To try to stop a war Florence is badly losing and take some steam out of the Pope’s vendetta against him, Lorenzo does something few politicians had done before or since: put himself directly in enemy territory.
King Ferrante of Naples as one of the Magi who visit the infant Jesus Christ in Marco Cardisco’s Adoration of the Magi. Date unknown. Source: Civic Museum of Castel Nuovo, Naples.
Transcript
Lorenzo had survived the assassination, but he had lost his brother. It should be admitted that judging from the evidence Lorenzo’s relationship with his younger brother Giuliano wasn’t the close partnership their grandfather Cosimo had with his own brother. Lorenzo was suspicious of his brother, while Giuliano apparently thought at least for a time that Lorenzo was standing in the way of his own ambitions. If Giuliano had lived, it is possible that he and Lorenzo might have gone the route of many siblings born into power, with Giuliano becoming a living focal point of resistance against his older brother’s regime. Even so, Lorenzo deeply mourned his brother. We know this not just through anything Lorenzo wrote or was reported to have said. With Lorenzo’s prestigious, almost non-stop correspondence, we have a gap of five whole days after his brother’s death.
Lorenzo wasn’t the only one to mourn. His brother was popular in Florence. Poliziano concluded his own eyewitness account of the Pazzi conspiracy with a glowing description of Giulio de’ Medici: “He was very mild, very kind, very respectful of his brother, and of great strength and virtue. These virtues and others made him beloved by the people and his own family during his lifetime, and they rendered most painful and bitter to us all the memory of his loss.” No doubt Poliziano, who was a mentor and personal friend of Giuliano had every reason to paint his fallen friend and pupil with the brightest colors possible. Still, at the very least he was reflecting the fact that Giuliano had been a popular and admired member of the Medici family.
The blow of Giuliano’s death was eased somewhat by a miraculous discovery. Lucrezia had heard rumors that Giuliano had fathered a child. Sending her agents to investigate these stories, she discovered they were indeed true. A woman had given birth to a child known to be Giuliano’s, although she had died shortly after, possibly from childbirth complications. The identity of this woman has been debated by historians and is still not known with 100% certainty. Likely, though, it was Fioretta Gorini, the daughter of a professor at the University of Pisa. Her infant son, named Giulio after his father, was brought to Lucrezia and Lorenzo agreed to have his nephew raised as if he were his own son. This fragile orphan would as an adult one day make decisions that would alter the course of European and perhaps world history. But that’s a story for later.
For now, Lorenzo had little time to grieve. The Pope quickly seized on the idea that the Republic of Florence had dared to hang an archbishop, in his ecclesiastical robes no less. Immediately the Pope used this outrage as an excuse to excommunicate Lorenzo. His declaration of excommunication denounced Lorenzo as “that son of iniquity and foster-child of perdition, with a heart harder than Pharaoh’s…kindled with madness, torn by diabolical suggestions…disgracefully raged against ecclesiastical persons and laid violent hands upon the Archbishop, detained him prisoner for several hours and hanged him on a Sunday form the windows of the Palazzo.” Never mind, of course, that it was the plan of the conspirators, signed off on by the Pope, to kill the Medici brothers on a Sunday.
The Pope also took his rage out on the ambassador from Florence in Rome, Donato Accaiuoli. One day, he heard a loud knocking on his door and found himself facing Count Girolamo Riario at the head of a group of armed soldiers. They dragged him before the Pope himself. To his credit, Donato remained defiant, chastising Girolamo before his uncle the Pope himself for his “rash presumption.” Only when the ambassadors of Venice and Milan also threatened to withdraw from Rome in protest was Donato saved from imprisonment or worse.
Behind the Pope’s rage must have been a realization that he had overstepped. Lorenzo had become more popular than ever. Almost every time he stepped out on the streets of Florence, he was greeted with cheering crowds. The Signoria also voted to give him some bodyguards who bore such fantastic names as Black Martin, Morgante the Giant, and Mutant. In his history, Guicciardini rather sardonically remarked:
”It gave him such a reputation and such advantages that one could say it was a most happy day for him. His brother Giuliano, with whom he would have had to share his wealth and compete for power in the regime, was dead. His enemies were gloriously removed through the power of the state, as were the shadows of doubt and suspicion that had previously followed him. The people took up arms on his behalf, and on that day they finally recognized him as patron of the city and gave him at public expense the privilege of going about with as many armed guards as he wished for his personal security. And in effect he so thoroughly took control of the state that he thereafter emerged, freely and completely, as arbiter and almost as lord of the city. The great but insecure power that he had had until that day now became very great and secure.”
