The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

I FLORENCE AND THE FLORENTINES

ONE SEPTEMBER morning in 1433, a thin man with a hooked nose and sallow skin could have been seen walking towards the steps of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence.¹ His name was Cosimo de’ Medici; and he was said to be one of the richest men in the world. As he entered the palace gate an official came up to him and asked him to wait in the courtyard: he would be taken up to the Council Chamber as soon as the meeting being held there was over. A few minutes later the captain of the guard told him to follow him up the stairs; but, instead of being shown into the Council Chamber, Cosimo de’ Medici was escorted up into the bell-tower and pushed into a cramped cell known as the Alberghettino – the Little Inn – the door of which was shut and locked behind him. Through the narrow slit of its single window, so he later recorded, he looked down upon the city.

It was a city of squares and towers, of busy, narrow, twisting streets, of fortress-like palaces with massive stone walls and overhanging balconies, of old churches whose facades were covered with geometrical patterns in black and white and green and pink, of abbeys and convents, nunneries, hospitals and crowded tenements, all enclosed by a high brick and stone crenellated wall beyond which the countryside stretched to the green surrounding hills. Inside that long wall there were well over 50,000 inhabitants, less than there were in Paris, Naples, Venice and Milan, but more than in most other European cities, including London – though it was impossible to be sure of the exact number, births being recorded by the haphazard method of dropping beans into a box, a black bean for a boy, a white one for a girl.

For administrative purposes the city was divided into four quartieri and each quartiere was in turn divided into four wards which were named after heraldic emblems. Every quartiere had its own peculiar character, distinguished by the trades that were carried on there and by the palaces of the rich families whose children, servants, retainers and guards could be seen talking and playing round the loggie, the colonnaded open-air meeting grounds where business was also discussed.

The busiest parts of the city were the area around the stone bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, which spanned the Arno at its narrowest point and was lined on both sides with butchers’ shops and houses;² the neighbourhood of the Orsanmichele, the communal granary, where in summer the bankers set up their green cloth-covered tables in the street and the silk merchants had their counting-houses;³ and the Mercato Vecchio, the big square where once the Roman Forum had stood.⁴ Here, in the Mercato Vecchio, the Old Market, were the shops of the drapers and the second-hand-clothes dealers, the booths of the fishmongers, the bakers and the fruit and vegetable merchants, the houses of the feather merchants and the stationers, and of the candle-makers where, in rooms smoky with incense to smother the smell of wax, prostitutes entertained their customers. On open counters in the market, bales of silk and barrels of grain, corn and leather goods were exposed for sale, shielded by awnings from the burning sun. Here also out in the open barbers shaved beards and clipped hair; tailors stitched cloth in shaded doorways; servants and housewives gathered round the booths of the cooked-food merchants; bakers pushed platters of dough into the communal oven; and furniture makers and goldsmiths displayed their wares. Town-criers marched about calling out the news of the day and broadcasting advertisements; ragged beggars held out their wooden bowls; children played dice on the flagstones and in winter patted the snow into the shape of lions, the heraldic emblem of the city. Animals roamed everywhere: dogs wearing silver collars; pigs and geese rooting about in doorways; occasionally even a deer or a chamois would come running down from the hills and clatter through the square.

Not many years before, though Dante had denounced their luxurious manners, the Florentines seem to have frowned upon any untoward display of wealth. They had dressed very simply, the standard costume for all men who were not artisans being an ankle-length gown, buttoned down the front like a cassock. Their houses, too, had been unassuming. Even those of the richest families had been furnished with plain wooden tables and the most uninviting beds. The walls were generally whitewashed, tapestries being unpacked from chests to be displayed on special occasions only; floors were of bare stone, rarely covered with anything other than reed matting; the shuttered windows were usually made of oiled cotton. Glass and majolica ornaments were few and discreet; silverware was produced from the sideboard, or from a locked cupboard in the master’s room, for none but the honoured guest; and few families yet had forks. In more recent years, however, though the Florentines continued to enjoy a reputation for frugality, they had become noticeably less abstemious and restrained. The stone houses of the well-to-do still presented a severe, even forbidding appearance to the street; but behind the glazed and curtained windows of the upper storeys, the rooms were frequently carpeted, the walls painted with murals, hung with tapestries, religious pictures and occasionally concave looking-glasses to reflect light onto a table or desk. Fireplaces were much more common so that on cold winter nights warming-pans and scaldini – earthenware jars filled with hot charcoal – were not so necessary. Much of the furniture was painted or decorated with marquetry. The canopied beds, standing on raised platforms and surrounded by footboards, were very large – often twelve feet wide – big enough for four people or even more to sleep in them side by side, lying naked beneath the linen sheets and breathing in air made sweet by scent or by herbs burning slowly in pierced globes hanging from the ceiling.

Over their trunk hose and jacket men still wore the lucco, the scarlet ankle-length gown with long, wide sleeves and a hood attached to the neck; but many young men now preferred more gaily coloured clothes – a pink cape, perhaps, worn with a satin jacket, white stockings shot with silver lace, a velvet cap with a feather in the brim, scented gloves, golden rings and a golden chain, a jewelled dagger and a sword. There were sumptuary laws as there were elsewhere in Europe; but no one paid them much attention. Certainly the women did not. An official, who was ordered to compel women to obey the laws, submitted a characteristic report of his failure:

In obedience to the orders you gave me, I went out to look for forbidden ornaments on the women and was met with arguments such as are not to be found in any book of laws. There was one woman with the edge of her hood fringed out in lace and twined round her head. My assistant said to her, ‘What is your name? You have a hood with lace fringes.’ But the woman removed the laced fringe which was attached to the hood with a pin, and said it was merely a wreath. Further along we met a woman with many buttons in front of her dress; and my assistant said to her, ‘You are not allowed to wear buttons.’ But she replied, ‘These are not buttons. They are studs. Look, they have no loops, and there are no buttonholes.’ Then my assistant, supposing he had caught a culprit at last, went up to another woman and said to her, ‘You are wearing ermine.’ And he took out his book to write down her name. ‘You cannot take down my name,’ the woman protested. ‘This is not ermine. It is the fur of a suckling.’ ‘What do you mean, suckling?’ ‘A kind of animal.’

To the dismay of many an austere churchman, the wives of Florentine merchants were, indeed, renowned for their sumptuous clothes, their elegance, their pale skin and fair hair. If their hair was too dark they dyed it or wore a wig of white or yellow silk; if their skin was too olive they bleached it; if their cheeks were too rosy they powdered them. And they walked the streets in all manner of styles and colours, in dresses of silk and velvet, often adorned with sparkling jewels and silver buttons; in winter they wore damask and fur, showing off prized features of a wardrobe which might well have cost far more than their husband’s house. Unmarried girls of good family were not, of course, allowed such freedom, rarely being seen in the streets at all, except on their way to Mass, and then always heavily veiled. In some households young and precious daughters were not allowed out at all; they had to read Mass in their own bedrooms and to take exercise in their father’s garden or in the family loggia. When it was time for marriage their parents or guardians made all the arrangements, of which the amount of the dowry was the most significant.

Many dowries included foreign slaves whose importation had been officially authorized in 1336 after an outbreak of plague had led to a serious shortage of native servants. These slaves were generally Greeks, Turks or Russians, Circassians or Tartars, the Tartars being preferred by some households because they worked harder, the Circassians by others because they were better looking and better tempered. All were expected to be fully occupied from morning to night, as Fra Bernardino, a travelling preacher from Siena, urged housewives to remember for their own good:

Is there sweeping to be done? Then make your slave sweep. Are there pots to be scoured? Then make her scour them. Are there vegetables to be cleaned or fruit to be peeled? Then set her to them. Laundry? Hand it to her. Make her look after the children and everything else. If you don’t get her used to doing all the work, she will become a lazy little lump of flesh. Don’t give her any lime off, I tell you. As long as you keep her on the go, she won’t waste her time leaning out of the window.

Bought quite cheaply in the markets at Venice and Genoa, the slaves were usually young female children who spent the rest of their lives in bondage. An owner had complete power over them ‘to have, hold, sell, alienate, exchange, enjoy, rent or unrent, dispose of by will, judge soul and body and do with in perpetuity whatsoever may please him and his heirs, and no man may gainsay him’. They were, in fact, considered as chattels, and classed in inventories with domestic animals. Many of them became pregnant by their masters: the correspondence of the time is full of disputes arising from such inconvenience; and the foundling hospitals were continually being presented with little bundles of swarthy or Slavic-looking babies.

