Medici Money

by Tim Parks

  Ghirlandaio’s Birth of John the Baptist (detail), in Santa Maria Novella (Tornabuoni chapel). Acting on instructions from Giovanni Tornabuoni, the painter seems more interested in his portrayal of these fifteenth-century spectators—the women of the Tornabuoni family—than in the biblical scene itself. The older of the two women wearing white headscarves is Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lorenzo’s mother.

  Despised and ignored, the turncoat Luca Pitti got his position of accoppiatore as promised, and with his brother on the Eight of the Guard, he was spared exile. But his young daughter, Francesca, did not get to marry Lorenzo. Instead she was given to Lorenzo’s uncle, Piero’s brother-in-law, the thirty-six-year-old Giovanni Tornabuoni, head of the Medici bank in Rome and already well advanced in negotiations to bring that Orsini girl to Florence for his nephew.

  “She walks with her head a little stooped,” complained Lucrezia Tornabuoni. A bare six months after the political crisis, Lorenzo’s mother was down in Rome to size up her future daughter-in-law. “I believe this comes from shyness.” Did the child have breasts? “Hard to tell the way these Romans dress.” Anyway, “as well as half of Monte Ritondo,” Lucrezia writes home to Piero, “the family also owns three other castles and … are better off every day because, apart from being maternal nephews of the Cardinal, of the Archbishop Napoleone, and of the knight, they are also related as cousins via their father for he is second cousin to the aforesaid Lords who love them greatly.” This was what mattered. The girl was sixteen. Oh, her name is Clarice, the future mother-in-law remembers to say halfway through a second letter. Only eighteen, Lorenzo was taken down south to view the goods and said they would do. The Medici were about to move into a different class. The trend behind that move would be the ruin of the bank.

  “THIS COMPANY USED to promote everyone who was good at his job, without any regard to family or privilege.” Back in 1453, Leonardo Vernacci, deputy director of the Rome branch, had written to Giovanni di Cosimo, then deputy director of the Medici holding, to complain about the promotion of Giovanni Tornabuoni. Tornabuoni had joined the company at the age of fifteen in 1443, the same year Piero di Cosimo married his sister, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. Vernacci accused young Giovanni of slacking. Now he was being promoted over the head of the talented young Alessandro Bardi, who quit as a result. Tornabuoni wrote to his sister’s husband, Piero (not to Giovanni), to complain about the complaints. “And Vernacci spies on me and reads my post!” In 1465 it would be Vernacci who now left the bank in disgust when Piero promoted his brother-in-law to the directorship of the Rome branch.

  Giovanni Tornabuoni had no special talents; he was obstinate, touchy, and self-important, but as a relative of the family he did appear in that Magi procession that Benozzo Gozzoli painted in the chapel in the Palazzo Medici, and later in life he actually commissioned a number of fine frescoes himself—first in Rome, when the young wife whom Luca Pitti had given him died in 1477, and again back in Florence in Santa Maria Novella, where the painter Ghirlandaio depicted a now-elderly Tornabuoni and his friends and relatives in decidedly patriarchal poses. Here the religious themes, in a fresco such as The Angel Appearing to Zacharias, fade discreetly into the background, while the senatorial figures of the contemporary Florentines in their robes and caps dominate the scene in what is now almost a work of journalism.

  In The Birth of John the Baptist, the Tornabuoni women stand center stage, entirely displacing the biblical scene to show off their modern, carefully tailored clothes and clearly identifiable household jewelry. It is an arrogant though always elegant parody of the early days of Cosimo’s church patronage, where at best a banker might creep into the frame through his name-saint. If the frescoes of San Marco in the 1430s made the sacred space a little less forbidding, a little more breathable for the busy dealer in dry exchanges, in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella that space has been unequivocally commandeered, utterly confused with the world of the contemporary Italian patrician. But then, as director of the Medici bank in Rome, Giovanni had spent his entire adult life in a papal court increasingly concerned with luxury, prestige, and power, not theology. And the irony is that the more worldly the Church became, the less attractive it was for bankers like Tornabuoni—as a customer, that is. The cost of the papal bureaucracy was soaring (500 employees had become 2,000), the price of nepotism likewise. Not to mention the expansionist wars. From the 1460s onward, the Medici bank was lending out more to the Curia than it was taking in with the commission on papal tributes. All too soon, the classic situation would be reached where the indebted client has the upper hand, the bank is too deeply involved to pull out.

