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

1479. ONE YEAR after the assassination attempt. Florence lay under interdiction. It was struck by the plague. The local priests were ordered to disobey the pope and bury the dead. The two condottieri the city had hired began to argue. Their armies had to be kept apart to stop them from fighting each other. As a result, it was difficult to bring pressure to bear on the enemy. And impossible to write poetry, of course. Even the usually obedient Clarice, now mother of six, rebelled. The family, along with the urbane poet Poliziano as tutor, had been sent into the country for safety. Mother and teacher loathed each other; both wrote to Lorenzo to complain. That man is teaching Giovanni Latin from the heathen classics instead of the holy Psalter! Giovanni was Lorenzo’s second son. The boy learns so fast, Poliziano gripes, when his mother is out of the way. It was old-style Christianity against the new eclectic humanism. As when bank managers bitched, Lorenzo didn’t know how to respond. Perhaps he actually liked the idea that those subject to him were in disagreement, rather than ganging up to threaten him. Clarice threw the intellectual poet out of the house. She preferred a priest as tutor. Lorenzo was furious but did nothing. Drawing from both sides of the conflict, young Giovanni would one day become the most eclectic, the most humanist, the most nepotist of popes.

In September 1479, the enemy took the fortress of Poggio Imperiale. The fighting season was over, but the following spring there would be nothing between the Neapolitan army and the gates of Florence. The people had now been taxed as much as a people can be, especially when the enemy has suggested that removal of their leader will resolve the problem. The Venetians and the Milanese were more concerned with their own disputes than with producing the kind of military support that might give their official ally a chance of defending itself. What was Lorenzo to do?

The history books argue endlessly over the Medici’s commitment or otherwise to a republican model, their plan perhaps to install themselves as hereditary princes. But although noble birth had certainly become part of the family strategy, Lorenzo was too intelligent to imagine that birth would be enough. Money was important, too. But there wasn’t much serious money left. What was still possible, though, was the grand gesture, the legitimacy of individual virtuosity, a cocktail of education, glamour, and charisma. In the new world that was coming, the cult of the leader might perhaps replace the legal right of the king. At dawn on December 6, 1479, laden with expensive gifts, Lorenzo set out for Pisa and a sea trip to Naples to negotiate face-to-face with King Ferrante in his own home. Having taken the decision alone, he wrote a moving letter to those who were constitutionally in power, the signoria, speaking of his willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of the city. “And with this good intention I set out: that perhaps God wishes that since this war began with the blood of my brother and my own, so too it may end by my hand…. For if our adversaries want nothing but me, they shall have me freely in their hands; and if they want something more, then we shall see.” The letter was perfectly calculated, and perhaps honest too. No doubt Lorenzo foresaw its appearance in history books.

In his Storie fiorentine, Guicciardini remarks that the expensive peace treaty that Lorenzo eventually brought back from Naples could perfectly well have been negotiated without that dangerous visit. Yet one can’t help feeling that the drama of the gesture — the just having thought of it and dared it, for there was no classical model — was absolutely central to the image that Lorenzo later created for himself as leader of Florence. Propaganda can invent a great deal, but it does prefer to work with a kernel of truth. Granted, Lorenzo had opened secret negotiations with King Ferrante long before he left; granted, he had various diplomatic cards up his sleeve, concessions to make; but all the same, it was an act of enormous courage to place oneself in the hands of a “most restless, most faithless, most hostile king,” a man who not so long ago had promised safe conduct to the condottiere Iacopo Piccinino (son of the more famous Niccolò) and then had him put to death on arrival.