Episode 19: Hill Versus Plain

Transcript

Something I didn’t really get into was that, while Cosimo was able to cling tightly to power since the general assembly he called under the steely gaze of armed troops, discontent had been simmering in the last years of his unofficial reign. Many of Cosimo’s top lieutenants who helped ensure the government would carry out his wishes, especially Agnolo Acciaiuoli, Luca Pitti, and Dietisalvi Neroni, all became increasingly critical of the Medici and their tactic of pre-selecting candidates for office, even though they did not dare do anything to act upon their criticisms or voice them too loudly.

Part of the reason for their discontent was genuinely political. There was another economic recession unfolding across Italy by Cosimo’s last years. The Ottoman Empire was rapidly consolidating its control over the Balkans and Anatolia and was starting to reach its long arms into the Black Sea region and the Middle East. So, naturally, the Ottoman Sultans were threatening Venice and Genoa’s colonies and trading outposts in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. What all this meant in practice was that, now that the trade networks were dominated by one government for the first time since the glory days of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, Europeans trading on these networks, including the fabled Silk Road from China, had to pay higher taxes and tolls. In fact, one long-standing historical theory is that the growing Ottoman monopoly over trade from the east drove European governments to seek alternatives, like down the west African coast and across the Atlantic, which created opportunities for unscrupulous adventurers like a certain young Genoese man named Cristoforo who grew up helping run his father’s cheese stand whose surname would one day be given to cities and countries that didn’t exist yet.

But that’s another story. In the meantime, Florence had been losing ground in the international cloth trade to English merchants, but the Ottoman Empire becoming what we’d today call disruptors to the old silk trade meant that Florence’s silk manufacturing businesses were booming. This was great news for the middle class and the rich who already invested in silk manufacturing and workers who specialized in silk production, but awful news for the upper classes whose fortunes relied on the old cloth business and even more so for unskilled workers, since fewer and more specialized workers were needed to make silk. Basically, it was an uneven recession that saw some people ride the waves and others sink, which of course is always the perfect backdrop for some old-fashioned political instability.

Plus attitudes toward republicanism were changing in Italy. Humanism and its reverence for Greek philosophy caused Florence’s intellectuals and politicians to pay attention to the politics of Plato and Aristotle. And, spoilers for those who haven’t read The Republic or Aristotle’s Politics, neither philosopher was that fond of the idea of just anyone getting to practice politics. After the government of Venice enacted a series of constitutional reforms that effectively locked anyone who didn’t belong to Venice’s top families out of most of the government, some in Florence started to rally around the idea that politics should be left just to members of a hereditary nobility who would naturally be best equipped to run a country.

However, as was always the case with Florentine politics, there were also personal motives abound. This was especially the case with Agnolo Acciaiuli. He had been perhaps Cosimo’s most vital ally in those turbulent days of trying to survive the Alberti regime, and they went into exile together. Besides that, they were genuine friends who shared each other’s passion for book collecting and for ancient philosophy. Their political and personal relationship was sealed when his nephew Pierfrancesco was married to Agnolo’s daughter Laudomia.

However, the fundamental problem was that Agnolo expected absolute loyalty and Cosimo was, let’s say, unsentimental when it came to politics. After all, Cosimo felt compelled by necessity to completely break his alliance with the Venetians, the people who arguably did the most to save him from political oblivion and then turn against them. Agnolo should have known Cosimo would always choose his political needs over personal favors. So it came as an unpleasant shock when Cosimo went behind the scenes to keep Agnolo’s son Lorenzo from being appointed to the prestigious post of Archbishop of Pisa so that a cousin, Filippo de’ Medici, would get the job and the political connections that came with it instead. The real break, though, came out of an abusive marriage. A relative of Cosimo’s wife Contessina named Alessandra de’ Bardi married Rafaello, another son of Agnolo’s. Rafaello abused Alessandra, so much so she begged her relatives to intervene. Her family organized a group of armed men who took Alessandra from Rafaello’s home in the middle of the neither. Neither Agnolo or Rafaello seemed to really care that Alessandra had run away, but that her family was claiming her hefty marriage dowry. In the inevitable legal battle, Cosimo, stepped in on behalf of his wife’s influential family. Honestly, though, I don’t know how Agnolo could know Cosimo so well and not expect this outcome and understand the reasoning behind it, if not sympathize. Anyway, Agnolo and Rafaello lost Alessandra’s dowry, and Agnolo was left with a canker sore in his heart. Privately he called Cosimo and his heir Piero “cold men whom illness and old age have reduced to such cowardice that they avoid anything that might cause them trouble or worry.”

