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

ALONG WITH THE family’s source of wealth, another thing to be got out of the way, in young Lorenzo’s Neoplatonic vision of things, was the regime’s hold on power. It seemed that whatever balia, council, or institution the Medici set up to guarantee their authority, as time passed even the most carefully selected allies began to vote along more republican lines. People have a stubborn bias toward freedom. When Lorenzo took over from his father, the signoria was being selected by nine accoppiatori, who in turn were selected annually by the Council of 100, the sort of permanent Medici balia established after the 1458 parliament. But the council was no longer doing as it was told. Lorenzo found he had to attend its assemblies in person if members weren’t to vote against him. It was irritating. “I plan to behave the way my grandfather did,” he had told the Milanese ambassador soon after his father’s death, “which was to do these things in as civil a way as one can, and as far as possible within the constitution.”

But how civil and constitutional can one be if one wants to have a rock-solid guarantee of remaining in power? Almost immediately, Lorenzo went far beyond his grandfather. By the end of 1471, the signoria was still being chosen by nine accoppiatori, but now the accoppiatori were chosen every July by their nine outgoing predecessors together with the signoria in office at the moment. Power was thus entirely circular. To console the Council of 100 for their loss of influence over the accoppiatori and hence the government, they were now allowed to ratify the decisions of the signoria directly, without the need of further ratification from the traditional Councils of the Commune and of the People — which more or less ceased to have any reason to exist.

At this point, the Medici are exercising almost complete control over the affairs of state. And yet a certain façade of constitutionality is maintained: The councils do meet and vote; the selection of the signoria is still recorded as though it were a fair lottery. Such pretenses of constitutionality quickly fell away when both banking income and political authority were threatened by the discovery of alum in Volterra.

Volterra is a small town some forty-five miles southwest of Florence. In the fifteenth century, it was a subject community, paying a tribute to Florence but running its own government. Naturally, everybody was excited about the alum, then disappointed when the mining concession was given to a private consortium with Florentine backing. It was important, of course, for the Medici bank to bring this new source of the product into their monopoly. The government in Volterra, run by a faction opposed to the consortium, confiscated the mine. Florence intervened to reverse the decision.

This is June 1471. Lorenzo has had a busy eighteen months since his father died. A rebellion, instigated by the conspirators of 1466, was put down in Prato. There were executions. His first child, Lucrezia, was born in 1470 and his first son and heir, Piero, arrived in February 1471. Clarice was playing her part. In March, Lorenzo was host to Galeazzo Sforza, duke of Milan, who brought an embarrassingly large entourage and indulged the scandalous habit of eating meat during Lent. Inevitably, God showed his wrath by having the Church of Santo Spirito burn down, and the frightened Florentines did penance with some strict new laws on luxury clothes and foods.

Throughout his wife’s pregnancies, Lorenzo continued to write love sonnets to Lucrezia Donati and was simultaneously working on a parodic Symposium of more than eight hundred lines featuring a wildly drunken evening among local philosophers and clergymen. It is hilarious. Certainly more of his time was given to this first experiment in satire than to the reopening of Medici bank branches in Venice and Naples.

Then, just as the Volterra crisis was hotting up, Pope Paul II died — this in July 1471—and Lorenzo had to hurry down to Rome for the coronation of Pope Sixtus IV. One can imagine how hard it was for a twenty-two-year-old to concentrate on politics, banking, babies, and poetry all at once. In his brief ricordi, Lorenzo describes the trip to Rome thus: “I was much honored, and brought back two antique marble busts of Augustus and Agrippa, that Pope Sixtus gave me, plus an inlaid cup of chalcedony and many other cameos and medals that I purchased.” Though he wrote these memories in 1473, Lorenzo doesn’t mention the most important event of his rule to date, the sacking of Volterra. It was not something to be proud of.