The golden age of the Medici’s unofficial lordship over Florence is drawing to an end with Lorenzo’s death. Here we look back over Lorenzo’s legacy as the patron, the politician, and even the embezzler and the human being. Also, what exactly was Lorenzo’s contribution to the course of not only Florentine but European history as a whole?
Transcript
Last time, we talked about the Medici bank being in free fall. And Lorenzo himself was well aware of the bank’s problems. Once, he wrote to the signorie himself, explaining his last tax report to the government: “In making out this report, I shall not follow the same procedure as my father in 1469 because there is a great difference between that time and the present with the consequence that I have suffered many losses in several of my undertakings, as is well-known not only to Your Lordships but to the entire world.”
We don’t know for sure based on Lorenzo’s own writings, but an awareness of the growing weakness of the bank might have driven him to seek other ways to ensure the future of his family. He continued his mother Lucrezia’s policy of trying to pull the Medici out of the world of the Florentine elites and into the wider realm of the Italian nobility. In February of 1488, Lorenzo’s eldest son Piero was wed to Alfosina Orsini. The bride came from a branch of Piero’s mother Clarice’s clan, the Orsini, that had settled in Naples a couple of generations ago. Her father Roberto, Count of Tagliacozzo, was not only a prominent member of the Neapolitan aristocracy, but was also a personal friend of King Ferrante. Through this marriage, Pietro was linked to the royal court of Naples through his new wife as well as to the Roman nobility through his mother.
But as far as Lorenzo was concerned the greatest legacy he left behind for the family was the one he gave to his younger son Giovanni. After Pope Sixtus’ death, the next Pope a Giovanni Batista Cibo, a descendant of Greek refugees who settled in Genoa. He took the name Innocent VIII. Perhaps because of his heritage, Innocent was more worried about organizing a new crusade against the Ottomans than grabbing up Italian land for his relatives, so he was much more easier for Lorenzo to deal with. Still, Lorenzo made sure to seal the deal by marrying off his daughter Maddelena to the Pope’s much older, gambling addict illegitimate son Francesco Cibo, as I mentioned before. Poor Maddalena paid the price, and Lorenzo got all the rewards. Years after failing to make his brother Giuliano cardinal, Lorenzo finally secured the honor of becoming a cardinal of the Catholic Church for his scholarly second son, Giovanni. Lorenzo considered this the greatest honor his family had ever achieved. Perhaps he even somehow had a gleaming that the future of his family lied not just with the nobility of Italy, but with the holy Mother Church as well.
The appointment of Giovanni as a cardinal had a couple of hiccups, however. Giovanni was only thirteen years old when he was made a cardinal. This made Giovanni de’ Medici the youngest cardinal in the history of the entire Church. The whole thing was enough of a potential scandal that Pope Innocent wanted to keep the entire appointment a secret and forbade Giovanni from wearing the robes of office or attending any meetings of the College of Cardinals for at least several years, apparently hoping that by then no one would care enough to ask any questions. Like any gushing father, however, Lorenzo couldn’t keep the matter to himself. The Pope was furious. And we do have a letter from Lorenzo where he apologized to the Pope while also trying to shift the blame:
“As to keeping this affair secret I should be much distressed if the knowledge of it had been made public by me. But Your Holiness may rest assured that it was immediately known in Rome, and then divulged by letters to people here, so that every one came to congratulate me. I can affirm that the news was not published by me, nor did I cause any demonstration of joy to be made.”
It wasn’t all good tidings for the Medici family in those years, however. Clarice had become ill with a disease that was likely tuberculosis for a long period of time. Finally, on July 30, 1488, she died. It is true that Lorenzo wasn’t as close to her as his own parents had been. Still, her death hardly left him unscathed. Lorenzo himself was so ill that his physician had him go to some mineral baths in the area of Pisa. While Lorenzo was gone and unable to travel, Clarice passed away and her funeral was held. It does seem that Lorenzo really was stopped by illness from attending his wife’s funeral. Certainly the words he wrote to Pope Innocent after Clarice’s death carry an authentic weight: “The deprivation of such loyal and such sweet company has filled my cup and has made me so miserable that I can find no peace.”