  Another man painted together with the Medici family in Gozzoli’s famous Magi procession was Francesco Sassetti, who had been appointed deputy general director of the bank’s holding in 1453, when Giovanni di Cosimo clearly was not pulling his considerable weight in the top position. Like Tornabuoni, Francesco Sassetti married an upper-class fifteen-year-old when in his late thirties, and again like Tornabuoni he had Ghirlandaio paint him (standing beside Lorenzo de’ Medici) for his family chapel, this time the Church of Santa Trinità. Was this a competition? If the Medici were to become aristocrats through marriage, education, and patronage, those around them clearly assumed that they themselves must take on a greater importance too.

  A change now occurred in the bank’s structure that would eventually allow this trend to get out of hand. Whenever one of the parties involved in a company contract died, the contract was dissolved. As general manager of the Medici holding in the halcyon years from 1443 to 1455, Giovanni Benci had been signatory to all the company’s branch contracts; hence, on his death, all the bank’s contracts had to be rewritten. At this point, the idea of the holding company was dropped. There is no letter or report to explain this fatal decision. From now on, the Medici share in each branch of the bank would be held directly by members of the family in partnership with the local managers and not through the holding. This meant that the general manager of the bank as a whole—when not a Medici, and it would never again be a Medici—no longer had a personal, financial interest in each separate branch through his share in the holding. Francesco Sassetti, for example, who held the top position for most of the rest of the bank’s life, from 1458 to 1490, only had shares in the Avignon and Geneva branches. As far as he personally was concerned, all the others could run at a loss. And during the three decades of his leadership, most of them did. Dramatically. At the same time, Sassetti himself became extraordinarily rich. By 1462, aside from house, farms, jewels, and other valuables, he had built up a fortune of 45,000 florins. All made with the bank. Four years later, in a period in which the bank was losing heavily, that fortune had gone up to 97,000 florins, enough to start a major bank of his own. It included large sums of money held in “discretionary” (interest-bearing) Medici accounts under such names as “The Convent of the Celestini,” or “a friend in Florence.” And since everyone had now understood that a show of learning reinforced claims to nobility, Sassetti had built up a library too, a very considerable library. In each book was a bookplate with his name and the little motto: À mon pouvoir (in my power…).

  Yet one thing that was never in Sassetti’s power were the decisions of the Medici bank’s distant branches, decisions that he was supposed to be coordinating. Part of the problem, no doubt, was that without the holding system, he felt no pressing personal need to bring those branches into line. But this state of affairs was exacerbated by the fact that the branches’ managers now shared Sassetti’s and the Medici’s aspirations to grandeur. “Most of them do what they want,” Sassetti complained, “with no regard, and take too much freedom.” What these men were mostly doing was lending far too much of the bank’s money to the people they wished to spend time with and resemble: kings, princes, dukes, lords, and cardinals.

