The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (39 page)

‘I have seen in the short time I have been here a thousand things like it,’ wrote Francesco Guicciardini to the Pope, reporting on a riot in the Piazza della Signoria,

and all derive from the ignorance of this eunuch [Passerini] who spends the whole day in idle chatter and neglects important things… He does his best to fill himself and everyone else with suspicion; he makes everyone despair; and has no idea himself what he is doing.

His two charges, Guicciardini considered, were equally reprehensible.

There was no doubt that the Florentines agreed with Guicciardini. When the news from Rome reached the city, they marched through the streets shouting slogans and singing songs of thanksgiving. And as soon as Passerini and his two pupils had scurried away, they threw the Pope’s effigy out of the church of the Annunziata, tore it to pieces in the square, and loudly declared their approval of a new republican constitution, the re-establishment of the Grand Council as well as the militia, and the election of anti-Medicean
Gonfaloniere
, Niccolò
Capponi, to hold office for a year. On the façade of the Medici Palace – which was, however, protected by a strong guard from mobs of would-be looters – a descendant of Ghiberti painted a picture of the Pope climbing up a ladder to the gallows.

The Pope determined to tolerate the situation no longer than his present powerlessness and bankruptcy obliged him to do. He could hope for no more help from the French whose forces, having yet again invaded Italy and advanced as far as Naples, were ravaged by the plague and obliged to surrender once more to the Spaniards. So he came to terms at last with the Emperor. On the understanding that the Pope would recognize his position in Italy and would crown him on his proposed arrival there, Charles undertook, by a treaty signed at Barcelona on 29 June 1529, to return the Medici to Florence – if necessary by force.

Thinking that they in turn would be well advised to come to an agreement with the Pope, whose conduct of the city’s government in the past had not been exceptionable, a few of the older and more cautious citizens of Florence now proposed the formulation of some sort of compromise. The younger citizens, however, refused to listen to such pusillanimous proposals and in their patriotic enthusiasm they carried the majority of the people with them. They called out the militia, voted money for mercenaries, pulled down villas beyond the walls which might have afforded cover to the Imperialists, built new strong-points, and improved the city’s fortifications. The military command they gave to a Perugian
condottiere
, Malatesta Baglioni, whose father had fought against the Medici and whose services to Florence would, he hoped, be rewarded by his returning to power in his native city. At the same time the ingenious Michelangelo, whose colossal and inspiring statue of David now stood in the Piazza della Signoria, was appointed to supervise the works of defence.
¹

Having proposed that the defences should be extended to circum-vallate the hill of San Miniato and that the belfry of its church should be protected from artillery fire by mattresses, Michelangelo waited to see the works almost completed, then lost his nerve and fled from the city. A few days later he returned, and though not reinstated in his
former responsible position, his behaviour was attributed to his artistic temperament and he was forgiven.

By then the Pope had enlisted the help of the Prince of Orange, the adventurer who had commanded the imperial troops during the Sack of Rome and who now agreed to lead an almost equally unruly, mostly Spanish force against Florence. In the early autumn of 1529 this force appeared on the hills above the city, calling out, so it was said, ‘Get out your brocades, Florence, for we are coming to measure them with our pikestaffs’. But although the army was nearly 40,000 strong, the Prince did not consider it either large or manageable enough for a direct assault and decided to starve the city into surrender.

Owing largely to the heroic activities of the gifted and ruthless Florentine commander, Francesco Ferrucci,
²
who repeatedly led out fighting patrols to keep the supply routes open, the city held out for no less than ten months. On 3 August 1530, however, Ferrucci was surrounded in the village of Gavinana in the mountains above Pistoia by a troop of Spanish soldiers who hacked him to pieces; and with his death Florentine resistance collapsed. For weeks past, indeed, surrender had seemed inevitable. Malatesta Baglioni, though he inarched about the streets with the word ‘
Libertas
’ emblazoned on his hat, had already entered into secret negotiations with the enemy. The population was starving and plague-ridden; mobs marched forlornly through the streets shouting for bread and for the return of the Medici as the only means of getting it. ‘Everyone was beside himself with fright and bewilderment,’ Benedetto Varchi recorded.

