The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (13 page)

It was some time, however, before these arguments gained much favour. But when the Venetians reacted against Cosimo’s policy by allying themselves with the King of Naples and threatening an invasion of Tuscany, Cosimo saw his opportunity to overcome the Florentines’ prejudices. Making one of his rare appearances at the Palazzo della Signoria, where Venetian ambassadors had gone to protest and issue warnings against the proposed alliance with Milan, he intervened personally in the debate to condemn their government as aggressors. He was not a gifted orator; but his words were clear, strong and effective. In August Florence’s formal alliance with Milan was signed.

Its repercussions were widespread and immediate: the Venetians urged the German Emperor to break up the new alliance; the Eastern Emperor was induced to withdraw the privileges of all Florentine merchants who were simultaneously expelled from Naples and Venice; Venetian agents were paid to intensify anti-Medicean feeling in Florence. Cosimo countered by closing down the Venetian branch of his firm and opening a new branch in Milan. At the same time, through those of his managers involved in the eastern trade, he managed to obtain concessions from the Turks in order to compensate Florentine merchants for the privileges withdrawn by the Greeks; and he made diplomatic overtures to Florence’s traditional friend,
France, so as to offset the advantages which Venice and Naples might have gained by approaching the German Emperor.

The negotiations at the French court required exceptional skill, for neither Cosimo nor Sforza wanted to precipitate French intervention in Italy, which both recognized to be almost inevitable once France and England had settled their differences. Rather did they hope to ingratiate themselves in Paris by making indeterminate offers of assistance should the French King, Charles VII, decide to insist upon Angevin claims to the Kingdom of Naples. The delicate discussions were left to Cosimo’s charming and capable friend, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, who by cajolery, flattery, and that grandiloquent rhetoric so relished by connoisseurs of Renaissance diplomacy made a most favourable impression upon the conceited, ambitious and erratic King of France. In April 1452, at Montil-les-Tours, a treaty was signed: France undertook to come to the help of Florence and Milan should they be attacked; Sforza was recognized as Duke of Milan; and, in return, Charles VII was assured that there would be no interference from either Florence or Milan if he decided to move against Naples.

Provoked by this treaty – and anxious to break up the new alliance while France was still preoccupied with England – Venice and Naples both declared war on Florence and Milan; and King Alfonso’s illegitimate son, Don Ferrante, marched on Tuscany. The Florentines listened to the news of his approach with the greatest alarm; crowds of citizens rushed to Cosimo’s palace, demanding to know what was to be done to save the city from attack; one frantic merchant burst into his room, shouting ‘Rencine has fallen! Rencine has fallen!’ Cosimo, affecting never to have heard of this small town inside the Tuscan border, coolly replied, ‘Rencine? Rencine? Where is Rencine?’

He was not nearly as confident as he took pains to appear. Feeling in the city was running high against him. The alliance with Milan was proving not merely a dangerous experiment, but an excessively expensive one as well; for Florence was having to pay for Sforza’s defences as well as her own, and the oppressively burdensome taxes, so Sforza’s agent in Florence reported to Milan, were daily increasing
the number of Cosimo’s enemies. Agnolo Acciaiuoli was sent hurrying back to France to enlist the help of Charles VII; but the French, with the English rampaging around Bordeaux, were for the moment reluctant to commit themselves to action on another front.

Cosimo fell ill and took to his bed; demands for peace became insistent; several of his leading supporters took the precaution of keeping away from his palace. Then, to the immense relief of the Medicean party, there came good news from France: Acciaiuoli had succeeded in persuading René of Anjou to come to the help of the alliance in exchange for reciprocal support of driving Alfonso’s Aragonese brood out of Naples. The intervention of a rough, marauding French army, which alarmed its allies even more than its enemies, followed by the Turks’ capture of Constantinople in May 1453, brought hopes of peace in Italy at last. These hopes were realized at Lodi in April 1454. And four months later, as the Turkish menace grew ever more threatening, Florence, Milan, the Pope and Venice drew together in a Most Holy League formed to guarantee the status quo within Italy and to withstand aggression from without.

Peace had come none too soon for Cosimo. ‘The citizens have raised a great clamour about the new taxes,’ the Venetian ambassador reported;

and, as never before, have uttered abusive words against Cosimo… Two hundred respected families, who lived on the revenues of their possessions are in a bad way, their properties having been sold in order to enable them to pay their taxes. When this imposition was levied, Cosimo had to announce that no one need complain because he would advance the money required and would not reclaim it until it suited everyone concerned. In order to retain popular favour, he has had to distribute many bushels of com every day amongst the poor who were crying out and grumbling because of the rise in prices.

Cosimo’s patient and far-sighted policy was, however, at last rewarded with success. Venice had been checked and was now too concerned with the Turks to pose any further threat to Tuscany; Sforza, firm ally of Florence, was universally accepted as Duke of Milan. The treaty, of which Naples, too, was a signatory, offered the
first real hope of a general peace that Italy had had for more than fifty years.

Cosimo was too much of a realist, of course, to suppose that the kind of loose alliance of Italian states which had now been formed was likely to endure. But for Florence, at least, so long as Cosimo lived, there were to be no more costly, unprofitable wars.

Nor was there to be any question of Florence joining the crusade against the Turks which the Pope preached with such fervour after the fall of Constantinople. As both the acknowledged arbiter of Italian policy and the papal banker, Cosimo was one of the first recipients of the Pope’s appeal. He was asked to supply two galleys, equipped and manned, which were to be launched against the Turks in return for indulgences for the Florentines’ immortal souls. Tactfully and guardedly, he replied to the request, making the excuse which he and his descendants were to find so useful:

When you solemnly speak of our immortal life to come, who can be so unimaginative as not to be uplifted by your words, not to glimpse the glory of his own immortality?… But with regard to your present proposition, most blessed Father… you write to me not as a private man who is satisfied with the mediocre dignity of a citizen, but as though I were a reigning prince… You well know how limited is the power of a private citizen in a free state under popular government.