We can also believe Lorenzo because in those years his own health had deteriorated. He had once been a fit and athletic man. As he got older, though, it became agonizingly clear that he had inherited both his mother’s eczema and his father and grandfather’s gout. This forced Lorenzo to travel to various mineral baths around Tuscany to try to find some relief. And as he aged, his condition got worse. By the start of 1492, at only the age of 42, Lorenzo had difficulty walking and suffered from constant fevers and pains all over his body. That March, he travelled to the villa at Careggi, which remained one of Lorenzo’s favorite spots even though it was from there that Lorenzo and his father Piero were almost ambushed by conspirators. Careggi also happened to be where his father and grandfather went to die. And, indeed, Lorenzo knew he was dying.
There Lorenzo was surrounded by not only his surviving family, but his artistic clients and friends. To Pico della Mirandola, who we met in our episodes about the Renaissance, Lorenzo joked that he wished he lived long enough to see what the library Pico was putting together would look like in the end. Also there was a certain friar. According to a very biased account that came down decades later, this friar refused to hear Lorenzo’s last confession unless he restored the republic of Florence. But this is purely a myth scribbled down for reasons we will get into over the next few episodes. In reality, Lorenzo’s friend Poliziano remarked in his personal account of Lorenzo’s final days that the friar told Lorenzo to remain firm in his faith whether or not God gave him more life or not. And when Lorenzo asked the friar to give him benediction, the friar did so. In case you haven’t guessed already, the friar was named Girolamo Savoranola. We will be hearing a lot more from him.
For now, though, here is Poliziano’s account of Lorenzo’s last moments:
“When given something to eat and asked how he liked it he replied, ‘As well as a dying man can like anything.’ He embraced us all tenderly and humbly asked pardon if during his illness he caused annoyance to anyone. Then disposing himself to receive extreme unction he commended his soul to God. The Gospel containing the Passion of the Christ was then read and he showed that he understood by moving his lips, or raising his languid eyes, or sometimes moving his fingers. Gazing upon a silver crucifix inlaid with precious stones and kissing it from time to time, he expired.” It was the evening of April 8, 1492 when Lorenzo the Magnificent passed away. He had sat on the invisible throne for about 23 years. In a cruel twist of faith, despite his health in his youth, Lorenzo was ten years younger than his sickly, mostly housebound father when he died.
So we’ve spent a lot of time with Lorenzo. Part of the reason why is we have a lot of material about him, ranging from letters and works of fiction he wrote to the writings of people who actually knew him. Another part is that Lorenzo’s time as the unofficial lord of Florence really does represent a huge turning point. Now I don’t want to get into the debate over Great Person History, but I think someone like Lorenzo is good proof for the moderate position, that history is certainly shaped by these vast, impersonal trends and technological and geographical circumstances. However, it is also given direction by key people who happen to be in positions of influence at crucial times. Lorenzo is one such person.
If the economic and social forces surrounding Florence hadn’t drastically reduced the power of the guilds and made the middle class more dependent on the wealthy for political access, it’s unlikely the Medici or any other family could have controlled the Republic as well as they did. And certainly Lorenzo’s life would have been very different if his father and grandfather hadn’t done what they did. And yet, if Lorenzo wasn’t as talented a diplomat as he undoubtedly was or he didn’t make the decision to link his family to the church and the wider Italian nobility, his family would have been forced back to obscurity or likely worse, Florentine history would have changed, and so would have the history of Italy and Europe, for reasons that, again, we’ll get into over the course of the next season.
As for Lorenzo the human being who once actually lived, it’s harder to judge, even though we know so much about him. He lived in a time when it was accepted, even to a degree expected, that people in positions of power in a republic would take a little from the till now and then and act in ways that would be flat-out illegal for public officials in most countries in the developed world today. Even then, his embezzlement if it was widely known would have been a huge, potentially destructive scandal. We don’t have enough information to know if he truly had to conduct these things. But even if he felt completely justified, it doesn’t change the fact that he resorted to extreme and self-serving measures that, as far as we know, his father and grandfather never did.