No one knew what to say any more, what to do or where to go. Some tried to escape, some to hide, some to seek refuge in the Palazzo della Signoria or in the churches. Most of them merely entrusted themselves to God and awaited resignedly, from one hour to the next, not just death but death amidst the most horrid cruelties imaginable.

A week after Francesco Ferrucci’s death a deputation of Florentine citizens agreed to the terms of surrender demanded by the representatives of the Emperor and the Pope. They were forced to hand over fifty hostages as pledges for a huge indemnity, to give up the fortresses still held by Florence to the imperial army, and to release all
Medici supporters who had been imprisoned. In return, the liberties of the city were to be guaranteed, and an undertaking was given that pardons would be available for ‘injuries received from alt citizens’, whom His Holiness would treat with that ‘affection and clemency he had always shown them’. But neither side expected the Pope to consider himself bound by these promises, as, in fact, he did not.

A week after the Emperor’s representatives had entered the city, those citizens prepared to vote for the creation of a
Balìa
were admitted to a
Parlamento
in the Piazza della Signoria. A Medicean
Balìa
was accordingly established. A faithful supporter of the Pope was appointed
Gonfaloniere
, and Francesco Guicciardini, who had left the city at the approach of the Imperial forces, was sent back to supervise further measures of ‘reform’ – and of revenge.

When Guicciardini arrived on 24 September he found

the people and their resources exhausted, all the houses around Florence destroyed for many miles, and in many towns of the Florentine dominion the peasant population immeasurably decreased, the common folk disappeared almost entirely.

His own villas were in ruins. He decided immediately that, if the State were to be put on ‘a proper footing again, mild measures [were] useless’. Mild measures were certainly not employed. Francesco Capponi, the leader of the extreme anti-papal party known as the
Arrabbiati
(the Angry Ones), was tortured and executed. So were several of his supporters. Raffaele Girolami, the newly elected
Gonfaloniere
, was also condemned to death, though eventually sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. Scores of other leading citizens were banished from Florence for ever.

To replace them in the government of the city, the Pope dispatched the dark, frizzy-haired, now nineteen-year-old youth, Alessandro de’ Medici, for whom he had bought the Dukedom of Penne from Charles V and to whom he hoped to marry the Emperor’s natural daughter, Margaret.

Having thus roughly and decisively settled the future of Florence, to
which he himself never again returned – and having created Ippolito a cardinal, an honour to which that cheerful, gregarious, extravagant and sensual young man in no way aspired – the Pope now concentrated his attentions upon the family’s one remaining asset, the little Caterina de’ Medici, a pale, thin, rather plain but strong-willed girl of twelve. He had high hopes for her. Indeed, there were some who said he had made Ippolito a cardinal merely to remove him as a possible suitor, for she had shown signs of being unduly fond of the boy, and Clement had no mind to let her make a marriage so unprofitable both to the Medici and to himself as Pope. He wanted, in fact, to arrange for her a marriage with a son of the King of France.

So ambitious a project needed extremely tactful handling. He must not appear too eager; nor must he act without the consent of the Emperor. He played his part extremely well. The Venetian ambassador, for one, was not at all convinced that the Pope had made up his mind about the match; while the Emperor evidently thought it so unlikely that the French court would agree to it that, when the Pope travelled to Bologna to seek his permission, Charles gave way as though it were a matter of not very much importance. To the Emperor’s surprise, however, the French were not at all averse to the match. And so it was that on 28 October 1533, the Pope himself conducting the ceremony in Marseilles, the fourteen-year-old Caterina de’ Medici, Duchess of Urbino, was married to Henri de Valois, Duke of Orleans, second son of Francis I.

It was Clement’s last triumph. Already ill when he began his journey to Marseilles, accompanied by those lavish wedding gifts for which the taxpayers of Rome and Florence had yet to pay, he returned to the Vatican a dying man. He was pitiably thin and shrunken; he was almost blind in his right eye, which had always had a slight squint; his liver was diseased and his skin was consequently pale and yellowish. Exasperating problems faced him on every side: there was the quarrel with England over the supremacy of the Holy See; there was the growing enmity of the Emperor who, irritated by the recent Medici marriage, was making renewed demands for a General Council of the Church; there were – vexatious above all – the persistent quarrels between Ippolito and Alessandro and the danger that
between them they would be responsible for their family losing Florence once again.

