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

“The men left in the government,” wrote the sixteenth-century historian Francesco Guicciardini of this revolt, “were mostly plebs, men of the crowd rather than nobles, with Messer Giorgio Scali and Messer Tommaso Strozzi at their head, and with popular support they governed three years in which time they did many ugly things, most of all when, for no crime actually committed, but just to be rid of their enemies, they cut off the heads of Piero di Filippo degli Albizzi, once the most renowned citizen of Florence, and likewise of Messer Donato Barbadori and of many other innocents, until in the end, as is the custom, when the people couldn’t put up with it any more, they deserted Messer Giorgio and cut his head off; Messer Tommaso saved his life by fleeing the town and was banned from returning in perpetuity, he and his descendants, and Messer Benedetto degli Alberti, who was one of the first to support them, was sent into exile.”

One sentence, two changes of regime, various executions. “Come è usanza,” says Guicciardini—“as is the custom.” Silvestro de’ Medici, the most prominent member of the Medici family and recent head of the Florentine government, had sided with the woolworkers. The family fell into disgrace. Giovanni di Bicci, eighteen at the time, would have seen every reason for keeping his head down, if the alternative was to have it cut off.

But perhaps most of all, the Medici bank came after the great plague of 1348 that wiped out a third of the population of Europe. In 1338, Florence numbered 95,000 inhabitants; in 1427, there were 40,000, which was still about the same as the population of London at the time. “They fell ill daily in their thousands,” wrote Boccaccio. “Many dropped dead in the open streets…. Such was the multitude of corpses that there was not sufficient consecrated ground for them to be buried in.” When it was over, it must have been as if the city had been emptied, the earth lightened of a teeming load. In any event, the rapid growth in trade and population that had characterized the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was now definitely over. Would the world ever be so full and prosperous again? A long period of consolidation and recovery had begun, though often it seemed that no sooner were things returning to normal than the sickness struck once more. In 1363 it carried off Giovanni di Bicci’s father when our future banker was still no more than a toddler. “The shops scarce open their doors,” wrote Lapo Mazzei in the year 1400, “the judges have left their bench; the seat of government is empty; no man is seen in the courts.” People were dying again.

But what was possible for judges and politicians was unforgivable in a young bank clerk. In 1420, despite being a member of the family, Cambio d’Antonio de’ Medici was fired for leaving his cashier’s post in central Florence to flee yet another bout of the epidemic. Back in 1402, Giovanni di Bicci had been one of the judges who chose which artist would design the bronzes on the doors to the Church of San Giovanni Battista, the Baptistery, the city’s oldest church in one of the central piazzas, opposite the still-unfinished duomo. The bronzes were commissioned as a votive offering to beg God to spare the city from these endless visitations of the plague. The winning design, by Lorenzo Ghiberti, showed Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac.

SO THE MEDICI bankers lived in the aftermath of remarkable innovations and great upheavals. “The people were tired,” says Guicciardini of the years when Giovanni di Bicci was a young man, “and happy to rest.” But we can also think of the Medici as coming before. For looking back, after the bank was gone, from the turmoil of the sixteenth century, it would seem to historians that Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici had belonged to a more self-assured, in some ways even innocent, age. No sooner had Piero the Fatuous fled than Italy was overrun by the French, and then by the Spanish, with the Germans and Swiss doing their best to cash in and complicate matters. It was not unusual for a dozen armies to be on the move across the peninsula, plundering at will. The Medici bank thus came before the sacking of Rome (1527), before the sieges of Naples (1527–28) and Florence (1529–30), before the cruel and suffocating inflexibility of the Counter-Reformation, before Italy lost any practical independence for more than three hundred years. Hence, despite the many wars and occasional torture, the murders and corruption, the interminable vote-rigging and tax evasion that will have to be chronicled in this book, we might nevertheless think of fifteenth-century Florence, the ninety-seven years of the Medici bank, as a quiet parenthesis in the troubled transition from medieval to modern worlds. A time in which usury and art could flourish.