Magnifico (75 page)

* By the time Lorenzo sold the estate, in 1486, it comprised sixty-seven separate farms.

* These medals contain a good deal of valuable information on the attack. One contains a portrait of Lorenzo with the words
“Salus Publicus”
(Salvation of the Public); the other medal has a portrait of Giuliano with the words
“Luctus Publicus”
(“Mourning of the Public”). Both show the moment of the attacks, with Lorenzo parrying the blow and Giuliano falling under the blades of Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini.

* Both Lorenzo’s and Giuliano’s bodies were ultimately moved to a tomb in the so-called New Sacristy of San Lorenzo (to distinguish it from the Old Sacristy designed by Donatello), designed by Michelangelo. Unfortunately the magnificent tombs sculpted by Michelangelo house the remains of two obscure descendants, one Lorenzo’s youngest son, the other a grandson. Both Lorenzo and his brother have to make do with a somewhat unsatisfactory monument tucked into a corner of Michelangelo’s architectural masterpiece.

† The mother’s name, if known at the time, has never been revealed. The young Giulio’ s swarthy features suggest that his mother was perhaps a Circassian slave. This was a common occurrence in Florence where men married so late. Even Cosimo had fathered a child with one of his slaves.

* Riario tried to deny any involvement in the attack on Lorenzo and Giuliano: “That nefarious act that took place in Florence, has caused me such bitterness and displeasure that it practically drove me out of my mind. It is this that has caused me to delay writing until now…that I was unaware that anyone was to be killed, this [most Illustrious Lords] you will discover is nothing but the truth.”(Quoted in Ilardi, “The Assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza,” in
Violence and Civil Disorder,
chapter 5.)

* While there was much talk of sending troops across the Alps to aid the war effort (see especially,
Lettere,
iii, chapter 11), the allies were reluctant to see foreign armies on Italian soil. Louis’s most important diplomatic effort on Lorenzo’s behalf was his call to convene a Church council to look into the pope’s conduct in office.

* Florentine law prohibited a native son from commanding her forces, a precaution against the tendency often seen in ancient Rome of using military success to seize political power.

* Niccolò Michelozzi, son of the architect who built the Medici palace, was Lorenzo’s most important secretary. Most of Lorenzo’s letters from this period are in his hand.

* Among the atrocities Landucci chronicles in the opening months of the war was the destruction of the town of Rencine by Sienese forces, the pillaging of the countryside around Siena by Florentines, the sacking of some fortresses by Niccolò Vitelli with “the burning [of] men, women and children, with every cruelty,” to which papal forces responded tit for tat (see Landucci,
Florentine Diary
, chapter 2).

* Lorenzo was ultimately forced to pay back the money he had borrowed illegally. Most painfully, he had to sign over the villa at Cafaggiolo to his cousins to make up the difference.

† Lorenzo placed the “new man” Antonio Dini in charge of the
Monte
. Dini was executed for malfeasance after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494.

* See the series of paintings of the Medici villas made in the 1590s by Giusto Utens. They are now housed in Florence’s Museo di Firenze Com’Era.

* It is perhaps no coincidence that Lorenzo took this high-stakes gamble at a time when his uncle Tommaso Soderini was serving as
Gonfaloniere di Giustizia.
After his earlier rivalry with his nephew, Tommaso had become one of Lorenzo’s most reliable allies.

* Filippo Strozzi was the son of Alessandra Strozzi and had been exiled after Cosimo’s rise to power in 1434. He had spent most of those years before his restoration in 1466 in Naples where he had established close ties with the king. He was thus an ideal candidate for this delicate mission.

* On March 29, the pope issued another bull of excommunication but this, like its predecessor, was almost universally ignored (see Landucci,
Florentine Diary
, chapter 2).

* Despite widespread panic, the Turkish invasion ultimately amounted to little. In October, the Ottoman commander, Gedik Ahmed pasha, returned across the straits to his Balkan stronghold, unable to provision his army in the barren lands of the south. By this time Don Alfonso, aided by the pope’s call for a Crusade against the invader, had massed his troops to prevent a return landing. The death of Sultan Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople, in May 1481 and the accession of his son, the more peaceful Bayezid II, precluded a revival of the Turks’ Italian adventure.

† Among them were Luigi Guicciardini, Bongianni Gianfigliazzi, Piero Minerbetti, Guid’ Antonio Vespucci, Maso degli Albizzi, Gino Capponi, Jacopo Lanfredini, Domenico Pandolfini, Lorenzo’s uncle Giovanni Tornabuoni, Antonio de’ Medici, and Antonio Ridolofi—a veritable who’s-who of the
reggimento.

* Landucci claimed that the Twelve were “given powers to act for the whole people of Florence” (
Diary,
chapter 2). These two committees should not be confused with the older
Dodici Buonuomini,
now largely ceremonial, or the
Otto di Guardia
who ran the state police.

† In 1489 the
Accoppiatori
were once again revived, an indication that the Seventy were not always as submissive as Lorenzo wished.

* The new law claimed the Council of Seventy would last for only five years, but this was, as everybody knew, a fiction meant to make the law seem less of a departure from tradition than it really was.

* The Ordelaffi’s troubles began in the 1460s when a feud erupted between two brothers, Cecco and Pino. It was the kind of tale all too common in the Romagna, involving various stabbings and poisonings. When the sickly youth Sinibaldo Ordelaffi was placed under the protection of papal forces, it was only a matter of time before the city fell into Riario’s lap.

