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

LORENZO WAS NOW so suspicious of all and sundry that he routinely had official Florentine ambassadors in foreign courts shadowed and duplicated by his own personal spies. Yet his trust in his bank managers seemed unbounded. The overall director, Francesco Sassetti, a man quite incapable of taking unpleasant decisions, was left entirely to his own devices, despite the fact that he worked from Lorenzo’s house in Florence. In Rome, Uncle Giovanni Tornabuoni swung from gloom to optimism with no long-term vision, no flexibility. “The pope is as stubborn as a corpse,” he complained of Innocent’s unwillingness to repay his debts. Yet Tornabuoni continued to tie up most of the bank’s capital with the Curia. In Bruges, before the final showdown, Tommaso Portinari had actually managed to persuade Lorenzo to form a separate company for the only profitable business the branch was doing, the occasional importation of English wool. Since Portinari had a larger share in this company than in the bank, he took a bigger slice of the gains, while losing a smaller percentage on the branch’s overall losses. “He took advantage of my inexperience,” Lorenzo later complained. But Il Magnifico had been running the Florentine Republic for years at the time, and a child would have understood the mathematics of the deal.

An atmosphere of farce hangs over these last years of the Medici bank. A second generation of untouchables and prima donnas was now being trained up beneath the first. In Bruges, Antonio de’ Medici, a distant cousin of Lorenzo’s, was so arrogant that when the family promoted him to deputy director, the other employees threatened a walkout and he had to be recalled to Florence. Later, Antonio would be sent to Constantinople to negotiate, successfully, the extradition of Giuliano’s assassin, Bernardo di Bandini Baroncelli. In Lyon, Lionetto de’ Rossi, Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, was convinced that one of his staff, Cosimo Sassetti, son of the general director, had been sent to spy on him. Most likely he had; Lionetto, after all, had been writing the most insulting things about the boy’s father in vitriolic letters to Lorenzo. Fortunately, the young Sassetti was as credulous as he was offensive. Overwhelmed by losses from bad loans, Lionetto sent Cosimo back to Florence with a balance sheet reporting profits. The director’s son was the only one taken in. Arriving in Lyon to investigate, in 1485, a certain Lorenzo Spinelli wrote to Lorenzo to say that Lionetto was completely out of his mind.

The bank was paying the price for its fatal attraction to political power. To lend to people whose reputation and position do not depend on honoring their debts will always be dangerous, but to give huge sums to people who actually feel it is undignified to repay is madness. These were not the kind of people you could take to court. They were the court. Often a condition of lending to one of them was that you must not lend to another. Louis XI of France was furious that the Medici were financing his enemy Charles the Bold, and so took measures against the bank in Lyon. Tornabuoni, angry that the French branch wasn’t sending him the money for papal bulls, refused to honor an important letter of credit from Lyon. The bank’s reputation could only plummet. The Florence branch started trading silk with a separate, non-Medici agent in the French town. At least they knew they would be paid. Lionetto was furious. How can I ever get my branch back into profit if the others take their business elsewhere? Far too late, Lorenzo sweetly invited his brother-in-law back to Florence to discuss matters, and on his arrival had him arrested and thrown in a debtors’ jail.

Hans Memling’s The Last Judgment (detail), commissioned by Tommaso Portinari. Despite losing 100,000 florins for the Medici bank, Tommaso instructs the great painter to imagine how the Angel of Death will weigh him in the balance when the bottom line is finally drawn.

It wasn’t the first time. Returning to Florence after the closure of the London office in 1480, Tommaso Guidetti had been arrested on the request of the Venice branch of the bank. He had not paid them for a shipload of currants. The debt amounted to more than 3,500 florins. I paid Tommaso Portinari in Bruges, was Guidetti’s claim. It was feasible. All the same, he had to flee from Florence, leaving behind a teenage wife, pregnant. The case was still unsettled more than thirty years later.