Medici Money

by Tim Parks

  THROUGHOUT THE 1440S and 1450s, draconian balias are instituted, made semi-permanent, then suddenly dissolved in the face of angry public reaction. New scrutinies are compiled with new rules. How many name tags are to be put in which electoral bags? How many members of the same family can serve on the same commission? Some people get only one tag in one bag and some get many tags in many bags. Some people are taxed out of business and some are hardly touched. “Whoever keeps in with the Medici does well for themselves,” writes Alessandro Strozzi bitterly to his exiled brother-in-law. Again and again, the Councils of the People and of the Commune are presented with the most ambiguous legislation. They reject it. The signoria reformulates it. The regime is determined to follow the letter of the law, if rarely its spirit. The process is exhausting. Some of Cosimo’s allies are calling loudly for a more drastic and definitive solution. They’re losing patience. Why can’t we have complete control and be done? But Cosimo has long since understood—and this is his modernity—that since power can no longer stem from a truly legitimate source, but is always at the end of the day “seized,” it will always be at best ad hoc, pro tem. Any drastic and definitive solution would thus be a fort waiting to be stormed by someone else equally drastic and determined. It is better to appear to be in constant negotiation, constantly ready to compromise. In the end, the key thing is to keep people, if not actually happy, then happy enough. To keep the lid on.

  The figure of the so-called veduto was important. When the podestà pulled a name from an electoral bag—for prior perhaps, or for one of the Twelve Good Men—the electoral officials had to check whether the person chosen wasn’t in some way barred from holding office. Had he paid his taxes? Had he, or a member of his family, served in a similar office within the last two years? Was he presently resident in Florence? Was he, or any of his relatives, already sitting on another council or commission? In the old days, when the election really was an honest lottery, many names might be pulled from the bag before one was eligible. To be pulled from the bag was to be veduto: “seen.” Actually to take office was to be seduto: “seated.” Since the results of the scrutinies that decided which names were in which bags were kept secret, to be veduto for the position of prior—or, better still, gonfaloniere della giustizia—was a great honor. It meant you had passed the tough selection procedure, you were a respected citizen. When new consultative commissions were convened, being a veduto was often a criterion of eligibility.

  With the new form of “elections”—just ten names in each bag, rather than hundreds—there had been no veduti, or very few. People were disappointed. Resuming control of the elections in 1443, after a brief return to the constitutional procedure, the accoppiatori began to arrange matters so that there would be plenty of veduti, as if the election had been carried out in properly random fashion. In short, they had names pulled out of the hat, names they knew were ineligible, not in order to take office but to be veduti. The trick was painfully obvious, but people were pleased all the same. They received an honor and were not burdened with responsibility. Such is the special humiliation of the fake democracy: the invitation to participate in farce. We have all sensed it. Cosimo, in fact, is creating a new kind of public figure: the person who declares his belief in the fairness of the system because it offers him a small sop, a public recognition. It treats him as though he were an equal. Among the eight priors, most of them Medici men who had served over and over again on all kinds of powerful commissions, there would often be one fellow who knew he was there for the only time in his life. A special favor. He would spend around a hundred florins, more than a year’s salary perhaps, to buy the prior’s expensive gown of saturated crimson; he would be feted and congratulated by all his relatives. But for the two months of his “power,” he knew to ask no questions, nor to seek to influence decisions. From now on, he would always support the Medici. “Many were called to office,” wrote one commentator, “but few were chosen to govern.”