When Benvenuto Cellini went to see the Pope on 22 September 1534 to show him some models he had designed for him, he found him in bed and failing fast.

He ordered his spectacles and a candle to be brought, but nevertheless he could discern nothing of my workmanship. So he set to examine the models by the touch of his fingers, but after feeling thus for some length of time he fetched a deep sigh, and told one of the courtiers that he was sorry for me, but if it pleased God to restore his health, he would make me a satisfactory payment. Three days later he died.

Cellini confessed that the tears filled his eyes as he kissed the dead Pope’s feet; but there was no one else to mourn for him. On the contrary, Rome rejoiced. As Francesco Vettori said of him, he had gone ‘to a great deal of trouble to develop from a great and respected cardinal into a small and little respected Pope’. Night after night St Peter’s was broken into; the corpse was transfixed by a sword; the temporary tomb was smeared with dirt; and the inscription beneath it, ‘
Clemens Pontifex Maximus
’, was obliterated and in its place were written the words, ‘
Inclemens Pontifex Minimus
’.
³

The news from Rome was received in Florence with glum foreboding. It was felt that, following the death of the Pope whom many supposed to be his father, Alessandro de’ Medici would impatiently throw off all restraint and institute that tyrannical government to which his own tastes seemed naturally inclined. So far he had behaved quite circumspectly. Nine months after his ceremonial entry into the city, he had been proclaimed hereditary Duke; but, so as to allay the outrage to republican susceptibilities which this proclamation caused, he was at the same time required to consult various councils of Florentine citizens and to heed their advice. For a time he had done so; the people had been gradually reassured; and it was grudgingly allowed that, ill-favoured and rude as he was, there might, when he grew older, be discovered some good in Alessandro after all.

The Pope’s death brought all the old fears back, and before that winter was over they were seen to be justified. Even the pretence of
consultation with the elected councils was abandoned as Alessandro indulged his young fancy for authoritarian rule and became ever more blatant in his sexual escapades. He outraged the citizens by having the great bell in the Palazzo della Signoria – which had been smashed in the Piazza to symbolize the death of the Republic – melted down and recast into medals glorifying his family; by having his coat-of-arms carved over the gateway of the recently enlarged fort at the Porta alla Giustizia;
⁴
by impounding all weapons, even those hung as votive offerings in the churches; and by building a huge new fortress, the Fortezza da Basso,
⁵
‘a thing totally inappropriate to a free city, as the examples of Venice, Siena, Lucca and Genoa clearly show’. There was murmured talk of tyrannicide; but the memory of the recent long siege was still fresh in men’s minds, and the dissidents hung back from so violent a solution to their plight which might bring another imperial army to the gates of the city. For a time it was hoped that the jealous Ippolito might settle the Florentines’ problems for them; and Ippolito did, indeed, agree to present a case against Alessandro at Charles V’s court; but before he was able to do so he died on 10 August 1535 at Itri, either of malaria or of poisoning. His body was carried back to Rome by the handsome athletes – Moors, Tartars, Turks, Negro wrestlers and Indian divers – with whom it had been his extravagant fancy to go out upon his travels.

The leading Florentine exiles then presented themselves to the Emperor with a long list of complaints against Alessandro. Their spokesman, Jacopo Nardi the historian, gave a horrifying account of the Duke’s misdeeds and of the miseries of Florence now being overawed by a ‘great fortress, built with the blood of her unhappy people as a prison and slaughter-house for the unhappy citizens’. But although the Emperor promised ‘to do what was just’, he preferred to set less store by Nardi’s charges than by the extremely cunning and wholly inaccurate rebuttal of them by Alessandro’s chief adviser, Francesco Guicciardini, who went so far as to conclude his peroration with the words, ‘One cannot reply in detail to the charges about women, rape and similar calumnies uttered in general; but His Excellency’s virtue, his fame, the opinion of him held throughout the city, of his prudence, of his virtuous habits, are a sufficient reply.’