The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (19 page)

This famous tournament was the inspiration for the earliest literary masterpiece in Italian of Angelo Ambrogini, known from his birthplace as Poliziano, the son of a distinguished Tuscan lawyer who, as a warm supporter of the Medici family, had been murdered by conspirators plotting the death of Piero. Shortly after his father’s murder, Poliziano had been brought to Florence and his education paid for by the Medici: he had studied Latin under Cristoforo Landino, Greek under Argyropoulos and Andronicos Kallistos, and philosophy under Marsilio Ficino. He was invited to stay for as long as he liked at the Medici Palace, and later given a villa by the family. By the time he was eighteen he was a classical scholar of formidable learning and a poet of extraordinarily precocious talent. His
Stanze delta Giostra di Giuliano de Medici
established him as the finest Italian poet since Boccaccio.

The tributes which Poliziano paid to Giuliano and, more particularly, to Lorenzo were not merely the courtly allusions which every generous patron might well have felt his due. Lorenzo was, indeed, ‘the laurel who sheltered the birds that sang in the Tuscan spring’. To his villas at Fiesole, Cafaggiolo and Careggi he invited artists, writers and scholars to talk with him, to read aloud with him, to listen to music, to discuss classical texts and philosophical mysteries. Sometimes the company met at the Abbey of Camaldoli
⁴
where, for four days in 1468, Lorenzo and Giuliano discussed such matters as man’s highest vocation, the nature of the
summum bonum
and the philosophic doctrines to be found in the
Aeneid
, with various members of the Platonic Academy including Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Leon Battista Alberti and three merchants of intellectual tastes, Alamanno Rinuccini, and Donato and Piero Acciaiuoli.

‘The second day after my father’s death,’ so Lorenzo recorded in his memoirs, ‘the principal men of the city came to our house to console us and to encourage me to take on myself the care of the State, as my father and grandfather had done.’ Among the leaders of the delegation was Tommaso Soderini, who had opposed his brother Nkcolò’s attempted
coup
against Piero, and who, as the husband of a Torna-buoni, liked to think of Lorenzo as his nephew. With him were several members of the Pitti family who, at a meeting of about seven hundred supporters of the existing regime held at the convent of Sant’ Antonio the day before, had made amends for Luca Pitti’s part in the
coup
by strongly supporting Soderini in his call for a unified request to Lorenzo. Lorenzo listened to the delegation with becoming modesty.’ Their proposal was naturally against my youthful instincts,’ he protested,

and, considering that the burden and danger were great, I consented to it unwillingly. But I did so in order to protect our friends and property; since it fares ill in Florence with anyone who is rich but does not have any share in government.

Lorenzo’s evident reluctance was understandable. He was not yet twenty-one, had been married for no more than six months, and would naturally have preferred to have spent more time than his new responsibilities would permit upon those pleasures which he pursued with such vigorous intensity. But he was a conscientious and ambitious young man who had already made up his mind that to decline the challenge of public life would be not merely selfish but unwise. Even without the advice of his dutiful, sensible and gifted mother who still had, and was always to have, great influence over him, he would never have attempted to avoid his family responsibilities. Although he agreed with becoming diffidence to assume his father’s authority, he had already written to the Duke of Milan asking for the continuation of that support which the Sforzas had extended to the Medici since the time of his grandfather.

Duke Francesco’s successor, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, was now firmly established in Milan, a competent ruler with an increasingly sinister reputation for acts of appalling viciousness and cruelty. His
enemies said that he had raped the wives and daughters of numerous Milanese nobles; that he took sadistic pleasure in devising tortures for men who had offended him; that he supervised these tortures himself and pulled limbs apart with his own hands; that he delighted in the moans of dying men and in the sight of corpses. Advocates of the Milanese alliance dismissed such stories as malicious inventions but they could not deny that the Duke was both prodigiously extravagant and ineffably vain. When he made a state visit to Florence in 1471, he arrived with an enormous retinue of advisers, attendants, servants and soldiers, including five hundred infantry, a hundred knights and fifty grooms in liveries of cloth of silver, each leading a war-horse saddled in gold brocade and with golden stirrups and bridles embroidered with silk. The Duke also brought with him his trumpeters and drummers, his huntsmen and falconers, his falcons and his hounds. His wife and daughters and their ladies were carried into the city in twelve gold-brocaded litters.

It was all very fine, the Florentines conceded, but they were not unduly impressed. They could have put on a much better show themselves, one of them commented, had they wanted to. And even the Duke himself had to admit that, although the Medici lived in much simpler style than the Sforzas, although Lorenzo chose to wear such plain, dark-coloured clothes, there was little in Milan to compare with the treasures assembled within the walls of the Medici Palace. For, despite all his arrogance and outbursts of psychopathic inhumanity, Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza was a man of some learning and much discernment. He had a genuine regard for the arts and scholarship for which Florence was so justly renowned; he also developed a deep respect for his young host who was already doing so much to foster them.

