by Tim Parks
Only two important members of the Pazzi family were not involved in the plot. Guglielmo Pazzi, Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, was not even approached. His loyalty would be divided. Renato Pazzi, on the other hand, reputedly the brains of the family, simply thought that murder was unnecessary. The Medici bank was in desperate straits. The best way to destroy Lorenzo would be to lend him money and watch him waste it. His debts would overwhelm him. Renato, then, believed that the Medici’s political prominence still depended on the bank. The family’s identification with the Florentine state was not complete. They were not, that is, in a position where they could just collect taxes for themselves to pay off their debts.
What did the Pazzi really know about the Medici’s financial troubles? In 1475, the Bruges branch had lost a legal battle against ex-London manager Gherardo Canigiani. This was public knowledge. Furious that Canigiani had used Medici money to become an English gentleman, Tommaso Portinari had invited him to act as agent for the bank and buy a shipload of English wool to send to Florence. As soon as the wool was safe at sea, Portinari refused to pay for it, claiming that Canigiani owed the Medici this and more. “Not even a Turk would behave so,” Canigiani protested, and, playing the card of his friendship with King Edward IV, managed to get an agent of the bank imprisoned and eventually to recover his money. Edward still owed the Medici around 30,000 florins.
The murder of Galeazzo Sforza, it was obvious to everybody, would make the chances of the Medici’s recovering the huge debts owed by that family even more remote. Galeazzo left an infant son and a shaky maternal regency that was constantly threatened by Galeazzo’s ambitious brother, Lodovico. Milan, Francesco Pazzi reckoned, would not be able to help Lorenzo in a crisis.
Then the death in yet another reckless battle, of rash Charles of Burgundy—this only three weeks after Galeazzo Sforza’s murder—was evidently another serious blow to the Medici bank. This was January 1477. Even assuming that Charles’s family were able to succeed to his dukedom, they wouldn’t want to pay off their debts in the near future. The director of the Pazzi bank in Bruges, Pierantonio di Bandini Baroncelli, was a close relative of Tommaso Portinari’s young wife, Maria di Bandini Baroncelli. They lived in the same small Italian community in a foreign town. If Pierantonio didn’t know that Tommaso was looking at overall losses of 100,000 florins—a vast sum—he certainly would have been aware that things were getting desperate. In the end, it was another close relative of Pierantonio’s, Bernardo di Bandini Baroncelli, who struck the first blow against Giuliano de’ Medici during mass in the duomo fifteen months after the duke of Burgundy’s death. More than anything else, it was the murder of Giuliano that saved the Medici bank and set it up for another fourteen years of Lorenzo’s mismanagement.
Girolamo Riario lent Francesco Pazzi his personal condottiere, Count Montesecco. They plotted. But Lorenzo refused their invitation down to Rome. He was suspicious. Where could they kill him then, and when and how? They must act soon, before someone got wind of the plot. In April 1478, the seventeen-year-old Cardinal Raffaele Riario (nephew to the lord of Imola and great-nephew to the pope—in short, nepotism incarnate) was visiting Florence. Armed men could be sent to the city as his escort. The Medici brothers had offered the child cardinal a celebratory lunch at their villa in Fiesole. The two could be murdered there. But Giuliano didn’t turn up for the party. There was no point, the conspirators had all agreed, in killing one brother without the other.
So the appointment with death was set back a week, to another Sunday lunch, after mass, at the Palazzo Medici in town, where the juvenile cardinal was now invited to inspect Il Magnifico’s famous collection of cameos. For all the animosity between the families, it seemed there was no question of renouncing formal visits with all their etiquette. Sometime during the morning, however, it turned out that once again Giuliano wouldn’t be eating with his brother. Frantic, the conspirators agreed they must do the deed at mass, only minutes away. But Count Montesecco shook his head. Not in church, he protested. God would see him in church. Did he imagine the Almighty was blind elsewhere? Montesecco had been Lorenzo’s designated assassin and was the most professional of the bunch. A key man. All in a hurry—because now it appeared that someone would actually have to go to Giuliano’s house and persuade him to come to church—two priests were given Montesecco’s brutal job. Nobody appears to have found their willingness strange. One hailed from Volterra and so had good reason to bear Lorenzo a grudge. Meantime, an army of papal soldiers was within striking distance of the town to the south and the archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, with about thirty armed men from Perugia, set off to take over the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government.