  At which point, reenter the Portinari brothers. Cosimo had taken the three boys, Pigello, Accerito, and Tommaso, into his home when their father, head of the Florence br
anch, died in 1431. At that point the eldest was ten, the same age as Giovanni di Cosimo, Piero’s younger brother. But while the Medici boys got their expensive humanist education, reading Cicero and Caesar, Pigello Portinari left the Medici household at thirteen to start work in the bank—first in Rome, then in Venice—until in 1452 he was given the directorship of the newly opened branch in Milan, which immediately took on an aristocratic air. Francesco Sforza had given Cosimo various buildings in disrepair to house the bank. Cosimo brought in Michelozzo, who transformed them into a wonderful and very grand palazzo. Pigello Portinari thus spent his early years as director concerning himself to a large degree with interior decorating, importing tapestries, and commissioning artists. After all, much of the bank’s capital was taken up in loans to the duke, loans repaid by allowing the bank to collect local taxes. So high was the interest rate on these loans that Pigello was able to attract capital from other Medici branches in order to keep funding the duke and his family’s lavish expenditures. Milan thus soaked up considerable resources without producing any wealth. Everybody was living extravagantly on borrowed time. When that time began to run out, and even the duchy’s tax revenues were not enough to repay the interest owed, the bank simply took back, as collateral, many of the jewels that the Sforzas had been persuaded to buy and sent them off to safes in Venice, in case the local authorities in Milan should ever decide to seize them.

  This pointless tying-up of capital was hardly satisfactory, but at least Pigello was honest. In 1464, however, against all past practices of the bank, he was allowed to take on his brother Accerito as his deputy. It was the core of an entourage, the kind of thing Cosimo had always been careful to avoid. After Pigello died in 1468, Accerito was furious when Piero sent a mere employee from Florence to examine the branch’s books. Accerito refused to show them. The bank had made all kinds of unwise loans and expenses. Francesco Sforza had died, leaving massive debts. “Accerito puffs up more and more every day,” complained Francesco Nori, the would-be inspector. “My dear brother Pigello is already forgotten,” wrote the third brother, Tommaso Portinari, from the bank in Bruges to Piero. “It’s disgraceful your checking up on him.” The veiled appeal to family connections did the job. Piero caved in and gave the directorship of Milan to Accerito, who proceeded to lose more and more money in interminable loans to the duke’s family until the branch was finally closed in 1478.

  MEANWHILE, OTHER FLORENTINE banks were going under altogether. In the mid-1420s, there had been seventy-two; in 1470, there were only thirty-three, with a half-dozen failures in the mid-1460s around the time Piero was calling in loans. The main reason for these failures, no doubt, was falling trade—a decline for which historians have yet to provide a complete explanation—and the bad debts of extravagant princes. Yet one can’t help feeling that at a very deep level the whole Florentine attitude to banking had changed. The old humility, the old enthusiasm for the nitty-gritty of moneymaking, was gone. The families traditionally involved in banking were now used to their wealth and looking for other forms of excitement. Tommaso Portinari is emblematic.

  If Cosimo’s mind had reached out across Europe—planning, calculating, spinning his web across the continent’s financial centers—his son Piero’s poor head, when obliged to take his father’s position at the center, was simply pained by the many tugs on that web. Piero, in the end, did no more than react to bad news. Most of it was coming from Tommaso Portinari in Bruges.

  Having been part of the Medici household since he was three, Tommaso started work in the Bruges branch in 1445 at sixteen. This was shortly before the crisis brought about by the collapse of Venturi & Davanzati in Barcelona in 1447 and then the firing of his older cousin, Bernardo Portinari, who had set up the branch. The 1447 crisis, as we have seen, had to do with the bank’s traditional business of interest-bearing exchange deals linked to triangular trading patterns. Brought up in the Palazzo Medici amid some of the city’s finest artworks and in a constant back-and-forth of politicians, ambassadors, and heads of state, Tommaso set his sights instead on grander things. “Stop spending so much time at court,” Piero was already writing to warn him when he was still a mere clerk. “Who could have spread such a vicious slander?” Tommaso replied. He was trying, he claimed, to secure a first sale of Florentine silk to the duke. “Will you give me an assistant?” he coolly adds. Piero wouldn’t.