At least the slave, hard as she was worked, could generally be sure of eating well, for although she had few legal rights and was often dismissed in documents as a creature of little importance, she was regarded as one of the family and treated as such. In hard times she was certainly better off than the very poor native Florentines who were sometimes reduced to a diet of dried figs or bread made with oak bark. If she belonged to a moderately prosperous family she could look forward to sharing their evening meal of garlic-flavoured pasta, ravioli in broth, liver sausage or black pudding, goat’s milk cheese, fruit and wine, with an occasional pigeon or a piece of meat, usually lamb, on a Sunday. For the richer merchants, of course, there was more exotic fare. Excessive indulgence was forbidden by sumptuary laws; but, as with clothes, the laws were flagrantly disregarded and the most was made of every loophole. If the main course was to consist of no more than ‘roast with pie’, well, then, everything that could possibly be desired was tossed into the pie, from pork and ham to eggs, dates and almonds. An honoured guest of a well-to-do citizen might be offered first of all a melon, then ravioli, tortellini or lasagne, then a berlingozzo, a cake made of flour, eggs and sugar, then a few slices of boiled capon, roast chicken and guinea fowl, followed by spiced veal, or pork jelly, thrushes, tench, pike, eel or trout, boiled kid, pigeon, partridge, turtle-dove or peacock. For vegetables there was usually a choice of broad beans, onions, spinach, carrots, leeks, peas and beetroot. Finally there might be rice cooked in milk of almonds and served with sugar and honey, or pinocchiato, a pudding made out of pine kernels, or little jellies made of almond-milk, coloured with saffron and modelled in the shape of animals or human figures. Everything was strongly flavoured. A chicken minestra would be spiced with ginger and pounded almonds, as well as cinnamon and cloves, and sprinkled with cheese or even sugar. Into a fish pie would go olive oil, orange and lemon juice, pepper, salt, cloves, parsley, nutmegs, saffron, dates, raisins, powdered bay leaves and marjoram. The red sauce known as savore sanguino contained not only meat, wine, raisins, cinnamon and sandal, but also sumac which is now used only for tanning. In summer the main meal of the day in the families of most well-to-do merchants would be served just before dusk at a trestle table near to the open garden door, the guests sitting on straight-backed chairs or, more likely, on benches or the lids of chests, while musicians played softly in a far corner of the room.

From such households as these came the men who ruled Florence. Theoretically every member of the city’s several guilds, the arti, had a say in its government; but this was far from being the case in practice. There were twenty-one guilds in all, seven major ones and fourteen minor. Of the seven major guilds that of the lawyers, the Arte dei Giudici e Notai, enjoyed the highest prestige; next in importance were the guilds of the wool, silk and cloth merchants, the Arte della Lana, the Arte di Por Santa Maria and the Arte di Calimala which took its name from the streets where the cloth warehouses were to be found.⁵ Emerging as a rival to these in riches and consequence was the Arte del Cambio, the bankers’ guild, though bankers still suffered from the condemnation of the Church as usurers and felt obliged to adopt certain customs and euphemisms in an attempt to disguise the true nature of their transactions. The Arte dei Medici, Speziali e Merciai was the guild of the doctors, the apothecaries and the shopkeepers, of merchants who sold spices, dyes and medicines, and of certain artists and craftsmen, like painters who, buying their colours from members of the guild, were themselves admitted to it. The seventh major guild, the Arte dei Vaccai e Pellicciai, looked after the interests of both dealers and craftsmen in animal skins and fur.

The minor guilds were those of such relatively humble tradesmen as butchers, tanners, leatherworkers, smiths, cooks, stonemasons, joiners, vintners and innkeepers, tailors, armourers and bakers. But while a member of the Arte della Lana would look down upon the Arte dei Fabbri, the smiths, in their turn, could feel superior to tens of thousands of those ordinary workers in the wool and silk trades, the weavers, spinners and dyers, the combers and beaters who, like carters and boatmen, labourers, pedlars and all those who had no permanent workshop, did not belong to a guild at all and – though they constituted more than three-quarters of the population of the city – were not allowed to form one. Such deprivation had in the past caused bitterness and occasional outbursts of violence. In the summer of 1378, the lowest class of woollen workers, known as the ciompi – because of the clogs they wore in the wash-houses – rose in revolt, protesting that their wages were scarcely sufficient to keep their families from starvation. Shouting, ‘Down with the traitors who allow us to starve!’ they sacked the houses of those merchants whom they condemned as their oppressors, forced them and their elected officials to flee for their lives, and demanded the right to form three new guilds of their own. The right could not in the circumstances be denied them; but they did not enjoy it for long. The jealousy of their fellow workers in other trades, combined with the power and money of their employers, soon destroyed the ciompi’s short-lived guilds. By 1382 the twenty-one original guilds were once more in undisputed control of the city; and by the re-enactment of the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, which had defined the constitution of Florence as an independent republic, these guilds resumed their manipulation of the government.

The government was formed in this way: the names of all those members of the guilds aged thirty or over who were eligible for election to office were placed in eight leather bags known as horse. Every two months these bags were taken from the sacristy of the church of Santa Croce where they were kept;⁶ and, in a short ceremony to which any citizen who cared to watch it was admitted, names were drawn out at random. Men known to be in debt were declared ineligible for office; so were those who had served a recent term or were related to men whose names had already been drawn. The citizens eventually selected were known for the next two months as Priori; and the government which they constituted was known as the Signoria. There were never more than nine men in the Signoria, six of them representing the major guilds, two of them the minor guilds. The ninth became Gonfaloniere, temporary standard-bearer of the Republic and custodian of the city’s banner – a red lily on a white field. Immediately upon their election all the Priori were required to leave their homes and move into the Palazzo della Signoria where they were obliged to remain for their two-month term of office; they were paid a modest salary to cover their expenses and enjoyed the services of a large staff of green-liveried servants as well as a Buffone who told them funny stories and sang for them when they were having their excellent meals. They wore splendid crimson coats lined with ermine and with ermine collars and cuffs, the Gonfaloniere’s coat being distinguished from the others by its embroidery of golden stars.

In enacting legislation and formulating foreign policy, the Signoria were required to consult two other elected councils known as Collegi, one the Dodici Buonomini, consisting of twelve citizens, the other, the Sedici Gonfalonieri, comprising sixteen. Other councils, such as the Ten of War, the Eight of Security and the Six of Commerce, were elected from time to time as the circumstances of the Republic demanded. There were in addition various permanent officials, notably the Chancellor, who was customarily a distinguished man of letters; the Notaio delle Riformagioni, who promulgated the decrees of the Signoria; and the Podestà, a kind of Lord Chief Justice, a foreigner usually of noble birth who lived at the palace, which was also a prison, later known as the Bargello.⁷

In times of trouble the great bell of the Signoria would be tolled in the campanile of their Palazzo. Because of its deep, mooing tone it was known as the Vacca; and as its penetrating boom sounded throughout Florence all male citizens over the age of fourteen were expected to gather in their respective wards and then to march behind their banners to the Piazza della Signoria to form a Portamento. Usually on such occasions the citizens, having affirmed that two-thirds of their number were present, were asked to approve the establishment of an emergency committee, a Balìa, which was granted full powers to deal with the crisis.

The Florentines were inordinately proud of this system which, upheld by them as a guarantee of their much vaunted freedom, they were ever ready to compare favourably with the forms of government to be found in other less fortunate Italian states. Venice, admittedly, was also a republic, but it was a republic in which, so its detractors soon pointed out, various noble families played a part in government which would have been impossible for such families under the constitution of Florence. Florence’s great rival, Milan, was under the firm rule of a tyrannical duke, Filippo Maria Visconti. The Papal States, a disorderly array of petty tyrannies which sprawled across the peninsula from Rome to the Adriatic, were in a condition approaching anarchy; while the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily was being torn apart by the rival factions of the Houses of Anjou and Aragon.

Compared with these other states, Florence certainly seemed fortunate to enjoy so commendably stable and democratic a government. But in practice the government was not democratic at all. Not only were the ordinary workers, the Minuto Popolo, successfully excluded from it; not only were the nobles, the Grandi, similarly denied representation in the councils of the Republic; but the whole process of election to those councils was controlled by a few of the richest merchant families who contrived to ensure that only the names of reliable supporters found their way into the horse, or, when this proved impossible, that a Portamento should be summoned and a Balìa appointed to ‘reform’ the horse, thus disposing of any unreliable Priori who might have been elected to the Signoria. In fact, it was a government carried on mainly by the rich and almost exclusively in their interests.

To the Florentine merchant, money had a quite extraordinary significance. To be rich was to be honourable, to be poor disgraced. According to that characteristic Renaissance man, Leon Battista Alberti, the philosopher, poet, athlete, painter, musician and architect, who came from one of Florence’s oldest merchant families,⁸ no one who was poor would ever ‘find it easy to acquire honour and fame by means of his virtues’; poverty ‘threw virtue into the shadows’ and subjected it to a ‘hidden and obscure misery’. Matteo Palmieri, another Florentine philosopher of old merchant stock, agreed with this view. In his opinion only the successful merchant who traded on a large scale was worthy of regard and honour: provided the lowest orders of society earned enough to keep them in food from day to day, then they had enough and should not expect to have more. Gregorio Dati, one of Florence’s international silk merchants, went so far as to say, ‘A Florentine who is not a merchant, who has not travelled through the world, seeing foreign nations and peoples and then returned to Florence with some wealth, is a man who enjoys no esteem whatsoever.’