There were even more dangerous defectors from the Medici cause. One of them was Dietisalvi Neroni, the very man Cosimo suggested should be his heir Piero’s chief advisor. The other was Luca Pitti, who besides being a wealthy banker was also one of the most popular politicians in Florence and had been an invaluable Medici ally in the legislature. He was a feeble man in his sixties, but he was still so well liked by the public and his fellow politicians he would be a useful public face for them. But at some point the others did reach an agreement that they would take down Luca once the Medici were dealt with. He was probably seen as easy prey even by his allies. After all, as Guicciardini scathingly noted, Luca “had not sufficient brains that Cosimo need fear him.”So it wasn’t the most steady of alliances. But they did have a lot in common. All were powerful men from Florence’s top families, who had their own support networks outside the Medici orbit. They were also all older men, who surely resented that Cosimo expected them to stay beholden to his sickly son.

They were also patient. When Cosimo died, they didn’t act, and instead Piero took the reins without any opposition coming out of the government. This is a good point to stop and take a look at Piero, who was forty-eight years old when his father died and found himself stepping into the role that was meant for his more charismatic and dead younger brother Giovanni. Piero was born on September 16, 1416. History would remember him as “il Gottoso”, in English “the Gouty”, because while his father and brother also suffered from gout in their later years, Piero suffered from the disease since he was young. In fact, the impression from the sources is that no one expected him to live as long as he did. If Piero wasn’t born the son of Florence’s richest banker, he probably would have gone into banking anyway. And if he was born in more recent times, it’s easy to imagine him becoming a math teacher or professor or an engineer of some kind. Probably the best evidence of this is a few sheets of paper found in Florence’s historical archives. On this paper, Piero meticulously recorded everyone who was at his father’s funeral, how much was paid for candles and torches, how many masses were said, and even how much black cloth the women wore at the funeral along with the four slaves wore and the price of the cloth. However, he still inherited something of his father’s passion for books, even if he viewed them more as commodities than containers of knowledge. Also, Piero was an avid collector of ancient coins. The scholar Antonio Averlino Filarete described the hours Piero spent looking over his collection:

“One day he may simply want for his pleasure to let his eye pass along these volumes to while away the time and give recreation to the eye. The next day, then, so I am told, he will take out some of the effigies and images of all the Emperors and Worthies of the past, some made of gold, some silver, some of bronze, of precious stones or of marble and other materials which are wonderful to behold. The next day he would look at his jewels and precious stones of which he had a marvellous quantity of great value, some engraved, others not. He takes great pleasure and delight in looking at these and in discussing their various exc ellencies.”

Piero was married to Lucrezia Tornabuoni, who came from an old Guelph noble family that still held considerable wealth and political influence in Florence. Curiously, like her husband, Lucrezia suffered from some lifelong debilitating illness that inflicted her with eczema and arthritis, which drove her to often seek relief at thermal baths around Tuscany. Despite both parents’ conditions, they had a fairly large family of four children, including Piero’s illegitimate daughter Maria. Nor did her condition distract Lucrezia from being active in business and patronage. Piero’s mother Contessina did support some writers and artists, but not until after Cosimo died. Lucrezia, on the other hand, owned several houses, farms, and shops around Tuscany and purchased new shops for herself while her husband was still alive. In fact, Lucrezia had her own clients, including a barber named Andrea di Francesco whom she helped in business and legal matters. Besides giving financial support to poets like Angelo Poliziano and Luigi Pulci, she actually wrote poetry, songs, prose, and plays herself. Her works included biographies of John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary, sacred songs, and stories about Esther, Judith, and Susanna. Of course, the fact she wrote about religious matters put her squarely in the standards of her time, but she was one of only a few Italian female writers even in an era that encouraged the education of upper-class women. Also, as the historian Natalie Tomas points out, Lucrezia chose to write about were all women who, in some sense, took risks in order to achieve their goals: Susanna defied the Elders’ sexual advances and risked death in order to preserve her chastity, while both Esther and Judith, respectively, used the supposed positive power of female intercession (the Virgin Mary) and the presumed negative power of female sexuality over men to rescue their people. Still, Lucrezia’s writings and songs were only shared or performed privately with her family and friends. They were not published for public eyes and ears until years after her death.

Going back to Piero, he was an overbearing parent, something he may have learned from his mother. His surviving correspondence with his son Lorenzo is needling and nagging. For example, there is this one letter he wrote to Lorenzo when he was sixteen:

 “You have arrived at Milan later than I thought, and perhaps more than you wished, on account of the delay caused by the honours paid you by the Duke at Ferrara. I have written to thank him, and to say we are his debtors, and also to Messer Giovanni Bentivoglio I have sent thanks, et cetera. You are to follow the advice of Pigello and his written instructions ; 1. be careful not to worry the Duke, he will have enough of that with this marriage. 2. You are to consider yourself as the servant and as belonging to the household of his Excellency, and to ask Pigello’s advice as to what visits to pay, and what to say. Remember to be civil and alert ; act as a man and not as a boy.”

