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

Agnolo Acciaiuoli, like Cosimo, had been exiled in the 1430s for his opposition to Rinaldo degli Albizzi and had been in the Medici regime from the beginning. But in 1463 Acciaiuoli’s daughter-in-law abandoned her husband Raffaello. He preferred boys and old Agnolo was violent, she complained. She wanted her dowry back. Being a Bardi girl, this was big money, 8,500 florins. Called in to arbitrate, Cosimo had said the young wife should be guaranteed her dowry, after which she could decide of her own free will whether or not to return to her husband. Agnolo was not happy with this. And he was particularly unhappy when Cosimo, having promised that another son of his, Lorenzo Acciaiuoli, would be given the next available bishopric in Tuscany, in the event preferred his own relative, Filippo de’ Medici, when that bishopric turned out to be in the sensitive subject town of Pisa. “Cosimo and Piero are cold men,” Agnolo wrote in one of many letters to Duke Francesco Sforza. “Sickness and age have made them such cowards that they run away from everything that bothers them or requires any effort.” Ever since Milanese troops had presided over that parliament of 1458, everybody, it seemed, was eager to present himself to Sforza as the next leader of the regime.

Everybody except Luca Pitti. Pushing seventy, Pitti had always been one of the most authoritarian and antidemocratic members of Cosimo’s coterie. As gonfaloniere della giustizia, he personally had called the 1458 parliament that put an end to republican opposition. He had suffered no slights from the Medici family, but as an extremely wealthy banker in the process of completing a palazzo that was intended to surpass any in town, Luca had no intention of bending a knee to anyone now that Cosimo was gone. In November 1465, when Piero de’ Medici insisted that he had Sforza’s blessing for running Florence, Pitti replied that he would rather be governed by the devil than by Milan. All at once he became the figurehead of an opposition, which, however, didn’t seem entirely consistent on foreign policy.

Niccolò Soderini, the fourth man, the most charismatic, may indeed have been a fervent republican. Or perhaps all he wanted was to reorganize those electoral bags to guarantee an upper-class oligarchy in which no single family would dominate. The Florentine patriarchy had always loathed Cosimo’s sly habit of bringing in “vile new men” who gave him a power base beyond and potentially opposed to the older families’ interests. Niccolò may also have resented the fact that his younger brother, Tommaso Soderini, was a major figure in the Medici faction. As always in Florence, there was a thick web of family relations straining this way and that. Cosimo, for example, had always thought Agnolo Acciaiuoli a bad influence on his (Cosimo’s) nephew, Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who was married to Agnolo’s daughter Laudamia. Pierfrancesco was important; as the only son of Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo, he held fifty percent of the Medici stake in the whole bank, though he didn’t work for the bank or seek important roles in government. With Cosimo’s death, Pierfrancesco was theoretically an equal partner with Piero. Having spent a great deal less on gathering allies about him, he possessed a great deal more ready cash.

NOW THAT HE was gone, it soon became clear how much Cosimo had relied on consensus for his authority. The special powers of the eight police chiefs, the so-called otto di guardia, were due to lapse. Piero wanted them renewed. The old men of the regime opposed him. The powers were not renewed. Piero wanted the accoppiatori to keep choosing a safe, pro-Medici signoria. The old men insisted on a return to random election. They had their way. And surprise, surprise, the first randomly chosen gonfaloniere della giustizia was Niccolò Soderini, one of the four. His two-month spell of government in late 1465 achieved nothing, but it left the town aware of being radically split. “We have divided the earth,” Acciaiuoli would later say, “and division breeds leaders, leaders get nervous.”

Piero had every reason to be nervous. Taking over the bank from Cosimo, he had found it undercapitalized, overstretched. He called in debts. Was it his covert enemy Dietisalvi Neroni who advised him to do this? In Florentine Histories, Machiavelli claimed it had been a ruse on Neroni’s part to make Piero unpopular. Successful godfathers do not resort to credit squeezes. Many companies failed. People were resentful. All at once the Palazzo Medici was attracting fewer petitioners. Everybody was paying respects to Luca Pitti in his even-grander palazzo. A rival mesh of patronage was gaining ground.