* Machiavelli, who objected to the bloodless wars so often conducted by Italian
condottieri
in which only civilians suffered, approved of the Battle of
Campo Morto,
“fought with more virtue than any other that had been fought for fifty years in Italy, for in it, between one side and the other, more than a thousand men died”(
Florentine Histories,
VIII, 23).

* Visitors to the palace report that father and son often traveled about the house in chairs borne aloft by servants.

* One of the few who truly mourned the death of the irascible pope was Girolamo Riario. Without his uncle’s protection his fledgling possessions in the Romagna were vulnerable to meddling by the more powerful states that surrounded them. Following Sixtus’s death Girolamo was forced to lead the life of an impoverished petty nobleman of the Romagna. In order to stave off financial collapse he tried to squeeze more and more money from his long-suffering subjects. In 1487 he murdered one of his creditors rather than pay back a debt. Adding to his unpopularity with the people of Imola and Forli was his tendency to favor fellow Ligurians at the expense of the natives. All of this eventually caught up with him and on April 14, 1488, four men, with whom he had quarreled over money, stabbed him to death in his palace at Forli. Though shortly after the murder the assassins wrote to Lorenzo asking for his protection, there is no indication that he knew about the plot in advance. No doubt he took a certain grim satisfaction that the count had gotten just what he deserved, a feeling that may have been enhanced by the fact that he did not have to lift a finger to achieve it. For the view that Lorenzo was in secret correspondence with the conspirators, see Martines,
April Blood,
chapter 1. By the time of his death, in any case, Girolamo had ceased to matter on the wider Italian stage.

* Lorenzo and the new pope got off on the wrong foot when the leader of Florence decided to attack the Genoese fortress of Pietrasanta in retaliation for the seizure of Sarzana during the Pazzi war, an action to which the Genoa-born pope took exception.

* One of those old friendships interrupted by the Pazzi conspiracy was with Marsilio Ficino, who had been close to many of the conspirators, including Francesco Salviati and Jacopo Bracciolini.

* His new eminence could create logistical problems. In one trip to the spa of San Filippo near Siena in 1490, that republic insisted on accompanying Lorenzo with an honor guard of more than five hundred soldiers (see Trexler,
Public Life in Renaissance Florence,
Epilogue).

* One of Cosimo’s famous quips concerned this uniform of a Florentine patrician: “When warned that it was not prudent to exile so many noblemen, and that through lack of men of quality Florence would be ruined, [Cosimo] responded that so many yards of red cloth (
panni di San Martino
) would make a gentleman; by which he meant that with honors and riches men of low status became noble.” (Guicciardini,
The History of Florence
). See also Trexler
Public Life in Renaissance Florence,
note 120, Epilogue, for a contemporary’s description of Lorenzo’s manner of dress.

* Guicciardini claims that in “the opinion of many he was so weakened by his amorous excesses that he died relatively young”(
The History of Florence
ix). While the claim is perhaps overstated, it is probable that his hectic pace exacerbated his medical conditions.

† The two were Moroto Baldovinetti and Battista Frescobaldi. The latter had helped Lorenzo extradite Bernardo Bandini from Istanbul but felt he had been insufficiently rewarded for his service (see Ross,
Lives of the Early Medici,
chapter 12).

* Estimates of the number of those whose voices actually mattered in the councils of government varied. It is also not clear that the numbers were a great departure from the Albizzi regime, when power was said to be concentrated in the hands of a few dozen powerful families. At all times Florence was really an oligarchy in which power was held in few hands. Innovations instituted by the Medici systematized and rendered more efficient a form of government already in place. They also gave greater authority to a single man at the top. One aspect that drew the greatest contemporary comment and stirred up the most resentment was that the Medici
reggimento
had a less aristocratic, more populist flavor, even if the number of families wielding power remained the same. The greatest opposition to Medici rule continued to come from the old optimate families that were no longer close to the center of power.

† One wonders if de’ Rossi slipped some coins into Bibbiena’s hands to arrange the meeting; the narrator never tells us but that was often the way things worked in Florence.

* Foreigners typically exaggerated Lorenzo’s power partly because they preferred to deal with an individual rather than negotiate the myriad councils and committees of the government, and partly out of genuine confusion about how the system worked.

* Oil painting, invented in northern Europe, was still a little-known medium in Italy. The importation of masterpieces in oil by van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, by the Medici and their employees, stimulated the growth of this new medium in Italy, leading to the masterpieces of Leonardo and Raphael.

* In some ways the political climate was similar to the “spoils system” of nineteenth-century American politics.

* From the outside, the spot looks remarkably similar today—a wall backed by cypress trees. The garden itself is now a commercial plant store.

* See, for instance, Vasari’s “Life of Torrigiano” in his
Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects
(vol. 1, p. 693): “Lorenzo the Magnificent, then, always favored men of genius, and particularly such of the nobles as showed an inclination for these our arts; where it is no marvel that from that school there should have issued some who have amazed the world. And what is more, he not only gave the means to buy food and clothing to those who, being poor, would otherwise not have been able to pursue the studies of design, but also bestowed extraordinary gifts on any one among them who had acquitted himself in some work better than the others; so that the young students of our arts, competing thus with each other, thereby became very excellent, as I will relate.
“The guardian and master of these young men, at that time, was the Florentine sculptor Bertoldo [di Giovanni], an old and practiced craftsman, who had once been a disciple of [Donatello]. He taught them, and likewise had charge of the works in the garden, and of many drawings, cartoons and models by the hand of Donat[ello], Pippo [Brunelleschi], Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, Fra Giovanni, Fra Filippo, and other masters, both native and foreign.”