Magnifico (54 page)

Equally important to Lorenzo was his belief that his improved relations with the Holy Father might well revive the dream, long deferred, of having a cardinal in the family. It was largely with this goal in mind that he agreed to the betrothal of Maddalena to Franceschetto Cibo, Innocent’s fat, hard-drinking, hard-gambling son, in March 1487.
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Lorenzo was saddened by the prospect of having to part with his beloved daughter, particularly to someone as unprepossessing as Francesco, but the benefits of such a connection could not be passed up.

Lorenzo had good reason to be concerned for Maddalena’s happiness. Most distressing to her father was the fact that the forty-year-old Francesco proved to be an inconsiderate husband to the frail fifteen-year-old girl. “The bad health of Madonna Maddalena and the thoughtless behavior of my Lord [Francesco Cibo] in keeping her up,” complained Matteo Franco, who had accompanied her to Rome as her chaplain, “for all this winter he has gambled every night, supping at six or seven and coming to bed at daylight, and she will not, and cannot, eat or sleep without him. Thus she has lost sleep and appetite and has become as thin as a lizard.” Adding to Lorenzo’s worries was the uncertain future for anyone whose status depended on his relationship with the reigning pope. While Lorenzo had provided for the newlyweds by bestowing on the couple the Pazzi villa at Montughi (where the final plans for the Pazzi conspiracy had been laid) and another at Spedaletto, he had difficulty persuading Franceschetto’s father to provide adequately for his son. “It is urgent that his Holiness should once and for all arrange the affairs of
Signor
Francesco so that I should not be daily worried about them,” Lorenzo wrote to Innocent in October 1489, “and that we can live in peace and harmony. To speak plainly,
Signor
Francesco has not the position the nephew
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of a Pope ought to have, and yet we are now approaching the seventh year of the Pontificate.” One wonders if Lorenzo saw the irony in the situation, which exactly reversed the one that prevailed in the previous regime when Sixtus’s anxiety to provide for
his
family caused the Medici no end of trouble.

It was impossible to conceal the truth that Maddalena’s happiness had been sacrificed for the greater glory of the Medici family. A bit of contemporary doggerel summed up the bargain Lorenzo had struck:

The little boy in question was Lorenzo’s second son, Giovanni, a studious lad who from the beginning had been groomed for a life in the Church. “He is so strictly bred,” remarked his tutor, Poliziano, “that never from his mouth comes a lewd or even a light expression. He does not yield to his teachers in learning, nor to old men in gravity of manner.” In laying the groundwork for Giovanni’s ecclesiastical career, Lorenzo was far more deliberate than he had been in the case of his brother. Giovanni’s bookish tastes made him a more suitable candidate, and his early education, despite Poliziano’s preference for basing the boy’s lessons on pagan authors, had been arranged with an eye to preparing him for a life in the Church. At the tender age of seven he had taken holy orders, and from then on Lorenzo kept up a continual pressure to ensure that local cathedrals held positions open for him. Additional plums for Giovanni were plucked from abroad. As a reward for Lorenzo’s helpful role in the Barons War, Ferrante had bestowed on the boy the wealthy Benedictine abbey of Montecassino, while Lodovico Sforza had chipped in with the equally remunerative Miramodo near Milan. Lorenzo also went trawling for likely prospects in French waters where his friendship with the king gave him a leg up on the competition. On one occasion the king proved a little overzealous and was forced to withdraw the particularly rich prize of Aix after discovering that the current occupant was not dead as had been reported.

By 1487, the year of Maddalena’s wedding, Giovanni was a plump lad of twelve with a taste for fine food, fine clothes, and classical literature. The twenty-seven benefices he now held provided the adolescent with a handsome yearly income, sufficient even for someone of his expensive habits. Lorenzo left nothing to chance in his campaign to further Giovanni’s career, flattering, cajoling, and otherwise tending to the needs of the Holy Father. He had gained such influence in the Vatican that the Ferrarese ambassador grumbled, “the Pope sleeps with the eyes of the Magnificent Lorenzo,” while the Neapolitan ambassador claimed “that the Florentine ambassador…governs the policy of Rome.”