  However secret the mechanisms by which the regime kept its grip on power, the results were now clear to everybody. A group of initiates from Cosimo’s inner circle was fixing everything. And growing richer. Foreign ambassadors did their business at Cosimo’s palazzo, rather than at the Palazzo della Signoria. The Milanese ambassador actually lived in Cosimo’s house. Every decision required Medici consent. The man is a prince in everything but name, thought the other leaders in Italy. But there is a great deal in a name. Why else would princes worry so much about their coronations? Despite analogies, the Florentine citizen’s condition was not quite the same as that of a subject in, say, the Papal States, or Milan. Equally powerless, he was mocked, or flattered, by the rhetoric of republicanism. He could not bow before his monarch in dignified fashion, saying, This is God’s will, nor, alternatively, tell himself: This man is a usurper and I only bow down because brute force obliges me to. Why did he bow down, then? At the end of the day, the Councils of the Commune and of the People did still exist. They could veto legislation. Under the Medici, the Florentine mind was constantly fired by ideals of political freedom that were forever frustrated. A fizz of excited political thought frothed over the submerged reality of protracted dictatorship. If the war ever came to an end, a domestic showdown was inevitable.

  IN THE PAY of the newly formed Republic of Milan, Francesco Sforza was fighting Venice. He also received money from the Medici bank. But the people of Milan soon realized that the condottiere was actually planning to take the city for himself. To defend themselves against him, they made peace with the Venetians behind Sforza’s back. It wasn’t enough. Sforza besieged the town, cut off its food supplies, and starved it into surrender. Quite simply, he was the most powerful military phenomenon in the area. Cosimo then shocked both Florence and the rest of Italy by being the first to give this bastard upstart official recognition as duke of Milan. Did he do it to secure the large amounts of money the bank had lent Sforza? Many members of Cosimo’s own inner circle were angry and suspicious. Or was it because he honestly believed that further Venetian inroads into a weak Milanese republic would be a serious threat to Florence? Or for both reasons?

  In any event, the Medici bank had already pulled its money and merchandise out of Venice before this momentous switch of alliances became known. There was nothing for the frustrated Venetians to seize in revenge. Outwitted, they sent agents to Florence to foment anti-Medici feeling. There was plenty of it. But when Venice allied itself with Naples for a joint attack on Florence and Milan, the Florentine people swung around behind Cosimo. The key to unity in Italy is always the presence of a common enemy. “Never did a winning faction remain united, except when a hostile faction was active,” says Machiavelli of the Florentines.

  Ultimately, it was an enemy common to all of Italy that ended this new war just as it had begun to go rather badly for Florence. In May 1453, the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II captured Constantinople. Eastern Christendom had gone. At once the powerful Turks started to raid the Adriatic coast. It was a wake-up call of September 11 proportions. Time to stop quarreling. In 1454, the Peace of Lodi was signed and in 1455, with shameless rhetoric, a “Most Holy League” was declared, uniting Rome, Milan, Venice, Florence, and Naples against the Infidel. It thus turned out to have been a stroke of luck for Cosimo that the Greeks had been so stubborn about the nature of the Holy Spirit and found themselves alone against the tidal wave of Islam.

  WITH THIS SUDDEN, unexpected peace, the political showdown in Florence could no longer be avoided. Their economy exhausted by the conflict, by another bout of the plague in 1448, and by an earthquake in 1453, many Florentines were starving. The councils insisted on a return to the old election by lot without the interference of the regime’s accoppiatori. No sooner had they got what they wanted than a more neutral, less pro-Medici signoria introduced a property tax that seriously threatened the interests of the rich. Cosimo put on a brave face and said he approved of the tax. It was important for him to have support from the lower orders. His fellow travelers we
re not so pleased. Prominent men were having to sell property to pay the tax. Still unsatisfied, the councils now also wanted a new, free, and fair scrutiny, which would mean more anti-Medici names in the electoral bags. What would happen if the government were really chosen at random after an impartial assessment of those qualified to serve? Where would the Medici be then?