But he was also a genuinely generous man, even if that generosity was often expressed ways that happened to benefit himself and his regime. We can see this in the fact that he did occasionally go above and beyond, like helping to protect Jews from anti-Semitic officials, and in the sincere friendships he formed with the scholars and artists he patroned. For example, he could have written off the controversial and occasionally destructive scholar Pico della Mirandola and saved himself some bad press, but he never did. Mary Hollingsworth does criticize Lorenzo for not spending enough on specific artists like his cousins did, but like I noted before this seems unfair to me. It seems almost perverse to say this in a time where we still revere the Italian masters of the Renaissance, but honestly from a purely pragmatic standpoint it was more important and benefited more people that Lorenzo revived the University of Pisa and funded scholarships there than if he spent the money on a few more statues or paintings.
Honestly, I can’t help but see Lorenzo as a tragic figure more than anything else. He was born into what was supposed to have been a republic and not a hereditary monarchy, and still from an early age he was forced into the role of the public face of a shaky political regime. Twice in his life he experienced almost being captured or even killed by enemies of his family, and politics cost him the life of his brother and any sense of lasting security for himself and his family. No wonder he was at least a little paranoid and distrustful, and no wonder that paranoia and distrust translated into the tyranny over Florence his enemies hated with good reason.
After spending months in Lorenzo’s company, I do believe he did have a sincere desire to escape into the life of a country gentleman who could spend his life on scholarly and literary pursuits and farming. There are examples from his writings and from the observations of the people who knew him I could point to, but to me one of the most revealing is a single line from one of Lorenzo’s religious plays. Written toward the end of his life, the play “The Martyrdom of Saints John and Paul” details the legend of two Christian soldiers who served under the first Christian emperor, Constantine I. When the pagan Julian the Apostate came to power, they refused to return to service and pledge loyalty to him, so Julian had them murdered in secret. There’s one line Lorenzo gives an embittered and tired Emperor Constantine that goes, “To rule is wearisome, a bitter feat.”
People flooded the streets to attend Lorenzo’s funeral, and the signoria voted to leave Lorenzo with a flattering and lengthy official epitaph, which concluded, “It has seemed good to the signoria and the people of Florence, on the motion of the chief magistrate, to establish a public testimonial of gratitude to the memory of such a man, in order that virtue might not be unhonored among the Florentines, and that, in days to come, other citizens may be incited to serve the commonwealth with might and wisdom.” In truth, Lorenzo’s legacy left the elites of Florence, the ottimati, divided. The Medici had been in power for almost sixty years by the time of Lorenzo’s death, and very few if any would still have any tangible memories of what the republic was like before Cosimo de’ Medici came to power. So some if not a majority were satisfied with the status quo, as long as they could get prestigious if mostly powerless political offices. Others, however, felt very differently. Despite not having lived at the time either, they looked back at the republic before Cosimo de’ Medici with nostalgia. Of course, they didn’t worry about the endemic factional infighting that led to violence and people being exiled for life just for basically being on the wrong side. Indeed, they had rosy views of the republics and democracies of ancient Greece and Rome too, as well as of the entrenched and ostensibly republican oligarchy that ruled over Venice. What mattered most to them was the rejection of power being concentrated in one family, and Lorenzo’s tendency after the Pazzi conspiracy to crack down on supposed conspirators gave solid form to their fears of such a form of government. Also, as we see again and again in history and our own time, nothing gets people invested in politics and viscerally angry at their government like a lasting economic downturn, and the depression that was still going on in Florence at the time of Lorenzo’s death was doing exactly that.
But the real threat looming by the time Lorenzo was on his deathbed wasn’t coming from inside the house, but from the outside. Next time, we’ll pull the camera far back and look at developments going on in Italy and even over the Alps in Europe itself, and how those developments brought a storm down on the Medici that would make even the Pazzi conspiracy look like a small tiff.
Thanks for listening, and buona note.
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