The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (23 page)

Three days later the Ferrarese ambassador in Florence wrote home to tell the Duke that Clarice de’ Medici was dead. He had not bothered to send the news before, he said, because he did not think it of much importance.

As Lorenzo had feared, the failure of the Pazzi conspiracy and the
Florentines’ fierce reprisals against those who had been involved in it aroused the utmost fury in Rome. Followed by three hundred halberdiers, Girolamo Riario stormed off to the house of the Florentine ambassador, Donato Acciaiuoli, arrested him and would have thrown him into the dungeons of Sant’ Angelo had not the Venetian and Milanese ambassadors strongly protested against this outrage of diplomatic immunity. Deprived of that chosen victim, Riario vehemently urged his uncle to use all the means at his disposal to avenge himself upon the Florentines in general and upon the Medici family in particular. The Pope, as angry as his nephew, needed little persuasion. He ordered the arrest of all the principal Florentine bankers and merchants in Rome, though he was compelled to release them when reminded that Cardinal Raffaele Riario was still held in Florence. He sequestrated the assets of the Medici bank and all Medici property he could lay his hands on; he repudiated the debts of the Apostolic Chamber to the bank; he dispatched a nuncio from Rome to demand that Lorenzo should be handed over to papal justice, and issued an enormously lengthy Bull of Excommunication against ‘that son of iniquity and foster-child of perdition, Lorenzo dei Medici, and those other citizens of Florence, his accomplices and abettors’. These accomplices were deemed to include the
Gonfaloniere
and the entire
Signoria
, all the members of which were ‘pronounced culpable, sacrilegious, excommunicate, anathematised, infamous, unworthy of trust and incapable of making a will’. ‘All their property is to revert to the Church,’ the document continued; ‘their houses are to be levelled to the ground, their habitations made desolate so that none may dwell therein. Let everlasting ruin witness their everlasting disgrace.’ If these sentences and punishments were not carried out within two months, the whole city of Florence was to be laid under interdict together with all its dependencies. Not content with this, the Pope declared war upon Florence and had no difficulty in persuading King Ferrante of Naples to do the same.

Eager to extend the dominion of the House of Aragon over Tuscany, King Ferrante’s son, Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, promptly marched across the frontier and, having taken possession of the territory round Montepulciano, sent an envoy to Florence with grim
warnings of the city’s imminent destruction together with another fierce message from the Pope couched in even more virulent terms than the Bull of Excommunication.

To these and subsequent threats the
Signoria
issued defiant replies:

You say that Lorenzo is a tyrant and command us to expel him. But most Florentines call him their defender… Remember your high office as the Vicar of Christ. Remember that the Keys of St Peter were not given to you to abuse in such a way… Florence will resolutely defend her liberties, trusting in Christ who knows the justice of her cause, and who does not desert those who believe in Him; trusting in her allies who regard her cause as their own; especially trusting in the most Christian King, Louis of France, who has ever been the patron and protector of the Florentine State.

Despite these protestations of trust, the Florentines had little cause to hope for much help from their allies. Admittedly, the French King had written a friendly letter of sympathy to Lorenzo and a protest to the Pope against his treatment of him; he had made vague threats of another General Council and of a renewal of Angevin claims to Naples; he had sent Philippe de Commines as a special envoy to Italy. But as Commines himself said, the citizens were, in fact, offered little more than sympathy: ‘Louis’s favourable inclination towards the Florentines was in some measure useful to them, but not so much as I wished, for I had no army with which to support them beyond my own retinue.’

In earlier years Florence might have expected military help from Milan; but ever since the murder of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the feud between the widowed Duchess, guardian of their young son, Gian Galeazzo, and her brothers-in-law, his uncles, had prevented Milan from playing any effective part in Italian politics. A Milanese force under Gian Giacomo Trivulzio was eventually sent to Florence’s help, but it was not large enough to be effective. Nor were the mercenary forces dispatched by the Medici’s Orsini relatives in Rome; nor yet was the Bolognese force which was provided by Giovanni Bentivoglio, whom Lorenzo had visited years before as his father’s representative and with whom he had ever since remained
on terms of the closest friendship. Indeed, when all these disparate troops were placed under the overall command of Ercole d’Este, the tall, handsome, cunning and cautious Duke of Ferrara, there were few people – and the Duke himself was evidently not one of them – who believed that the Florentines could possibly withstand the onslaught which the Neapolitan army, advancing up the Chiana valley, was threatening to launch against them.

