Medici Money

by Tim Parks

  Tommaso Portinari had ridden on horseback all the way from Bruges to Florence to sign that new contract. And to get married. Having returned to Bruges, he felt bound to apologize to Piero for having kept this second purpose of his visit secret. Why had he done that? Why not celebrate his wedding openly? For the simple reason that, with their growing power, the Medici had taken to arranging not only their own marriages but, as in the case of Giovanni Tornabuoni, everybody else’s as well. Cosimo began it, Piero continued, and Lorenzo would excel in this department. While the Medici married up into the aristocracy, all the other noble families must marry down into the middle classes. A gap would be established. Society would thus be arranged around the Medici, for the Medici, and, most important, beneath the Medici. Tommaso, who grew up under their wing, was cutting free, as they had cut free from the Florentine mesh by having Lorenzo marry an Orsini. Piero was spared the pain of this wicked slight because he was dead when Portinari’s letter of apology arrived.

  Tommaso was now forty. His bride, Maria di Francesco di Bandini Baroncelli, was fifteen. The proud husband immediately had portraits painted by Hans Memling, with the well-bred adolescent wearing the pointed hat (with drapes) of the Flemish well-to-do, plus a lavish necklace of the kind the Officers of the Night would gladly have confiscated back in Florence. Is a pattern emerging: Tornabuoni, Sassetti, Portinari? After Tommaso and Maria’s first children arrived, the whole family would appear kneeling in prayer on either side of Ugo van der Goes’s bizarre and beautiful Adoration of the Shepherds, a painting that would cause such a stir when it arrived as an altarpiece in Florence. Meantime, despite that tough new clause in his contract, the loans to the duke of Burgundy continued and, come 1473, the Medici bank was still running those miserable, loss-making galleys when they were set upon by pirates off the Channel coast at Gravelines. The San Giorgio escaped. The San Matteo was captured, thirteen of its crew killed, and its cargo seized—another big loss for the bank—including a Last Judgment by Memling commissioned by Tommaso’s ex-boss, Agnolo Tani. Instead of going to Florence, the painting ended up in Danzig, where it remains to this day.

  WITH OR WITHOUT the “last judgment,” the writing was definitely on the wall for the bank. In 1467, Tani had been sent to London to see if he could turn around the now-familiar scene of excessive lending to the local monarch—in this case, Edward IV. During the financial crisis of the mid-1460s, it had been imperative for Piero to guarantee a flow of raw wool to Florence—not just for his own workshops but also to maintain employment in general and prevent the kind of labor unrest that would feed opposition to the Medici regime. Again political convenience was bad news for the bank, since to get the export licenses for the raw wool from England, the London branch had had to do endless favors for the king. “I well understand, that what I have to do here,” Tani wrote back to Piero once he had seen the accounts, “is resurrect the dead, no less.” Did he already have Memling’s commission in mind? “But if you and Tommaso do what I say, then with the grace of God….”

  Nobody did what he said. Giovanni Tornabuoni in Rome refused to accept finished English cloth in part-payment for the London branch’s debt. Later, suddenly fearing he would never be paid at all, he lost his nerve, hurried to Florence, and seized a huge quantity of cloth that Tani had sent from London to pay monies owed to Bruges, and that Bruges had then sent on to Italy (in those famous Burgundy galleys) in part-payment of their debt toward the Florence branch. Tornabuoni’s seizure of the cloth was illegal and the source of endless future accounting headaches; Francesco Sassetti as general director of the Medici bank should have prevented it, or at least censured it. But Tornabuoni was Lorenzo il Magnifico’s uncle. He was family, whereas Agnolo Tani was just a conscientious bank manager. The London branch now owed the Rome branch more than 40,000 florins, and with Pope Paul II borrowing heavily, it was becoming more and more urgent for Tornabuoni—who, as a shareholding partner in the Rome venture was liable for eventual losses—to receive prompt payment of the papal tributes that the other branches were collecting.

  In London, however, it was clear to Tani that his only chance of saving the branch lay in accepting as payment for loans the one product the English wanted to give him, finished wool cloth, and getting the other branches of the Medici bank to sell it all over Europe. “Please advance me 3,000 florins for the cloth you have received,” he begged Sassetti in Florence. But Sassetti wouldn’t pay anything until the cloth was sold. He sent letters of cautious advice. “We need help, not advice,” Tani growled, this time writing directly to Lorenzo de’ Medici. “A quarter of the men in this kingdom are lawyers so I get advice in plenty…. Before I came here everybody was telling me to perform miracles, but now you’ve all gone quiet.”