It was a respect that others were being taught to share. Piero had no sooner died when yet another attempt had been made to destroy the power and influence of the Medici. Thinking to take advantage of the youth and inexperience of the new head of the family, the conspirators who had attempted to overthrow Piero in 1466 and had since been living in exile assembled an army and, under the leadership of Diotisalvi Neroni, seized Prato. But that was the limit of their
success. Their hopes of help from clandestine supporters in Florence and from Ferrara dwindled away as Lorenzo, and a
Signoria
well disposed towards him, acted as quickly and decisively as Piero had done under the earlier threat. A force of Florentine mercenaries was immediately dispatched to retake Prato; the conspirators were dispersed; and the authority of the Medicean regime was once again secure.

Lorenzo’s personal position in that regime was not yet openly acknowledged. When, for instance, Pope Paul II died the next year, a deputation was sent to Rome by the
Signoria
to offer his successor, Sixtus IV, the city’s congratulations. Lorenzo was invited to be one of the delegates, but he had no greater privileges nor higher status than any other member of the embassy: Florence was still, in name, a republic; and its citizens remained anxious that it should continue to appear to be so. It was recognized nevertheless that Lorenzo, by his birth, merited special treatment. Too young to be a member of the
Cento
, he was admitted as a member by special decree. He was also admitted to the
Balìa
and kept busy with important affairs of state as though he were already a highly experienced politician, writing numerous letters to foreign ambassadors and princes and playing a leading part in the deliberations of the councils.

The influential position he had already achieved for himself by 1472 was demonstrated well enough when there was trouble in Volterra, one of the most restless and independent of those Tuscan towns which, while self-governing except as regards foreign policy, still had to render an annual tribute to Florence. The trouble arose over a contract for mining alum in a cave in the neighbourhood of Volterra; the contract had been granted to a consortium comprising three Florentines, three Sienese and two Volterrans. There was strong feeling amongst the people of Volterra that this consortium had gained its profitable contract by fraud. They therefore elected magistrates who seized the mine and dismissed the men who were operating it. Lorenzo was not a member of the consortium nor does he appear to have had any control over it; but when the commune of Volterra asked him to arbitrate in the dispute, he was sufficiently well disposed towards the consortium to decide that control of the mine
must be handed back to its members. The two Volterran members, Inghirami and Riccobaldi, delighted and encouraged by his decision, promptly marched back to the mine with an armed escort and declared themselves representatives of the rightful owners. It was an invitation to violence, and violence immediately broke out. There were savage riots in which several people were killed; the dead body of Inghirami was thrown out of a window onto the square below; and the Florentine
Capitano
of Volterra had cause to feel grateful that he had not been thrown out with him.

Lorenzo was now determined that the uprising must be put down by force. His orders had been disobeyed. Some of those in whose favour he had pronounced had been savagely murdered, and the Volterran rebels had been joined by Florentine exiles who were urging them to join them in an attack on the Medici. A majority of the
Signoria
were of the opinion that to use force was both provocative and unnecessary. This was also the opinion of the Bishop of Volterra. But Lorenzo would not listen. The Volterrans were notoriously turbulent and should be taught a lesson; if they were not, other Tuscan towns might follow their example. His advice was taken. An army, led by Federigo da Montefeltro, Count of Urbino, and composedofmercenaries in Florentine pay, marched towards Volterra, whose citizens looked frantically about for allies, but in vain. They even went so far as to offer their town to the King of Naples if only he would save them from Florence, but apart from a little help from Siena and Piombino no comforting response was received from anywhere. After a month’s siege the town surrendered. Lorenzo wrote a letter expressing his relief that it had all ended so satisfactorily; but he wrote too soon.

By the time his letter reached Volterra the town was being wildly plundered. No one afterwards discovered how it was that the terms of surrender were so blatantly violated. Some said that the mercenaries employed by the Volterrans had opened the gates to the Count of Urbino’s men in order to help them plunder the town. By whatever means they entered it, the Count’s men were soon pillaging Volterra, breaking into houses and shops, murdering men and raping women. Some reports had it that the Count himself, having
found and stolen a rare polyglot Bible, made no efforts to control them; others claimed that he did have several of his soldiers hanged but that this was no deterrent. In any case, it was many hours before the uproar died down and by then hundreds of people were dead or mutilated, and whole streets were ransacked and in ruins. The horror of the scene of devastation was heightened by the effects of a landslip caused by torrential rain.

On learning what had happened Lorenzo immediately rode over to Volterra. He did what he could to reassure the people that his fellow citizens in Florence profoundly regretted the outrages, and he distributed money to those who had suffered loss. His regret was obviously sincere; but it was impossible to overlook the fact that it was he who had advocated the use of force, that it was he who had employed the Count of Urbino, that it was he who had approved the restoration of the mines to the original
concessionaires
, and that it was he who had pressed for the withdrawal of Volterra’s rights of self-government. And in Volterra these things are not forgotten even to this day.

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