The Duke of Calabria’s troops were not the only threat to Florence. By now, the Pope had induced Siena and Lucca to join forces with him and had entrusted the command of his own army to that formidable soldier, Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. Philippe de Commines, having seen the troops in the papal camp and compared them with the motley array that their enemies had so far assembled, was forced to conclude that the independence of the Florentine Republic was soon to be ended.

The Florentines themselves, far more optimistic than Commines, continued to reject all the demands the Pope made of them. The Tuscan bishops, reacting defiantly to the Bull of Excommunication, had unanimously decided at a meeting in the Cathedral in Florence that the actions which the
Signoria
had so far taken were completely justified. And, in accordance with this decision, they issued their own decree excommunicating the Pope. Copies of the excommunication were printed on the press set up in Florence the year before by Bernardo Cennini, and distributed throughout Europe under the imposing title,
Contrascommunica del clero Fiorentino fulminate contro il summo Pontifice Sisto IV
. Their attitude was wholeheartedly supported by their clergy, by their congregations and by Lorenzo himself.

By this time Lorenzo had established himself as the undisputed leader of the Florentine cause. He had called a meeting of the leading citizens and in his high-pitched, nasal voice had dramatically assured them that as he was himself the cause of the Pope’s campaign against Florence he was willing to sacrifice himself and even his family if they thought that the exile or death of the Medici would prove the salvation of the city. Replying on their behalf, Jacopo dei Alessandri told him that it was their unanimous determination to stand by him
to the end. They appointed a guard of twelve men to be responsible for his personal safety and elected him one of the Ten of War, the emergency committee set up to direct the campaign for the city’s defence.

That this campaign did not end in the disaster for Florence which Commines expected was due far more to good fortune and to the peculiar traditions of fifteenth-century Italian warfare than to any notable competence in either the Florentine army or in its commander, the Duke of Ferrara, who appeared unwilling to test his strength against the Duke of Calabria, a skilful soldier who also happened to be his brother-in-law. Always careful to keep a good two days’ march away from the enemy, the Duke of Ferrara took three weeks to cover the fifty miles between Pisa and Sarzana. When urged by the Florentines to move his men more quickly, he ridiculed such exhortation from ‘mere mechanics who [knew] nothing of war’. ‘The system of our Italian soldiers is this,’ commented the Florentine apothecary, Luca Landucci. ‘You turn your attention to plundering in that direction, and we will do the same in this. Getting too near each other is not our game.’ By November 1478, no decisive battle having yet been fought, both armies retreated to their winter quarters.

The next year was less favourable for Florence. First of all, the uncles of the young Duke Gian Galleazo Sforza, worsted in their efforts to gain power in Milan, had gone to Naples where King Ferrante incited them to go back north with an army and seize the Duchy by force. The return of her brothers-in-law to Lombardy so alarmed the Duchess that she recalled the Milanese contingent from the defence of Florence to help defend her own government in Milan.

The Duchess was particularly alarmed by the return of Lodovico Sforza, known as il Moro, the Moor, because one of his Christian names was Mauro and he had a very dark skin. He was a rather effeminate-looking man with an extremely small mouth and neatly curled hair. He was vain, boastful and cowardly; yet he was undoubtedly clever. A bad judge of men, he knew a great deal about art and literature. He was cynical and amoral, but he was courteous
and considerate. He had a definite talent for administration and diplomacy, and a remarkable memory. He was a man to be reckoned with.