Plus the rulers of not just Italy but across Europe were outraged at the news of the Pazzi conspiracy. Even the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire reached out to Lorenzo to express his sympathies. King Louis XI of France wrote personally to Lorenzo to console him and express his horror at the Pazzi conspiracy, claiming he was so disturbed by what happened it might as well have happened to himself. This might have been a little diplomatic exaggeration. However, if anything truly troubled monarchs, it was the specter of assassination, especially assassinations involving both one’s own subjects and foreign powers, so perhaps there was at least a bit of sincerity there. Lorenzo wrote back to Louis gratefully, saying, “For I well know and God is my witness that I have committed no crime against the pope save that I am alive and have not allowed myself to be murdered.” The king also wrote to the Signoria of Florence: “Beloved and great friends, We have just heard of the great and inhuman outrage, opprobrium and injury, which not long ago has been committed against your Seigneury, against the persons of our most dear and beloved cousins Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici, their friends, relations, servants, and adherents, by those of the Pazzi Bank and their dependants ; and of the death of our said cousin Giuliano de’ Medici, whereby we have been and are as much grieved as though it had happened to ourselves.” Louis XI also wrote to the pope himself. Although he also expressed anger and demanded that the remaining conspirators under the Pope’s protection, specifically Count Girolamo, be turned over to justice, Louis stepped back from accusing the Pope himself and instead suggested that Count Girolamo and the Archbishop of Pisa had acted behind the Pope’s back. But, even though he didn’t threaten the Pope directly, Louis XI seriously did consider calling a general council of the Church, which would be empowered to basically put the Pope on trial and depose him.
Kind letters of consolation, even from the heads of the major powers of Europe, only go so far. As much as the Pope had made himself unpopular through his connection to the Pazzi conspiracy and his shameless angling for his parvenu relatives, it would soon become clear that Pope Sixtus still had the upper hand. Not content with just attacking Lorenzo on the spiritual plane, the Pope declared war on Florence, backed by the King Ferrante of Naples. In normal times, the triple alliance of Florence, Milan, and Venice would have very likely won a slam dunk against Naples and Rome. However, these weren’t normal times. Venice was too worried about the Ottoman Turks encroaching on its colonies in Greece to give more than the bare minimum effort into helping Florence. Meanwhile Milan’s duke, Gian Galeazzo II, was a child too young to rule in his own right, and his mother and regent Bona of Savoy was locked in a bitter power struggle with his uncle Ludovico Sforza. In short, Florence was all but on its own.
Lorenzo, however, was far from on his own in his own city, at least not at first. In a supreme act of political theater, Lorenzo put his position to the test by giving a speech to the Signoria, offering to abdicate for the sake of ending the war and the Pope’s hostility. “All citizens must place the common before the private good, but I more than anyone else, as one who has received from you and from my country more and greater benefits.” The Signoria acclaimed them, and then for the next several days Lorenzo was personally visited by the city’s leading citizens, all to assure him of their support. When the Pope wrote to the Signoria, demanding that they banish Lorenzo, they fire back a stern and uncompromising letter. “You say that Lorenzo is a tyrant and command us to expel him. But most Florentines call him their defender. Remember your high office as the Vicar of Christ. Remember that the Keys of St. Peter were not given to you to abuse in such a way.” The Pope then resorted to the other ultimate weapon in the papacy’s arsenal, an interdict. In case you don’t remember the last time Florence was under a papal interdict in our narrative, an interdict forbids clergy and monastics in Florence from performing any rites or rituals except the most essential, specifically baptisms and last rites. When the interdict dropped, the priests and monastics of Florence gathered and declared that they would defy the Popes orders and continue supporting Lorenzo.
The people were all behind Lorenzo. But not indefinitely, as even he must have known. In case no one ever told you this before, war is a tad stressful. It’s even worse for the people on the losing side, and that’s the place Florence found itself in soon after the war started. By the summer of 1479, much of the Tuscan countryside had either been raided or was occupied by Neapolitan troops. The people were facing the inevitability of a hard, hungry winter. At the same time, Lorenzo came down with a case of malaria. He made a slow, hard recovery, but Florence itself was suffering from an outbreak of the plague. The warm, patriotic feelings following the Pazzi conspiracy were fading fast. People began putting up anti-Medici placards on the street and the same leading citizens who once personally assured Lorenzo of his support began grumbling over why their city was suffering, seemingly just on behalf of this one man who was acting more and more like Florence’s monarch. The memoirs of one Florentine, Luca Ladduci, noted, “The citizens are living under the threat of war, of plague and of the papal excommunication, and they are very frightened. God help them.”
