Medici Money

by Tim Parks

  Time is on the Medici side. Cosimo is getting richer. The branches in Rome, Venice, and Geneva in particular are producing healthy profits, the first through collecting Church tributes, the other two through exchange deals along Europe’s busiest trading routes. To the sick, cash-starved city of Florence, Medici money seems to possess curative powers. Cosimo has been draining the resources of the Florence branch of the bank to make extra loans for the war effort. If he held power, perhaps he would be even more generous. He would have the wherewithal to look after the city. People are beginning to make puns on the name Medici—doctors. And it’s not just the surname. Cosimo’s name saint, St. Cosma, and his brother, St. Damiano, were doctor saints who performed miracles of healing. Cosimo had had a twin brother, appropriately named Damiano, who died at birth. Now in his mid-forties, and ironically in pretty poor health, the leader of the Medici clan is well aware that Rinaldo degli Albizzi must see him as a threat.

  On May 30, 1433, Cosimo transfers 15,000 florins from Florence to Venice, sells 10,000 florins’ worth of personally held government bonds to the bank’s Rome branch, and deposits 3,000 Venetian ducats in the Monastery of San Miniato al Monte and a further 5,877 ducats in the Monastery of San Marco. He and his father have given generously to the Church over the years. Now the sacred and the profane are getting very seriously mixed up. Hidden among the miracle-working bones of long-dead martyrs, or wrapped in what might have been Christ’s shroud, Medici money is at hand to satisfy local customers if the political situation leads to a run on the bank—Cosimo mustn’t lose people’s confidence by asking them to wait for a withdrawal. On the other hand, it is safely out of the way should the Albizzi, or an Albizzi-controlled government, try to confiscate his wealth.

  FOR MOST HISTORIANS, Cosimo is the innocent victim of what happens next. He is also a political genius. The unanimity of this paradoxical view is striking. Rinaldo degli Albizzi is written off as a tyrant and a prig. He was opposed to Cosimo’s humanist friends, the historian Christopher Hibbert complains, because he saw them as dangerous for Christianity. A bigot. But Rinaldo was right. The humanists certainly represented the first step toward the secularization of the West. That is not to say they were not Christian. Had they opposed Christianity, they would have been swept aside immediately. But their interests lay elsewhere, and their determination to see each written text as the product of a particular period of history would ultimately lead to an entirely different view of the Bible. At the level of political institutions, as early as 1440 the humanist Lorenzo Valla would demonstrate, through able textual scholarship, that the supposedly fourth-century Donation of Constantine, by which Constantine the Great was believed to have granted Pope Sylvester spiritual and temporal dominion over Rome and most of Western Europe, was in fact a ninth-century fraud. The pope’s rule was thus no more legitimate than that of any upstart condottiere. He too depended ultimately on money, military power, and false papers.

  Cosimo supported the humanists and they him. Who else could fund them so generously? But who else funded the Church so generously? Pope Eugenius IV, who replaced Martin V in 1431, needed an efficient international bank. Cosimo advanced the cash for Martin’s burial and the funds for Eugenius’s coronation. Who wouldn’t deal with such a man? Money has this excellent quality: It can hold the most heterogeneous elements together. We meet our enemies in the account books of our banks, who, more often than not, are funding both of the political parties between which we are supposed to choose when we vote. Lavishing finance on such a wide range of clients, Cosimo knew he was putting himself in contention with a ruling faction that depended exclusively on the support of Florence’s old patrician families.

  It’s the summer of 1433 and the road to power is blocked. Whoever makes the first move will be most in the wrong, most exposed to a public backlash, but also most able to deliver the killer blow. Cosimo retires to his stronghold in Trebbio to the north of the city. He stays there until the fall. Far from being the genius politician, he doesn’t seem to know how to proceed. Does he already consider himself indispensable? Is he waiting for the call to power, for an invitation to sort out the city’s finances? He has already lent the city a staggering 155,000 florins, as a result of which the Florence branch of the bank has been operating at a loss. Finally the call does come. Cosimo de’ Medici is requested to present himself at the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of government. Three days after returning to Florence, on September 7, 1433, Cosimo walks the couple of hundred yards from his house to the big central piazza and enters the massive building with its tall, solid tower. Even today, the place radiates a grim authority. And at once he is arrested.

