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

In fact, for at least the first half of this book — until the mid-1450s, that is — the reader can take it that Florence is always at war, and that these wars have fewer consequences for most people than almost any other war we are used to thinking of. To understand this strange phenomenon and how profoundly it altered the nature of the Medici bank and the destiny of its founding family — for no commercial organization lives in a vacuum — we must get a grip on the state of Italy in the early fifteenth century.

It’s complicated. Because the country was fragmented into a score of small and even tiny states, historians like to say that the name Italy was “nothing more than a geographical expression.” This is quite wrong. Italians were perfectly aware of a shared history, church, culture, and language (however varied its dialects). As a result, they were also aware that it might occur to someone to unite the country, as once it had been united under Rome. This is what they were afraid of. At the local level, they yearned for unity, the better to avoid it at the national level. Group identity and community pride were, and in Italy still are, very much a city thing.

Let us dispense with the “boot” image and imagine a cylinder topped by an inverted equilateral triangle. The cylinder is surrounded by the sea and mostly mountainous, the triangle is generally flat but shut off to the north by the Alps. There are five major players in the game. In the lower part of the cylinder, the Kingdom of Naples; in the middle, Rome and its Papal States; at the conjunction of cylinder and triangle, Florence; toward the top left of the triangle, Milan; at the top right, Venice. In between these larger states is a generous scattering of smaller ones, there to be gobbled up by predators, like fruit in a computer game.

All five larger powers are imperialist by vocation, if only because conquest tends to confer an aura of legitimacy on their leaders. You don’t argue with a winner. Their overseas empire mostly lost to the rampant Turks, the Venetians are looking to expand inside the northern Italian plain (Verona, Brescia) and down the Adriatic coast (Ferrara, Forlì, Rimini). Conscious of the vastness of France to the north, Duke Filippo Visconti of Milan has his eyes on the western port of Genoa and various other towns to the south and east as a counterweight. The duke is rapacious, incorrigible, his emblem a snake swallowing a child. Despite its pacifist rhetoric and republican vocation, Florence has recently captured Arezzo, Pisa, and Cortona, and bought Leghorn (for 100,000 florins) to secure an outlet to the sea. Now the Florentines want Lucca, and perhaps one day Siena too.

In Rome, Pope Martin will be happy if he manages to gain some kind of real control over his small and turbulent client states on the eastern side of the cylinder, the Adriatic coast. Like any other duke or prince, he engages in military campaigns, his army commanders for the most part being bishops. No smiles, please. Just as a vow of celibacy doesn’t stop a man from having children, so cassock and crucifix won’t prevent him from being effective in battle. To the south, Naples is run by the Angevins, a French family whose members are also counts of Provence. Naturally, they are eager to expand northward from Naples and dream of eventually connecting up with their French possessions. Being about halfway between the two, the port of Genoa would seem to be the appropriate link, if only they could get their hands on it before Duke Visconti of Milan does. But meantime the Angevins’ right to the Neapolitan crown is contested by the Spanish royal family of Aragon, which already rules Sicily. There are frequent skirmishes.

Given this play of forces, the pattern that endlessly repeats itself is as follows: One of the “big five” states — say, Milan — attacks a smaller independent town or towns. Inevitable military success arouses the suspicions of the other major players, two of whom — say, Florence and Venice — form an alliance. When Milan’s next victim sends out an SOS, the allies dive in. They too seize a few towns but then get suspicious of each other. Milan strikes directly at Florence to draw off a siege elsewhere. The Venetians move west to grab Verona and Brescia. The pope charges up the Apennines to the east, hopeful of subduing a couple of rebel towns while everybody is too busy to notice. Not to be left out, the Neapolitans march north. To help or hinder? Nobody is sure. Everything is fluid. Everything is up for grabs.

Or is it? Clearly, Rome has a special status. Not just a despot, but God’s vicar on earth, the pope, if seriously threatened, can order an interdiction, as he did in Florence in the fourteenth century. Then the priests won’t perform your marriage ceremony or give you last rites or bury your dead. Without ritual, the world comes to a standstill. Rome, aside from moments of Angevin delirium, or internal republican revolt, is untouchable.