  In 1468, when King Edward’s sister, Margaret, became the duke of Burgundy’s third wife, Tani took advantage of the lavish celebrations to sell the king 6,000 florins’ worth of Florentine silk. Quite a coup. But in order to get the sale, he had to make another loan. To have any clout when collecting loans, it seemed one must always appear to have more to lend. In the end, only the willingness of the Milan branch of the bank to advance London money against receipt of finished English cloth eventually allowed Tani to accomplish his mission and return the London branch, if not to health, then at least to some kind of zombie status. In the spring of 1469, the aging manager made the punishing trip back to Italy, on horseback, no doubt determined to tell the Medici that if the various branches of the bank were not better directed and coordinated, then before very long the whole network would collapse.

  No sooner had Tani left England than the War of the Roses, which had brought Edward IV to the throne in 1461, broke out again. This time, in October 1470, Edward lost power and all the Medici money with it. The bank was again in desperate straits. Having fled to the Netherlands, however, Edward regrouped his forces and in May 1471 returned to England and won back his throne. But the Medici had no cause for celebration. Not only had Edward had to borrow heavily to pay for his military campaigns, making it even less likely that he would pay back the bank, but to make matters worse, a long roll call of other noble Medici debtors lay dead on the battlefields of Barnet and Tewkesbury, where Edward had triumphed.

  Together with his appetite for the aristocratic life, Francesco Sassetti, at the head of the organization, was also afflicted by a chronic inability to fire anyone. The two character traits are united perhaps in the love of ease, comfort, cordial relations. In any event, when the efficient Tani left London, having just about turned around the bank’s fortunes there, Sassetti did not take the opportunity to replace the local manager, Gherardo Canigiani, who had been largely responsible for causing the mess that Tani had gone to sort out. One would have thought that the crises of the previous years would have demonstrated once and for all the folly of tying up a bank’s capital in loans to a monarch who not only was barely solvent but liable at any moment to be overwhelmed by civil war. So if, on Edward’s return, Canigiani at once started extending fresh credit to the king, he presumably knew, as Portinari knew when he lent money to Charles the Bold, that he was not operating in the best interests of his employer. At last smelling a rat that was now in an advanced stage of decay, the Medici bank closed down its London operation in 1472 and terminated its contract with Canigiani, who promptly obtained a letter of naturalization from Edward IV, married a rich woman, and, with the king’s help, became a very proper English country gentleman with lands in Buckinghamshire and his own coat of arms.

  While men such as Agnolo Tani, Leonardo Vernacci, and Francesco Nori (the man who had tried to inspect Accerito Portinari’s accounts in Milan) were serious and attentive bankers of the old Florentine school, ever anxious about the bottom line, others, it seemed, were only playing at banking in order to be close to kings and queens. Resurrecting the Medici business in this world was not of great importance to men like Canigiani and Tommaso Portinari, so long as they themselves could be reborn in the next: the world of royalty, art,
and luxury clothing. As a major shareholder in Bruges, Tani was furious when he heard that, behind his back, Tommaso Portinari, in his role as director, had agreed that the branch would take on all London’s debts when the English operation was wound up. Why on earth had Portinari done such a stupid thing? The only answer is: to be close to the London bank’s major debtor, King Edward IV, now in military alliance with his rash Burgundy brother-in-law, planning the great invasion of France, which would eventually be launched in 1475.

  THERE IS A moment, a written statement, in the history of the Medici that all the history books quote. On the evening after Piero’s death, December 2, 1469, some seven hundred citizens met in the Convent of Sant’Antonio and agreed that the “reputation and greatness” of the Medici family must be preserved. “By which they mean,” explained the ambassador of Ferrara to his lord, “that the secret things of this government will pass through Lorenzo’s hands as before through his father’s.” The following day, a group of leading citizens went to the Palazzo Medici to give Lorenzo, who was about to turn twenty-one, the news. And we come to the famous quotation, from Lorenzo’s brief ricordi, or memoirs:

  Though I, Lorenzo, was very young, being twenty years of age, the principal men of the city and of the regime came to us in our house to mourn our loss and to encourage me to take charge of the city and the regime as my grandfather and my father had done. The which being contrary to my age and involving great responsibilities and perils, I accepted with reluctance, and only to preserve our friends and possessions, for in Florence things can go badly for the rich if they don’t run the state.

