one's life was worth to say a word, so anxious were the authorities to destroy every relic.

  14

  CONSPIRATORS AND CARDINALS 1498–1527

  ‘An appalling spectacle of horrors.’

  NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

  In the gloomy years following the execution of Savonarola, the bent figure of Sandro Botticelli, ‘old and useless, ill and decrepit’, as Vasari described him, could be seen hobbling about Florence with the help of crutches. He seemed an incarnation of the sad and weakened state of the city. A long and bitter war with Pisa – during which the condottiere paid to conduct it, Paglio Vitelli, was tried and executed for treason – had placed a scarcely supportable strain on the resources of the treasury, while a series of financial crises had brought several of the city's guilds to the verge of bankruptcy. The bitter atmosphere of these sad days is reflected in Luca Landucci's diary entries. A characteristic entry was written on 24 February 1500:

  A Sienese physician was murdered by three men… who fell upon him from the butcher's shop at the corner of Via Ghibellina next to the Stinche1… They were hanged where they had committed the crime. They went on the executioner's cart, being tortured most cruelly with red-hot pincers all through the city; and here at Tornaquinci the brazier for heating the pincers broke. There not being much fire left, and it not burning properly… the executioner got out and went for charcoal to the charcoal-burner, and for fire to the baker and used a kettle as a brazier making a hot fire. The Cavaliere kept shouting all the time, ‘Make it red hot!’ And all the people wanted [the murderers] to be tortured without pity. Even young boys were ready to kill the executioner if he did not do his work well. The condemned men shrieked in the most terrible manner. All this I saw at Tornaquinci.

  In an attempt to strengthen the government, it had been decided to appoint a Gonfaloniere for life; but the priore chosen for this high responsibility, Piero Soderini, was not a man to inspire much confidence. It was generally conceded that he was industrious and honest, a stickler for constitutional propriety, yet as one of his critics said, he had ‘no ideas, no imagination and no sparkle’. When faced with any difficult problem he was known to consult one of his government's minor officials, a thin, pale young man of high intelligence, the son of a lawyer from an old Tuscan family, Niccolò Machiavelli.

  Deeply interested in the t
heory and practice of government, Machiavelli was also concerned with the conduct of war, and had long since come to the conclusion that Florence's reliance upon self-seeking mercenaries and condottieri was as inept as it was expensive. What was needed, he argued, was a national militia whose soldiers, conscripts and volunteers from Florence's country districts, would fight bravely for causes in which their own honour and interests lay, just as the citizens of ancient Rome had fought to defend their republic. Strongly influenced as always by Machiavelli's ideas, Piero Soderini agreed to the enlistment of a militia and entrusted him with the task of organizing and equipping it. Iron breastplates were ordered as well as lances and arquebuses, and for each man ‘a white waistcoat, a pair of stockings, half red and half white, a white cap and a pair of shoes’. In February 1506 a parade of the first recruits, most of them from the farms, villages and small towns of the contado, was held in the Piazza della Signoria. ‘They were soldiers but lived in their own homes,’ wrote Luca Landucci, who was there to watch them march up and down. ‘They were obliged to turn out when needed and it was ordered that many should be equipped in this way throughout Tuscany so that we should not need any foreigners. It was thought the finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence.’

  It had been arranged none too soon, for Florence was by then under threat from a formidable army raised by the Pope.

  The Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, had died three years before; and, after the twenty-six-day papacy of the decrepit Pius III, had been succeeded by the commanding, fearsome and irascible Julius II, the grandson of a Ligurian fisherman and nephew of Sixtus IV, who prided himself on his soldierly qualities. ‘I am no schoolman,’ he said when asked to suggest a suitable emblem for a statue of him being made by Michelangelo. ‘Put a sword in my hand, not a book.’

  A wooden bust of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527).

  No sooner had he taken up residence in the Vatican than he was off campaigning in Emilia and the Romagna, determined to compel cities which had rebelled against the papacy in the days of his predecessors to return to their obedience. Having regained Bologna and Perugia, he turned upon Venice – which had presumed to take over Rimini, Faenza and Ravenna – calling upon France and Spain to help him; then, having routed the Venetian army at Agnadello, he demanded that the other Italian states join him in driving the ‘foreign barbarians’, his recent allies, out of the peninsula.

  The Florentines were disinclined to help him. They had no quarrel with Spain; and, although their unfortunate brush with King Charles VIII was a recent and bitter memory, their traditional friendship with the French had not been irreparably damaged. When the Pope heard of their decision to remain neutral he flew into one of his celebrated rages, and was even more angry when almost ten thousand of the men he did eventually manage to assemble, mostly Spaniards, were slaughtered in an exceptionally savage battle with the French by the banks of the River Ronco on Easter Saturday 1512.

  Almost as many French soldiers were killed and their young commander, Gaston de Foix, thrown from his saddle by a stray shot, had been hacked to death by Spanish infantrymen. But the Florentines, learning that the Pope's so-called Holy League had been dealt a crushing blow, lit bonfires in celebration, believing that the danger was past.

  The danger was not past, however. Their homeland threatened by invasion from both England and Spain, the French withdrew from Italy; and the forces of the Holy League, free from interference and recovered from their recent mauling, now marched upon Florence intent upon replacing the city's government with one more amenable to the Pope's demands.