By common consent it was agreed that the trade from which the merchant’s riches were derived must be both ‘comely and grand’. Quickly made fortunes were highly suspect; so were those made from dealing in ‘ugly trades’, from ‘socially inferior skills’, from ‘low callings, suitable for wage earners’. Trade on an imposing scale and in fine merchandise, however, was not only a credit to the merchant who carried it on but also to the Republic itself which derived such benefit from it.

Having acquired riches the merchant must not be chary of spending them. He must have a fine palazzo and a commodious family loggia, a pleasant country villa and a private chapel. He must provide his family with suitably expensive if not unduly flamboyant clothes, and be ready to provide his daughters with handsome dowries. He must be generous in his donations to the building of churches and convents not only for the glory of God but also for the honour of his descendants and of Florence. If he were rich enough he would gain additional prestige by lending money to the. Republic. Giovanni Rucellai, whose enormous fortune was based on the famous Florentine red dye, the oricello, from which his family derived their name, declared that he had done himself much more honour ‘by having spent money well than by having earned it’; he had also derived deeper satisfaction in spending it, especially the money he had spent on his palazzo, a splendid edifice designed by Alberti.⁹

But to be a rich and munificent merchant in a respectable way of business was not in itself sufficient to gain esteem in Florentine society. Ideally a good marriage was also required; so was a tradition of family service to the Republic. Indeed, no one could pretend to high social rank who did not hold or had not held some public office. This was impressed upon the sons of merchants from their earliest years; and a family whose name did not feature on the parchment lists of former Priori, all of whom had been carefully recorded since 1282, was almost beyond the pale. The venerated and enormously rich patrician, Niccolò da Uzzano, kept one of these lists hanging on the wall of his study so that, when the candidature of someone unknown to him was canvassed, he could immediately satisfy himself that he was not a parvenu.¹⁰

The Medici were not parvenus. Yet, compared with many of their rivals, they were not an ancient family either. In later years all manner of legends gained currency.

II THE RISE OF THE MEDICI

IT WAS said that the Medici were descended from one Averardo, a brave knight who had fought under the banner of Charlemagne. This Averardo had once passed through Tuscany on his way to Rome, and in the district to the north of Florence known as the Mugello he had come upon a savage giant, the terror of the poor peasants of the neighbourhood. He had done battle with the monster and had killed him. In the fight his shield had been dented in several places by the heavy blows of the giant’s ferociously wielded mace; and Charlemagne had rewarded Averardo’s bravery by allowing him to commemorate his great victory by representing the dents on his coat-of-arms by red balls or palle on a field of gold – ever afterwards the insignia of the Medici.¹ More prosaically, and rather more probably, others maintained that these red balls represented pills or cupping-glasses, the Medici – as their name suggested – having originally been doctors or apothecaries, descendants of a charcoal burner who had moved into Florence from the Mugello. Yet others had it that the balls represented coins, the traditional emblems of pawnbrokers.

What at least was certain was that in more recent years the Medici had been leading lives of quiet respectability in Florence, prospering as the city prospered, and occasionally occupying public office. The first member of the family to become Gonfaloniere was one Ardingo de’ Medici who was elected to that office in 1296. His brother Guccio also became Gonfaloniere three years later and had the distinction of being buried in a fourth-century sarcophagus which was placed outside the black and white octagonal church of San Giovanni Battista, known as the Baptistery. Another Medici, Cosimo’s great-great grandfather, Averardo, was elected Gonfaloniere in 1314; but thereafter the family appear to have suffered a decline. One of Averardo’s grandsons, Filigno di Conte de’ Medici, lamented this decline in a short book of memoirs he wrote for his children. He was pleased to say that the family still owned several small houses in Florence, as well as two palazzi, an inn, and ‘the half of a palazzo with houses round it’ at Cafaggiolo in the Mugello. They were still quite well off, but not nearly as rich as once they had been; while their social position, though’ still considerable, ought to have been higher’. Gone were the days when it ‘used to be said, “You are like one of the Medici”, and every man feared [them]’.

A cousin of Filigno, Salvestro de’ Medici, reclaimed the family’s prestige by being elected Gonfaloniere in 1370 and again in 1378, the year of the riots of the ciompi. Salvestro was known to be in sympathy with the ciompi and for a time his reputation blossomed in the light of their success. But their ultimate failure ruined him; and thereafter the Medici, whose name was now inevitably associated with the party of the people, were regarded with suspicion by many of the leading families of the city.

It was a suspicion which Cosimo’s father, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, had always been anxious to allay. He had not been born rich: the little money left by his own father had had to be divided between a widow and five sons. And having made his own fortune, Giovanni was determined not to put it in jeopardy. His sympathies, like Salvestro’s, were supposed to be with the Minuto Popolo and he consequently enjoyed much popularity with them. Yet he was a man of the utmost discretion, acutely aware of the danger of arousing the Florentines’ notorious distrust of overtly ambitious citizens, anxious to remain as far as possible out of the public eye while making money in his rapidly expanding banking business.

He enjoyed the reputation of a kind man, honest, understanding and humane; yet no one could mistake the worldly-wise shrewdness in his hooded eyes nor the determined set of his large chin. He was never eloquent, but in his talk there were occasional flashes of wit which were rendered all the more disarming by the habitually lugubrious expression of his pale face. Although his riches had been increased by the handsome dowry which his wife, Piccarda Bueri, had brought into the family, he lived with her and his two sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo, in a modest house in the Via Larga before moving to a slightly larger but still unpretentious house in the Piazza del Duomo not far from the unfinished cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.² Giovanni would have preferred to avoid public life altogether, as many minor merchants contrived to do; he would ideally have liked to divide his time between his house in Florence and his country villa, between his office in the Piazza del Duomo and his bank in the Via Porta Rossa³ near the present Mercato Nuovo.⁴ But in Florence, as one of his grandsons was to say, rich merchants did not prosper without taking a share in the government.

So Giovanni reluctantly accepted office as one of the Priori in the Signoria in 1402, in 1408 and again in 1411; and in 1421, for the statutory two-month period, he occupied the office of Gonfabniere. For the rest he appeared content to sit in the shadows of his counting-house, contributing generously to public funds and private charities, investing in land in the surrounding countryside, adopting no more definite a political stance than one of moderate opposition to the civic aspirations of the dispossessed Grandi – whose banker he was nevertheless happy to be – and allowing the rich Albizzi family to exercise control of the government through their friends and nominees in the Signoria.

It had to be agreed even by their political opponents that this period of rule by the Albizzi and their associates had not so far been particularly unpopular in Florence, coinciding as it did with a time of relative prosperity. It had been a harsh rule to be sure: opposition to it had been rigorously crushed; malcontents and rivals had been arrested, banished, impoverished, even executed. But Florentine territories had gradually and continually expanded. Before the Albizzi came to power these territories already stretched far beyond the walls of the city and included the towns of Pistoia, Volterra, and Prato which was bought from the Queen of Naples in 1351. But since they had successfully taken over the government, the Albizzi had not only gained possession of Arezzo; they had also opened up a passage to the sea by capturing Pisa and its port, Porto Pisano, in 1406, and in 1421 they had bought Leghorn from the Genoese.

The acquisition of these ports – celebrated at Pisa by the launching of the first Florentine armed galley – immensely increased the wealth of the Republic, and gave a new impetus to the trade in wool and cloth upon which its prosperity had long depended. From England and the Low Countries, as well as from the hills and valleys of Tuscany, vast quantities of wool had for generations come into Florence to be refined, dyed and re-exported. Before the Black Death the industry was believed to have supported as many as 30,000 people. This explained the importance and influence of the Arte di Calimak and the Arte della Lana, the cloth and wool trade guilds, which for so long had played an essential part in the government of the city and had been responsible for the construction of so many of its finest buildings. The building of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, for instance, had been entrusted to officials of the Arte della Lana whose emblem of a lamb was a notable feature on its walls.

The owner of two wool workshops in Florence, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was a member of the Arte della Lana; but, since his main interest was banking, he was also a member of the Arte del Cambio, a guild whose prestige had been increasing ever since 1252 when the bankers of the city had issued a beautiful small gold coin, stamped on its reverse side with the city’s Latin name, Florentia, and on the obverse with its emblem, the lily.⁵ This was the famous Jiorino d’oro which became internationally known as the flower, the florence or the florin. It contained fifty-four grains of fine gold, and in terms of purchasing power the florin of the 1430s might be considered the equivalent of about £20 today: certainly a man could live very comfortably indeed on an annual income of 150 florins; a small house and garden in the city could be rented for about thirty-five florins a year; a handsome palazzo could be bought for a thousand; a maidservant would cost him no more than ten florins a year and a slave could be bought for fifty. The florin had rapidly gained universal confidence and was soon in common use throughout Europe, to the great credit of the city of its origin and to the banking houses which conducted business there. In 1422 there were two million golden florins in circulation and seventy-two bankers and bill-brokers in the neighbourhood of the Mercato Vecchio. One of the most prosperous and certainly the most rapidly expanding of these businesses was that of the Medici.

