Magnifico (36 page)

GIROLAMO RIARIO AND FRANCESCO DE’ PAZZI WERE NOT
the kind of men one would expect to strike up an intimate friendship. Both were wealthy and powerful, but they had come to prominence following very different paths, and in a society attuned to every nuance of culture, breeding, and pedigree, the gulf between them might in normal circumstances have proved unbridgeable. Girolamo carried himself with all the ostentation of someone only recently vaulted into the first ranks of society—the epitome of the parvenu. His clothes were of the finest silk brocade, his manicured fingers sparkled with gold and gemstones. Francesco, small, pale, and filled with a nervous energy, dressed with the understated elegance of one with nothing to prove. One had been born into an obscure family from a provincial fishing village, a former customs clerk who owed his high position to the talents and energy of his uncle; when he spoke it was in the harsh, untutored syllables of the Ligurian coast where he was born. The other was the bluest of blue bloods, an aristocrat intensely conscious of his family’s contribution to the glorious history of Europe’s most glittering and cultured metropolis.

Despite the difference in upbringing, they did share one distinctive trait—a prickly sense of their own honor that made them quick to anger and incapable of forgetting an insult. They both were ambitious and intemperate men who tended to view political rivals as mortal enemies. This natural affinity was greatly enhanced by the fact that each felt he had been wronged by the same man—Lorenzo de’ Medici, the tyrant of Florence. A common hatred proved a strong inducement to overlook other differences.

Precisely when their anger, rising with each new sign of Lorenzo’s deviousness, crystallized into a more definite plan of action is not known. The Imola affair was certainly the prime catalyst, focusing their anger and drawing them closer together, but it is likely that their thinking evolved slowly over the course of months or even years. As outrage followed outrage, the two reached a critical point where it seemed to them that the only solution to their troubles lay in the murder of the Medici brothers and the overthrow of their regime. Niccolò Valori, writing a few decades after the events, claimed it was Riario who first hit upon assassination as the method most likely to achieve their ends, while Guicciardini credited Pazzi.
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Most plausibly, Machiavelli gives them both an equal share in the conception of the plot: “And since he [Francesco] was very friendly with Count Girolamo, they often complained to one another of the Medici: so after many complaints they came to the reasoning that it was necessary, if one of them was to live in his states and the other in his city securely, to change the state of Florence—which they thought could not be done without the deaths of Giuliano and Lorenzo.”

For Riario the elimination of the Medici brothers was a pressing, practical matter. As long as they reigned in Florence, Riario’s fledgling state in the Romagna would be threatened with extinction, squeezed as if between two millstones by the powerful states of Milan and Florence. Riario was haunted by the specter of his elderly uncle’s death, at which time, as he confessed to one of his co-conspirators, “his state would not be worth a bean, because Lorenzo de’ Medici wished him ill, nor did he believe that there was a man in the world who wished him greater ill; and that after the death of the Pope he would not seek anything less than to rob from him his state and finish him off because he felt he had received many injuries from his hands.”

Pazzi’s motives were at once more personal and more abstract. It enraged him to see the Medici receive princes and emperors at their palace on the Via Larga while his more ancient family was left in the shadows. As long as Lorenzo lived, Pazzi would be forced to grovel at his feet or endure the ghostly existence of a rootless exile. Like many frustrated politicians, he transformed his personal disappointment into an ideological crusade.

Though the unfolding plot has long been referred to as the Pazzi conspiracy, suggesting it was Francesco who took the lead, neither could have done without the other: Riario, one of the most powerful figures at the papal court, had connections and access to money and military muscle, while Francesco de’ Pazzi possessed an insider’s knowledge of Florentine government and, vitally, personal access to the Medici brothers. Pazzi’s hatred of Lorenzo, like his pedigree, was of older vintage—one might say it predated his birth since the chip on the collective Pazzi shoulder went back generations—but Riario’s feelings were no less virulent for their recent origin. Ultimately, Riario comes across as the more calculating of the two, spinning his web from the comfort and safety of Rome, while Pazzi, driven by fantasies of vengeance and of a hero’s martyrdom, would prove himself both more courageous and more reckless.