  At the approach of the league's Spanish soldiers, peasant families and the population of entire villages fled to Florence to seek safety behind its massive walls. Within those walls, the citizens remained calm, confident in the ability of their militia to defend them. After all, although supported openly or secretly by Florence's rivals and enemies, the Pisans had been defeated after a struggle lasting fifteen years, mainly by the efforts of the militia; and the militia would surely acquit themselves as well now. There was ‘no need to fear’, Luca Landucci assured himself. ‘On the contrary, it was the enemy who ought to be afraid, because if they came down into these plains they would fare badly. Many battalions of militia had been levied, and all the men-at-arms were eager to encounter the enemy.’

  The league's commander, Raymond de Cadorna, was himself not at all confident that his army was strong enough for the task it had been assigned. He had not wanted to advance into Tuscany at all; nor had the Pope's nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, who was reluctantly accompanying the Spanish army. Also with the army, however, was a young man in the Pope's confidence who had compelling personal reasons to advocate a determined attack upon Florence: Lorenzo de' Medici's second son, Giovanni, now thirty-six years old and a cardinal for the past twenty.

  A less likely looking soldier it would be difficult to imagine. Pale, paunchy, extremely short-sighted, with a nose markedly snubbed and a mouth hanging half open as though he were in dazed surprise, Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici had the appearance of a gourmand much given to the pleasures of easy comfort, as, indeed, he was. Yet, when Pope Julius had taken twenty-four grumbling cardinals with him in unwilling attendance on his rampages around the rebellious Papal States, he had been much struck by the young Medici cardinal's good nature, his genial acceptance of the hardships of camp life and his courage. He had noted, too, his sharp intelligence and, behind the carefree manner of the bon vivant, a restless ambition.

  His elder brother, the unfortunate Piero, with whom he had escaped from Florence during the anti-Medicean uprising of 1494, had been drowned when his boat capsized in the swollen water of the Garigliano, and Giovanni was now head of the Medici family. Determined to claim his inheritance, he urged the Spanish commander forward towards Florence, insisting that no terms should be agreed with the city that did not provide for the restoration of his family to their properties, rights and privileges. He was already in touch with sympathizers in Florence by means of a peasant who carried messages into the city, depositing them in a hole in the wall of a cemetery near Santa Maria Novella; while his cousin, Giulio, had arranged a secret meeting with Antonfrancesco degli Albizzi, a leading member of the proscribed Medicean party, who assured him that the Gonfaloniere would put up only a token resistance.

  As it happened, however, Piero Soderini was not a man to give way so readily. Belying his reputation as an efficient but unimaginative administrator, he addressed the assembled crowd in the Piazza della Signoria in an eloquent and moving speech, urging them to fight for their city's liberties and to oppose all efforts to restore the Medici family to their former power. The citizens shouted their support of Soderini's stand; and orders were issued for the imprisonment of all known supporters of the Medici and for the militia to take up positions in all the city's strongholds. The Spanish troops of the Holy League continued their advance upon Florence, battering their way into Prato, so Francesco Guicciardini recorded, and

  rushing through the town where there was no longer any opposition, but only cries, flight, violence, sack, blood and killing, the terrified Florentine foot soldiers casting away their weapons and surrendering to the invaders… Nothing would have been spared the avarice, lust and cruelty of the invaders had not the Cardinal de' Medici placed guards at the main church and saved the women who had taken refuge there. More than two thousand died, not fighting (for no one fought) but fleeing or crying for mercy.

  For two days the pillage of Prato continued, as houses, churches and monasteries were ransacked, priests killed at their altars, women raped in the streets, men tortured to reveal the places where their valuable possessions had been hidden and then stripped naked and thrown into wells and ditches already choked with severed limbs.

  As news of what Machiavelli called this ‘appalling spectacle of horrors’ reached Florence, scarcely ten miles from Prato's south-eastern gate, a deputation of Medici supporters went to the Palazzo della Signor
ia to demand the resignation of the Gonfalionere. Soderini was only too ready now to accede to their request and to escape from the city while he could. Escorted from Florence into exile, he was replaced by a Gonfaloniere sympathetic to the Medici. Cardinal Giovanni's younger brother, Giuliano de' Medici, entered the city on 1 September 1512, a few hours after Soderini left it. Already workmen were busy restoring the Medici palle to those buildings from which they had been removed and replacing the Medici emblems on the family palace in Via Larga. Machiavelli's militia was disbanded; and Machiavelli himself, in a purge of officials of the previous regime, was replaced by a Medicean. He left Florence to live in a small house in the country which he had inherited from his father.

  Giuliano de' Medici, a well-mannered and good-natured young man, had entered Florence unattended and wearing an inconspicuous lucco. His brother, the cardinal, more given to drama and ceremony, rode into the city in state, accompanied by 1,500 troops in the manner of a conqueror. Yet he immediately made it clear to the Florentines that he had no intention of imposing a tyrannical rule. A pro-Medicean demonstration was organized in the Piazza della Signoria; a Parlamento was called and a Balia was appointed, all in the approved constitutional manner. But, although nearly all the members of this Balia were also members of the Medici party, it was made clear that the government which they were to administer was to be conducted in accordance with the cardinal's motto, ‘Jugum enim meum suave est’ (‘Truly my yoke is easy’). Florence was to turn her back on the recent past and return to the mood of the happier days of the cardinal's revered father, Lorenzo il Magnifico.