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

“The secret things of our town.” The Florentines used the expression frequently, understood what it meant, and did not clarify. They did not clarify because they were referring to the embarrassing gap between the way things were supposed to be done and the way they were really done.

COSIMO RETURNS FROM exile. A parliament is held. It ratifies the formation of a balia, a large council that wields unlimited powers for a limited period. This is a wonderful equivocation. Unlimited power for a day can cast its shadow years hence. They could execute you. The balia confirms the sentences of those members of the Albizzi clan who have been exiled and announces more sentences. It invalidates the pro-Albizzi scrutiny of 1433 and orders the name tags it produced to be burned. It appoints a group of so-called accoppiatori to make a new scrutiny. Accoppiatore means “he who brings together”—he, that is, who couples the right names with the right bags, for some people will be suitable for serving on the Council of the Commune but not on the powerful otto di guardia, the commission of eight police chiefs. Some will be equipped for sitting on the city’s public debt commission, but not for being governor of Pisa or Volterra.

Question: How can the priors, the signoria, be elected while the complex procedure of reviewing the whole male population to make the new scrutiny is carried out? Answer: The accoppiatori—Cosimo’s inner circle — will stick just ten names, from Cosimo’s inner and outer circle, into each election bag and the podestà will draw the government from those. This procedure, the balia ruled, was to last just a few months; accoppiatore is a temporary appointment. But the deadline for completing the scrutiny was put back — first to April 1435, then June, then October, then November, then March 1436. All in all, it was proving much easier to deal with a handful of names than with thousands.

In June 1436, the scrutiny is finally ready but the Councils of the People and of the Commune are persuaded to pass, by a single vote, a law that allows the priors to extend, for a year at a time, the right of the accoppiatori to prepare electoral bags with just ten names. And they do. For one year. Then another. It seems these shady civil servants have a regular job. Accoppiatore was beginning to take on the meaning “fixer.” The priors extended their powers for a third year, at which point it was almost time for another scrutiny, though the names of the previous one have never really been used. But now there is a war on, and government finances are in desperate straits. This is not a time for the divisive business of scrutinizing the population and deciding who has a right to do what. Solidarity is at a premium. Month by month, election after fixed election, the podestà’s extractions of the priors’ names are recorded in the city archives exactly as they always were since the constitution was first written. It is important to understand that all this is perfectly legal.

With uncanny good luck, Cosimo is elected gonfaloniere della giustizia, head of government, first immediately after his return from exile, then precisely as the heads of the Eastern Church arrive in Florence for their famous council of 1439, then again at a particularly tense moment in 1445. In short, he knows how to have his name pulled from the bag when it matters. But for the most part, Cosimo is careful to keep in the background, never to make a display of his unconstitutional power. “He mixed power with grace,” Machiavelli tells us in his Florentine Histories. “He covered it over with decency.” “And whenever he wished to achieve anything,” says Vespasiano da Bisticci, “to avoid envy he gave the impression, as far as was possible, that it was they who had suggested the thing, not he.”

Of course what the majority of people are suggesting to Cosimo is what kind of state or bank appointment they or their sons and grandsons and nephews would like to have. Begging letters pour in for positions that are supposedly chosen by lot. Cosimo does his best. But you can’t please everyone. The Councils of the People and of the Commune are not happy. Is this Florentine republicanism? After the Battle of Anghiari in 1440, the defeat of Milanese troops and the consequent elimination of the Albizzi threat to the regime, the pressure of public opinion is such that the traditional system of truly random elections has to be restored.

But only for three years. In 1444 the ten-year sentence of exile on Cosimo’s enemies is coming to an end. To have seventy old enemies return at once would be dangerous. So the councils are bullied into accepting a balia, thus once again temporarily conceding unlimited powers. The sentences of exile are extended for a further ten years. The electoral “experiments” resume.