Episode 20: Conspiracy or Countercoup?

Transcript

Last time, we saw Piero narrowly dodge a possible abduction or assassination attempt. Only the fact that his son Lorenzo wasn’t recognized and was able to get back to Florence using the backroads foiled the plot. Or was that actually what happened? A silk merchant and staunch critic of the Medici regime, Marco Parenti, left behind an interesting memoir that was discovered, having laid forgotten in the archives, by historian Mark Phillips in the 1970s.

There is one significant passage from the diary, which just throws an entire wrench into what we know about history:

“Piero was advised…that he should wait no longer since his reputation and authority and that of his followers were being destroyed. They saw no other way to defend his government from those attacking it, but with arms. And it should be at the first opportunity, before his adversaries – not expecting such resolution in his humiliation, but relying on time to bring their designs slowly into effect – would take note of it. This counsel pleased Piero greatly, and it was most fitting to his own nature, as long as he could a way to carry out so great a business. Piero then enacted the following deceit.” Parenti goes on to explicitly say that the entire assassination attempt was, quite simply, a lie.

One modern historian John Najemy, author of A History of Florence,  runs with this claim, suggesting that the whole conspiracy against Piero de’ Medici was just a deliberate distortion of a legal attempt to restore the Republic of Florence. Personally, I don’t buy it. I’m willing to admit that maybe the plan was to abduct Piero or force him into exile or to go to trial instead of outright killing him, but I’m not at all convinced the entire episode was fake news. For starters, as far as I know, Najemy is the only modern historian of the Medici who takes Parenti’s claims seriously, and none of the other accounts of the time even hint at the possibility that Piero and his supporters made up the whole attempt.  And besides, Najemy relies on Parenti a lot when he writes about Piero de’ Medici, even though Parenti is very clearly against all things Medici. Then there’s the question of how Parenti would have known the ins and outs of such a huge scheme. Now it is true that Parenti was well-connected among Florence’s elite, which is how he got a lot of the material he put into his memor. But given that he was alive during the events he records, it seems a bit unlikely he found out about such a dangerous truth, but also was ever told intimate details about how the plot was ironed out. And maybe most importantly, like we talked about last time, the Party on the Hill was already on the ropes after Niccolo Soderini’s disastrous turn as gonfalionere. It just doesn’t make sense that Piero would put into motion a complicated plan, one that by Parenti’s own admission more than a few people knew about and which hinged completely on a lie, a lie that just one person could have easily exposed with potentially catastrophic consequences for Piero de’ Medici. What actually does make sense is that a political party that exhausted most of its constitutional options and that honestly would go on to exhibit some…rather questionable decision-making skills would try to go the violence route.

Plus I like to think I’d come up with a better lie than “Well, they probably would have killed me if my teenage son just so happened to be at the right place at the right time without anybody spotting him.” I’d probably claim I single-handedly escaped all the assassins in an exciting horse chase, for starters.

In any case, unless you think Parenti is right, the Party of the Hill was waiting in the still incomplete Palazzo Pitti for news about the death or at least the abducation of Piero. Instead, on the afternoon of August 27, 1466, they received word that Piero was carried in his litter past the walls of Florence, surrounded by his armed supporters, mercenaries, and soldiers sent from Milan. The Party of the Hill was at a loss. Apparently they counted on Piero running afoul of their blockade that there was no plan B. Even Marco Parenti admitted that the leaders of the Party of the Hill were “unified more by a common hatred than a common ideal.”

So…if Piero had been killed or captured, what would have been done? We don’t know, exactly. Marco Parenti was confident that the Party of the Hill just wanted to restore the republic to what it was before Cosimo de’ Medici came to power. But like I said in past episodes the guilds had lost most of their former political influence, and power now belonged to the city’s patriarchs and their networks of clients. Florence was no longer the republic of the guilds, but the republic of the patriarchs. So most likely, if the Party of the Hill had succeeded in overthrowing the Medici, they probably would have just ended up with a fragile power-sharing arrangement between patriarchs or another of Florence’s great families stepping in to fill the power vaccuum. But I think it’s just as likely that there was no plan past getting rid of Piero de’ Medici one way or the other, just like with the killers of Julius Caesar over 1,500 years ago. If I’m right, then at least it’s proof that even during the Renaissance people in power just didn’t learn from history.

For several days after Piero’s return, the Party of the Hill did nothing. The sources we have suggest the leaders all just sat around waiting for someone else to act. Unfortunately, even the sickly Piero who had to be carried around in a litter was not so slow. The Medici fortified their palace, stockpiled on food and drink, and actually purchased all the arms that could be found in the city to both make sure they were well-armed and to help guarantee their enemies won’t be. Piero also kept in close touch with his most important ally, Francesco Sforza’s son and the new Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria. The Party of the Hill had their own foreign allies. They had gotten encouraging messages from both Venice and the King of Naples. Also a staunch enemy of Milan, Borso d’Este, who ruled the neighboring city-states of Modena and Ferrara as duke and marquis respectively, supposedly had a small army ready to storm into Tuscany. However, apparently the leaders of the Party of the Hill were reluctant to take the ultimate step of no return by having foreign troops march into their own city. At least, they did finally start by rallying their own supporters who took on the cry of “Popolo e Liberta!” In the district closest to the Palazzo Pitti, where anti-Medici support was naturally strongest, people who were Medici supporters gathered together their families and most precious goods and moved near the Palazzo Medici. The city was literally being divided.