An office in Rome had been established in the previous century by Giovanni’s distant cousin, Vieri di Cambio de’ Medici; there were also branches in Venice and Genoa, Naples and Gaeta. Giovanni de’ Medici, who had begun his career as an apprentice to his cousin Vieri, opened a new branch in Geneva, a second branch in Rome, and, as a consequence of the growth in trade following the conquest of Pisa, established correspondents in Bruges and London. But Giovanni’s success as a banker was not so much due to the prosperity of the Florentine wool trade as to his friendship with the Pope.

It seemed a most improbable friendship, for Baldassare Cossa, who was elected Pope in 1410, was not at all the sort of man with whom a rather staid and provident banker might be expected to associate. Sensual, adventurous, unscrupulous and highly superstitious, Baldassare Cossa came of an old Neapolitan family and had once been a pirate. When he decided to enter the Church it appeared to those who knew him best that he sought further adventure rather than the service of God. Adventures he certainly had.

The Church at this time was in a deplorable condition with a pope at Avignon contesting the rival claims of a pope at Rome. In an attempt to end this ‘great schism’, which was dividing Europe into rival camps, a Council had met at Pisa in 1409. The Council’s solution had been to depose both the Avignon pope, Benedict XIII, and the Italian pope, Gregory XII, and to elect a new pope, Alexander V, who promptly adjourned the Council. Since neither of the previous rivals was prepared to accept the verdict of the Council there were now three popes instead of two, a situation which was not improved when Alexander V died and Baldassare Cossa succeeded him, choosing the title of Pope John XXIII. In a fresh attempt to resolve the difficulty, the German Emperor Sigismund summoned a new Council at Constance, and towards the end of 1414 Pope John left for Constance, apparently taking with him a representative of the Medici bank as his financial adviser.

By this time the Medici were well established as the Pope’s bankers. Other Florentine banking houses, notably the Alberti, the Ricci and the Spini, had acted as financial agents for the Curia in the past; and the amount of business which the Medici had conducted at Rome was relatively small, though Giovanni had much increased its volume while he was working there between 1386 and 1397. During the pontificate of John XXIII, however, it was the Medici who were most closely associated with the affairs of the Curia. It was said that they had helped to secure this position for themselves by providing the Pope with the money – 10,000 ducats – with which he had purchased his cardinal’s hat; certainly, while he had been Cardinal Legate at Bologna from 1403 until 1410 he had constantly been in correspondence with Giovanni, with whom he had conducted a great deal of business and to whom he referred as ‘my very dear friend’.

After Cardinal Cossa’s election as Pope the Medici had begun to enjoy an exceptionally profitable relationship with the Papal Chamber, by which the Curia’s revenues were collected and disbursed. They had also been the principal backers of John XXIII during his war with King Ladislaus of Naples who supported the claims of Gregory XII one of the two rival popes; and when Pope John made peace with King Ladislaus in June 1412 it was again the Medici who played the main part in finding the 95,000 florins which were to be paid to the King of Naples under the terms of the treaty. Two valuable mitres, as well as a quantity of papal plate, were handed over to one of the Rome branches of the Medici bank as a pledge. This sort of transaction was not to Giovanni’s taste; but it was a small and necessary price to pay for the enormous profits to be made from the handling of papal finances. How truly immense these profits were may be judged from the fact that over half the astonishing profits of the Medici bank now came from the two Rome branches.

At the Council of Constance, however, the Medici suffered a setback. Pope John arrived at Constance at the end of October 1414 to find himself accused of all kinds of crimes including heresy, simony, tyranny, the murder by poison of Alexander V and the seduction of no fewer than two hundred of the ladies of Bologna. After escaping from Constance disguised as a layman with a cross-bow slung over his shoulder, he was betrayed and brought back to face the Council, which deposed both him and Benedict XIII, accepted the resignation of Gregory XII, and elected a new pope, Martin V.

Pope John, ill and destitute, was held prisoner for three years in the Castle of Heidelberg until the Medici once more came to his help by arranging, through their Venetian branch, to pay a ransom for his release of 38,500 Rhenish gulden. Accompanied by Bartolomeo de’ Bardi (soon to become the Medici’s manager in Rome), the deposed Pope made his way to Florence where Giovanni de’ Medici welcomed him, provided him with a home for the remaining few months of his life, and interceded on his behalf with Martin V, who agreed to appoint him Cardinal-Bishop of Tusculum.

Martin V was then also living in Florence where he remained for two years at the monastery of Santa Maria Novella.⁶ He was a gentle, simple man, but his relations with the Medici were not as close and friendly as Giovanni would have liked. There was trouble over a pearl-encrusted mitre which had come into Medici hands at the time of Pope John’s flight from Constance and which was only returned to the papal chancellor after Giovanni had been threatened with excommunication. There was trouble, too, over Pope John’s will, under the terms of which the Medici received a finger of St John the Baptist which the testator, whose trust in relics was unbounded, had carried with him always. Later there was a quarrel over Pope John’s tomb in the Baptistery, which contained upon its base the words ‘Ioannes Quondam Papa XXIII’, an inscription which Pope Martin V considered an affront to his own authority.

On 9 September 1420 Pope Martin left Florence for Rome accompanied by twelve cardinals. An immense procession of the city’s officials, representatives of the guilds and the colleges, and uniformed standard-bearers escorted him to the Porta di San Pier Gattolini where he gave them all his apostolic blessing. He then rode out of the city to the convent of San Gaggio. Here ‘he got down from his horse’, so a contemporary chronicler reported, ‘and asked for all the nuns of the convent to be brought before him. He blessed them one after the other and kissed them on the forehead over their veils.’

Giovanni de’ Medici, who had accompanied the procession as one of the four Cavalieri, those honoured citizens of Florence who had the right to wear golden spurs, watched him depart and cannot have felt other than concerned that his bank’s relationship with the Papacy had become so strained. The Medici were not entirely excluded from curial business, but they no longer enjoyed the special privileges they had had in the time of Pope John XXIII. Now it was their ancient rivals, the Spini, who were favoured by the Papal Chamber.⁷ But towards the end of 1420 the Spini company suddenly failed and were forced into bankruptcy. Soon afterwards the Medici manager in Rome took over their business, and his bank recovered its former position. Within a few years, indeed, the Medici bank became not only the most successful commercial enterprise in Italy, but the most profitable family business in the whole of Europe. For this as much credit was due to the elder son as to the father.

Cosimo had been born on 27 September 1389, the day upon which are commemorated the early Christian martyrs, Cosmas and Damian, the patron saints of physicians, whom he was often to have introduced into paintings commissioned by him or painted in his honour. He had received his early education at the school of the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where he had begun to learn German and French as well as Latin and a smattering of Hebrew, Greek and Arabic.⁸ Later, together with the young sons of other rich Florentine families, he had attended the lectures and lessons of Roberto de’ Rossi, one of the leading scholars of the day and himself a member of an old and wealthy Florentine family. Under Roberto de’ Rossi’s enlightened guidance, and thereafter in discussion groups at the Santa Maria degli Angeli monastery which he continued to attend in his middle age, Cosimo acquired and developed that deep respect for classical learning and classical ideals, combined with an interest in man’s life on earth which was to remain with him for ever. He became, in fact, a humanist.

He was not as learned as many other humanists in his circle, though Pope Pius II, who had a very low opinion of Florentines in general, condemning them as ‘traders, a sordid populace who can be persuaded to nothing noble’, allowed that Cosimo was a highly cultured, clever and knowledgeable man, ‘more lettered than merchants are wont to be’. Certainly there were few Florentine humanists with a wider knowledge of classical manuscripts which he began to collect at an early age, and there were scarcely any who were more intensely concerned with the importance of humanistic ideals in the conduct of public life. Although he himself never became a master of those arts and disciplines, such as rhetoric, which the humanist was taught to practise, he never questioned the right of those who did master them to occupy the most honoured positions in Florentine society. Most of them, after all, came from the same sort of background as himself. But in one important respect Cosimo was different, as his father had always urged him to be, from most of the humanists of Florence: he seemed anxious to remain, as far as possible, out of the public eye.

He was rarely to be seen walking the streets of the city, never with more than one servant in attendance, and always quietly dressed, scrupulous in giving the wall to older citizens and ‘showing the utmost deference to the magistrates’. He left it to the scions of other rich families to play the parts of paladins: at a big tournament in the Piazza Santa Croce in 1428,⁹ when Lorenzo, son of the great Palla Strozzi,¹⁰ won the victor’s laurels, Cosimo was not even mentioned as having been present, nor was any other member of his family. When people came to him for help or to ask his advice about some business matter, he would listen to them carefully and quietly and then tell them what he thought in a few, short words, almost brusquely, as though unwilling to commit himself to friendship. Ordinary people liked him, though, and trusted him; and, even in later years, when age had withered his sallow features giving them a sardonic twist, when his curt and often ambiguous observations assumed an increasingly sarcastic and derisive note, there was something in his manner that commanded affection rather than awe.