By September he had come to terms with the Duchess, had established himself in power in Milan, and had made up his mind that the Florentine Republic, on the verge of collapse, was no longer a suitable ally for his Duchy. At the same time the Duke of Calabria’s forces, rampaging about in the Val d’Elsa, captured the fortress of Poggio Imperiale and would have attacked Florence itself had not the small town of Colle, less than thirty miles south of Florence, offered so determined a resistance that he was held up there for two months. When at last Colle fell on 14 November – after the Duke’s mortars, so Luca Landucci recorded in his diary, had been’ fired at it a thousand and twenty four times’ – the winter was too far advanced for the Neapolitan army to continue its operations in the Val d’Elsa and the Duke of Calabria took his men away once more to hibernate in Siena. But though they had been given another breathing-space, the Florentines’ situation was now more desperate than ever. The various
condottieri
in their service were perpetually quarrelling with each other; the Duke of Ferrara had wandered off in the wake of the Sforzas; gangs of brigands, pretending to be enemy raiding-parties, plundered the Tuscan countryside; plague had broken out in Florence; and its citizens were beginning to grumble about the heavy taxes which the war had forced the emergency committee to introduce. Moreover, the Florentine economy was in decline, partly due to the virtual cessation of imports of wool from England where manufacturers were now making their own cloth; while hundreds of workers were locked out of their factories by merchants with no work for them to do. Well aware that the Republic could not survive another season’s campaigning and that his allies supported the general wish for peace, Lorenzo now took what appeared to the Florentines as an extraordinary and courageous decision: he made up his mind to go to Naples and to present himself at his enemy’s court. Leaving the city in the care of the recently elected
Gonfaloniere
, Tommaso Soderini, he rode away to the sea. Before embarking he wrote to the
Signoria
from the town of San Miniato Tedesco on the road to Pisa:

In the dangerous circumstances in which our city is placed, the time for deliberation is past. Action must be taken… I have decided, with your approval, to sail for Naples immediately, believing that as I am the person against whom the activities of our enemies are chiefly directed, I may, perhaps, by delivering myself into their hands, be the means of restoring peace to our fellow-citizens… As I have had more honour and responsibility among you than any private citizen has had in our day, I am more bound than any other person to serve our country, even at the risk of my life. With this intention I now go. Perhaps God wills that this war, which began in the blood of my brother and of myself, should be ended by my means. My desire is that by my life or my death, my misfortune or my prosperity, I may contribute to the welfare of our city… I go full of hope, praying to God to give me grace to perform what every citizen should at all times be ready to perform for his country. I commend myself humbly to your Excellencies of the
Signoria
. Laurentius de Medici.

When this emotional letter was read out to the
Signoria
, not a single one of the
Priori
, according to Filippo Valori, was able to restrain his tears. Profoundly distrusting King Ferrante, who was reported to preserve the bodies of his enemies embalmed in a private museum, they thought that they might never see Lorenzo again. Yet it was recognized that his offer of personal sacrifice was a gesture, perhaps the only gesture, that might save the Republic. The
Signoria
, therefore, gave Lorenzo their blessing, nominated him ambassador to Naples and wished him every success. The day after he received their reply he sailed from Vada, arriving in Naples just before Christmas 1479. He was twenty-nine years old.

Standing on the quay to meet him was King Ferrante’s second son, Federigo, whom Lorenzo had met and grown to like as a boy. They greeted each other warmly. Lorenzo was welcomed with equal warmth by the Duke of Calabria’s clever wife, Ippolita Sforza, whom he had also known well for years; and by Diomede Carafa, one of King Ferrante’s principal advisers, an elderly author, connoisseur and collector of antiques for whom Lorenzo had done many favours in the past, by helping and entertaining his friends when they visited Florence, and to whom he had presented an exquisite bronze head of a horse which was one of the finest Roman antiquities in Carafa’s
collection. Indeed, it soon became clear to Lorenzo’s suite that his mission was far less foolhardy than it had seemed and far less dramatic than he had been astute enough to present it in his letter to the
Signoria
.

Before writing that letter, he had for long been in secret communication with the Neapolitan court and had assured himself that his arrival there would not be unwelcome. The ship in which he had sailed, in fact, had been sent from Naples to fetch him. He knew that the Duke of Calabria, whose troops now controlled large tracts of land in southern Tuscany, was opposed to any peace settlement that did not recognize his conquests; but Lorenzo also knew that King Ferrante was extremely apprehensive about the King of France’s continued threats of renewing Angevin claims to the throne of Naples and about the intentions of the Turks whose squadrons were sailing threateningly up and down the Italian shores of the southern Adriatic.