There was one step the Party of the Hill did not dare take: appeal to the artisans and the workers. In his memoir, Marco Parenti sardonically writes, “One doubt held them back. This was fear of the lower classes roused up in arms. After Piero was defeated and his house and goods sacked, having once tasted the delights of this vandalism, they might be excited to such a fury that the desire would come over them to turn upon the rest of the well-to-do, thinking in this way to be able to throw off their misery. And perhaps, with growing boldness, they might rise against the government and take it for themselves, as they did in 1378.” And, as it was, the majority of the working classes actually sided with the Medici. Unfortunately, so did a majority of the city’s patricians.

One unexpected person did support the Party of the Hill, however: Piero’s cousin, Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. Just to recap, Pierfrancesco was the son of Cosimo’s beloved brother, Lorenzo. After Lorenzo’s death, Cosimo had him raised in his household along with his other children. Since he was Lorenzo’s only child, he also inherited his father’s shares in the Medici bank, which amounted to half the total shares. I hadn’t really talked about Pierfrancesco a lot in this narrative because frankly there hasn’t been a lot to say. Even though Cosimo had arranged for Pierfrancesco to have a seat in the Signoria when he was just shy of thirty – which was considered very young to be a prior in the Signoria, and was taken as another sign of Medici tyranny – the nephew never showed much interest in either the bank or politics. He seemed to just want to live quietly off the massive inheritence he got from his father.

Cosimo married Pierfrancesco off to his the daughter of his comrade and friend, Laudomia Acciauoli. And it seems Pierfrancesco’s father-in-law Angelo Acciaiuoli was even less tolerant of Pierfrancesco’s lack of ambition than Cosimo was. In one letter to his son-in-law Angelo testily wrote, “You have reached the age when you should be learning some skills and you should not waste time.” So for that reason it must have been an unpleasant shock when earlier that year in May Pierfrancesco’s name showed up on a petition with 400 signatures, demanding that the Signoria dismantle the mechanisms that allowed the Medici to keep a grip on power. No source I’m aware of really preserves an understanding of Pierfrancesco’s motives, but it is a safe bet it had less to do with his actual politics and more to do with having an overbearing father-in-law. Seeing a weak link in the Party of the Hill, Piero confronted Pierfranceso, whose own villa was right next to the Palazzo Medici, and pressured him into signing over a 10,000 florins. As Miles J. Unger puts it in his biography of Lorenzo de’ Medici, “The sight of heavily armed men outside his window proved sufficient inducement for Pierfrancesco to rediscover the virtue of the family solidarity he had so recently forgotten.”

Piero had seized the advantage when it came to money, supplies, and soldiers. But the Party of the Hill finally acted, just by daring Piero to violate the constitution. Even though the Signoria was firmly in the Medici camp, Dietisalvi Neroni had convinced the priors of the Signoria to diffuse the situation by ordering leaders of both sides to appear before the Signoria. Knowing from his father’s example that obeying such a summons might land him in jail, Piero finally saw a bright side to his debilitating illness. He would claim to be too ill to travel, and instead send both his sons Lorenzo and Giuliano as his representatives. The Signoria solemnly and ternly ordered both sides to disarm and send their troops out of the city boundaries. When his sons returned with the order, Piero simply refused. Whether or not it made him look like the tyrant his enemies made him out to be, Piero knew he outgunned his enemies and he was not about to sacrifice his most valuable card for nothing.

Fortunately, his sons also came bearing good news from a surprising source – or maybe it wasn’t too surprising, given how widely disliked Luca Pitti was. But whether or not he had expected it, Luca had sent a message with Lorenzo and Giuliano back to their father, saying he was willing to negotiate behind the backs of his comrades. There are plenty of moments in history that went unrecorded I would pay money to actually get to see, and one of those is Piero’s reaction to this bit of news.

The negotiations were carried out in secret. In the end, in exchange for playing the role of the Party of the Hill’s Judas, Luca would get three rewards that would make sure he would get in good with the Medici regime. Luca’s brother Luigi would be made one of the Otto di Guardia, Luca himself would be appointed as one of the Accoppiatori, the officials who pre-selected candidates for office; and Luca’s daughter Francesca would be married to Piero’s son Lorenzo (or so Luca thought). Actually, here Piero, like a true banker, got Luca on a technicality. He just promised that Francesca would be married to a man from Piero’s family, and that man just happened to be Giovanni Tornabuoni, Piero’s brother-in-law.