He was still in his early twenties when he married Contessina de’ Bardi, eldest daughter of Giovanni de’ Bardi, one of his father’s partners in the Rome branch of their bank. The Bardi were an old Florentine family and had once been immensely rich; but, like the Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli families, they had lent far more than was ever repaid to various rulers, including King Edward III of England and Robert, the Angevin King of Naples, so that they had consequently fallen on hard times. The dowry which Contessina was able to bring to her husband was therefore not a large one, although it included the Palazzo Bardi, the family palace in the Via de’ Bardi, a street whose houses had once all belonged to her family.¹¹ She and Cosimo moved into the palace, whose rooms were soon unobtrusively decorated with the Medici insignia; and it was here that their first child, Piero, was born – in accordance with the hopes of a well-wisher who had written to Cosimo, ‘God preserve you and arrange that the first night you sleep with your noble and illustrious wife, you may conceive a male child.’

Contessina appears to have been a rather unimaginative, fussy, managing woman. Fond of good food, fat, capable and cheerful, she was also domestic and unsociable. Far more scantily educated than her granddaughters were to be, she was, like many another Florentine wife, denied access to her husband’s study. Cosimo was quite fond of her; but he was never in the least uxorious, and bore his long partings from her with equanimity, writing to her seldom.

The first of these partings appears to have occurred in 1414 when, at the age of twenty-five, Cosimo is reported by his friend, the bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, as having left for the Council of Constance with Pope John XXIII. He was away for two years, travelling from city to city north of the Alps after Pope John’s deposition, and visiting the various branches of the family bank in Germany, France and Flanders. He was back in Florence at the time of Pope John’s death; but soon afterwards went down to Rome as branch manager, leaving his wife behind in the Palazzo Bardi to look after their son, Piero, and Piero’s younger brother, Giovanni.

Cosimo was manager in Rome for over three years, making occasional visits to Florence but living most of the time in a house at Tivoli where he was looked after by a slave-girl whom he called Maddalena. One of his agents had bought this girl for him in Venice, having established that she was ‘a sound virgin, free from disease and aged about twenty-one’. Cosimo was attracted by her, shared his bed with her; and she bore him a son. As was usual in such unexceptional cases the son, who was christened Carlo, was brought up with Contessina’s sons and given a suitably thorough classical education. A young man of markedly Circassian appearance, he entered the Church and, through his father’s influence, became Rector of Prato and Protonotary Apostolic.¹²

While Cosimo remained in business at Rome, he was able to avoid arousing the jealousy of his family’s rivals and enemies in Florence; but soon after his return his obvious capacity and his supposed support of the Popolo Minuto against the Magnati reawakened the Albizzi’s suspicions of his family.

His father, always so wary and discreet, had throughout his life maintained his reputation for modesty and moderation. When the Albizzi approached him with plans to tighten the hold of the existing oligarchy on the government of the Republic, he declined to cooperate with them. But as soon as the Albizzi’s opponents, learning of this refusal, endeavoured to gain Giovanni’s support for a more positive resistance to the oligarchy, he replied that he had no intention of helping to bring about a change of government and that, in any case, he was too busy with his own business affairs. Likewise, when the Albizzi proposed to reform the iniquitous Florentine tax system by introducing a new kind of income and property tax known as the catasto, Giovanni, after greeting the proposal with the utmost caution, eventually agreed to support it but with so many conditions and reservations that his actual attitude towards it was clouded by ambiguity.

All his life he had been at pains to behave like this, never to give cause for jealousy, always to avoid commitment; and as he lay dying he urged his two sons to follow his example. Be inoffensive to the rich and strong, he advised them, while being consistently charitable to the poor and weak.

Do not appear to give advice, but put your views forward discreetly in conversation. Be wary of going to the Palazzo della Signoria; wait to be summoned, and when you are summoned, do what you are asked to do and never display any pride should you receive a lot of votes… Avoid litigation and political controversy, and always keep out of the public eye…

When the time came, Cosimo was to give his own sons similar advice; but, despite his apparent modesty and the guarded reticence of his manner, he was far more ambitious than his father and was determined to put his money to different uses. The Albizzi watched his progress with suspicion and concern.

III ENEMIES OF THE ALBIZZI

THE HEAD of the Albizzi family, Rinaldo di Messer Maso, was a haughty, proud, impulsive man, reactionary and priggish.¹ He had proved his worth as a soldier and a diplomat, and was firmly resolved both to maintain the power of the oligarchy – if necessary by halving the number of the lesser guilds – and to defeat Florence’s rivals in battle. He had already pushed the Signoria into an inconclusive war with Milan; and in 1429 he urged a war with Lucca which had sided with Milan against Florence, her ancient enemy and principal competitor in the silk trade. The idea of conquering Lucca was popular in the city; and Cosimo himself was later to lament that its rich territories, stretching from the mountains to the coast, remained stubbornly independent despite all attempts to subjugate them by force. But he doubted that the moment was propitious for war; and, although he consented to serve on the emergency committee, the Ten of War, he did so with evident reluctance, hinting that under the direction of the Albizzi the Florentine army could not possibly win. His caution was justified. The Lucchesi appealed to Milan for help, and, in response to their request, Duke Filippo Maria Visconti dispatched to Lucca the great condottiere, Francesco Sforza. The Florentine mercenaries were no match for Sforza, whom the Signoria were reduced to buying off with a bribe of 50,000 florins; and when this merely led to the Duke of Milan finding another talented general for the Lucchesi – Niccolò Piccinino – the Ten of War were driven to devising a complicated plan to divert the river Serchio and thus sweep away Lucca’s ramparts by a sudden inundation of water. This plan also failed as its critics had predicted: the garrison rushed out of Lucca at night, pulled down the Florentines’ dam and sent the waters cascading into the enemy camp. By the autumn of 1430 Cosimo had decided that it would be unwise to remain associated any longer with the conduct of the disastrous and enormously expensive campaign. So, making the excuse that he wished to let others have their turn serving on the war committee, he left Florence for Verona.

In his absence his enemies spread rumours in Florence that he was using his enormous wealth to overthrow the government by hiring condottieri to invade the Republic. There were those who believed these rumours; and there were many more who, while not believing them, were prepared to use them as an excuse for ridding Florence of an over-successful rival. A deputation of disgruntled Grandi and Magnati called upon the elderly Niccolò da Uzzano, the most respected statesman in Florence, to seek his advice and enlist his support in their proposed attack on Cosimo. Niccolò received the deputation at his palace in the Via de’ Bardi; he listened to them politely, but was wary and discouraging: even if it were possible to get rid of the Medici, would it really be desirable to increase thereby the power of the Albizzi who might even become tyrants like the Visconti of Milan? Besides, it might very well not be possible to get rid of them. If it came to a contest between the adherents of the two families, it was doubtful that the Albizzi would get the best of it. The Minuto Popolo, grateful for past favours, were still on the Medici’s side. They had other supporters too: several of the most prominent families in the city, the Tornabuoni and the Portinari amongst them, were closely associated with them in various business undertakings; other families were indebted to them for loans and gifts; yet others were linked to them by marriage – the Bardi by Contessina’s marriage to Cosimo, the Cavalcanti and Malespini by his brother, Lorenzo’s, marriage to Ginevra Cavalcanti.² Moreover, in the close-knit circle of the humanists, Cosimo had numerous friends, whereas Rinaldo degli Albizzi – an outspoken not to say bigoted critic of the new classical learning as being inimical to the Christian faith – had many enemies.

Niccolò Niccoli, Carlo Marsuppini, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni and Ambrogio Traversari were all close friends of Cosimo and each one of them was already an influential figure in Florentine society. They were all remarkable men. Niccolò Niccoli, the handsome, aesthetic son of a rich Florentine wool merchant, was at sixty-six the oldest. A most fastidious, exquisitely dressed and almost excessively neat dilettante, he had never cared for trade and had exhausted his inherited fortune on a beautiful house and a magnificent collection of books and manuscripts, medals, coins, intaglios, cameos and vases which ‘no distinguished visitor to Florence ever failed to inspect’. He had begun this collection when Cosimo, twenty-five years younger than he, was a child; and, as Cosimo grew up, he had been inspired by it to make a similar collection of his own. They had once planned to go to the Holy Land together in search of Greek manuscripts; but a journey for such a purpose had not commended itself to Giovanni de’ Medici, who had packed off his son into the bank before he caught any other fanciful ideas from Niccolò. For Niccolò’s devotion to classical antiquity was an obsession. He eventually amassed eight hundred books, by far the largest library of his day, and was adding new volumes to his shelves up to the day of his death, selling off land and borrowing money from Cosimo in order to do so. He never wrote a book himself, since he never managed to finish a paragraph that wholly satisfied his exacting taste; but he did develop a cursive script which enabled his scribes to copy out manuscripts quickly, neatly and elegantly and which became the basis for the italic type used by the early Italian printers. He became an object of curiosity to visitors to Florence, who looked out for his dignified figure as he passed gracefully down the street but who were warned that he could be very brusque, ill-tempered and dismissive. The only person of whom he himself appeared to be in awe was his termagant of a mistress whom he had taken over from one of his five brothers, much to the annoyance of the rest of the family. One day two of these brothers, enraged by the girl’s brash ill-temper, bundled her out of the house and gave her a good thrashing. Niccolò, to whose sensitive ears even the’ squeaking of a trapped mouse’ was intolerable, burst into tears at her screams.

