The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (32 page)

You are the youngest cardinal, not only in the Sacred College of today but at any time in the past. Therefore, when you are in assembly with other cardinals, you must be the most unassuming, and the most humble… Try to live with regularity… Silk and jewels are seldom suitable to those in your station. Much better to collect antiquities and beautiful books, and to maintain a learned and well regulated household rather than a grand one. Invite others to your house more often than you accept invitations to theirs; but not too often. Eat plain food and take plenty of exercise… Confide in others too little rather than too much. One rule above all others I urge you to observe most rigorously:
Rise early in the morning
. This not only for your health’s sake, but also so that you can arrange and expedite all the day’s business…

With regard to your speaking in the Consistory, I think it would be best for the present while you are still so young, to refer whatever is proposed to you to His Holiness, giving as your reason your youth and
inexperience. You will find that you will be asked to intercede with the Pope for many small objects. Try at first to do this as seldom as you can, and not to worry him unduly in this way. For it is the Pope’s nature to pay the most attention to those who bother him least… Farewell.

Lorenzo’s reference to Rome as a sink of iniquity was not unjust. There were reckoned to be almost seven thousand prostitutes in a population of less than 50,000, most of them working in brothels licensed by the papal authorities and many of them suffering from syphilis, ‘a kind of illness very common among priests’, according to Benvenuto Cellini, who caught the disease himself. There were almost as many professional criminals as prostitutes, many if not most of whom avoided punishment by paying bribes. There were alleged to be an average of fourteen murders a day; and although the stench from the rows of rotting corpses of executed men hanging from the battlements of the Castel Sant’ Angelo made it an ordeal to cross the bridge beneath, most murderers, if caught, were soon released. Roderigo Borgia, one of the richest cardinals, explained when asked why so many malefactors escaped execution, ‘The Lord requires not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may pay and live.’ It was this Roderigo Borgia who, on the death of Innocent VIII, secured his own succession as Alexander VI by disbursing the most lavish gifts to all his rivals and potential supporters. Five asses laden with gold were believed to have entered the courtyard of the one cardinal, Ascanio Sforza, whose own riches and influence might have defeated him.

The young cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici seems to have enjoyed his early years in Rome to the full; but once a price had been placed on his head by the government of Florence he thought it advisable to go abroad for a time. So, having obtained permission from Alexander to travel beyond the Alps, he left for Venice en route for Bavaria in company with his cousin Giulio, who had been studying at the university at Pisa. From Bavaria they went to Brussels, then travelled up to the Flemish coast with the intention of sailing for England. Changing their minds, they rode south for Rouen instead, then to Marseilles whence they took boat for Genoa to stay with Giovanni’s sister Maddalena. From Genoa, they returned at last to
Rome where Alexander VI, having himself by then quarrelled with Florence, greeted them kindly.

They settled down in a palace in the city where, disregarding the meagreness of his resources, Giovanni determined to enjoy life to the full, surrounding himself with genial mends and a constant stream of guests. As well as his cousin Giulio, there lived in the palace Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, brother to Piero Dovizi, a brilliant, amusing and wily man, five years older than Giovanni, formerly his tutor and soon to become his secretary. Often to be seen there also was Giovanni’s younger brother, Giuliano, a well-mannered, kind, rather feckless though not unambitious young man whose cheerful good nature had endeared him to the families of the Duke of Urbino and the Marquis of Mantua, his hosts during his years of exile. Another frequent guest was the Pope’s favourite nephew, Cardinal Galeotto Franciotto, whom Giovanni had at first chosen to cultivate for selfish reasons but whom he grew to love so much mat, after Franciotto’s early death; he could not hear his name mentioned without tears starting to his eyes.

With Franciotto on one side and Dovizi on the other, with Giuliano and Giulio, with various cardinals and visitors from Florence whose good opinion he was anxious to cultivate, and with numerous artists by whom the name of Medici was still revered, Giovanni played the part of host with such lavish generosity that he was frequently in debt His guests became used to the constant disappearance and reappearance of his most valuable pieces of silver, which made their way between his dining-room and the shops of the Roman pawnbrokers.

Yet although he spent long evenings at the dining-table, long mornings discussing the several arts in which he took a lively interest, and long afternoons hunting and hawking in the Campagna – explaining that such exercise, incongruous though it might be for a cardinal, was a necessary duty for one so corpulent – Giovanni was far from content to devote all his life to the pleasures he so obviously enjoyed. He seemed always to have one pale, short-sighted eye turned in the direction of the thin, bearded, restless figure of the newly elected Pope.

