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

Returning to Florence in time for his father’s showdown with the anti-Medici conspirators — Pitti, Acciaiuoli, Dietisalvi, and Soderini — Lorenzo makes his dramatic appearance together with the troops from Milan, armed and on horseback, at the parliament in the Piazza della Signoria. It is a gesture at once of seduction and coercion. Florence must love me. An artistic gesture. The young man dismounts and stands together, as an equal, with the priors in their red robes as the request for a balia with unlimited powers is read out, and the people, surrounded by armed men, vote away their republican rights. It is in the nature of every artist to combine seduction and coercion. The public must succumb to my point of view, to the point of my sword. There is no radical split between Lorenzo the poet and Lorenzo the politician. Way below the eligible age for public service, he was nevertheless given a place on the balia, which, with its unlimited powers, would once again put the city firmly in Medici hands.

Lorenzo de’ Medici, in a bust attributed to Verrocchio. Hardly Adonis, Lorenzo was obliged to master other forms of seduction. He remains one of the finest of fifteenth-century poets.

Alum, one suspects, was not on Lorenzo’s mind as he faced the Florentine people in the piazza at that moment of crisis. But it was present everywhere. It was with alum that raw wool from England was cleansed of its grease. Everyone in the square was wearing wool. It was alum that fixed the dyes in the priors’ crimson gowns and alum that cured the leather on the horsemen’s saddles. And three years later, in 1469, when Lorenzo married Clarice Orsini by proxy and, in her absence, celebrated this great step from merchant to aristocrat with a lavish tournament in Piazza Santa Croce, alum was present again in another way. This gritty white sulfate was largely responsible for paying the 10,000 or more florins that the event is reputed to have cost.

Pearls and velvet abounded at that expensive celebration. Young Lorenzo carried a standard given to him not by his new wife but by his old girlfriend, Lucrezia Donati. It showed a woman twining a laurel crown, for her poet. And since Lucrezia was queen of the tournament, it was she, and not Lorenzo’s new but absent wife, who placed a silver helmet on the warrior’s head when, inevitably, the family who had financed the event had its boy win. What Lorenzo had signed down in Rome in 1466 was a contract giving the Medici the total monopoly over all sales of alum throughout Christendom. There is no indication from his writings that Lorenzo had grasped the importance of this. Perhaps what mattered more was that Lucrezia too was married now, though her husband was abroad on business. People were gossiping. Meanwhile, Clarice, married and virgin, wrote from Rome to say that the mere thought of Lorenzo’s being involved in a tournament had given her a migraine. From a family of real soldiers, and with no experience of Florence and its amorous ways, she could be forgiven for mistaking the real source of danger. “All libidinous and venereal,” as Guicciardini described him, “marvelously involved in things of Venus,” as Machiavelli added, Lorenzo continued to write poetry. To Lucrezia.

MONOPOLIES, LIKE USURY, were illegal under Church law. Because unnatural. God had given the natural world to all mankind, not to a chosen few. Denying people liberty and keeping prices artificially high, monopolies were obviously a form of stealing and could only lead to perdition. As with usury, the Church insisted that only full restitution of ill-gotten gains could make amends and get you to heaven, though it is difficult to see how, after exercising a monopoly for some years, you could ever calculate the exact amount of what had been stolen, or from whom.

The Church’s concept of the monopoly was not restricted to the situation where a single organization had control over the sale of a particular product. To form a workers’ union, for example, was also a monopoly, and of the most pernicious variety: It restricted freedom of labor and the right of an employer to hire any worker on any terms. A union was unnatural. Any association of wool-workers, for example, in this cloth-manufacturing town of Florence, was immediately condemned and crushed.