  Nervous, the regime seized on the chance of a favorable signoria to ask the councils to grant unlimited powers again. They would not. Since members of the councils cast their votes (actually beans) secretly, it was hard to twist their arms. When the legislation was sent back for the nth time, the priors demanded that votes be cast openly. The signoria’s two-month term of office was running out. At this point, Archbishop Antonino got involved on the councils’ side and threatened the regime’s bullies with excommunication if they tried to alter the constitution in this way. Perhaps precisely because the Church had taken so much money from the Medici, it felt the need to declare its independence. Voting in secret, the Council of the Commune and the Council of the People again rejected the proposed legislation. They were determined to bring rhetoric and reality together. Florence must be governed as the constitution stipulated. They wanted freedom.

  This was the summer of 1458. As a last resort, the pro-Medici priors of the signoria decided to call a parliament, the first since 1434. Cosimo’s consent was sought and given. But first they waited until the Milanese ambassador had convinced Sforza to dispatch troops to Florence. With soldiers from Milan in place at all entrances to the piazza, the parliament went as parliaments must. Old, tired, and chronically ill, Cosimo was careful not to attend. A new, hundred-strong council was formed with complete power over all “matters of security.” It was a permanent balia, but without the dangerous name. From that point on, the pretense of legality was pure formality: a limited group of men would go on electing each other to this or that body without fear of interference. You could join in, but only if you were willing to toe the Medici line. Any real opposition would have to be armed. No one had the stomach for it. If this was a success for the regime, it was certainly a defeat for Cosimo, who had much preferred the pleasant façade, the collusion of grateful clients, the satisfaction of having persuaded people to do something that he had never openly requested. But the tools of persuasion that make such things possible today—our modern media, mass production, and mass consumption—were not available to the Medici. Nor had anybody thought of the trick of allowing two apparently opposing but secretly complicitous factions to rotate in power at the whim of a complacently “enfranchised” population. The strategy of the two-party democracy lay far away in the future. Meantime, Cosimo was growing more and more preoccupied with the prospect of life after death, and friends were becoming rivals.

  At the Medici bank’s head office, Giovanni Benci was dead. Cosimo’s younger and favorite son, Giovanni, proved a poor replacement. He preferred the high life to the calculation of profit and loss. Immoderately fat, he bought himself a nice slave girl while serving as ambassador to the Curia in Rome. It was becoming a family tradition. Disappointed, Cosimo brought home the Geneva director, Francesco Sassetti, one of the world’s all-time great flatterers, to work beside his son. It was a sign the old banker was losing his grip. Sassetti wasn’t up to it. Having achieved his position through servility, he was incapable of imposing discipline. A branch was opened in Milan, but like the venture in Ancona years ago, it was mainly there to serve Sforza. There was very little serious trade in and out of Milan and hence little chance of profits from exchange deals. While a bank benefited an economy doing business—an economy such as Venice, for example—there was nothing it could do in Milan but encourage a duke to spend more than he ought.

  Still, at least Italy was mostly at peace, and Cosimo was taking a lot of the credit for it. His astuteness, if it was that, lay not so much in his having switched Florence’s alliance from Venice to Milan as in having reduced the number of major players in the political game to match the number of states available. Anchored in Milan, Sforza was no longer a loose cannon, a military power without a state. Hence he no longer needed to fight to have an income. Cosimo hadn’t quite foreseen the consequences of this. He had expected Sforza would help Florence conquer Lucca in exchange for all the Medici money that had been showered on him in his struggle to become duke. Perversely, Sforza hung up his sword and settled down with wife and nineteen children, legitimate and otherwise, to enjoy his earthly possessions.

  FREQUENTLY BEDRIDDEN, Cosimo no longer accepted public office. His sons, themselves middle-aged, were sick too. They all suffered from gout. When not away at their country estates, all three had to be carried around the huge palazzo they had built in town, among their beautiful collections and possessions. Cosimo cried in pain when he was lifted. There was a problem with urine retention. Taking a keen interest in Plato’s ideas about eternal life, paying generously for a new translation of the complete works of the philosopher, he now did most of his business in the windowless, candlelit chapel at the heart of the Palazzo Medici. On the walls, Gozzoli’s wonderful Journey of the Three Kings glimmered all around, showing Cosimo and his family beside the Magi, their donkeys carrying heavy merchandise across distant landscapes, rather as if bank and Bible had got mixed up. There was a monkey, too, sitting on a horse, and a cheetah. The bank occasionally dealt in exotic animals. Archbishop Antonino, who had not in the end excommunicated anyone over the 1458 coup, made a point of condemning supposedly sacred pictures that distracted the viewer’s attention with frivolities. He explicitly mentioned monkeys and cheetahs. Such is an established church’s opposition to the regime it lives with.

