Lorenzo is at the height of his power and security. However, just behind the scenes, the family bank that caused the Medici to come into power in the first place is slowly but steadily falling apart, thanks to the Ottomans, a squabble between English royals, and, most of all, the ugly realities of politics.
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Portrait of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici (c. 1563) by Cristofano dell’Altissimo. Source: Palazzo-medici.it.
We close out Season 1, “The Early Medici”, with a look at the life and death of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, whose descendants would become the branch of the family we usually mean when we talk about the Medici. Not only is he the first prominent member of the family, however, he also founded the dynasty in the sense that he started the tradition of sponsoring forward-thinking artists, writers, and architects and in how his apparent reluctance to be a public figure actually inspired a formula for political success that would carry his descendants to greater heights than even his more ambitious forebears could have imagined.
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While I talked about how Giovanni de Bicci dei Medici reaped the benefits from his relationship with the sketchy soldier turned rival pope John XXIII, the rest of the Medici family was not doing so well. The family remained committed to the populist cause. Unfortunately, the conservatives also remained firmly in power since the fall of Salvestro de’ Medici. As a result, various Medici along with members of other populist families were persecuted by the government, either barred from political office or exiled from the city. So, while we can’t know what his true political beliefs were, by making himself a low-key ally of the conservatives, Vieri de’ Medici was truly and literally saving himself and his family. Giovanni de Bicci would not follow in his cousin and fairy godfather’s footsteps. However, he would find his own savvy way of surviving the political whirlwind.
A portrait of bankers at a traditional banking table. Source unknown.
We take a step back from the life of Giovanni di Bicci dei Medici to look at banking, commerce, and religious and legal attitudes about usury and luxury in Renaissance Florence. How did the Medici and other Florentine dynasties prosper in banking when loans with interest were considered a grave sin and a form of theft?
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I decided to take a brief break from telling the story of Giovanni di Bicci’s life to give a little context to exactly how the Medici made their money. Let’s talk capitalism. Or proto-capitalism.
A miniature depicting Valentina Visconti, Duchesse d’Orléans, with the symbols of Milan and the Visconti family, from a copy of Cicero’s De natura deorum, c. 1400. Source: anne-marie.eu.
Around the dawn of the fifteenth century, two developments unfolded that would sooner or later change the future of the Medici family forever. In one, Valentina Visconti enters a miserable marriage with a French royal. In the other, Giovanni de Bicci de’ Medici takes advantage of Europe being split between two and even three rival popes by (allegedly!) bankrolling the church career of a former soldier who hobnobbed with pirates and robbers that eventually sees him become Pope.
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This time, I’m going to have to zoom out a bit. I do try to keep this from turning into the northern Italy or the History of Florence podcast. But we’re at a point where two events that initially had absolutely nothing to do with the Medici would have ramifications that would completely shape the family’s future.
A statue of Michele di Lando in the Loggia del Mercato Nuovo. Source: Saliko via Wikimedia Commons.
After Salvestro de’ Medici helps stoke the flames of revolution, violence breaks out on the streets of Florence and a wool-comber is installed in the highest office of the republic. But who will really benefit from this proletariat revolt in the long term?
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Let’s start this episode with an exercise of imagination. Close your eyes, unless you’re driving or walking, in which case please don’t close your eyes, and try to imagine what it was like to be a poor laborer, earning a pittance from Florence’s cloth industry, sometime in the years following the Black Death.
A picture of the Mugello Valley in Tuscany. Source: Christian Lorenz
Sometime before the dawn of the fourteenth century, a family named the Medici moved from a small village in the Mugello Valley in the Apennines to the bustling city of Florence. Eventually, they became successful bankers and one member was elected to the republic’s top office. They also jumped right into the city’s latest violent class and factional civil war.
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Once upon a time, there was a courageous knight named Averardo. He fought well for Emperor Charlemagne, freeing Italy from the tyranny of the Lombards. While traveling through the Mugello Valley, he caught word of a giant who was terrorizing the people who lived there. Averardo challenged this Goliath to one-on-one combat. The giant tried to brain Averardo with his mace, but he lifted his golden shield at the pivotal moment, holding the shield so strongly that the mace shattered against it. However, it left the shield dented with the iron balls off the mace. Even with his shield damaged, however, Averardo was able to overpower and kill the cruel giant. Impressed by his feats, Charlemagne himself granted Averardo the right to use the dented shield, iron balls and all, as his family insignia. With that, Averardo graciously accepted the invitation of the people he liberated to settle in the valley. There, his descendants became known as the Medici family.
With Florence free of foreign interference (for once), a medieval “class traitor” spearheaded reforms that severely weakened the nobility’s grip on the government and gave a lot of formal power to the city’s merchant and artisan guilds. In this episode, I delve into the nuts and bolts of how this guild regime operated. Also, I talk about whether or not we can talk about Florence as part of an “Italian nation”, even though a unified Italian nation state was still about 600 years from being born.
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So the last time we checked in on the Florentines, they were finally free of the foreign control of the Holy Roman Emperors and Charles of Anjou. The feud between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines was finally over by 1267, with the Ghibelline cause lost for good with the downfall of the Hohenstauffen dynasty of Holy Roman Emperors. Well, at least, lost for good in retrospect. Not surprisingly, by 1300, the Guelphs split into two brand-new factions, the White Guelphs, who opposed papal influence, and the Black Guelphs, who supported the Pope, which provided a new excuse for infighting among the nobility.
The Medici Podcast 