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

But in the summer of 1447, the Spanish company was unable to honor 8,500 florins’ worth of letters of credit. The Venetian merchants demanded their money back from the Medici. Bruges was left without payment for vast quantities of cloth and above all without a way of returning money to Italy. With the elaborate system of triangular trading on which the Medici bank depended becoming ever more precarious, the only solution now seemed to be to encourage Henry VI of England to accept loans in return for which he would allow the Medici to increase the amount of wool they were buying and sending to Italy. The loans would be repaid by exempting the Medici from export duties on whatever they bought.

It was a dangerous and expensive way of bringing money back to Italy, since it involved the constant concession of large amounts of credit. Medici managers set off for Contisgualdo (the Cots-wolds) to watch the sheep shearing, then down to Antona (Southampton) to arrange for transport. With the monopoly of their own trade organization bypassed, the English wool merchants were furious. And many of the Florentine monks were likewise getting increasingly irritated about the number of bankers appearing in sacred paintings and demanding pride of place in their prayers. It seemed the more money you spent on those who wished to stay pure and poor, the greater the possibility of a fundamentalist backlash. Everywhere tension was building. In 1452 Girolamo Savonarola was born. Less than half a century hence, this fiery preacher would be running Florence and the Medici would have fled. Albeit briefly, the city of God would replace the Medici regime. In the political field as elsewhere, Cosimo’s solutions always had a precarious feel about them.

THERE WAS A question that from time to time would form on the lips of the Florentine ruling elite: Should we admit such and such a person — a foreigner, an ambassador, a vulgar self-made man — into “the secret things of our town”? But surely, you object, in an open republic with a written constitution, there are no secrets, aside from military matters. What was this about?

On return from exile in 1434, Cosimo held no institutional position. He was a private citizen whose sentence had been revoked. He was the head of a triumphant faction taking power from another. Factions were illegal. The government, as we have seen, was elected by lot: at the top the signoria, which is to say eight priors and the gonfaloniere della giustizia. They proposed all legislation and held the powers of chief magistrates. Then the advisory bodies of the Sixteen Standard Bearers and the Twelve Good Men; then the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune, whose one power, but considerable, was that of a veto on legislation proposed.

What did Cosimo have to do with all this? What more could he be than another name in the leather bags from which, at staggered intervals, the podestà—a sort of mayor with no political power, usually a man from out of town — would select the members of the various government institutions, at random? The names in the bags were determined by a “scrutiny” held once every five years that assessed the male population on such criteria as age, wealth, family, guild membership, criminal record. On ousting the Medici in 1433, the Albizzi had held an unscheduled scrutiny to have the right sort of names put in the bags. Their great mistake had been not to eliminate the names of the previous scrutiny but merely to add new ones. Thus, with bad luck, it had happened that a pro-Medici signoria had been picked.

Whenever the process of government was stalled, when the priors kept proposing as essential something the councils repeatedly vetoed as nefarious, then, as we recall, a parliament was called. The people flocked into the Piazza della Signoria and were bullied into conceding draconian powers. One says, “flocked,” but in this archive-obsessed state, no accurate record was kept of the numbers of people in the piazza for a parliament. Nor of the way the vote split. It didn’t split. This was an exercise of pure power, thinly dressed as democracy.

Why did the priors not call a parliament more often? Because the democratic rags were so very thin that not only did they fool no one, they didn’t even allow people to pretend that they had been fooled. It had become important for the Florentines, as it is important for us today, to imagine that they shared, as equals, in a process of collective self-government. Should this patently not be the case for any extended period of time, then rebellion became legitimate. But as with the question, When is an exchange deal a loan with interest? or again, When is church patronage an expression of secular power? appearances, perceptions, definitions, and above all words were of the utmost importance. A coup d’état, for example, is called a parliament.