  The history books then take sides. Fifteenth-century Florentine factionalism has proved a remarkably resilient disease. Five hundred years on, hardly a scholar escapes infection. So the detractors point out that only two days before Piero’s death, Lorenzo had written to Galeazzo Sforza, duke of Milan, to ask for military help to guarantee his succession. This hardly looks like reluctance. The supporters, on the other hand, note that as an accomplished poet, Lorenzo did indeed have other interests. In the future, various poems would speak eloquently of the desire to abandon power and responsibility, which are seen as a prison rather than a privilege.

  In the heat of this debate, the most intriguing aspect of the statement passes without comment: the words in the quotation sound as though written decades after the event from the vantage point of middle age and maturity; in fact, Lorenzo wrote them when he was only twenty-four. Still at the beginning of his rule, that is, he was already imagining how it would be seen later; he was inventing his persona, preparing material for the historians. “He behaves like an old man,” remarked the ambassador to Milan approvingly in 1469 when Lorenzo was only twenty. But then, as Piero’s son, the boy had been sent on his first diplomatic missions when still in his early teens. Power, together with a humanist education that concentrated on the great political leaders of antiquity, had created something Cosimo could not have foreseen: an extraordinary self-consciousness. Aware of his special situation, equipped with an abundance of role models, Lorenzo was playing a part. Not a real prince, he must act the prince. There were so many adults to impress.

  “WITHOUT PLATONISM MAN can be neither a good citizen, nor a good Christian,” Lorenzo de’ Medici would one day claim. What on earth did he mean by that? And why, though his grandfather would never have made such a claim, did the old Cosimo become so interested in Plato in the last years of his life?

  Greek philosophy was recovered and revived somewhat later than Roman. One simple reason was language. Greek was hardly taught until the middle of the fifteenth century. But even when Plato had been read, in Latin translation, by the great humanist (and Cosimo’s friend) Leonardo Bruni, for example, the old Greek wasn’t taken seriously. These self-regarding fantasies about philosopher kings, Bruni thought, were completely impractical. Plato’s notions of a hierarchical stairway of realities, with inanimate material at the bottom and a world of ideal forms at the top, had already been widely appropriated and interminably elaborated by early Christian theologians in one form or another. It was theoretical nonsense. Stepping outside of medieval scholasticism and Christian mysticism for a breath of fresh air, the early humanists were looking for clear-sighted, secular wisdom, the lucidity of historians and political commentators: Cicero, Livy.

  Under Cosimo’s protection—a house and a salary—Marsilio Ficino translated the entire works of Plato into Latin in the 1460s. It was the first time they had all appeared in a form Western Christendom could read. Later to become a priest, Ficino added his own personal but crucial twist to Christian Platonism: The human soul, he decided, was “the center of nature,” the connecting link between the hierarchies of Platonic reality. Through love and intellect, the human soul naturally strives upward, away from what is base and earthly, through the hierarchy, to the pure light of perfect eternity, God.

  Discussed by Florence’s best minds, while celebrating Plato’s birthday, for example, every November 7 at the Medici villa at Careggi, such ideas came at exactly the right moment for the process of upward social transformation in which the Medici were involved. Apart from giving a new sense to courtly love poetry (the mind moving from profane to divine love), all education, refinement, and intellectual achievement could now be understood as essentially moral, involved in a process of striving toward the Divine. Certain secular activities, that is, could be described as partaking of the sacred, or at least as turned toward the sacred. Nothing good (and the dangerous implication is that we know instinctively what is good) was outside the Christian framework. At which point art and poetry need no longer turn so constantly to strictly Christian subject matter, because beauty itself is close to divinity and the human soul naturally leans toward it. Creativity, which is of God, is not, in this new and optimistic version of Platonism, denied to man, though few achieve it. But when achieved, it is essentially good. Even today, there are many who believe that art is necessarily on the right side, and do not ask which bank sponsored it. Sponsored by Medici money, Botticelli can use the same pretty model for a Madonna, or for Venus. He can leave the lady’s clothes on or he can lift them off. Either way, the mind is being lifted spiritually. At this point, the gesture of penance implicit in almost all Cosimo’s patronage of the arts can be safely and happily forgotten. Art is always sacred.

