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

When the grand virtues risk appearing as charade, or as borrowed from a different drama, the one sure value that remains is money. You can count it. You can weigh it. You can check it with your teeth. In Rome, Francesco Pazzi, head of the family’s bank there, took note of how easy it was to see off a political leader. Republican values might have more pull in a town like Florence, which already enjoyed the collective illusion that it was the modern manifestation of antique glory. So small in stature that he was generally known as Franceschino, this particular Pazzi was renowned for his bad temper and good luck. The Medici had already alienated their main client, the pope. They had alienated the king of Naples. They had alienated all those republican Florentines who believed in the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune. Most of all, Lorenzo de’ Medici would never let the Pazzi family back into public life in Florence. If Lorenzo and his brother were killed, the Pazzi bank — which, like so many others, was going through hard times — would be in a position to take over a large part of the Medici’s business. Money would bring power.

Franceschino drew in Archbishop Salviati in Pisa and Girolamo Riario, the pope’s nephew, now running Imola and eager to build up a serious dukedom before his uncle departed this world. The conspiracy could count on the military support of the Papal States and of Naples. Uncle Iacopo, however, the patrician head of the Pazzi family, a great blasphemer and gambler but highly respected all the same, was reluctant. The stakes were high and the odds poor. For a long time he argued against the assassination attempt. But eventually he came on board. Hadn’t Franceschino, he later justified himself, always been the lucky one?

Only two important members of the Pazzi family were not involved in the plot. Guglielmo Pazzi, Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, was not even approached. His loyalty would be divided. Renato Pazzi, on the other hand, reputedly the brains of the family, simply thought that murder was unnecessary. The Medici bank was in desperate straits. The best way to destroy Lorenzo would be to lend him money and watch him waste it. His debts would overwhelm him. Renato, then, believed that the Medici’s political prominence still depended on the bank. The family’s identification with the Florentine state was not complete. They were not, that is, in a position where they could just collect taxes for themselves to pay off their debts.

What did the Pazzi really know about the Medici’s financial troubles? In 1475, the Bruges branch had lost a legal battle against ex-London manager Gherardo Canigiani. This was public knowledge. Furious that Canigiani had used Medici money to become an English gentleman, Tommaso Portinari had invited him to act as agent for the bank and buy a shipload of English wool to send to Florence. As soon as the wool was safe at sea, Portinari refused to pay for it, claiming that Canigiani owed the Medici this and more. “Not even a Turk would behave so,” Canigiani protested, and, playing the card of his friendship with King Edward IV, managed to get an agent of the bank imprisoned and eventually to recover his money. Edward still owed the Medici around 30,000 florins.

The murder of Galeazzo Sforza, it was obvious to everybody, would make the chances of the Medici’s recovering the huge debts owed by that family even more remote. Galeazzo left an infant son and a shaky maternal regency that was constantly threatened by Galeazzo’s ambitious brother, Lodovico. Milan, Francesco Pazzi reckoned, would not be able to help Lorenzo in a crisis.

Then the death in yet another reckless battle, of rash Charles of Burgundy — this only three weeks after Galeazzo Sforza’s murder — was evidently another serious blow to the Medici bank. This was January 1477. Even assuming that Charles’s family were able to succeed to his dukedom, they wouldn’t want to pay off their debts in the near future. The director of the Pazzi bank in Bruges, Pierantonio di Bandini Baroncelli, was a close relative of Tommaso Portinari’s young wife, Maria di Bandini Baroncelli. They lived in the same small Italian community in a foreign town. If Pierantonio didn’t know that Tommaso was looking at overall losses of 100,000 florins — a vast sum — he certainly would have been aware that things were getting desperate. In the end, it was another close relative of Pierantonio’s, Bernardo di Bandini Baroncelli, who struck the first blow against Giuliano de’ Medici during mass in the duomo fifteen months after the duke of Burgundy’s death. More than anything else, it was the murder of Giuliano that saved the Medici bank and set it up for another fourteen years of Lorenzo’s mismanagement.