Other Italian states replied to the Pope’s appeal with similar evasions. Only the Venetians, who stood to profit in this life as well as in the next by the successful outcome of a Holy War, were more forthcoming. Undeterred, the Pope determined to sail under the banner of the Cross; but before he could put to sea he died of malaria. The Medici bank officially lamented his loss, and transferred their attentions to his successor.

As a banker, Cosimo was quite as astute as his father; and under his direction the family business continued to expand. Noted for his brilliance as an organizer, for his astonishingly retentive memory, and for a tireless industry that sometimes kept him working all
through the night, Cosimo was also well known for the unquestioning loyalty he demanded and obtained from his branch managers who, wisely chosen and closely supervised, were expected to remit to Florence regular and lengthy reports of their activities and who received, in return, a generous share of profits. Finding his father’s associates, the Bardi, too old-fashioned in their methods, he took in as partners two brilliant young men, Antonio di Messer Francesco Salutati, manager of the Rome branch, and Giovanni d’Amerigo Benci, manager at Geneva. And with their help the business grew more rapidly than ever until the trade mark of the Medici bank –
– the bank’s motto, ‘
Col Nome di Dio e di Bona Ventura
,’ and Medici representatives could be found in almost every important capital and commercial centre in Europe: London, Naples, Cologne, Geneva, Lyons, Bâle, Avignon, Bruges, Antwerp, Lübeck, Ancona, Bologna, Rome, Pisa and Venice. Some branches of the bank were quite small; others were no more than temporary establishments, catering for the trade of some passing fair or council. None of them had a large staff. In 1470 the average number of men employed at the various branches was between nine and ten, cashiers being paid about forty florins a year, apprentices twenty. Even so, many of the Medici establishments were amongst the largest commercial enterprises in their respective cities, and their managers, as well as being astute men of business, were also political agents of the Florentine Republic. The branch in Milan, for example, was a kind of ministry of finance housed in a palazzo made available to the bank by the Duke, Francesco Sforza, and greatly enlarged at Cosimo’s expense to the designs of Michelozzo. The branch in Rome, which followed the peregrinations of the Curia, enjoyed a comparable prestige and was even more profitable. As Cosimo’s father had cultivated Baldassare Cossa, the future Pope John XXIII, so Cosimo himself had cultivated Tommaso Parentucelli, the Tuscan doctor’s son who became Bishop of Bologna and finally Pope Nicholas V. Parentucelli, who as a young man had been forced by poverty to leave the University of Bologna and to accept work as tutor in Florence to the children of Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Palla Strozzi, had distinguished himself at the Council of Florence after which he had given invaluable advice to Cosimo on
the development of the Medici library. A friendly, witty man of great learning, of whom his friend and fellow humanist, Aeneas Silvius de’ Piccolomini, used to say, ‘What he does not know is outside the range of human knowledge’, Parentucelli had seemed to Cosimo a man worth backing. He had appreciated his orderly mind, his discreet yet purposeful manner; and when asked for a loan he had had no hesitation in granting the Bishop all that was required. On the Bishop’s becoming Pope, these close links with the Medici bank had been maintained to their mutual advantage. Nicholas V’s friend Piccolomini, who was elected Pope in 1458 and chose the title Pius II, kept up the papal tradition of friendship with the Medici and continued to entrust them with the Curia’s financial affairs. When he came to Florence in 1469 he stayed as a matter of course at the Palazzo Medici, where he and Cosimo seem to have become quite intimate. When bidding him good-bye, Cosimo

tried to kiss the Pope’s foot, but because he was crippled with gout was unable to bend. He laughed and said, ‘Two Florentines named Papa and Lupo returning from the country met in the Piazza and offered each other their hands and a kiss. But they were both very fat and there was such corporosity (if I may use that word) on both sides that they could only touch their stomachs. Gout now denies me what corpulence refused them.’

As well as undertaking all the customary services of a bank, the Medici houses undertook all manner of commissions for their customers, supplying tapestries, sacred relics, horses and slaves, painted panels from the fairs at Antwerp, choir boys from Douai and Cambrai for the choir of St John in Lateran, and even, on one occasion, a giraffe. They were also importers and exporters of all manner of spices, of silk and wool and cloth. They dealt in pepper and sugar, olive oil, citrus fruits, almonds, furs, brocades, dyes, jewellery, and above all, in alum, a transparent mineral salt essential to the manufacture of fast, vivid dyes and widely used in glass-making and tanning. Up till 1460 nearly all European supplies of alum came from Asia Minor, the most productive mines near Smyrna being controlled by the Genoese until 1455 and thereafter by the Turks. But in 1460 huge new deposits were discovered at
Tolfa near Civitavecchia in the Papal States, where thousands of tons of alum had been deposited by vapours emitted from extinct volcanoes. No commercial concern was better placed than the Medici to exploit this valuable find. So, in 1466 the bank signed an agreement with the Pope which gave them and their partners in the Societas Aluminum the right to work these enormously profitable mines and to sell their products abroad.

Some years later the French historian, Philippe de Commines, described the bank not merely as the most profitable organization in Europe but as the greatest commercial house that there had ever been anywhere. ‘The Medici name gave their servants and agents so much credit,’ Commines wrote, ‘that what I have seen in Flanders and England almost passes belief.’

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