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

This was the summer of 1458. As a last resort, the pro-Medici priors of the signoria decided to call a parliament, the first since 1434. Cosimo’s consent was sought and given. But first they waited until the Milanese ambassador had convinced Sforza to dispatch troops to Florence. With soldiers from Milan in place at all entrances to the piazza, the parliament went as parliaments must. Old, tired, and chronically ill, Cosimo was careful not to attend. A new, hundred-strong council was formed with complete power over all “matters of security.” It was a permanent balia, but without the dangerous name. From that point on, the pretense of legality was pure formality: a limited group of men would go on electing each other to this or that body without fear of interference. You could join in, but only if you were willing to toe the Medici line. Any real opposition would have to be armed. No one had the stomach for it. If this was a success for the regime, it was certainly a defeat for Cosimo, who had much preferred the pleasant façade, the collusion of grateful clients, the satisfaction of having persuaded people to do something that he had never openly requested. But the tools of persuasion that make such things possible today — our modern media, mass production, and mass consumption — were not available to the Medici. Nor had anybody thought of the trick of allowing two apparently opposing but secretly complicitous factions to rotate in power at the whim of a complacently “enfranchised” population. The strategy of the two-party democracy lay far away in the future. Meantime, Cosimo was growing more and more preoccupied with the prospect of life after death, and friends were becoming rivals.

At the Medici bank’s head office, Giovanni Benci was dead. Cosimo’s younger and favorite son, Giovanni, proved a poor replacement. He preferred the high life to the calculation of profit and loss. Immoderately fat, he bought himself a nice slave girl while serving as ambassador to the Curia in Rome. It was becoming a family tradition. Disappointed, Cosimo brought home the Geneva director, Francesco Sassetti, one of the world’s all-time great flatterers, to work beside his son. It was a sign the old banker was losing his grip. Sassetti wasn’t up to it. Having achieved his position through servility, he was incapable of imposing discipline. A branch was opened in Milan, but like the venture in Ancona years ago, it was mainly there to serve Sforza. There was very little serious trade in and out of Milan and hence little chance of profits from exchange deals. While a bank benefited an economy doing business — an economy such as Venice, for example — there was nothing it could do in Milan but encourage a duke to spend more than he ought.

Still, at least Italy was mostly at peace, and Cosimo was taking a lot of the credit for it. His astuteness, if it was that, lay not so much in his having switched Florence’s alliance from Venice to Milan as in having reduced the number of major players in the political game to match the number of states available. Anchored in Milan, Sforza was no longer a loose cannon, a military power without a state. Hence he no longer needed to fight to have an income. Cosimo hadn’t quite foreseen the consequences of this. He had expected Sforza would help Florence conquer Lucca in exchange for all the Medici money that had been showered on him in his struggle to become duke. Perversely, Sforza hung up his sword and settled down with wife and nineteen children, legitimate and otherwise, to enjoy his earthly possessions.

FREQUENTLY BEDRIDDEN, Cosimo no longer accepted public office. His sons, themselves middle-aged, were sick too. They all suffered from gout. When not away at their country estates, all three had to be carried around the huge palazzo they had built in town, among their beautiful collections and possessions. Cosimo cried in pain when he was lifted. There was a problem with urine retention. Taking a keen interest in Plato’s ideas about eternal life, paying generously for a new translation of the complete works of the philosopher, he now did most of his business in the windowless, candlelit chapel at the heart of the Palazzo Medici. On the walls, Gozzoli’s wonderful Journey of the Three Kings glimmered all around, showing Cosimo and his family beside the Magi, their donkeys carrying heavy merchandise across distant landscapes, rather as if bank and Bible had got mixed up. There was a monkey, too, sitting on a horse, and a cheetah. The bank occasionally dealt in exotic animals. Archbishop Antonino, who had not in the end excommunicated anyone over the 1458 coup, made a point of condemning supposedly sacred pictures that distracted the viewer’s attention with frivolities. He explicitly mentioned monkeys and cheetahs. Such is an established church’s opposition to the regime it lives with.