As a modern biographer of Lorenzo de’ Medici put it, “Piero’s letters alternatively exhibit pride in his son’s precocious ability and an almost neurotic need to interfere in the smallest details of his conduct.” No wonder one time, in response to one of his father’s letters, Lorenzo fired back with “I wrote to you two days ago, and for this reason I have little to say.”

Bossing around his son was one thing, dealing with other people was another. As his own father shrewdly observed, Piero was a better banker than he was a leader. Case in point: Piero had given his brother-in-law Giovanni Tornabuoni a job at the Rome branch of the Medici bank. The bank’s manager wrote to Piero, complaining about Giovanni’s job performance and sourly noting: “This company used only to promote those who deserved it and paid no attention to family connections.” Giovanni also wrote to Piero, accusing his boss of trying to undermine him. Piero bowed to pressure from his wife’s family, fired the manager, and gave Giovanni the manager’s old job. To be fair, soon after he was named the new manager, Giovanni did work out a lucrative deal with the papacy over investments in an alum mine that had been recently discovered in the Papal States, so perhaps he wasn’t all that unqualified.

But from the start, Piero rarely left the Palazzo de’ Medici due to his illness, causing important political and diplomatic meetings to take place in the comfort of his home. Nothing could have better vindicated the critics of the Medici and their claims that the Medici were the greatest threat to the republic Florence had seen in centuries. Also, at the same time, Piero was deprived of a key ally. The Duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza, passed away. This death clearly unnerved Piero, who wrote in a letter to his son Lorenzo, ““I am in such affliction and sorrow for the sad and untimely death of the Illustrious Duke of Milan that I know not where I am. You can imagine what it means to us both in private and in public matters.”

So it is perhaps no surprise that Piero leaned heavily on Neroni for support and advice, just like his father wanted. Right away, Neroni convinced Piero to call in all the Medici bank’s debts in Florence. Just as Neroni likely intended, this was a catastrophic decision that worsened the recession and even drove several Florentine businesses into bankruptcy. Soon after, the growing anti-Medici party, with Luca Pitti as their representative, started operating in the open. Florentines in the know began to talk about the Party of the Plane, so named because of the Palazzo de’ Medici’s position on flatland, and the Party of the Hill, likewise named after the fact that the Pitti palace was located on high ground on the Arno River just across the Palazzo de’ Medici. As soon as 1465, a year after Cosimo’s death, the Party of the Hill scored a major victory. They defeated a bill Piero supported that would have extended the judicial powers of the Otto di Guardia, the police force that the Medici created. Then they pushed through a major reform that ended the practice of screening candidates for office and instead let all eligible citizens be selected for office. The bill had so much public support that Piero had no choice but to support it.

Then, that October, a member of the Party of the Hill, Niccolo Soderini, was chosen as Gonfalioniere. Like much of the party, he was a former Medici supporter. He had even been saved from a death sentence by Cosimo when he was charged with plotting the assassination of Niccolo da Uzzano, a leading conservative under the old Alberti regime. Soderini was a well-known political agitator, beloved for speaking out against the excesses of the rich in a time of economic decline. His tenure started out with such high expectations that at the Palazzo della Signoria a crowd crowned him with an olive wreath after he gave a well-received speech promising to restore the republic’s old election practices. However, Soderini pushed too hard and too fast. Soon enough, he was seen as not just a threat to the Medici, but a demagogue trying to destroy the entire political order. The rest of the Party of the Hill stepped in to put Soderini back in line, making most of his term a waste of time. His own brother Tommaso remarked that Niccolo went into office like a lion and left like a lamb. Indeed, while he went into office with a crown, he left with graffiti painted onto the Palazzo della Signoria, reading, “Nine fools out.”

Taking the place of Niccolo Soderini and the other priors were a solidly pro-Medici government. The Party of the Hill immediately went on the defensive, claiming that the candidate selections were rigged, but their own bill had eliminated the Medici’s only real instrument for putting their supporters into the Signoria, so few took the accusations seriously. Indeed, Niccolo Soderini’s failure to enact any kind of constitutional reforms despite promises to do so had discredited the Party of the Hill worse than anything Piero had done.

So far, his enemies had acted constitutionally. Then, on the morning of August 27, 1446, Piero was returning to Florence from a rare trip out to the family estate at Careggi. Suddenly a messenger on horseback caught up with Piero and his retinue. The messenger had a letter from his son Lorenzo, who was still in Florence. The letter warned that the leaders of the Party of the Hill, whose ranks now included no one other than Piero’s own cousin Pierfrancesco, had hired mercenaries to ambush Piero on the highway back to Florence. Lorenzo learned about the plan and sent a warning to his father, who took the backroads back instead and called on his supporters to arm themselves and protect him as he made his way back to the city.

It was now time for Piero to earn his inheritance.