From the beginning the conspirators were faced with a major structural difficulty—the lack of meaningful Florentine involvement. The contrast with 1466 is telling: while in that earlier coup the main instigators were Florentines at the highest level of government, men whose faces, characters, and reputations were familiar to the citizens of the city, none of the original Pazzi conspirators was well known or well liked in the community. Francesco, though native-born and from a prominent family, had lived abroad for so many years that he was practically a stranger in his own hometown. Worse still, his recent involvement in the Imola affair had angered his compatriots. Even those ideologically opposed to Medici rule would have a hard time accepting “liberty” from the likes of Francesco de’ Pazzi. Riario was even less acceptable to a Florentine public that bridled at the slightest hint of outside interference in their affairs. However distorted their notions of Florentine opinion, Riario and Pazzi knew that a more respectable, more Florentine, face must be put on the undertaking.

Thus it was that as their plans ripened they brought a new figure into their confidence. In some ways this new addition to the inner circle appeared ideally suited to the task. Not only was he a Florentine from a distinguished family but, as a powerful figure in the curia, aide to Cardinal Pietro Riario and cousin of Francesco de’ Pazzi, his loyalty was never in doubt. In addition to his ties with both of the principal plotters, he had his own reasons to hate Lorenzo. It is a measure of how out-of-touch they were with public opinion in Florence that the second native son drawn into the web was almost as unpopular in his native land as Francesco de’ Pazzi himself.

Born in 1425, Francesco Salviati was older than his fellow conspirators. He was already well into middle age and with a distinguished ecclesiastical career behind him by the time he joined with Girolamo Riario and Francesco de’ Pazzi in their perilous undertaking. (Girolamo, born in 1438, was eighteen years his junior, while Francesco, born in 1445, was twenty years younger.) Like his partners, Salviati was unhappy with the current state of affairs, believing he had been denied the ecclesiastical appointments he coveted most through the malicious interference of the First Citizen of Florence. But while he certainly had good reason to resent Lorenzo, it seems curious that a man of his mature years, with everything to lose and perhaps little time to enjoy the fruits of his victory, should have allowed himself to become involved with a couple of young hotheads with a taste for mayhem.

It is unclear how far back Francesco Salviati’s hatred for Lorenzo and his family went. The Salviati were an old and respected Florentine clan, but during Francesco’s lifetime they had seen a decline in their fortunes.
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The Salviati palace still stands, around the corner from that of the Pazzi, with whom they were allied by ties of marriage, but in Francesco’s day it was one of the few remaining assets of a family that had fallen on hard times. The worst blow to the Salviati came in the economic depression of 1466, a disaster for which many people still blamed Lorenzo’s father. Francesco Salviati had particular reason to be bitter. Piero’s retrenchment following the death of his father, in which he tightened the liberal credit extended by Cosimo, contributed to the failure of a wool shop in Pisa owned by the Salviati family.

But if Salviati harbored resentment toward those responsible for his family’s descent into poverty it was not immediately apparent. Indeed it was in Cosimo’s Florence that, as an ambitious young man, Salviati first distinguished himself, aided in his efforts by many within the ruling elite. He belonged to the circle gathered around the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, an impressive group that included not only Angelo Poliziano but also Giuliano and Lorenzo. Poliziano later wrote that Salviati was “devoid of knowledge of and also respect for the law, divine as well as human…lost in sensuality and disgraceful intrigues.” He also attributed to him the sins of gambling at dice, flattery, and vanity, though this standard catalogue of vices was compiled only after his treachery was revealed. In fact at one time the two had been on friendly terms. As a young man Poliziano had written Salviati some flattering letters in hopes of obtaining a position.

Like many a youth with more education than money Salviati pursued a career in the Church. It was his cousin Jacopo de’ Pazzi (Jacopo’s mother, Caterina Salviati, was Francesco’s aunt) who bankrolled Salviati’s fine humanist education, a necessity for one seeking employment in the papal courts. After completing his schooling he proceeded to Rome, where he joined such intellectual luminaries as Bartolomeo Platina and Leon Battista Alberti, who were determined to place the latest humanist scholarship at the service of a modernized Church. With his Pazzi connections, his drive to succeed, and his Florentine education, Salviati rose through the hierarchy, becoming in time the indispensable right-hand man of Cardinal Pietro Riario.