  Under Florentine law, a man couldn’t serve in government if he hadn’t paid his taxes. At the end of August, the name Bernardo Guadagni had been drawn from the bag that supplied the gonfaloniere della giustizia, the head of government. The officials checked his tax situation. Until shortly before that draw, Bernardo had been in arrears. But then Rinaldo degli Albizzi had paid his taxes for him. What a coincidence that his name was drawn! Rinaldo now has the city in his hands and Cosimo is in a trap. This is what all the banker’s money and genius have brought him to: a charge of treason, a sentence of exile or death.

  THE GRAND TURNING points in the history of the Florentine Republic are marked by the summoning of a so-called parliament. At its most basic, the system of government is this: The eight priors and the gonfaloniere form the signoria, which initiates all legislation. In doing so, they consult two advisory bodies, the Twelve Good Men and the Sixteen Standard Bearers, who, like the priors, are chosen by lot. The laws proposed are then ratified or rejected by the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune, each about two hundred strong, and again chosen by lot, but this time for four- rather than two-month periods.

  The system can be unwieldy. Since there is a well-established difference of wealth and class between those whose names are in the bags for drawing the priors and those in the bags for the two big councils, it is not surprising that sometimes the councils repeatedly refuse to ratify laws that successive governments insist are vital. So when an impasse is reached, or when some particularly momentous and difficult decision must be made rapidly, a parlamento is called, which is to say a gathering, in the open square outside the Palazzo della Signoria, of all Florentine males over the age of fourteen. The principle is not unlike that of the modern referendum. Sovereignty passes directly to the people. But, notoriously, modern governments call referendums only when they are sure that they can bully people into voting as they should.

  So, in Florence on September 9, 1433, as the deep, old bell of the Palazzo della Signoria booms out to call the citizens to their political duty, armed men are already circling the square and controlling each point of entry. Medici supporters are discouraged from attending. Cosimo can see a corner of the scene from his cell window. Dutifully—and this is always the way at these parliaments—the men who do attend vote for the formation of a so-called balia. The word balia just means “plenary powers.” Basically, the proposal made at every parliament is that the people hand over their future to an ad hoc body of two hundred men chosen, of course, by the present signoria, thus bypassing the resistance of the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune. In 1433 the signoria meant Rinaldo degli Albizzi.

  The balia has been called to decide the fate of the Palazzo della Signoria’s illustrious prisoner. Rinaldo wants Cosimo dead. Rinaldo is a landowner, the Albizzi family is old and rich. But it is not a family practiced in the art of exchange. Rinaldo is neither a banker nor a merchant, and he cannot compete with his rival when it comes to transferable wealth, to loans and bribes and patronage. He knows that Cosimo is one of a new generation who will not be destroyed by exile, as rich men were in the past. He has understood that banks do not exist in space in the same way as a castle, a farm, or even a factory does. The man must be beheaded, he tells the balia. It’s the only way.

  But he can’t swing it. Even the men h
e has chosen for the balia are divided. Cosimo has so many friends. So many citizens are indebted to him. They see a future in him. Unlike a similarly rich banker, Palla Strozzi, Cosimo seems willing to spend his money more widely, for the civic good, to get involved in public affairs. Given more power, perhaps he would spend even more, rather than shifting capital to other cities.

  The charge against the accused is vague. Cosimo de’ Medici has sought “to elevate himself above others.” But don’t we all? Put on the rack, two Medici supporters “confess” that Cosimo has been planning an armed rebellion with foreign help. No one believes it. It’s not his style. Venice immediately sends three ambassadors to plead on Cosimo’s behalf. The Medici bank has important business dealings with influential Venetians. The new pope, Eugenius IV, is also Venetian and from just the kind of rich merchant family that deals with people like the Medici. The Vatican representative is eloquent on Cosimo’s behalf. The Church does not want its banker beheaded and Pope Eugenius has all kinds of sanctions at his disposal.