Many of Niccolò’s manuscripts were discovered for him by his friend Poggio Bracciolini, who was to achieve lasting fame as a scholar, orator, essayist, historian, satirist and author of a collection of humorous and indecent tales, the Facetiae. Born in a village near Florence in 1380, he was the son of an impoverished apothecary, and came to the city as a boy with only a few coins in his pocket. He contrived to get a place at the Studio Fiorentino,³ the university which had been founded in 1321 after the Pope’s excommunication of Bologna and which Cosimo, as one of its trustees, had helped to extend by pressing for the employment of professors of moral philosophy, rhetoric and poetry in addition to those already teaching grammar, law, logic, astrology, surgery and medicine. Poggio studied law, entered the guild of notaries and obtained employment as a writer of apostolic letters at the Curia. He went with Pope John XXIII to the Council of Constance and, some years later, accompanied Cosimo on a holiday to Ostia where they made an archaeological study of the area. Resourceful, charming, cheerful, convivial, humorous, highly intelligent and not above bribing monks whose assistance could not otherwise be procured, he was immediately and remarkably successful as Niccolò Niccoli’s agent in seeking out manuscripts in Germany, France and Switzerland. He brought all manner of treasures to light, discovering whole masterpieces long since lost and the full texts of what had previously been known only in mutilated copies. In the library of one Swiss monastery, for instance, which was housed in a dingy, dirty dungeon at the bottom of a tower, he found Lucretius’s De rerum natura, a history by Ammianus Marcellinus, a book on cookery by Apicius and an important work on Roman education by Quintilian.

Texts which could not be purchased he copied out in an exquisite, easily-read and well-spaced hand, using as his model the eleventh-century Carolingian script rather than the tiresome, clumsy Gothic handwriting which had superseded it. When Cosimo de’ Medici saw Poggio’s script he decided to have all his own books copied in a similar manner. It was also admired by the early Italian printers who used it as a basis for their Roman type, just as they had used Niccolò Niccoli’s cursive script for their italic. In Poggio’s script lay the origins of modern handwriting and of modern printing.

Poggio, however, was not one of those humanists who became so involved in study they lost their taste for life. He loved eating and drinking, making jokes and making love. Ideally he liked to work in the company of pretty girls. He told Niccolò Niccoli how one day, when he was copying an inscription, he had broken off to feast his eye on two girls who were watching him. Niccolò had been rather shocked; but Poggio replied that whenever he was working he would always choose to have well-shaped girls beside him ‘rather than a long-horned buffalo’. He had several mistresses and, by his own admission, fourteen illegitimate children for whom he could afford to care well; with his business sense, and through his connection with the Curia, he had been able to make a great deal of money. It was not until he was fifty-five that he decided to get married. Then, characteristically, he chose a pretty girl of eighteen who brought him a handsome dowry with which he purchased a palazzo where, in due course, six more of his children were born.

Like Poggio, Leonardo Bruni, another of Cosimo’s humanist friends, had come to Florence as a poor young boy, had studied law at the Studio Fiorentino and, having obtained employment at the Curia, had amassed a fortune. But he was far more intense and earnest than Poggio, sharp-nosed, alert, inclined to be arrogant and, so a fellow humanist said of him, ‘unbelievably eloquent’. He strongly disapproved of Niccolò Niccoli’s having a mistress; and Poggio he considered to be really depraved. He himself had abandoned the idea of a career in the Church in order to marry a respectable, and extremely rich, young woman. Thereafter he devoted himself to writing, translating, and to playing his due part in the civic life of Florence, a city which he urged men to consider as the successor of the ancient republics and of which he was to become – and tenaciously to remain – Chancellor. So exalted was his reputation that an envoy from the King of Spain was once seen to fall on his knees before his magnificently red-robed figure.

An equally honourable but far more modest and saintly man was Ambrogio Traversari, to whom Cosimo was devoted. A little monk who never ate meat, Traversari had come to Florence from the Romagna, where his family owned large estates, and had entered the austere Camaldolite Order of which he had just become Vicar-General. He was a formidable scholar who had taught himself Hebrew, and was as much at his ease in translating Greek as Latin. So rapidly, indeed, could he translate Greek into the most polished Latin that Niccolò Niccoli, who could write as quickly as any man in Florence, could not keep up with his dictation. For Cosimo, who was just three years older than he was, he translated all of Diogenes Laertius’s works overcoming his modesty to include the most impure passages with the rest. Cosimo was a frequent visitor to his rooms at Santa Maria degli Angeli, and was soon to have cause to feel deeply grateful for his firm friendship in his imminent clash with the Albizzi.

Also seen frequently at the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli was Carlo Marsuppini, a scholar from a noble family of Arezzo, who had been appointed lecturer in rhetoric and poetry at the University. At the age of thirty-two he was the youngest of Cosimo’s humanist friends; but his learning was already renowned – during the course of one single celebrated lecture he contrived to quote from every known Greek and Latin author. He was considerably less prolific than Bruni but, not as fastidious as Niccolò Niccoli, he did manage to produce one or two Latin translations from the Greek, some epigrams and poetry, and a funeral oration for Cosimo’s mother.

Marsuppini’s bitter rival at the University was a young man of his own age, Francesco Filelfo, who was born at Tolentino near Ancona where his parents, both Florentines, were then living. Before he was twenty he had already gained a reputation as a classical scholar that enabled him to obtain an important diplomatic appointment in the Venetian service at Constantinople. Here he married the pretty daughter of his Greek tutor, John Chrysoloras, whose brother, Emmanuel Chrysoloras, had been Professor of Greek at the University of Florence. Filelfo himself came to teach in Florence at the invitation of Niccolò Niccoli who was, at first, delighted by his versatility and energy. Filelfo rushed from lecture to lecture, talking from dawn to dusk and with equal facility about Cicero and Terence, Homer and Livy, Thucydides and Xenophon. He also lectured on moral philosophy, and once a week in the Cathedral gave a public discourse on Dante. In addition to these activities he found time to write numerous epigrams and odes, speeches and histories, and to undertake translations whenever these promised to be sufficiently profitable. But after a time Niccolò Niccoli began to regret ever having asked the bustling young man with the Byzantine beard to come to Florence. Filelfo proved to be vain, ill-tempered, insolent, avaricious, prodigal and spiteful. Cosimo’s friends took to avoiding him, and in his quarrels with Carlo Marsuppini they took his rival’s side. Filelfo then courted the Albizzi and offered them his services as a master of invective. Cosimo, who had greeted him warmly on his arrival in Florence and had offered to pay his rent, was to become the most virulently savaged of all his victims.

Yet so long as the other humanists in Florence remained his friends and, what was even more important, so long as Niccolò da Uzzano was alive, Cosimo had no reason to fear that the Albizzi could mobilize forces strong enough to ruin him. Even though he was generally sympathetic towards the political views of the Albizzi, Niccolò da Uzzano had always respected the Medici and had actually been moved to tears at the funeral of Cosimo’s father. But in 1432 Niccolò himself died and, thereafter, Rinaldo degli Albizzi’s anti-Medicean plot quickly matured. Malicious stories about Cosimo, many doubtless inspired by Filelfo, began to circulate in the streets of Florence: he dressed so plainly, it was said, only the more easily to avoid accusations about his ill-gotten riches; his supposed sympathy for the people was no more than the calculated duplicity of the self-seeker; had he not been heard to say that the people never did anything honest except for their own advantage or out of fear? His well-publicized donations to religious charities and building funds were utter hypocrisy, the conscience-money of a usurer, given with an eye to his family’s glory and nothing more; did he not always make sure that the Medici insignia were prominently displayed on any building that he had paid for? Why, he had emblazoned ‘even the monks’ privies with his balls’! One night in the early months of 1433 the doors of Cosimo’s palace were smeared with blood.

Once again, as in the autumn of 1430 when he had gone to Verona, Cosimo withdrew from Florence, this time to his estate il Trebbio in the Mugello where he stayed for several months.⁴ Meantime, he discreetly transferred huge sums of money from his bank in Florence to his branches in Rome and Naples, giving orders for bags of coins to be desposited for safe keeping with the Benedictine hermits of San Miniato al Monte and the Dominican friars of San Marco, where they would be safe from confiscation should the Albizzi move against him.

