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

“PEACE HAVING BEEN achieved outside, war began again inside,” Machiavelli observes. As if this were some logical necessity. People were still fighting over the catasto, the wealth tax. Discrimination! the merchants raged. Our books are being checked by government inspectors who actually work for rival companies. As always, their strategy was to have the new tax so brutally and extensively enforced that its enemies would multiply. You’ll have to register all the property in all the outlying territories too, they insisted. Some of it is owned by Florentines. You’ll have to register every loom, every mill.

There were those in the government who felt that extending the tax was not a bad idea. The Florentines had a flair for bureaucracy, which is why we now have so many records of the city’s history. So the process of bringing all the outlying towns into the tax register began. In protest, an eighteen-man delegation arrived from the small subject town of Volterra. We can’t pay, they complain. They are arrested. On release, one of the men returns to Volterra and starts a rebellion. Niccolò Fortebraccio, a now out-of-work condottiere, is engaged to go and sort things out. Before he and his mercenaries arrive, the Volterrans have already rebelled against the rebels and the town is in Florentine hands again. But Fortebraccio doesn’t want to be unemployed. In November 1429, he marches into the territory of Lucca northwest of Florence and, acting on his own initiative, captures a couple of small citadels. Suddenly, the Florentines are unanimous in deciding that the capture of Lucca is absolutely indispensable. Wealthy Lucca will be their compensation for the disasters of the previous seven years. As always when there is a war, the city forms a ten-man committee to decide military strategy, the so-called Ten of War. Now undisputed head of the Medici clan, Cosimo is on it.

A cloud of ambiguity hangs over these crucial years that bring Cosimo to power. But then a cloud hangs over everything to do with him: the bank, his patronage of the arts, his relationship with slaves, his foreign policy. When Rinaldo degli Albizzi proposed that the other patrician families get rid of him, the now-decrepit Uzzano is reported by Machiavelli to have pointed out how difficult this would be: “The deeds of Cosimo that make us suspect him are these: he helps everyone with his money, and not only private individuals, but the state, and not only Florentines, but the condottieri; he favors this or that citizen who has need of the magistrates; by the good will that he has in the generality of people he pulls this or that friend to higher ranks of honor.”

Did Uzzano really say these words? Commissioned to write the Florentine Histories for a later Medici and a grand duke at that, Machiavelli admitted in a letter to a friend that he couldn’t honestly say “by what means and tricks one [Cosimo] arrives at so great a height.” Hence: “That which I don’t want to say myself, as coming from me, I will make his [Cosimo’s] adversaries say.” And he makes Uzzano conclude: “So we will have to allege as the causes for driving him out that he is merciful, helpful, liberal, and loved by everyone.” In a cash-starved town, Cosimo had for some years now been using his wealth to gather political consensus. To what end?

“It is hard for the rich to live in Florence, unless they rule the state.” Such would be the comment of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Cosimo’s grandson. And the implication was, if you don’t control the state, the state will ruin you. You will become the object of punitive taxation deliberately aimed at confiscating your fortune. But was this just an excuse? Would it have been possible for the Medici to run a spectacularly profitable bank and to stay out of government? In Rome or Milan, perhaps it would. One can become only so powerful in the shadow of a despot. Insist on a loan repayment from a prince and he arrests you. A pope excommunicates you. Even in republican Venice, the doge was elected for life and that was that. You couldn’t take his place, so you could hardly be feared either.