Lorenzo did not have long to wait for his reward. On March 10, 1489, a large crowd of jubilant citizens began to gather around the Medici palace. “We had heard,” wrote the apothecary Luca Landucci, “that the Pope had made six cardinals, who were as follows: two French, one Milanese, two of his nephews [shades of Sixtus], and one Florentine, son of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Thank God! It is a great honor to our city in general, and in particular to his father and his house.” The spontaneous joy of the Florentine people reveals the extent to which most had come to identify with the ruling family, believing that when a Medici distinguished himself the entire nation could take pride in the achievement. Lorenzo was overjoyed, declaring the news to be “the greatest honor that has ever befallen our house.” In naming Giovanni Cardinal Deacon of Santa Maria in Domenica, Innocent had fulfilled the dream of the family that was generations old. Now, surely, the Medici could count themselves among the great families of Europe. In Machiavelli’s memorable phrase, Giovanni’s elevation “was a ladder enabling [Lorenzo’s] house to rise to heaven.”

The one sour note was the pope’s irritation at Lorenzo for having publicized an appointment that Innocent wished to keep secret. Given the inconvenient fact of Giovanni’s extreme youth—at thirteen, he was the youngest cardinal ever appointed—Innocent had instructed Lorenzo to keep quiet for three years until his elevation would appear less of an embarrassment. But Lorenzo had no intention of keeping such spectacular news secret, excusing himself on the grounds “that [the nomination] was a thing of such public notoriety in Rome that people here can hardly be blamed for following the example set there, and I could not refuse to accept the congratulations of all these citizens, down to the very poorest. If it was unseemly it was impossible to prevent.” Lorenzo was being disingenuous: while he was correct when he said such matters were difficult to suppress, he never had any intention of forgoing the benefits that would come his way as soon as people learned of Giovanni’s elevation. No one could doubt now that the pope was Lorenzo’s creature through and through, and anyone who had business with the Holy Father—which was to say pretty much anyone in a position of authority in Europe and beyond—had to take into consideration the feelings and interests of the First Citizen of Florence.

Settling the future of his two oldest sons was the key to putting the family’s fortunes on a firm foundation, but his other children had their part to play as well in the dynastic game. In selecting spouses for his remaining children, Lorenzo was motivated largely by the need to heal the wounds that had been opened up in the body politic by the Medici’s sudden rise into the aristocracy of Europe. Though he had crushed the Pazzi, who in any case seemed to have little support, Lorenzo understood that among the ancient families of Florence there remained a reservoir of ill feeling that would need to be drained were his family to avoid a repetition of that sorry episode. With this in mind, in 1488 he espoused his oldest daughter, Lucrezia, to Jacopo Salviati (cousin of the infamous archbishop), thus hoping to draw the fangs of those who still sympathized with the Pazzi cause. In an effort to close the rift that had opened up between the branches of the family descended from Giovanni di Bicci’s two sons, Luigia, Lorenzo’s third daughter, was promised to Giovanni de’ Medici, a descendant of Pierfrancesco. (Her untimely death in 1488, when she was only eleven, dashed hopes of an easy reconciliation.) Following a similar pattern of building up local alliances, Contessina was espoused to Piero Ridolfi, from an old and distinguished Florentine family long allied with the Medici, a final effort to demonstrate that they had not risen so high that they had forgotten their neighbors.
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It was not only through marrying off his children that Lorenzo worked to bridge the gulf that had opened up between the first citizen and the people of Florence, a gulf that only widened with each new Medici triumph and with each new proof that Republican government, and the social compact it implied between the leading families of the city, was failing. The ancient institutions—the
Signoria
in their splendid ermine-lined robes, the boisterous councils of the People and of the Commune where democratic sentiment still ran strong—continued to meet in the Palace of the Priors, but they were reduced to little more than a pantomime meant to distract the citizens while the real business of government went on behind closed doors wherever Lorenzo met with his cronies.