Something had to give. And Lorenzo knew this. So he took a huge gamble. On December 7, 1479, at their usual meeting, the members of the signoria had a letter from Lorenzo read out. One can imagine them mumbling to each other or even shouting in surprise as the words came out. Lorenzo and a small group of trusted guards and servants had left the city in the middle of the night in secret. Lorenzo wrote the letter in a town halfway to Pisa. By the time the Signoria received it, he would already be on a ship headed straight to Naples. The letter read, ““If I have not already informed Your Illustrious Excellencies of the reason for my departure it is not out of presumption but because it seems to me that the troubled state of our city demands deeds, not words. Since it appears to me that the city longs for and demands peace, and seeing no one else willing to undertake it, it seemed better to place myself in some peril than to further endanger the city. And so I have decided that with the blessing of Your Illustrious Lordships I will travel openly to Naples. Because I am the one most persecuted by our enemies, I believe that by placing myself in their hands I can be the means necessary to restore peace to our city.”
Of course, it wasn’t quite the spontaneous gesture it sounds like. Lorenzo had an unlikely agent in Naples, Filippo Strozzi, whose family had become the bankers of the Neapolitan royal court after they were exiled from Florence following their own schemes against Lorenzo’s grandfather. Also, Filippo himself had become a personal friend and confidant of Ferrante’s. Strozzi was carrying out covert negotiations with King Ferrante and without the Pope’s knowledge while reporting back to Lorenzo. Thanks to Strozzi, Lorenzo already knew that even though Naples was winning the war, King Ferrante was afraid for his throned. See, his old rival for the kingdom of Naples, Rene of Anjou, had died, but his claim to the throne of Naples eventually passed on like a family heirloom to no one other than King Louis XI of France himself. The more the war dragged on, the more likely it was that King Louis would intervene, and if he did that, he might seize on the excuse to grab Naples while he happened to be in the neighborhood.
When he arrived in Naples, Lorenzo did indeed receive a friendly reception, especially by the standards of someone who was essentially the leader of a hostile nation. After a day of two of possibly deliberately being kept in suspense, Lorenzo was allowed to ride out past the city walls to greet the king personally. The meeting was a promising success. In a letter to the Signoria, Lorenzo crowed, “He greeted me most graciously and with many kind words, showing in many different ways the affection he had for our city and his desire to enter into a true union.” Also, Lorenzo had one other invaluable ally in Naples other than Filippo Strozzi. This ally was Ippolita Sforza, the daughter of Duke Francesco Sforza who had been married off to Ferrante’s son and heir Alfonso. Ippolita and Lorenzo had been friends and correspondents for years, even before her marriage. She herself was a supporter of humanist writers and had been taught Greek. Ippolita went about deploying her connections among the upper class of Naples for Lorenzo’s benefit. Lorenzo himself was no slouch and worked to ingratiate himself to the people of Naples, buying the freedom of a hundred Neapolitans captured and enslaved by pirates and providing money for the dowries of the poor.
Even with these advantages, I think it would be a mistake that Lorenzo’s diplomatic trip to Naples was just a vacation filled with hobknobbing with the kingdom’s rich and famous. I mean, there was that element, but I think Mary Hollingsworth is being a bit too cynical when she writes, ““Lorenzo was far too arrogant to have worried about throwing himself into the Neapolitan lion’s den.” The fact was Ferrante had a well-deserved reputation for being arbitrary and cruel, so much so it was rumored that he had the bodies of his enemies stuffed and preserved in a kind of macabre museum. This probably wasn’t true – although personally I like to think it was – but there was a real danger that Ferrante would flip and have Lorenzo shipped directly off to his enemy, the Pope. Also as much as Ferrante feared a French invasion, he also didn’t want to make an enemy of the Pope, or at least this particular vindictive Pope. So Ferrante masterfully wore his poker face and stalled for time while he tried to find a way to back out of the war without offending the Pope too much. This exasperated Lorenzo, especially since he regularly received word that unrest in Florence was threatening to boil over. One of his retinue would later write, ““During the day Lorenzo appeared perfectly easy, graceful, cheerful and confident, but at night he grieved bitterly about his own ill fortune and that of Florence, saying repeatedly that he did not care a fig for his own life but that it distressed him beyond measure that he could not save his country from the dangers which beset her.”
After three months with negotiations still going on, Lorenzo played that ultimate move known to all negotiators known to everyone from politicians to people trying to get a good price on a new car: the walk out.