IT WAS ONE of the rules of Florentine republicanism that for their two-month term of government, the eight priors and one gonfaloniere della giustizia must spend the whole time together in the Palazzo della Signoria, eating and sleeping included. Looked at this way, eight weeks in power could seem rather a long time, which is perhaps why the Medici so rarely served on the signoria. In any event, as luck would have it, the gonfaloniere that day, Cesare Petrucci, was the same man who, as captain of Prato, had courageously put down an armed insurrection in 1470. When Salviati came asking for an audience, it took Petrucci just a few moments to appreciate that there was something suspicious about the archbishop’s behavior and to have both him and his men locked up.
In the church, too, everything goes wrong. The Medici brothers are standing well apart. At some agreed moment in the liturgy, Francesco Pazzi and Baroncelli simply massacre Giuliano. Why hadn’t they been assigned to Lorenzo? Francesco strikes so repeatedly and violently that he stabs himself in the leg and can barely walk. No doubt the packed church is in an uproar. But the two priests have failed to dispatch Lorenzo. Il Magnifico draws his sword, runs. Francesco Nori, once would-be inspector of Accerito Portinari’s accounts in Milan and now head of the Florence branch of the Medici bank, blocks the path of the assassins. It’s unusual to think of a bank manager protecting his boss with his body. Baroncelli stabs him to death. But Lorenzo is already locked in the sacristy. He is safe. Outside, at the city gates, the papal troops have failed to show. In desperation, old Uncle Iacopo takes to his horse yelling, “Liberty!” up and down the streets. The confused crowd is not impressed. In the end, the common people rally to Lorenzo. He speaks from the balcony of his house. He is identified with law and order. It’s a huge step toward a Medici dictatorship.
Revenge is rapid and brutal. Archbishop Salviati, Francesco Pazzi, and scores of others, many innocent, are strung from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria, or in some cases simply tossed to their deaths from the higher floors. Bodies are dragged about the streets, derided and defiled. Only Baroncelli escapes. The young Cardinal Riario is held prisoner; a hostage is essential to discourage the pope from taking revenge on Florentines in Rome. All adult Pazzi males, with the exception of Lorenzo’s brother-in-law Guglielmo, are killed or imprisoned. Their children are ordered to change their last name. Their widows and daughters are forbidden to marry. All over Europe, Pazzi assets will be tracked down and confiscated for years to come. The family’s name and emblems must be destroyed wherever they are found.
But Lorenzo’s troubles are only beginning. The next two years will constitute the great formative crisis of his life. Not only have the fortunes of his bank plummeted, not only have his brother and one of his few efficient business associates been killed, but now the pope excommunicates him and everybody who defends him. Sixtus “fills all Italy,” all Europe, with letters aimed at destroying Lorenzo’s reputation and denying him support. Then the Papal States and Naples declare war on Florence and move rapidly on the offensive. Only Lorenzo is our enemy, they announce, willing the Florentine people to ditch their leader. But such tactics rarely work. Especially after a failed assassination attempt in church.
If life hasn’t prepared Lorenzo to run the family bank, there is probably no one in Italy better trained for a pro
paganda war. His letters to other heads of state are endless, intimate, and persuasive. This man was brought up on begging letters. Nothing comes more naturally. And he has a remarkable facility with words. In particular, Louis XI of France is encouraged to renew Angevin claims to the crown of Naples. Milan and Venice are called on to stop arguing with each other and send troops. Back home, Sandro Botticelli is employed to fresco the spectacle of the hanged conspirators—not inside a building, but on an outside wall near the Palazzo della Signoria. And it’s the Florentine government that pays the painter, not the Medici. Forty florins. Andrea del Castagno does a similar job on the façade of the Pazzi palazzo. “Natural portraits,” enthuses the sixteenth-century art historian Vasari, “and hanged upside down by their feet in strange positions, all different and bellissimi.” Apparently there is no limit to what can be made beautiful in art. The crime and its punishment will be spectacularly present to the public mind long after the corpses have rotted. The sculptor Verrocchio is ordered to make three life-size figures of Lorenzo to be displayed in various churches. What does a city have artists for? What a shame there are no machines to duplicate these works of art, no photographs, no posters.