Instinctively, and without any well-thought-out plan, Lorenzo was groping toward another kind of leadership, one based on his personal aura, on his achievements and his character—in a word, on his
Magnificence
—rather than on the fickle coalitions and deal-making that characterized Florentine politics in the past. This personal style of leadership had been implicit from the beginning as his parents trotted out the lisping infant in full regalia to star in the city’s many processions and pageants. It had continued in the cult of youth built around him and his brother, Giuliano. After his accession to power, and especially after the Pazzi conspiracy, Lorenzo had eschewed such obvious glamour, but only in order to project an image of himself as a sober statesman, father to his people. To retain a hold on his fellow citizens after he had eviscerated the institutions through which political legitimacy was conferred, he had to create a “charismatic center” without offending his fellow citizens by assuming the trappings of royalty. He did this, above all, by leading the life of an
exemplary
citizen, doing more and doing better those things that were expected of any man of substance. If charity was the obligation of every Christian, he was a paragon of pious giving; if a gentleman was supposed to be learned, Lorenzo was a scholar beyond compare. In an age that valued the well-rounded person, Lorenzo’s mastery of all the noble pursuits of mind and body astounded even those accustomed to talented polymaths. Nor was he shy about trumpeting his accomplishments since he knew that they raised his standing in the eyes of his compatriots. And the men who supped at his table and enjoyed the comforts of his home knew how to repay his generosity by singing his praises: “Blest in your genius,” wrote Poliziano of his patron,

This aura of magnificence was cultivated as well through his material possessions, which betokened not only immense wealth but refinement of mind. The reach of the Medici banking empire through space and time was manifest in his home filled with Flemish tapestries and swords of damascene steel forged in the armories of the Levant, in ancient statues dug from the ground and manuscripts unearthed from dusty libraries. Those lucky enough to receive an invitation spread the word of the dazzling collections of objets d’arts to which he was daily adding, so that the palace on the Via Larga, so austere on the outside, began to seem like the fabled treasury of some Oriental potentate.

To those not easily impressed by such intangibles he had other, more practical, gifts to bestow. Using his own private funds and the unparalleled resources of the Medici bank, he ensured a steady supply of grain to the city that kept the price of bread low. Lorenzo’s own coin flowed into the poorest sections of the city where he knew he was purchasing goodwill that he could tap into in times of crisis.
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For those who worried about Florence’s standing in the world, Lorenzo’s personal prestige only added to the credit of the city as a whole. He was a friend of kings, and now of popes, correspondent with all the mighty of Europe, who sought his advice on a wide range of subjects. Even the Ottoman sultan thought so highly of Lorenzo that he sent lions and giraffes to populate his private menagerie. In time he was called simply
il Magnifico,
the term of respect used to denote any person of wealth and rank, now clinging to him almost as a title and testifying to his unique claim on the loyalty of his people. His authority had been built over years of careful maneuvering, but in the end it rested on his countrymen’s recognition that, in the phrase of one his critics, Lorenzo was the greatest Florentine in history.

Despite this carefully crafted image, Lorenzo’s success depended equally on his ability to convince the people that he was one of them. His style of leadership was grand but not aloof. To the end of his life he remained very much the citizen of Florence, greeting supporters and meeting with petitioners in the piazza or in church. According to one account, Lorenzo held daily audiences in the public square “to whomever wanted it.” When his portrait is included in contemporary paintings, as in the Sassetti chapel, there is nothing that distinguishes him from his fellow citizens. Indeed, Lorenzo’s presence in the lives of his subjects was far more intimate and human-scaled than that of any king. His authority was reinforced through the symbolism of intimacy rather than of awe, a symbolism he projected, particularly in the last five years of his life, through the public ceremonies and festivals that filled the Florentine calendar.