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

In the Eternal City, Cosimo settled in Tivoli. Deprived of stout Contessina’s domestic skills, he asked an agent in the bank’s Venice branch to find him a slave. The keeping of slaves had been permitted since the late 1300s after the plague had left the working population seriously depleted. The epidemic struck down men and women, old and young alike, of course, but the slaves brought in to solve the shortage — from the Slavic countries, Greece, North Africa — were almost all young women. She is “a sound virgin, free from disease and aged about twenty-one,” Cosimo’s agent told him. Quite an advertisement. Himself a declared devotee of the Virgin, Cosimo called the girl Maddalena, after a more ambiguous Mary, and some time later she bore him a child, Carlo, with marked Circassian features. We do not know how much embarrassment this caused, but clearly being a manifest adulterer was not as much of a problem as being a manifest usurer. No question of restitution here. Cosimo brought up Carlo in his own household together with the legitimate sons, Piero and Giovanni, and later used his influence to get the boy into the Church and have him become bishop of Prato. This was standard practice. It was considered appropriate for the fruits of carnal sin to take vows of celibacy. Hadn’t Saint Jerome rather paradoxically suggested that the only purpose of procreation was to produce virgins for God?

One of the men Cosimo was working with in the bank in Rome, Giovanni d’Amerigo Benci, had a child by a friend’s slave before marrying a much younger woman who bore him eight children. Then, when she died, he had another child from his own slave, who once again had been given the name Maria. A deeply religious man and brilliant accountant, Benci was to be the chief architect of the Medici bank’s success under Cosimo and eventually spent some of the considerable wealth he accumulated in the process to restore a convent of cloistered nuns (known as the Murate, the walled-in ones) before whose altar this prolific man wished to be buried. Meantime, we have no more news of Cosimo’s Maddalena. In a tax return of 1457, the aging banker would declare possession of four slaves, but their names and genders are not mentioned. Only their collective market worth—120 florins.

FOREIGN VISITORS TO Italy in the fifteenth century frequently remarked on two peculiarities: Everybody had illegitimate children and everybody was extremely concerned with etiquette. Of visiting foreign courts, the Italians observed that, deserving or otherwise, the monarchs enjoyed the blind loyalty of their subjects, who nevertheless behaved in the most slovenly fashion. Courtiers snacked and played cards in a French king’s presence. How boorish the Germans were! What horrible eating habits! My life is at your service, the Italians said, deferring to their betters. I live only to do your bidding. But treachery was endemic. They bowed and scraped and stabbed you in the back.

The historian Jakob Burckhardt related the high level of illegitimacy to the general breakdown of dynastic order in Italy. All that mattered was power. With cash you could buy papal recognition of an illegitimate child’s legitimacy. Does that make sense? And it was perhaps in the absence of order and under the constant threat of anarchy that etiquette and obeisance became so important. They gave a form to life, however superficial. All the art of the period, literary and pictorial, all the imaginative constitutional compromise, the obsession with precise accounting, the interminable rules about what could be worn and what could not, the huge output of letters, chronicles, reflections, and memoirs, might be seen, in part, as a reaction to encroaching chaos. Frescoed, the crowd or the battle scene became form, manageable, beautiful, less frightening. The court of Francesco Sforza, the bastard who, with Cosimo’s financial help, would fight his way to being duke of Milan, gave the most punctilious attention to ceremony. Even before his wife became duchess, Francesco insisted that people call her illustrissima. She too was illegitimate.

But as well as this mime of decorum, there was also an Italian habit, still alive today, of seeking out, in the risky business that life always is, a protecting figure, not unlike a patron saint, who would intercede on your behalf with the powers that be — the taxman, for example, and the priest. It would not be long now before Cosimo the banker would become such a figure, the center of a network of families writing him letters of the variety, “Cosimo, you are our God on earth,” or poems addressing him as “the singular refuge of all those/who live under the standard of poverty.” Meanwhile, the Medici bank was expanding, Giovanni d’Amerigo Benci was sent to Geneva to do business at the city’s big international fairs, and Florence, of course, was at war.