Julius II, who after the twenty-six-day Papacy of Alexander VI‘s successor, the decrepit Pius III, had been elected Pope in November 1503, was the grandson of a fisherman, a tall, handsome, rough, talkative, syphilitic, irascible man. He was much given to boasting of his poor childhood – when he had sailed with cargoes of onions down the Ligurian coast – of his lack of scholarship and of his taste for the life of a soldier. ‘I am no schoolman,’ he said once when asked to suggest a suitable emblem for a statue of him being made by Michelangelo. ‘Put a sword in my hand, not a book.’

Julius delighted in the sword. Not long after his elevation he set off, with twenty-four cardinals in unwilling attendance, to reduce the rebel cities of Perugia and Bologna whose obedience to the Church he was determined to compel. Shaken by the news of his approach, Gian-Paolo Baglioni, the ruler of Perugia, surrendered the city into his hands, kneeling before him and begging for mercy. The Pope forgave him but added, ‘Do it again and I’ll hang you.’ Then, leaving his cardinals no time for rest, he marched them through the marshes of the Romagna to Bologna. The city having been deserted by Giovanni Bentivoglio, they entered it on 11 November 1506, exhausted and peevish, their hands and faces red and lumpy with mosquito bites.

Having regained Bologna and Perugia for the Church, Julius now determined also to recover Rimini, Faenza and Ravenna, which had fallen into the hands of Venice. To do so he called into existence the League of Cambrai, allying himself not only with Louis of France and Ferdinand of Spain but also with the Emperor Maximilian who were all to take a share of the Venetian dominions. The combination was far too powerful for Venice whose troops were routed at Agnadello near Cremona on 14 May 1509. Yet the Pope, having so successfully extended the dominions of the Church, could not but regret that this had entailed foreign powers gaining footholds in Lombardy. He determined to drive diem out, repeatedly declaring, ‘I will not have these barbarians taking over Italy.’ He called upon all Italy to drive them back once more across the Alps, beginning with the French. ‘Let’s see,’ he said riding off to turn a French garrison out of Mirandola, ‘Let’s see who has the bigger balls, the
King of France or I.’ Inspired by his relentless determination his troops captured Mirandola, through whose shattered walls he scrambled by means of a wooden scaling ladder. But it was to be many months before he was able to achieve a more significant success, for most Italian states, including Florence, showed little inclination to respond to his call.

France was the Florentines’ traditional friend. The friendship had, admittedly, been placed under severe strain by Charles VIII, but the war with Pisa which the French had provoked was now over. The Pisans had been forced to sue for peace after the defeat of their supporters, the Venetians, at Agnadello. The Florentines, therefore, decided to remain neutral – ‘a bad example’, the Pope declared angrily; but it was one which other Italian states thought it prudent to follow. So Julius, unable to rouse Italians by his call for a crusade against the French, turned to the Spaniards, now in firm possession of Naples. With them he formed a new Holy League whose forces marched north to Bologna which, having been retaken with French help by Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, had been returned to Bentivoglio. At the same time, Julius announced that once Bologna had been recaptured his Legate there would be Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici. Julius had been much impressed by Giovanni’s good-natured acceptance of the discomforts of campaigning and had already rewarded him with the see of Amalfi and the promise of further preferment. In Florence, the
Signoria
heard of Giovanni’s ascendance with alarm.

The forces of the Holy League, however, were far from successful. They had failed to take Bologna; and, on Easter Saturday 1512, they were stopped in their tracks on the banks of the Ronco on their way to the relief of Ravenna. In the ensuing savage battle – in which the Spanish and French cannon, roaring ceaselessly in the smoke, sent their balls bouncing and ploughing through whole rows and columns of men-at-arms – the losses on both sides were so enormous that scarcely ever before in the history of Europe had so many men been left dead upon the field. Almost ten thousand soldiers of the Holy League are said to have been killed, and nearly as many men in the French army.