  Then the marquis of Ferrara muscles in. He’s another client who appreciates Cosimo’s services. Lying as it does in the noman’s-land between Venice and the Papal States, Ferrara is an important ally for Florence. The members of the balia are impressed. The mobility of money, it seems, makes the fate of a banker an international affair. Had the Medici merely been wealthy landowners, they could have been dispatched without anyone’s noticing. Paid by Cosimo’s friends, Florence’s only military leader of note, Niccolò da Tolentino, gathers his soldiers and marches toward Florence from Pisa on the coast. At the same time, Cosimo’s younger brother, Lorenzo, is busy raising an army from among the peasants to the north of the city, where the family has its villas and agricultural land. Already the balia has been deadlocked for a week or more.

  Back in his cell, under the roof of the Palazzo della Signoria, Cosimo finally agrees to start eating when his jailer offers to pre-taste his meals for him. The man will be generously reimbursed. Visitors start to climb up to the banker’s cell from the lower floors of the same palazzo where the balia is meeting. It’s a sign that Albizzi is losing his grip. Cosimo is allowed pen and paper: Pay the bearer, he begins to write, this or that sum of money. And he signs. Bernardo Guadagni, head of the signoria, receives 1,000 florins, far more than his miserable tax arrears, paid by Rinaldo degli Albizzi, were worth. “He could have had ten times more,” Cosimo later remarked, “if only he had known to ask.” In return for his thousand florins, Guadagni fakes illness, stays at home, and delegates his authority to another prior, likewise bribed.

  Suddenly, the moment to kill has passed. The Medici army in the Mugello is ready to march. Niccolò da Tolentino and his mercenaries are within striking distance. Under pressure from foreign diplomats, the banker Palla Strozzi, a constitutionalist who genuinely believes that wealth can and should keep out of politics, withdraws his support for the proposed death sentence. Needless to say, his money carries a lot of votes with him. Everything that happens, it seems, is the result of each participant’s calculation of his private interest. There are no ideals involved. An ideal situation for a banker. On September 28, three weeks after Cosimo’s arrest, fearing an attack from without and a rebellion within, Rinaldo at last backs down and proposes a sentence of exile rather than execution. Relieved, the balia gives him a majority. Cosimo is to go to Padua for ten years, his cousin Averardo to Naples, his brother Lorenzo to Venice. That should keep the family apart. Fearful that there may still be plans to assassinate him, Cosimo begs to be allowed to leave the city at night and in secret. Throughout the remaining thirty years of his life, he will never again allow himself to be so completely at the mercy of events.

  WHAT DID COSIMO do in exile? Much the same as he had done at his villa in Trebbio before imprisonment. He runs his bank and waits. He behaves. The postal service is effective enough. After two months, a newly appointed signoria allows him to move to Venice, where he stays in San Giorgio Maggiore, the old monastery of his client the pope. Immediately, he offers to build the monks a new library and supply the books. The Venice branch of the bank has been making profits of 20 percent a year on a capital outlay of 8,000 florins. What better way to spend it than by making friends and building support? Cosimo has brought his own personal architect, Michelozzo, into exile with him, almost as if this kind of project formed part of a predetermined plan. When a distant Medici relative tries to involve him in a conspiracy to engineer his return to Florence with the help of Milanese troops, Cosimo scores moral points by reporting the scheme to the government of Venice, which passes on the information to Florence. This is hardly generous to the relative, but Cosimo knows that the Florentines are bankrupt, and that no one will lend the priors “so much as a pistachio nut.” How furious they must be to think of Cosimo lavishing his money on libraries in Venice when he could be helping out in Florence. Every generous display of wealth abroad will turn minds at home. In 1433–34, the profits of the Venice bank almost double. Much of this is business lost to Florence.