  But to dig a little deeper, at what wasn’t explicitly stated or perhaps even consciously meant, yet nevertheless seeps through: the process of raising yourself up, of becoming this refined, educated, artistic aristocrat, was now no longer an evil thrusting above and beyond your proper medieval station (as the treason charge against Cosimo in 1433 implied). On the contrary, it was a sign of your upward aspiration toward the Divine. This was an attractive and soothing thought. It would galvanize Lorenzo into sponsoring, and himself engaging in, a range of lavish, public artistic projects, mainly secular, which were at once beautiful and politically convenient, in that they enhanced his and the city’s image. A leader who sponsors and, as a poet, actually creates beautiful art cannot be a bad leader. A leader who employs the likes of Botticelli to make festival banners and carnival floats will not get a bad press from posterity. And the good citizen, the good Christian, must be a Platonist because only the Platonist appreciates and participates in this striving for the beautiful and better, this aestheticizing of public life. If he wasn’t a Platonist, that is, our philistine citizen might merely start counting the florins and piccioli and making dry remarks about political self-interest.

  Which brings us to the chief drawback of these exciting ideas: They had little to say about moneymaking and the price of things. The underlying contradiction here is quite different from Cosimo’s dilemma: How do I get my soul to heaven while amassing a fortune with supposedly sinful banking practices. The problem now is that while wealth is actually more important than ever—for how else can you get the best artists, the best teachers, a decent translation of Plato, not to mention the wherewithal to throw a lavish party f
or a dead philosopher’s birthday?—nevertheless the actual process of moneymaking is passed over as something base, something on the lowest level of the Platonic hierarchy, something the nobler soul would gladly leave behind in its struggle to be free from mere matter.

  To this frame of mind, then, the complexities of accountancy, the intricate technicalities by which the sin of usury can be avoided, are no longer things to dwell on with pleasure, as Cosimo doubtless did dwell on them—Cosimo who said he would be a banker even if money could be made by waving a wand. No, now the cultured man wants to wave whatever wand comes to hand and get the problem of a good income out of the way as soon as possible: by lending money to the duke of Milan at the highest possible rate of interest, for example; by getting the concession to collect import duties at the customs post of Gravelines; or, most dramatically, in the case of the Medici bank, by the attempt to establish a permanent gold mine with the alum affair.

  What was the alum affair? “It makes me think of the Holy Spirit,” wrote Gentile Becchi, Lorenzo’s tutor. “I don’t understand it.” Ironically, the two extremes of Christian Platonism’s hierarchy of realities—base matter, divine essence—seem to have become equally incomprehensible to the educated mind located somewhere in between. In any event, the eagerness to have the money problem out of the way thanks to this base material, alum—an aluminum sulfate used, among other things, for dyeing cloth—would plunge Lorenzo into the great defining dramas of his life, where the part he was learning to play would demand a divine performance.

  6

  The Magnificent Decline

  First son after three sisters, his mere arrival was a triumph. Vast resources stooped over him, anxious to be of use. Even his wet nurse received begging letters.

  Spectacularly ugly, he was brought up to seduce. At the age of five, he was dressed as a little French boy to greet Prince Jean d’Anjou. Alas, his nose was flattened on his face. At the age of ten, he recited poems for the visiting Galeazzo Maria Sforza, for Pope Pius II. His protruding jaw pushed the lower lip above the upper. He learned to play the viola and the lute. He learned to ride on horseback and to hold the falcon. Deprived of any sense of smell, he began to write poetry full of flowers and bees. It was love poetry. At the age of sixteen, his bumpy forehead and bushy eyebrows had won the heart of pretty Lucrezia Donati. Hoarse and unpleasantly high-pitched to the ear, in verse his voice chimed with precocious harmony. “Tender age will not forego to follow Love.” He knew his models: Petrarch, Dante, Ovid. With charming assurance, he elaborated his pain. “So cruel the first wound was!” Young Lucrezia was promised to someone else.