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

With the quarrel between the mining consortium and the town’s ruling faction deadlocked, the Volterrans appeal to Lorenzo to arbitrate. Predictably enough, Lorenzo decides that the alum consortium, which includes two prominent, pro-Medici Volterrans, should keep its concession. The opposing faction rebels, riots, kills the two prominent Lorenzo supporters, and declares independence from Florence. Nevertheless, the aging counselor Tommaso Soderini tells Lorenzo that there really is no need to send an army. A crisis like this can be solved with patience and negotiation.

Soderini, who had remained faithful to the Medici throughout his elder brother’s rebellion in 1466, was now pushing seventy. He was married to Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s sister, Lorenzo’s aunt, and, as the regime’s most senior man, he no doubt expected to exercise a certain influence over his young nephew. But this was precisely the kind of presumption that Lorenzo would not accept. Less like his grandfather Cosimo than he claimed, Lorenzo was determined not just to be in charge, but to be seen to be so. He, a Medici, a man married into the Orsini family, a man who had hosted the duke of Milan in his palazzo, had been insulted, his friends killed.

Lorenzo hires and sends an army. After a month’s siege, the Volterrans surrender on the understanding that their lives and properties will be spared. Entering the town, the mercenaries sack, rape, and kill. It is the right of a mercenary army to sack the town they have taken. Everybody knows that. From now on, the Volterrans will be Lorenzo’s implacable enemies. Appalled by the bloodshed resulting from his decisions, Lorenzo tries to make amends with a personal gift to the Volterrans of 2,000 florins. It is less than a fifth of what had been spent on his famous marriage tournament three years earlier. Even before the material damage to the town can be repaired, the recently discovered alum mine is closed down. The deposit turns out to be scanty and the quality poor. The whole brutal affair has been completely unnecessary.

“LORENZO’S GREATEST FAILING,” wrote the historian Guicciardini in 1509, “was suspicion.” First of a new species — the aristocrat by education, marriage and money, rather than hereditary right — Lorenzo was afraid that others wouldn’t recognize his superiority, then afraid, when they did, that they would try to bring him down. A pattern of behavior emerged: imagining himself threatened, or offended (it was the same thing), he would overreact and bring about the clash he feared. That was how the massacre in Volterra was provoked. There was worse to come.

Pope Sixtus, who had been so generous to Lorenzo with the chalcedony cups at his coronation, who supported him over the Volterra affair and even granted him and his mother and brother a plenary indulgence — a place in heaven no less — now tries to regain control of Città di Castello in the northern Papal States, not far from the southern borders of the Florentine Republic. The signore of the town — or usurper, as Sixtus sees it — is a friend of Lorenzo’s and appeals for his help. Lorenzo immediately takes the pope’s campaign as a personal affront and sends troops to help his friend, though not enough troops to do anything more than alienate the pope, his bank’s most important client. Despite all the diplomatic missions in adolescence, Lorenzo is still a very young man to be running a state.

Pope Sixtus announces that he wants to buy the lordship of Imola, a town northeast of Florence, for his nephew, Girolamo Riario. Almost everything Sixtus does, he does for his nephews. To secure the deal, however, he needs to borrow more than 40,000 florins. From his banker, obviously, who else? But Lorenzo feels that Imola should be in Florence’s sphere of influence, not the pope’s. Looking at the map, one can’t help but agree. He refuses the money. He warns another Florentine bank dealing with the pope to refuse too. The Pazzi are an ancient and highly respected family — one old uncle and a dozen adult nephews — with an international bank similar in structure to that of the Medici. Not only do they go ahead and lend the cash to Sixtus, but they actually inform him of Lorenzo’s attempt to stop them, as if the Medici were the merest commercial competitors and not the rulers of Florence. This is a major insult, and a big risk for the Pazzi. Clearly they feel that Lorenzo hasn’t been giving their family the honors it deserves — for example, in the scrutiny of 1472 when the Pazzi got very few name tags in the electoral bags. Well, they certainly wouldn’t be getting any more now.