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

In 1474, Pope Sixtus proposes Francesco Salviati as archbishop of Florence. But Salviati is a close friend of the Pazzi. The pope, however, despite Lorenzo’s attempt to stop him from buying Imola, proves amenable to protest and nominates Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, Rinaldo Orsini, instead. Which was generous. Then the archbishopric of Pisa falls vacant, and this time the pope appoints Salviati without consulting Lorenzo. In the meantime, he has ordered an audit on the Curia’s alum accounts with the Medici bank. The price in Bruges and London has plummeted. The forecast income isn’t forthcoming. Lorenzo is deeply offended. It’s a dishonor to audit me! My family has served the pope for decades. And he denies the new archbishop, Salviati, right of entry to Pisa. Pisa is subject to Florence. I should have been consulted. No one can be bishop in Pisa without my consent. The pope threatens Lorenzo with excommunication. And he appoints a Pazzi as bishop down in Sarno near Naples.

“Puffed up by his Majesty [King Ferrante of Naples] … these Pazzi relatives of mine are seeking to harm me as much as they can.” Thus Lorenzo in a letter to Duke Galeazzo Sforza in Milan, begging him to put pressure on the pope to withdraw the appointment of Salviati to the archbishopric of Pisa. Lorenzo refers to the Pazzi as relatives because his older sister Bianca has long been married to one of the Pazzi nephews, Guglielmo.

But Pisa is a battle Lorenzo can’t win. The Church is too strong. Not long after Salviati is finally allowed to enter the town and take up his archbishopric, the pope declines to renew the Medici’s alum monopoly and gives it instead to the Pazzi. Again the bank pays the consequences for the politicking that its wealth has made possible.

Would the tit-for-tat never end? Apparently not. In March 1477, a dispute arose between Giovanni Pazzi, another of the dozen nephews, and the cousin of his wife, Beatrice Borromei. The Borromei family was extremely rich. Beatrice’s father had just died. Since Beatrice had no brothers or sisters, she expected to inherit the old man’s wealth, which would thus enter into the Pazzi family. But her cousin, Carlo, disagreed. He seized part of the fortune and insisted that, being male, he should have it. Lorenzo intervened — Don’t do this! his younger brother, Giuliano, warned him — to get a law passed that would give nephews precedence over daughters. This was a major change in social custom, no doubt affecting hundreds of lives, calculations, prospects. Despite urgent advice to the contrary, Lorenzo went ahead and the money was kept from the Pazzi family. “Giuliano de’ Medici complained over and over to his brother,” writes Machiavelli, “that by wanting too many things, all of them might be lost.” As far as Giuliano was concerned, they were. He was assassinated by the Pazzi during mass in the duomo in April 1478. Lorenzo escaped.

THE HUMANISM OF the fifteenth century has generally received an enthusiastic press: the enquiring mind turns away from abstruse metaphysics to concentrate on what is human. That must be a good thing. Yet the phenomenon was so various, the human is so various, that it is truly hard to approve of every manifestation of the movement. Unless perhaps what most attracts us to humanism, what makes most of us humanists in fact, is the movement’s greatest outrage: its dismissal of what came before as a thousand years of darkness, as if the middle ages had somehow been inhuman. Why did the humanists have to do that? Why is the dismissal still so important to us?