Meantime, the brilliant poet and personal friend of Lorenzo’s, as well as tutor of his children, Angelo Poliziano, is given the task of writing the official version of the conspiracy, portraying the Pazzi and their accomplices in the worst possible light. The model he adopts is Sallust, the same text that the assassins of Sforza had been reading, except that here the conspirators are not given the role of brave republicans and friends of the poor. They are ignorant, selfish, cruel, grasping. Advantage is taken of the printing press, newly arrived in Italy, to have this travesty distributed as widely as possible. Even today, nothing is more swiftly published than the expedient lie. One way or another, Lorenzo will convince the Florentines.
But if the propaganda war is going well at home, the real conflict is another matter. The invading troops advance into Tuscany with relative ease. Clearly, this is not a moment for restructuring the Medici bank, or thinking about the crazy policies that have brought it to its knees. All the company’s assets in Rome and Naples have been confiscated, their staff expelled. There is scarcely a branch producing profits. Yet, for Lorenzo, getting hold of money was never easier. Since his father’s cousin, Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, the bank’s second largest shareholder, died in 1476, and since his surviving heirs, Lorenzo and Giovanni, are only fifteen and eleven, Il Magnifico, as their financial guardian, holds their fortune for them in thirteen leather bags. On May 1, 1478, he takes 20,000 florins. On May 3, he takes a further 5,000. On June 2, 8,000; August 8, 8,000; August 13, 1,600; September 27, 11,000. That’s the lot. Then at some point Lorenzo also begins to procure money, with no official authorization, from the public purse, the state. This is precisely what, until the assassination attempt, Renato Pazzi was convinced he couldn’t do. But Renato has been executed now. Lorenzo will take 75,000 florins from the Florentine state over the coming years. He even sinks to begging for cash from his own bank managers. Francesco Sassetti obliges. He has so much stashed away. Tommaso Portinari does not. This personal affront finally opens Lorenzo’s eyes as far as Portinari is concerned. He decides to sever the partnership between the families and close the Bruges and Milan branches of the bank.
1479. ONE YEAR after the assassination attempt. Florence lay under interdiction. It was struck by the plague. The local priests were ordered to disobey the pope and bury the dead. The two condottieri the city had hired began to argue. Their armies had to be kept apart to stop them from fighting each other. As a result, it was difficult to bring pressure to bear on the enemy. And impossible to write poetry, of course. Even the usually obedient Clarice, now mother of six, rebelled. The family, along with the urbane poet Poliziano as tutor, had been sent into the country for safety. Mother and teacher loathed each other; both wrote to Lorenzo to complain. That man is teaching Giovanni Latin from the heathen classics instead of the holy Psalter! Giovanni was Lorenzo’s second son. The boy learns so fast, Poliziano gripes, when his mother is out of the way. It was old-style Christianity against the new eclectic humanism. As when bank managers bitched, Lorenzo didn’t know how to respond. Perhaps he actually liked the idea that those subject to him were in disagreement, rather than ganging up to threaten him. Clarice threw the intellectual poet out of the house. She preferred a priest as tutor. Lorenzo was furious but did nothing. Drawing from both sides of the conflict, young Giovanni would one day become the most eclectic, the most humanist, the most nepotist of popes.
In September 1479, the enemy took the fortress of Poggio Imperiale. The fighting season was over, but the following spring there would be nothing between the Neapolitan army and the gates of Florence. The people had now been taxed as much as a people can be, especially when the enemy has suggested that removal of their leader will resolve the problem. The Venetians and the Milanese were more concerned with their own disputes than with producing the kind of military support that might give their official ally a chance of defending itself. What was Lorenzo to do?
The history books argue endlessly over the Medici’s commitment or otherwise to a republican model, their plan perhaps to install themselves as hereditary princes. But although noble birth had certainly become part of the family strategy, Lorenzo was too intelligent to imagine that birth would be enough. Money was important, too. But there wasn’t much serious money left. What was still possible, though, was the grand gesture, the legitimacy of individual virtuosity, a cocktail of education, glamour, and charisma. In the new world that was coming, the cult of the leader might perhaps replace the legal right of the king. At dawn on December 6, 1479, laden with expensive gifts, Lorenzo set out for Pisa and a sea trip to Naples to negotiate face-to-face with King Ferrante in his own home. Having taken the decision alone, he wrote a moving letter to those who were constitutionally in power, the signoria, speaking of his willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of the city. “And with this good intention I set out: that perhaps God wishes that since this war began with the blood of my brother and my own, so too it may end by my hand…. For if our adversaries want nothing but me, they shall have me freely in their hands; and if they want something more, then we shall see.” The letter was perfectly calculated, and perhaps honest too. No doubt Lorenzo foresaw its appearance in history books.