While Cosimo was away in the country, Rinaldo degli Albizzi set about manipulating the elections to the new Signoria which was due to meet in September. He completed the work with unobtrusive skill. Of the nine Priori chosen, seven were definitely prepared to support him, while only two, Bartolommeo Spini and Jacopo Ber-linghieri, were believed to be possible Medici adherents. The man elected as Gonfaloniere was Bernardo Guadagni whose debts Rinaldo had settled in order to render him eligible for office.⁵

During the first week in September, Cosimo who was still in the Mugello, received an urgent summons from Guadagni to return to the city immediately. There were, he was told, ‘some important decisions to be made’. He decided to face them.

Cosimo arrived back in Florence on 4 September 1433. That afternoon he went to the Palazzo della Signoria to see the Gonfaloniere, Bernardo Guadagni, who was evasive and uncommunicative: the ‘important decisions’ which had necessitated Cosimo’s return from the Mugello would be discussed when the Signoria met in council three days later; in the meantime there was no way of accounting for the rumours of impending trouble which had been circulating in the city for the past few days.

After leaving the Gonfaloniere, Cosimo went to sec one of the Priori whom he believed to be a friend and from whom he received the same kind of vague reassurance. He then went to his bank, no doubt to arrange for the transfer of further sums from Florence. After that he could do nothing but await the imminent meeting of the Signoria.

When he arrived at the Palazzo della Signoria on the morning of 7 September the session had already begun. As the captain of the guard escorted him up the stairs, he passed the shut door of the Council Chamber. Soon after being locked inside his little cell he was told that he had been ‘arrested on good grounds, as would be soon made clear’.

Two days later, on 9 September, the huge Vacca boomed in the belfry above his head to call the citizens of Florence to a Parlamento in the Piazza. As the low, mooing notes of the bell sounded through the city, crowds of people began to converge upon the Piazza in response to its summons; but armed supporters of the Albizzi halted them at the entrances to the square and all those who were known to be, or suspected of being, Medici adherents were denied entry. Looking down from the window of his cell, Cosimo afterwards claimed to have counted no more than twenty-three heads in front of the ringhiera, the ground-floor stone terrace upon which the Priori were standing. In the name of the Signoria these few citizens were asked by the Notaio delle Riformagioni if they agreed to the establishment of a Balìa, a committee of two hundred members ‘to reform the city for the good of the people’. Obediently they gave their approval and a Balìa was accordingly appointed.

Although Rinaldo degli Albizzi now seemed to be in full control of the government, the Balìa could not be persuaded to recommend the execution of Cosimo as he strongly urged it to do. Its discussions were apparently stormy and indecisive, some members supporting the proposal that Cosimo should be beheaded, others arguing that banishment would be punishment enough, one or two suggesting that the prisoner ought to be released. It was clear that many members of the Balìa were reluctant to go to the extremes advocated by the Albizzi not only for fear of the violent disapproval of those thousands of Florentines who, though for the moment intimidated, still looked to the Medici as their champions, but also because his arrest had already called forth strong protests from abroad. The Marquis of Ferrara, a customer of the Medici bank, had intervened on Cosimo’s behalf. The Venetian Republic, also financially indebted to him, had immediately dispatched three ambassadors to Florence who did all in their power to secure his release; and if, after a heated talk with Rinaldo, they failed to do so, their arrival in Florence, as Cosimo said himself, had ‘a great effect on those who were in favour of executing’ him. Rinaldo also had a visit from Cosimo’s old friend, Ambrogio Traversari, Vicar-General of the Camaldolite Order, and supposedly the representative of an even more influential customer of the Medici bank, Eugenius IV, the austere son of a Venetian merchant, who had succeeded Martin V as Pope two years before. By this time Rinaldo had succeeded in bringing a charge of treason against Cosimo by having two of his supporters tortured on the rack. One of these, Niccolò Tinucci, a celebrated notary and occasional poet, had been forced by the city rackmaster to confess that Cosimo had intended to enlist foreign help in bringing about a revolution in the city. Neither Traversari nor the Venetian ambassadors believed in this confession; nor did most of the citizens of Florence. Rinaldo, indeed, was gradually being forced to conclude that he would have to be content with a sentence of banishment rather than the death penalty which his henchman Francesco Filelfo was so insistently demanding.

In his cell in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria, Cosimo had been allowed to see a few selected visitors, in addition to Ambrogio Traversari. He had also been permitted to have his meals brought over from the Palazzo Bardi as he was afraid of being poisoned. But the greatest care was taken to ensure that he neither received nor gave any messages, and that no communications passed between him and his bank: an official watched over the cooking, carrying and serving of his food, while a guard remained within earshot when he was talking to his visitors. But the guard, Federigo Malavolti, was sympa-pathetic: messages did pass out of the cell, and bribes were offered and accepted. The Gonfaloniere himself, the impecunious Bernardo Gua-dagni, readily pocketed a thousand florins as soon as they were offered to him – he was a feeble fellow, Cosimo afterwards commented derisively, as he could have had ten thousand or more if he had asked for them. Anyway, in return for the relatively modest bribe, Gua-dagni announced that he had suddenly been taken so ill that he could no longer participate in the council’s deliberations; he delegated his vote to another Priore, Mariotto Baldovinetti, who, equally impecunious, had also received a bribe from the Medici coffers.

As well as having to contend with former supporters who had now been suborned, with powerful foreign customers of the Medici bank, with faithful friends of the Medici family who were growing more outspoken every day, and with the gradual desertion of such influential moderates as Palla Strozzi, the Albizzi had also to face the possibility of an armed uprising. For as soon as he heard of the arrest, Cosimo’s brother, Lorenzo, and various other members of the family had rushed out to the Mugello to raise troops to release him. At the same time preparations had been made to assemble a small army of Medici adherents at Cafaggiolo; and the condottiere, Niccolò da Tolen-tino, believed to have received money through Cosimo’s friend, Neri Capponi, had moved down with a band of mercenaries from Pisa to Lastra. Niccolò da Tolentino remained at Lastra for fear that his further advance would result in a tumult in Florence during which Cosimo might be assassinated; but there could be no doubt that he played an important part in Rinaldo degli Albizzi’s ultimate decision to abandon hope of having his tiresome prisoner condemned to death.

On 28 September it was decided that Cosimo should be banished for ten years to Padua, that his wily cousin, Averardo, should be sent to Naples, also for ten years, and that his brother, Lorenzo, a quieter and less offensive figure, should be exiled for five years to Venice. All of them, together with the rest of the family, excepting only the Vieri branch, were declared to be Grandi and thus excluded from office in Florence for ever. Subsequently the leaders of their party in Florence, Puccio and Giovanni Pucci, were banished to Aquila for ten years;⁶ while the two Priori who had not followed the Albizzi line during the meetings of the Signoria were denied the rewards, in the way of sinecures and appointments of both profit and honour, that were given to all the rest.

When Cosimo, whose many virtues seem not to have included physical courage, was summoned before the Signoria to hear the decree of banishment read out to him, he evidently made a rather abject reply. He protested that he had never frequented the Palazzo della Signoria except when summoned, that he had ‘always declined to be nominated an official’, that far from inciting any Tuscan city to rebel against the government of Florence he had helped to buy several by providing loans to raise troops to conquer them. However, he declared,

As you have decided I am to go to Padua, I declare that I am content to go, and to stay wherever you command, not only in the Trevisian state, but should you send me to live among the Arabs, or any other people alien to our customs, I would go most willingly. As disaster comes to me by your orders, I accept it as a boon, and as a benefit to me and my belongings… Every trouble will be easy to bear as long as I know that my adversity will bring peace and happiness to the city… One thing I beg of you, O Signori, that seeing you intend to preserve my life you take care that it should not be taken by wicked citizens, and thus you be put to shame… Have a care that those who stand outside in the Piazza with arms in their hands anxiously desiring my blood, should not have their way with me. My pain would be small, but you would earn perpetual infamy.

Anxious as he was himself that there should be no uncontrollable violence, the Signoria gave orders that their prisoner should be spirited from Florence under cover of night through the Porta San Gallo. He was to be escorted by armed guard to the frontier, and there left to make his own way to Padua by way of Ferrara.

IV EXILES AND MASTERS

ON HIS journey into exile, Cosimo was met with compliments rather than reproach. At Ferrara he was warmly welcomed and splendidly entertained by the Marquis; at Padua he was greeted as an honoured guest by the authorities who were obviously delighted to have so distinguished and so rich an exile amongst them. For rich he still certainly was, all the attempts of Rinaldo degli Albizzi to bankrupt him while in prison having failed. ‘One should either not lift a finger against the mighty,’ Rinaldo commented gloomily to his friends, ‘or, if one does, one must do it thoroughly.’ He was forced to recognize that, although he had succeeded in temporarily removing his enemy from Florence, his own position in the city was now far from secure.