That Salviati was more than the list of vices attributed to him by Poliziano is revealed in his correspondence with Marsilio Ficino, though the latter was clearly a better philosopher in the abstract than he was a judge of humanity in the flesh.
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The philosopher’s affection for Salviati is attested to by the fatherly advice he was wont to bestow on his fellow humanist when, as often seemed to be the case, Salviati felt thwarted in his ambitions. “I wanted something important in your affairs to happen, which would prompt me to write a congratulatory letter to you, and I expected it every day,” Ficino wrote. “I see that nothing has yet happened worthy of my desire and your deserts. Trust in God, Salviati. I know you were not born for small or commonplace purposes. So be of good heart and, as is usual to you, strong in spirit. You will achieve great things if you are strong in spirit.” Urging patience on Salviati, however, was a futile effort. For all their kindly advice, Ficino’s letters betray the frustration of their recipient, who already seemed to feel he had been cheated of the stellar career to which his abilities entitled him.

Salviati’s great break came in December of 1473 when his boss, Cardinal Pietro Riario, died suddenly in Rome. As always occurs with the unexpected deaths of powerful men there were the inevitable rumors of poisoning. A more likely explanation is that Cardinal Riario was a victim of his own excesses. Debauchery is never the most healthy of lifestyles, and Riario was the epitome of the dissolute Renaissance prelate. “Our delightful feasts all came to an end, and everyone lamented the death of Riario,” went one contemporary’s facetious obituary.
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Cardinal Riario’s passing had many consequences beyond the losses suffered by the procureresses, vintners, and pastry chefs of Rome, not least of which was that it unhinged his uncle, who seems to have lost what little sense of proportion he once possessed. Indeed Sixtus was so grief-stricken that many feared for his sanity. Nothing could replace the indispensable Pietro, either in the pope’s heart or in the more practical role as his chief financial and political advisor, but the void was eventually filled to the best of his somewhat limited abilities by his younger brother, Count Girolamo. The contrast between the two was striking. Both, it is true, possessed the burning ambition common to all the Riario, but Pietro had been a man whose intelligence was placed at the service of an expansive vision of papal power. Girolamo, by contrast, could hardly see beyond the narrow horizons of his own immediate advantage. After Pietro’s death papal policy grew increasingly violent and erratic as Girolamo lunged first this way and then that in a desperate attempt to secure his uncertain future.

As for Salviati, the death of his patron cleared the path to greater things. Of all the titles held by the deceased cardinal, the one Salviati coveted most was that of archbishop of Florence. In the end his bid to become the chief prelate of his native land was unsuccessful, but somewhere in the obscure negotiations that led to the appointment of Lorenzo’s brother-in-law Rinaldo Orsini to the vacancy, the pope seems to have promised Salviati that he would be named to the next available position. The opportunity to make good on this pledge came later that year. On October 7, 1474, Filippo de’ Medici, archbishop of Pisa, died. Seven days later the pope issued a bull announcing Salviati as his replacement.

The nomination of Francesco Salviati as archbishop of Pisa touched off a new crisis in the already strained relations between Lorenzo and the pope. It also put Sixtus on a collision course with the Florentine
Signoria,
which had not been consulted in the matter as tradition dictated and as the pope had earlier promised. Even before Filippo de’ Medici’s death the
Signoria
had placed before the pope a list of acceptable successors. Salviati’s name was, pointedly, not among them.
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It is understandable, then, that when the government of Florence learned of Salviati’s appointment they reacted with outrage and indignation. Not only had the pope failed to consult them, but he had chosen a candidate whose activities on behalf of the pope and his family made him obnoxious to all patriotic Florentines.
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Worse still, it was clear that the pope was grooming Salviati for the cardinalship, filling that vital office with the one native son unacceptable to his own people. On October 18 a special committee of leading members of the
reggimento
resolved to oppose this insult to the dignity of the republic with all the means at their disposal. Noting that the Holy Father was entitled by law to select whomever he chose to be his bishop, they also pointed out that only the government of Florence had the right to determine who could set foot on their territory. Thus while they could not stop Salviati’s appointment, they could effectively bar him from claiming his prize by preventing him from crossing the border into Tuscany.