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

Determined to please, perhaps precisely because he was not the favorite, Piero was most at home overseeing Cosimo’s commissions of buildings and works of art. An avid collector, in love with lavish furnishings and beautiful domestic interiors, he would spend hours gloating over stacks of illuminated manuscripts, or collections of antique coins. He slept on silk sheets embroidered with the family coat of arms. But you must train for government, his father insisted. And train Piero dutifully did. He held a number of government posts: prior, accoppiatore, even gonfaloniere della giustizia. As his personal emblem, he chose the falcon, which always returns faithfully to its master. “Honored, like your father,” was how people addressed him in their begging letters. “A most careful imitator of his father’s admirable virtues,” wrote Donato di Neri Acciaiuoli in a dedicatory preface to his Life of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus. But imitate as he might, Cosimo’s role wasn’t available to Piero. Because Cosimo hadn’t succeeded anyone.

Accusations that Cosimo had been eager to become a prince were off the mark. He thrived on the complications, the ambiguities, the idea that his fellow Florentines had elevated him despite the constitution. Florence had stripped its feudal nobles of their privileges and didn’t want a return to the past. Yet education was breeding aristocratic presumptions in the banker’s children. Their life began to resemble that of noblemen. Is it possible, they must have started to wonder, to invent an aristocracy, a new, more sophisticated version of the crude old birthright — not simply and brutally to seize power but to create, over two or three wealthy and well-read generations, a new hereditary privilege?

The future of Europe for centuries to come would depend on the answer to this question. And that answer, of course, is no. Money and culture do not amount to a divine right to pass on political power to one’s heirs. And yet … if sufficiently enlightened, if supported by effective propaganda, if interminably intermarried with others who had similar pretensions, or who had once been recognized as royal, perhaps the world might be convinced by an expensive parody, an ersatz aristocracy — especially if, at the end of the day and in the teeth of the evidence, the people enjoying the privileges were always willing to declare themselves ordinary citizens. Paralyzed on silk sheets through the summer of 1466, Piero de’ Medici could hardly be likened to a chrysalis turning into a butterfly. But before the year was out, he would have freed the Medici family from the sticky limitations of the old Florentine oligarchy. With wings bought from usury, the Medici bankers would soar above their station at last. The gouty man was plotting a marriage that would turn those republicans green with envy.

Like art and education, marriage was something that involved an exchange of money but also had the potential for distinctions that went beyond money. These are the interesting things in life, where countable and uncountable values rub and spark together. Traditionally, it was the bride who had to purchase, with her dowry, the right to her husband’s protection. Piccarda de’ Bueri’s 1,500 florins had been crucial for husband Giovanni di Bicci’s initial investments. The Bueri were solid Florentine merchant stock; no more. A distant cousin of Piccarda’s would serve the Medici bank as an agent in Lubeck, collecting papal dues from Scandinavia; trading in furs, amber, and linen; keeping all his accounts in Italian to baffle the local taxman.

But a future husband, or his negotiating parents, also had the option of accepting less money in return for more prestige. Her branch of the family being out of luck, Contessina de’ Bardi didn’t bring Cosimo much cash, but she was still a Bardi. It was a valuable alliance. The wife chosen for Cosimo’s son, Piero, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, brought even less money, a mere 1,000 florins, but in return for even more prestige. Once aristocratic, Lucrezia’s family had changed its name from Tornaquinci to Tornabuoni to avoid the ban on noblemen participating in public life. The girl had blue blood. How strange that the Florentines had banned the nobles from exercising political power but were still impressed by their pedigrees. Many modern democracies are still tensed by this contradiction. Lucrezia, however, legitimized her special status by being nobly educated as well as nobly born. But can one really say, “nobly educated”? Doesn’t such an expression mean we’ve accepted the premise that education can buy certain rights? In any event, Lucrezia was well read. She wrote devotional poetry, of the kind sung by religious confraternities. She made her own small venture into business, redeveloping some rundown sulfur baths, no doubt with her menfolk’s gouty joints in mind.