  This was the duke of Burgundy, a principality that at that time occupied an area in the east of modern France stretching as far north as the English Channel, where it bordered with English territories around Calais, and then farther east up the Channel coast into modern Belgium. The dukes of Burgundy had occasionally been tempted to get involved in the Hundred Years’ War, usually on the English side against their traditional rivals, the French. Tommaso, with no prompting or brief from the bank, had got himself made counselor to the young regent and later duke of Burgundy, Charles le Téméraire, usually translated in English as Charles the Bold, though the more accurate rendering would be Charles the Rash. A duke who had earned such a name might well need a counselor, but who would lend him money? Tommaso, of course, had been given the position of counselor precisely because he was able and willing to lend money. Not his own, but the Medici bank’s. Just as Giovanni Tornabuoni in Rome had run down his boss, Leonardo Vernacci, in letters to the Medici family back in Florence, so Tommaso began to write nasty things about his director, Agnolo Tani. “A Turk!” he told Piero. “The customers hate him!”

  Tani, like Vernacci, was of the old school, a cautious, crotchety, capable banking man with no particular family connections. “I will resign from the bank if he comes back,” Tommaso threatened when Tani was away on a trip to Florence. This was 1465. Overwhelmed by other worries, Piero gave Tommaso what he wanted, the top position. After all, the two men had been brought up in the same home, presumably shared the same interests. At this point, the Rome, Milan, and Bruges branches of the bank were all being run by directors who felt they had special claims on the Medici family, special privileges, men who didn’t like to think of themselves “merely” as bankers. In 1470, Lionetto di Benedetto d’Antonio de’ Rossi was given the directorship of the once-prosperous branch in Geneva, which had now moved, together with Europe’s main trade fairs, to Lyon in France. Lionetto had recently married Piero’s illegitimate daughter, Maria, and thus was Lorenzo il Magnifico’s brother-in-law. Which makes four key branches in the hands of men who can’t be fired.

  No sooner is he director of the Bruges branch than Tommaso Portinari decides that the bank needs a palazzo comparable with the one his brother presides over in Milan. Hotel Bladelin, one of the finest buildings in Bruges, costs 7,000 Rhine florins. “And I do not live in pomp and show!” he protests in a letter to Piero. Impatient with ordinary banking trade, Tommaso goes remorselessly for the deal to end all deals. Giovanni Arnolfini—made famous by Jan van Eyck—has a concession to collect the customs duties on goods passing by cart or mule train from English-held Calais to the Low Countries. The collection point is the small coastal town of Gravelines. Counseling the duke, Tommaso takes over the contract for the Medici bank for 16,000 francs a year. Rash Charles has just banned the import of finished English wool cloth. Surely, Tommaso reasons, this will lead to a huge increase in raw wool imports, taxed at a higher rate. Can’t lose. Instead, the English take reprisals. They want to work that wool themselves. They refuse to be pushed around like this. Trade falls drastically. By the summer of 1471, income from the Gravelines concession is close to zero.

  The duke of Burgundy has built a couple of galleys for Pope Pius II’s planned crusade against the ever-threatening Turk. The crusade is abandoned when Pius dies while waiting at the Adriatic seaside for his army to materialize. This in 1464. The duke now has two expensive galleys on his hands. Can counselor Tommaso sell them? With trade declining, there are no takers. To do le Téméraire a favor, the enterprising Tommaso buys the galleys for the Medici bank with Medici money. They can trade under the flag of th
e duke of Burgundy (the duke is flattered), thus evading Florentine taxes when they unload in Pisa. It’s another white elephant. Come 1469, when it’s time to renew Portinari’s five-year contract, Piero, now in the last stages of terminal illness, introduces a special clause to the otherwise-standard branch director format:

  With the court of Burgundy or other lords or princes you must deal as little as possible … because the dangers are greater than the profits and many merchants have ended up badly in this way…. From this and other great enterprises you must steer clear, because our intention is to do business to conserve what we have of material goods, of credit and of honor, not to seek to get richer at great danger.

  It’s curious reading these words of solid commercial wisdom from a man who has just launched his son into the spendthrift elite of international blue blood and who himself has spent lavishly on political ends. A certain schizophrenia is at work. Piero has one foot in the old world, one in the new. He fords the stream. Not so the young Lorenzo, who, shortly after his father’s death, will proudly confess to Agnolo Tani, still a major partner in the Bruges branch, that “I know nothing about such matters.” Meaning banking.