  And now the wars have begun again, the usual complicated mix of rebellion and opportunism. Pope Eugenius has fled an uprising in Rome and taken up residence in Florence. He needs his banker more than ever. He needs money to buy friends and pay mercenaries. The city of Bologna, part of the Papal States, likewise falls to rebels. The Venetians and Florentines form an alliance to put down the uprising. Milan wades in on the other side, and in the late summer of 1434, the Florentines are soundly defeated by the now-inevitable Piccinino near Imola. A disaster. Immediately afterward, to top it all, Rinaldo degli Albizzi commits the unpardonable error of allowing a pro-Medici group of priors to appear from the electoral bags. Why didn’t he rig the election? Cosimo is invited back. Rinaldo’s attempt at armed rebellion is headed off with pathetic ease by a few empty reassurances from Pope Eugenius. His only consolation a few days later when he himself is exiled will be a big told-you-so to the seventy other prominent men obliged to leave the city with him. Cosimo should have been killed: “Great men must either not be touched, or, if touched, eliminated.”

  Taking over the reins of power, Cosimo at once exiles the dithering Palla Strozzi along with Rinaldo, thus demonstrating that to have money and not commit it politically is folly. Why else do big organizations give to political parties? In short, the banker is back, he is revered, he wields unconstitutional powers, and he hasn’t even broken the law. Such was and no doubt is the power of money. Historians choose to praise the bloodless nature of this transfer of power. “Yet it was tinged with blood in some part,” Machiavelli reminds us. Together with four other citizens, Antonio Guadagni, son of Bernardo (the gonfaloniere della giustizia who had accepted Cosimo’s bribe), left his designated place of exile to go to Venice. Given the city’s good relations with Cosimo, this was unwise. The five were arrested, sent to Florence, and beheaded.

  Donatello’s David. The first we know of this extraordinary statue with its effeminate boy hero is its appearance in the courtyard of Palazzo Medici. There were those who accused Cosimo de’ Medici of approving of homosexuality.

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  “The Secret Things of Our Town”

  He was accused of being friendly to sodomites. The first we know of Donatello’s David is in Cosimo’s house. It is hard to think of a better advertisement for homosexuality than this life-size naked youth in polished bronze who slays a giant to place a dainty foot on the severed head and assume an erotic pose. Hermaphroditus, a book of poems dedicated to Cosimo, was publicly burned. It promoted sodomy, said celebrity preacher Bernardino di Siena. But Cosimo never used his power to abolish the Officers of the Night, the vice police who prowled the piazzas in search of serving girls with too many buttons, perverse men in platform shoes, gay lovers caught in the unnatural act.

  He was accused of being friendly to Jews. In 1437, the Florentine government conceded explicit moneylending licenses to Jews, not to Christians. But there is no indication that Cosimo opposed the law obliging Jews to wear a yell
ow circle of cloth. A Jew was not part of Christendom and that was that.

  He was accused of usury and tax evasion. You will go to hell for benefiting from his evil earnings, Rinaldo degli Albizzi had told the Medici sympathizers. After his return to Florence, Cosimo lifted restrictions on the so-called dry exchanges. It was one of the few transactions that all the theologians agreed was usury.

  He was accused of hijacking church renovation for his own glorification, of kicking out other would-be patrons, of replacing the family chapels of enemies with those of friends, of trying to buy his way into heaven, of using excommunication as a weapon to recover personal debts, of being too friendly with priests who are “the scum of the earth.”

  He was accused of spending fabulous sums on a huge new palazzo while others starved, and of appropriating cash from the public purse to do it. “Who would not build magnificently being able to spend money which is not his?” his detractors complained. Blood was smeared on the massive doors of the new house. Designed by Michelozzo and situated on the via Largo, just a few hundred yards north of the duomo, the Palazzo Medici had, and still has, the forbidding look of the fortress about it. There were no windows at ground-floor level, just solid stone.

  He was accused of cruelty and tyranny. He exiled so many and never failed to have the standard ten-year sentence extended before expiry. Families were split and letters censored. Up and down the peninsula, paid informers monitored the whereabouts of old enemies. Ingenious codes were developed to bemuse the city officials.