Cardinal Giovanni, who had ridden along the Spanish ranks on a white palfrey before the battle began, exhorting the troops to fight well and praying to God for victory, had been captured as he gave comfort to the dying amidst the littered corpses of the dead. He was escorted to Bologna where his stout figure in scarlet robes and his sweating face beneath the broad-brimmed tasselled hat were exposed to the taunts of the populace. The Bentivoglio, however, treated him with kindness. He was also treated well upon his removal to Modena where Bianca Rangone sold her jewels to provide him with food and clothing. At his eventual destination, Milan, he was provided with comfortable lodgings in the house of Cardinal Federigo Sanseverino.

The French, so Giovanni then believed, had gained an undoubted victory outside Ravenna from which they had forced the cruelly mauled forces of the Holy League to withdraw. The Florentines thought so, too, and lit huge bonfires to celebrate the Pope’s defeat as they had done to celebrate the rout of the Venetians at Agnadello. But it proved to be an immensely costly victory from which the winning side could reap no advantage. In the closing stages of the battle, the talented young French commander, Gaston de Foix, had been knocked from his horse by a stray shot and, spattered with blood and brains, had been hacked to death by Spanish infantrymen. Moreover, a large Swiss army had marched down towards French-occupied Lombardy to take advantage of the confusion, while France itself was threatened with invasion by both England and Spain. The French forces, running short of provisions, were obliged to withdraw from Ravenna and Bologna, then from Milan, and finally from Lombardy altogether.

Cardinal Giovanni, far too valuable a hostage to leave behind, was compelled to go with them. But determined to decamp long before he reached the Alps, he feigned illness at a village on the banks of the Po, where a priest who was accompanying him managed to slip away from the French guard and to enlist the help of two local landowners in a plan of escape. As the cardinal was about to step into a barge at the river bank the following morning, a band of armed peasants from the landowners’ estates burst out of the reeds and, in the ensuing uproar, hustled the captive away. Improbably disguised as a soldier,
Giovanni was then taken to a pigeon-house in the courtyard of a castle belonging to one of the landowners’ kinsmen, then to Godiasco, then to Mantua where he learned that preparations were already far advanced to use the army of the Holy League, now free of the French, to enforce a change of government in Florence. His arrival in Mantua ensured that there could be no doubt what form that new government would take.

Since the execution of Savonarola, Florence, no longer an important power, had failed to regain the vitality and gaiety of the golden age it had enjoyed during the last years of Lorenzo the Magnificent. A series of financial crises had brought several guilds almost to the verge of ruin. The long, exhausting, humiliating war against Pisa, incompetently conducted by treacherous
condottieri
, had drained the
Signoria
’s resources. The French King’s representative in Tuscany, Robert de Balzac Entragues, had sold Sarzana to Genoa and Pietra-santa to Lucca. Gloom descended over the city, a gloom which was reflected in the final paintings of Botticelli, a prematurely old man now, limping through the streets, ‘unable to stand upright and moving about with the help of crutches’.
²

Four years after the death of Savonarola, an attempt had been made to strengthen the government of the city by appointing a
Gonfaloniere
for life. The man chosen for this appointment was Piero Soderini, an honest, hard-working but unremarkable administrator whose fame has been eclipsed by that of the relatively minor official in the government whom he came to consult on all matters of importance, Niccolò Machiavelli.

Machiavelli was a thin, neat, pale man whose sparse black hair was brushed straight back from a high and bony forehead. In the only portrait of him that survives he returns the spectator’s gaze with a look at once amused, questioning and sardonic. The son of a lawyer from an old Tuscan family, he had been appointed to his present post at the age of thirty following the execution of Savonarola, whose ideas and methods he had disdained. One of the concerns of Machiavelli’s department was war; and it was his strongly held view, as it had
been of other Florentines before him, including Leonardo Bruni, that the Republic’s traditional system of hiring troops to fight its battles would have to be abandoned in favour of a national militia. It had been found so often in the past that
condottieri
were utterly untrustworthy: sometimes they declined to fight alongside other bands hired to co-operate with them; at other times they refused to fight against
condottieri
with whom they were on friendly terms; occasionally they accepted money from both sides; always they were unwilling to risk the lives of their men and thus waste their assets. Soderini agreed to have the formation of a national militia approved by the
Signoria
and he entrusted Machiavelli with the task of organizing it. Machiavelli began to do so with energy and enthusiasm, and by February 1506 he was able to hold a parade in the Piazza della Signoria of the first recruits. They were mostly peasants from the outlying country who were, so Landucci recorded,