With their most popular member gone, the Party of the Hill crumbled. In the following days, a trickle of men came to the Palazzo Medici to beg for Piero’s forgiveness, including the other party leaders Dietisalvi Neroni and Angelo Acciaiuoli. Some he forgave, others Piero lashed out at. We don’t know what he said, but we might have a hint, which we’ll get to later. For now, thought, the threat to not just his family’s control over the city but to his life had ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Still, the victory had to be secured. The pro-Medici Signoria called a general assembly. The citizens at the assembly, under view of thousands of soldiers and Lorenzo de’ Medici riding a horse and in splended army and with loud shouts and acclaim voted to establish a balia, a special committee to punish the people responsible for the recent unrecent and to reestablish the accopiatori, who would once again make sure only the right people were eligible for political office.

When his time came, Piero’s father Cosimo had orchestrated a massive purge of the city’s elite. Piero could afford to be more merciful. Only 2 were banished or stripped of political rights. Guicciardini remarked in his journal, “Unlike his father Cosimo, Piero proved most clement, for he allowed no one to be punished except those whom it would have been too dangerous not to punish.” That included Dietisalvi Neroni and Angelo Acciauoli, who besides being dangerously powerful rivals of the regime cut close to home in their betrayals of Piero. Cousin Pierfrancesco was among those spared, although he was effectively banned from political office for life. Not that he minded, likely enough. Piero’s mercy even extended to old enemies of the regime. The brothers Filippo and Lorenzo Strozzi were among Cosimo’s enemies who were exiled in life. They set up a branch of their family bank in Naples, where they became important bankers to the royal court and even the personal friends of King Ferrante of Naples. Piero took the opportunity to lift their sentence of exile and invite them back to Florence, which was enough to make the King of Naples a devoted friend of the Medici.

Understandably, though, Piero was much less forgiving to his father’s former friend who had turned against the family. One day, Piero received a letter from Agnolo in his exile, asking for a pardon: “I am laughing at the games of fortune and at how it makes friends become enemies and enemies become friends as it suits it. You can remember when in your father’s exile I considered his injury more than my own dangers, I lost my fatherland and nearly lost my life, nor, while I lived under Cosimo, did I ever fail to honor and support your house; nor after his death had I any intent of offending you. It is true that your bad constitution and the tender age of your children dismayed me, so that I judged it better to give such a formto the state that after your death our fatherland would not be ruined. From this arose things that were done, not against you but for benefit of my fatherland – which, even if it was an error, deserves to be canceled because of my meaning well and my past deeds. Nor can I believe, since your house found such faith in me for so long a time, that I cannot now find compassion in you and that my many merits will be destroyed by one single mistake.”

Piero’s response: “Your laughter over there is the cause that I do not weep, because if you were laughing in Florence, I would be weeping in Naples. I confess that you wished my father well and you will confess that you received well from him; so much more was your obligation than ours, as deeds must be valued higher than words. Thus, since you have been well recompensed for your good, you ought not now to marvel if your evil brings you just rewards. Nor does love of the fatherland excuse you, because there will never be anyone who will believe that this city has been loved and increased less by the Medici than by the Acciaiuoli. So live there in dishonor, since you did not know how to live here in honor.”

As for Luca Pitti, well…he came out of the whole fiasco better off, but not by much, depending on your point of view. Marco Parenti had some words to share about Luca Pitti’s fate after the fall of the Party of the Hall. Now, of course, being strongly anti-Medici, he probably was taking some liberties with the truth here, but at the same time it isn’t too surprising, given that Luca undoubtedly gave himself a reputation as a constant turncoat: “Having had all his requests satisfied, M. Luca nonetheless was not left in the position he had thought. He was an accoppiatore but no one went to him to be chosen as one of the priors. His brother Luigi was one of the Eight, but his colleagues held him in no esteem. He was alllied to Piero in marriage, but this had not in the least cheered him. He remained cold and alone at home, and no one visited him to talk about political affairs – he who was used to have his house full of every kind of person. Occasionally he ventured out and he would hardly find anyone on the street who would speak a word to him.”

There’s definitely a moral lesson for us out of the life of Luca Pitti, a man who started out as a beloved political figure and ended up a figure of contempt, whose only achievement was survival.

There definitely was a message for the Medici. You could reasonably argue they had only been saved by a combination of blind luck and the incompetence of their enemies. But there was, I think, more to it than that. Christopher Hibbert wrote that it was this moment, and not any of Cosimo’s victories, that truly marked the beginning of Medici ascendence, and I agree with that. Call it a countercoup or a conspiracy, but the struggle between the Parties of the Plain and the Hill had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that what the Medici offered was better than what had come before. All of Florence got a glimpse of the former days of the republic, when you could be exiled or even have your entire family backlisted just because you backed the wrong faction at the wrong day and when political bickering could transform into street violence. At least with the Medici at the wheel you could still go into politics and have some say over domestic policy, as long as you weren’t seen as a threat to the regime.

But again the whole Pitti affair also showed how vulnerable the Medici were. They had no noble title that legitimized their rule over Florence, like the Dukes of Milan, nor did they have any kind of constitutional office, like the doges of Venice and Genoa. Their power basically rested on their performance. As long as it seemed like they could deliver stability and some degree of prosperity to Florence, they were safe.

But if they couldn’t, well…things would probably get trickier. For now, though, the good times were just ahead, thanks to Piero’s promising young son who had helped save his father’s life and the family’s entire future.