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

Now Savonarola meets Lorenzo at death’s door. Lorenzo has already been granted extreme unction — the last rites of the Church — so the priest has no power over his eternal soul. On the other hand, he can hardly refuse the invitation to speak to a dying man. If you recover, you must change your life, Savonarola says. Knowing there is no recovery, Lorenzo agrees. Savonarola gives his blessing. It’s a standoff, a stalemate, an insoluble antagonism: money and metaphysics, eclectic humanism and rigid fundamentalism. The wonder is that history should offer us an encounter so emblematic of the forces whose clash will decide the future of Europe. Twenty-five years later, Giovanni de’ Medici’s frank enjoyment of the papacy would be challenged by the revolt of Martin Luther. Banking would be profoundly affected. Protestant England was the first to legalize usury. Catholic Italy, under the Counter-Reformation, reimposed the old laws that bred the old subterfuges.

HOW DIFFICULT TO be Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici! “I have three sons,” Lorenzo is reputed to have said, “one dumb, one smart, one sweet.” Piero was the dumb one, Giovanni the smart. If the authority of Lorenzo had depended first on wealth, later on charisma, Piero possessed neither. The money had mostly been spent, and there are cases where even the best education is just wasted time. Piero was good at sports, particularly an early form of football. But the era of the sports celebrity had not yet arrived. He had inherited Lorenzo’s suspicious nature but not his charm. And yet, remarks Guicciardini, the succession was so smooth, “the good will on the part of people and princes so great, that had Piero had even an ounce of wit and prudence, he could not have fallen.” He didn’t and he fell.

Throughout the fifteenth century, it had been the habit of the Italian city-states, at some crisis point in their internal struggles, to play the threatening card of calling on a foreign ally to tip the balance in the peninsula. In desperate straits against Rome and Naples in 1480, Florence had invited the French to reconsider their claims to the throne of Naples. In 1482, during the Venetian assault on Ferrara, Florence and Milan had encouraged the Turks to step up their attacks on Venice’s maritime possessions. Venice had replied by inviting the duke of Lorraine to consider his claim to Naples, the duke of Orleans his to Milan. In a pointless war against Naples in 1483, Pope Innocent VIII had again suggested that the duke of Lorraine might want to take the kingdom. Dangerous games. Nobody seems to have considered what might actually happen if a foreign army did push into Italy. It was Piero’s bad luck to find out.

Ignoring the bank, rapidly alienating Florence’s patrician families, Piero also infuriated Lodovico Sforza, now duke of Milan, by appearing to prefer the city’s other ally, Naples. All too soon, Sforza was inviting the king of France to consider himself king of Naples. In Paris, young Charles VIII had only just shaken off an oppressive regency and come into his own. He wanted to do something bold. And he did. He gathered 30,000 men and marched over the Alps, down through Lombardy, heading south.

Allied to Naples, Florence was a potential target for this campaign. Suddenly an army far bigger than any the Florentines had had to deal with in recent decades was heading toward the city, an army with a foreign king at its head, not a paid Italian condottiere who might be bribed. In desperation, as the French approached and with the city’s political class almost entirely against him, Piero tried to repeat the gesture his father had made when he went to Naples to deal face-to-face with King Ferrante more than a decade ago. But the boy was only twenty-two. He hadn’t prepared the ground. It was the gesture of a novice trying to copy the maestro’s masterpiece. He even repeated the same charade of leaving the town first and sending back a letter to be read to the signoria.

I won’t sack Florence if you hand over Sarazana, Sarzanello, Pietrasanta, and the ports of Pisa and Leghorn: those were the French king’s conditions. He was demanding more or less all of Florence’s gains over the last century. To everybody’s surprise, Piero agreed. The signoria was furious and refused to recognize the agreement. It was a crucial break, a reminder that constitutional power did not lie with the Medici. The signoria sent out Savonarola to talk to Charles, the irony being that Savonarola actually welcomed the French arrival. This foreign army was the fulfillment of all his prophecies of doom.