In his Storie fiorentine, Guicciardini remarks that the expensive peace treaty that Lorenzo eventually brought back from Naples could perfectly well have been negotiated without that dangerous visit. Yet one can’t help feeling that the drama of the gesture—the just having thought of it and dared it, for there was no classical model—was absolutely central to the image that Lorenzo later created for himself as leader of Florence. Propaganda can invent a great deal, but it does prefer to work with a kernel of truth. Granted, Lorenzo had opened secret negotiations with King Ferrante long before he left; granted, he had various diplomatic cards up his sleeve, concessions to make; but all the same, it was an act of enormous courage to place oneself in the hands of a “most restless, most faithless, most hostile king,” a man who not so long ago had promised safe conduct to the condottiere Iacopo Piccinino (son of the more famous Niccolò) and then had him put to death on arrival.
Stendhal, in his Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, suggests that it was only through the drug of aesthetic passion and pleasure that the Medici were able to subdue the Florentines’ “passionate love for liberty and implacable hatred of nobility.” They accepted the Medici, that is, because the family filled the city with beautiful things. There may be something in this, but not if we are to limit aesthetics and beauty to canonical works of art. Pictures, sculptures, palazzi would never have been enough. Lorenzo had gone into the lion’s den. It was a marvelous gesture. Over three long months, he had talked the enemy around. He had seduced King Ferrante. And the drama of it, the magnificence of the adventure, had seduced the Florentines. From now on, they knew that they were gov
erned by a man with balls and charisma. And enormous luck. For in August 1480, the Turkish army landed on the Italian peninsula and seized Otranto on the southeast coast. Twelve thousand people were killed and ten thousand taken into slavery. How all the other wars mentioned in this book pale into insignificance beside these figures. But it was excellent news for Lorenzo. In return for his contribution to the collective effort to repel the Infidel, he could demand the return of territories conceded in his treaty with King Ferrante, as well as complete absolution from the now-nervous Pope Sixtus IV.
So, quite scandalously, everything at last returned to normal, as if the Pazzi conspiracy had never been. In 1478, immediately after the assassination attempt, the Florentine signoria had written to Sixtus describing him as “Judas in the seat of Peter.” In response, Lorenzo had been condemned as a “heretic,” which meant a death sentence. And now, just three years later, all was forgiven and forgotten. In December 1481, Giovanni Tornabuoni was down in Rome again, negotiating recognition of the papal debt to the Medici bank, reassuring old clients, resuming business. Yet something had changed. In letters back to his nephew, Lorenzo, Tornabuoni for the first time switches from the familiar tu to the formal voi, as if addressing a superior. As head of the bank, Lorenzo had always been addressed as la Magnificenza vostra. The same was true of his father, and of Cosimo too in his old age. It was ordinary etiquette. But now, after the feat of Naples, after taking the city’s destiny in his own hands and delivering it from its enemies, Lorenzo is suddenly Il Magnifico. Out on his own. Everyday politeness is elevated into individual glory. A stiff old uncle bends his knee. At which point, Lorenzo’s need for the bank has really ceased to exist. It’s unthinkable that Il Magnifico might lose power merely for a lack of cash.
BIOGRAPHIES OF LORENZO tend toward hagiography. They concentrate on this period between 1480 and 1492 and describe it as a golden age. Didn’t Machiavelli, in the gloom of sixteenth-century foreign dominance, describe it as such? Lorenzo manipulates the available art patronage, private and public, sending great painters hither and thither to those who want the best. He doesn’t commission much himself because money is short and he has, as we shall see, other uses for it. When he does spend, it’s not on the kind of public and religious projects that Cosimo patronized. Lorenzo’s purchases are private. He likes to possess things. On the other hand, he has clearly grasped the idea of using art and even poetry to enhance the reputation of the state and the legitimacy of his reign. The Florentine government would preside over and promote the production of beauty. Such a policy is widely believed to be a good thing. Fortunately, there was a remarkable supply of first-class artists: Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo, Botticelli, Leonardo. Fortunately, there were excellent writers—Poliziano, Landino, Lorenzo himself—capable of transforming Tuscan into the language of Italy, a coup beyond any military victory.
