Medici Money: Banking, metaphysics and art in fifteenth-century Florence

AS WELL AS choosing the right manager, one also had to get the right pope. When Giovanni di Bicci became Giovanni XXIII’s banker, there were actually three popes in vitriolic and even bloody conflict with each other: Giovanni in Rome, Benedict in Avignon, Gregory in Naples. In the second story of the Decameron, Boccaccio suggested that it was precisely the perverse antics of the Church, its corruption and interminable internecine quarrels, that demonstrated the resilience of the Christian faith. People went on believing regardless. All the same, three popes presented a serious administrative headache. Who makes the clerical appointments? To whom do I pay tithes? Who will shrive me? Weary of the division, the Holy Roman Emperor invited all contenders to a Church Council in Constance in 1414 to settle the matter. Giovanni XXIII, who was at that point taking refuge from his various enemies in Florence, set off, and with him the Rome branch of the Medici bank. The Rome branch — take this as read from now on — always travels with the pope and his entourage. In the end, for banking purposes, Rome is the Curia, the papal court. What has there ever been in Rome, Italians still complain, but bureaucracy, ecclesiastical or secular?

Everywhere the pope went, food and accommodation prices rose, endearing him to some and half-starving others. And what with three popes and all the cardinals arriving from all over Christendom and moving a great deal of money back and forth, the Italian banks did good business in Constance. Cosimo, now twenty-five, having just married Ilarione’s distant cousin, Contessina de’ Bardi, joined his in-law to get some experience and meet some useful people. Alas, their pope came out the loser. After some tortuous diplomacy, Baldassarre/Giovanni, sensing things were not going his way, tried to scuttle the council, upon which he was arrested and accused of heresy, incest, piracy, simony, sodomy, tyranny, murder, and fornication … with more than two hundred women. Perhaps there is a wild leverage in matters of morality as well as in banking. You are the world’s spiritual leader, or the worst of all villains. You are singing in paradise or utterly damned. In any event, the culprit ceased to be pope, and in fact, so far as the Church was concerned, never had been. Hence the title of Giovanni XXIII was still available for a less-ambiguous candidate five centuries later. Meantime, the Rome branch of the Medici bank split, one half staying with the now-imprisoned Baldassarre/Giovanni and the other attaching itself to the new Pope Martin V, the two other papal pretenders having wisely retired from the field.

THE TALE OF Giovanni XXIII’s vicissitudes — his four-year imprisonment, the Medici’s remarkable loyalty to him, his bequest to them of the sacred finger of John the Baptist, their payment of 3,500 florins to ransom him, his assignment to them of his collection of rare jewels, their successful intercession with Martin V (after returning to the Curia a certain fabulously bejeweled mitre) to have their friend named on his release, whores and heresies forgotten, bishop of Tusculum (Frascati) — all this would be story enough to fill a book. Yet often it is not the obvious melodrama that really changes things, nor even the bewildering back-and-forth of money and sacred objects, but something quite different, apparently innocent. What mattered most in this tale — for the Medici, their bank, for Florence, and arguably, as we shall see, for us too — was Baldassarre/Giovanni’s funeral monument. For in 1419, six months after he was ransomed, the ex-pope coughed up, in Cosimo de’ Medici’s house, that final debt whose payment you can only put off for so long.

Let us return for a moment to the first story of the Decameron. Ser Ciappelletto, notorious liar, cheat, fornicator, murderer, and sodomist (the list begins to look familiar), a notary by profession, is sent to a foreign country to do some debt collecting. He lodges with the local Italians, who, true to the nation’s international vocation, are usurers. He falls mortally ill. They are terrified: if their guest doesn’t confess, he will be denied burial; if he does, the scandal of the company they are keeping will offer local people the excuse they are looking for to lynch them for their usury. But Ser Ciappelletto has a solution. He confesses himself, yet claims to remember no worse sins than having once spat in church and once cursed his mum when he was a little boy. No, he never lent money at an interest. No, he never had sex with anyone. He preserved his virginity. Convinced the man is a saint, the priest has him buried in the local convent, where his tomb becomes an object of frenetic popular devotion; those who pray over it claim miraculous results.