[Insert George Costanza’s “The only thing these guys fear is the walk out”]
And that’s what Lorenzo did. Citing urgent matters in Florence, he quickly left on the night of February 27. Even though there was not yet a peace treaty, Lorenzo was welcomed back like a hero, someone who risked his own safety to bring peace to Florence. And, shortly after his return, it was proven that it worked. The peace that was signed brought an end to the war with Naples, but it also meant paying a sizable indemnity to Naples and handing over a key fortress on Tuscany’s southern border to Naples’ ally, the Republic of Genoa. Even then, the treaty was hailed as a great victory.
The Pope might have still carried on with hostilities, even after the loss of his most important ally. But then the closest thing a fifteenth-century Italian would have seen to the beginning of the actual apocalypse happened: an Ottoman fleet carrying over 14,000 Ottoman troops had captured the fortified port city of Otranto in the heel of Italy. Even for Pope Sixtus this was no time to be fighting a war. In the midst of making elaborate plans to flee Italy with the entire papal court in case the Ottomans marched on Italy, Pope Sixtus made terms with Lorenzo that November, lifting both the interdict and the excommunication. One Florentine even blasphemously called the invasion of Otranto a “great miracle.” Call that statement a sign that Europe was truly past the age of holy warfare between Islam and Christianity, an indication of how much Pope Sixtus was truly despised in Florence, or just another case of how short-sighted people can be, especially when it comes to politics.
Lorenzo had pulled himself and Florence out of the fire, but the crisis had taught him a grim lesson. At the peak of the troubles, he had been threatened almost as much by his so-called friends among the city’s best and brightest, the ottimati, as he had been by the Pope and the King of Naples. Indeed, the Pazzi conspiracy had shown that internal critics will even call upon hostile foreign powers just to remove him. There needed to be one more safeguard in the government to guarantee his influence and the continued power of his family. As Lorenzo himself bitterly remarked, “When I go more than ten miles out of the city, the love and loyalty of friends come to an end.”
Drawing on the massive political capital he had, Lorenzo proposed the creation of a new executive body: the Council of Seventy. The new council had broad authority over foreign policy and fiscal matters since they chose among their own members who would be in the relevant committees. The new council was even given the right to decide what proposals will be submitted to the legislative councils, a power that once belonged to the Signoria. Finally, they were also effectively in charge over elections to the Signoria and appointments to the leadership of the Otto di Guardia, replacing the older accopiatori. Of course, the Council of Seventy was initially staffed with Medici loyalists. And who would choose new members of the Council of Seventy? The Council of Seventy, of course. The signoria were still on paper the main executive branch and heads of state for the Republic of Florence, but the Council of Seventy was so powerful that it effectively replaced them as the de facto heads of the government. And, of course, the person who ruled the Council of Seventy was unquestionably Lorenzo de’ Medici. In fact, as Lorenzo’s modern biographer Miles Unger points out, the real genius of the Council of Seventy was that ““It was small enough to be easily controlled from the top, but large enough so that no one member was likely to emerge who could challenge the leadership of the head of the Medici household.”
Lorenzo did at least throw the ottimati a bone, by making it so only members of Florence’s top families were eligible for appointment rather than members of the rising upper-middle class that served as the backbone of Medici support for so long. However, even a Medici partisan like Benedetto Dei complained, “They refashioned the government in such a way so that it was based on tyranny rather than on the public good.”
To be somewhat fair to Lorenzo, the establishment of the Council of Seventy merely accelerated a process that began with the decline of the guilds. With the artisans and merchants of Florence depending more and more on the patronage of the rich for their political careers, it is not too surprising to see the emergence of what Unger describes as a “professional political class”, one that would coalesce around a state body like the Council of Seventy. Now “professional political class” probably sounds ominous. To some if not many Florentines, though, it might have been a reasonable trade-off. If you were a member of the Florentine elite, in this time you might lose having a real say over the domestic and foreign policies of Florence, but you still got all the perks of political office without having to worry about ending up like Dante or Cosimo de’ Medici, getting exiled just because you were connected to a losing faction. So it’s easy to see why these changes might have been attractive, not frightening, to some members of the upper class.
Now at this point, I’m going to pull the camera back. We’ve only really talked about Lorenzo as a politician and diplomat, but nowadays he’s actually famous for his deeds as a patron. Also we haven’t really talked about his wife Clarice or their children. So join us next time as we look at Lorenzo’s personal life and his many relationships with artists, writers, and scholars as well as Lorenzo’s own experiments with the literary arts.
Buona note.
The Medici Podcast 