  Cosimo heard mass. Above the altar, there was Lippi’s lovely painting of the Virgin and Child, plus a reliquary with genuine fragments from Our Lord’s passion. Hard to come by. And to make the man feel even safer, there was a secret tunnel to escape through—to be carried through, that is—should anyone ever have the nerve to try the frontal assault. It was in this tiny chapel that Cosimo received the men of the regime, to discuss “the secret things of our town.” It was in the chapel that Francesco Sforza’s son, Galeazzo, found him in 1459. Likewise, the marquis of Mantua’s son in 1461. On the second occasion, both Cosimo and Piero were in too much pain from their gout to give the youngster a tour of the great house. Only Giovanni was mobile. Limping heavily, his arm hanging on a servant’s neck, the obese man insisted he would oblige, but gave up when it came to tackling the stairs. Money and magic were impotent here. Moving goods all over Europe, the Medici men rarely made it to the top floor.

  Giovanni died in 1463. Depressed, Cosimo knew he was next. Burial arrangements were carefully negotiated. No doubt money changed hands. He would lie beneath the very center of the nave of the Church of San Lorenzo, in close proximity to the relics of the holy martyrs. Above the sarcophagus, a stone column would connect it to the tomb-marker on the church floor, a large white porphyry circle enclosing two crossed oblongs, a magical motif signifying, apparently, eternity. The effect, when one visits San Lorenzo today, is both unobtrusive and absolutely central: the banker’s vocation. Barely noticed, he is the ground beneath the communicant’s feet. A last generous endowment paid for a mass to be said for Cosimo’s soul 365 days a year in perpetuity, and quality funeral clothes for all the mourners, including four female slaves. It is the only news we have of them.

  5

  Blue Blood and White Elephants

  During the hot days and nights of August 1466, an old drama played itself out in the streets and palazzi of Florence. Once again the city was divided into two armed camps. Once again a transfer of power was in the air. Yet the principal actors seemed strangely hesitant, as if reluctant to rehearse what had been done so many times before, or unsure perhaps as to how to proceed in these different times.

  Cosimo had died and something had to change. “With Cosimo your plan is impossible,” the exiled Palla Strozzi had told Girolamo Machiavelli when the rebel came looking for support to overt
urn the banker’s regime. “Without him it will be unnecessary.” Cosimo was revered and he had had the money. Members of other old and wealthy families addressed him as “father.” Still, they had built the regime with him, they told themselves, not for him. And certainly not for his son. Piero had no hereditary right, no special charisma, nor perhaps so much money. The bank was in difficulty. Banks in general were in difficulty. So while in 1458 the challenge to the Medici had been launched through legal institutions, in line with the constitution, it now came, more seriously, from Cosimo’s ex-partners in the regime—the ones who for decades had manipulated the constitution on his behalf. Suddenly, four canny old men were talking about liberty.

  Dietisalvi Neroni, one of Cosimo’s oldest collaborators and brother of the city’s new archbishop, had been annoyed when plans to expand the Medici palazzo threatened to take light away from his own. Such a slight would clearly be perceived as a comment on his diminishing importance. Immediately after Cosimo’s death, Neroni wrote to Francesco Sforza in Milan that just as Cosimo had been a father to other members of the reggimento, so they would now be fathers to Piero—i.e., the Medici are no longer the leading family. This is an oligarchy, not a principality.