After spending two months in Padua, Cosimo secured permission to join his brother in Venice where he was offered rooms in the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. Here he settled down comfortably and, no doubt influenced by the knowledge that it was a monastery for which Pope Eugenius – having once been a friar there – had much affection, he announced that he would pay for a much-needed new library.¹ He commissioned a design from the young Florentine architect, Michelozzo Michelozzi, who had accompanied him to Venice, the buildings in Florence on which he was working for Cosimo having been brought to a temporary halt.

While in Venice, Cosimo was kept fully and regularly informed of the changing situation in Florence where his supporters were continually plotting the downfall of the Albizzi. At the beginning of February 1434, the eloquent and highly cultivated Agnolo Acciaiuoli,² who had criticized the Albizzi’s dictatorial methods, was arrested and sentenced to ten years’ banishment to Cosenza. A few weeks later a distant relative of Cosimo, Mario Bartolommeo de’ Medici, who was suspected of trying to undermine the Albizzi’s foreign policy, was also arrested and banished for ten years.

Cosimo himself warily avoided implication in these conspiracies. He knew that every month the Albizzi were becoming more and more unpopular in Florence and that both Venice and Rome favoured the return of the Medici. He was comforted to learn that since the Medici’s departure no other bankers could be found to supply the government ‘with so much as a pistachio nut’. By the late summer of 1434, after a decisive defeat by Milanese mercenaries of Florentine troops at Imola, feelings against the government had run so high that a majority of known Medici supporters were elected to the Signoria. One of these, Niccolò di Cocco, became Gonfaloniere.

Had it not been for the objections of the immensely rich Palla Strozzi, who, since the death of Niccolò da Uzzano, had been the most respected and influential of the moderates in the oligarchy, Rinaldo would have used violence to prevent this new Signoria meeting; but he was persuaded to allow the members to enter into office on the understanding that they would be forcibly ejected from the Palazzo della Signoria at the first suggestion that the Medici should be asked to return. Determined not to be browbeaten, the Signoria took advantage of Rinaldo’s temporary absence from Florence in September to issue the invitation which he dreaded; and, upon his return to the city, they summoned him to their Palazzo. Suspecting that he would be arrested and thrown into the Alberghettino as Cosimo had been, and believing that he had the support of several prominent citizens – including Palla Strozzi, Giovanni Guicciardini,³ Ridolfo Peruzzi⁴ and Niccolò Barbardori⁵ – Rinaldo ignored the summons, hurried to his palace, called his remaining adherents to arms and gave orders to the captain of his five-hundred-strong bodyguard to occupy the church of San Pier Scheraggio⁶ opposite the Palazzo della Signoria and to prepare to take possession of the Palazzo itself The guard on the door of the Palazzo was offered as many ducats as would fill his helmet to open the door for Rinaldo’s men should the Signoria instruct him to lock it.

On the morning of 25 September, Rinaldo’s troops began to take up their positions. But the Signoria were not to be caught unawares. They brought their own troops into the Piazza, ordered others to march up and down through the streets, and made preparations to withstand a siege by having provisions brought into the Palazzo. They then shut and barricaded the gates, and summoned reinforcements from the surrounding districts. To gain time while these reinforcements were being assembled, they also sent two Priori to enter into negotiations with the Albizzi and called upon the services of another far more powerful intermediary who had now arrived in Florence, Pope Eugenius IV.

Having quarrelled with the powerful Colonna family, to which his predecessor, Martin V, had belonged, Pope Eugenius had been driven from Rome by a rampaging mob and had fled to Florence where he was given shelter in the monastery of Santa Maria Novella. Here he was known to have spoken sympathetically of the Medici and to have entertained the hope that a strong government in Florence might ally itself with Venice and help him return to Rome, backed by Medici money. On the afternoon of 26 September, the Pope’s representative, Cardinal Vitelleschi, left Santa Maria Novella to find Rinaldo and to bring him back to the monastery for discussions with his Holiness.

By now Rinaldo’s situation was becoming desperate. He had succeeded in occupying the Piazza Sant’ Apollinare and in closing all entrances to it as preliminary measures before seizing the Bargello, attacking the Piazza della Signoria and burning all the houses of the Medici as well as those of their principal supporters. But although numerous mercenaries, promised the prospect of plunder rather than pay, had been enlisted outside Florence, they were slow in arriving; and many of Rinaldo’s troops already inside the city were gradually deserting him. Worst of all, Giovanni Guicciardini, whose support he had deemed essential to his success, now declared that he was prepared to do no more than ensure that his brother, Piero, a known Medici adherent, would not back up the Signoria; while Palla Strozzi, who had previously indicated that his five hundred personal men-at-arms would be at Rinaldo’s disposal, changed his mind, rode into the Piazza Sant’ Apollinare with merely two servants in attendance and then, having spoken briefly to Rinaldo, rode quickly off again. Rinaldo’s main supporter, Ridolfo Peruzzi, also began to waver, accepted a summons to appear before the Signoria and, having wasted time in fruitless discussions with them, urged Rinaldo to accept Cardinal Vitelleschi’s invitation to go to talk to the Pope at Santa Maria Novella.

Accompanied by Peruzzi and Barbadori, and followed by a disorderly squad of armed supporters, Rinaldo rode off to see the Pope soon after six o’clock in the evening. As they approached the houses of the Martelli family, whose senior members were close friends and sometimes business associates of the Medici, an attempt was made to block their way. Fighting broke out, several men were badly wounded, and after the Martelli’s guards had been driven back inside their walls, Rinaldo had the utmost difficulty in inducing his men to follow him to Santa Maria Novella rather than to break into the Palazzo Martelli and plunder it.⁷ When at last they arrived grumbling before the monastery they sat down in the Piazza, obviously unwilling to wait there long.

Few of them did wait long. Night had long since fallen when Rinaldo emerged from the monastery to find only a small group of them still sitting in the Piazza. It was clear that his spirit was broken. The Pope, so commanding in appearance and manner, so skilled in argument, had persuaded him of the futility of further resistance to the wishes of the Signoria which were also, so Rinaldo was informed, the wishes of the Curia. Little reassured by the Pope’s promise to do what he could to protect the Albizzi from the vengeance of their opponents, Rinaldo returned to his palazzo.

Two days later, for a full hour, the huge Vacca in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria was tolled to summon the citizens to a Parlamento. As the people gathered in the Piazza, which was ringed by troops, Cardinal Vitelleschi and two other representatives of the Pope appeared on the ringhiera. Soon afterwards, to the clamorous welcome of fanfares, they were joined there by all the members of the Signoria and the officials of the Republic, including the Notaio delle Riformagioni who in the time-honoured way called out, ‘O, people of Florence, are you content that a Balìa shall be set up to reform your city for the good of the people?’ The crowd obediently gave their consent; and a Balìa of three hundred and fifty citizens was accordingly elected. The sentence of banishment passed on the Medici was immediately revoked, and the family were commended for their good behaviour during the time of their exile from which they were now formally recalled.

On the same day, 28 September 1434, Cosimo left Venice with an escort of three hundred Venetian soldiers; and a few days later, cheered by the peasants in the villages through which he passed, he arrived at his villa at Careggi in time for dinner.⁸ The grounds were crowded with welcoming people. There were crowds, too, along the road leading into Florence, and in the city itself masses of people were waiting in the streets, hoping to witness the triumphal return of the Medici to their palace. For fear of uproar, the Signoria sent an urgent request to Cosimo not to enter the city that day, but to wait until nightfall. So, after sunset, accompanied by his brother, Lorenzo, one servant and a mace-bearer from the city, he re-entered Florence by a small gateway near the Balikrgello. He spent the night in a room which had been specially prepared for him in the Palazzo della Signoria; and the next morning, after visiting the Pope to thank him for all he had done for him, he returned to the Palazzo Bardi to the tumultuous cheers of the crowds gathered in the streets ‘as though he were returning from a great victory’.

Already sentences had been passed on his opponents. Rinaldo degli Albizzi, his sons and descendants were all banished from Florence – so were branches of several other families, and, in some cases, families in their entirety, in accordance with the custom of considering a crime as much a collective as a personal responsibility. Included in the decrees of banishment were members of the Peruzzi, Guasconi, Guadagni and Guicciardini families, Niccolò Barbadori, and Matteo Strozzi. Indeed, so many well-known names – over seventy in all – appeared in the list of exiles that someone complained to Cosimo that he was almost emptying Florence of its leading citizens. His typically brusque and sardonic reply was, ‘Seven or eight yards of scarlet will make a new citizen.’

Rather than risk sharing the fate of the Albizzi upon Cosimo’s return, Francesco Filelfo had already fled to Siena where, in the service of the Visconti, he wrote a stream of slanderous abuse of the Medici, incited the Florentines to rise up against them, and even, so it seems, helped to hire a Greek assassin to murder Cosimo. Few regretted the departure from Florence of this tiresome, vain and cantankerous scholar. But many lamented the banishment to Padua of the revered and honest Palla Strozzi, who had never given his full support to the Albizzi and had ultimately abandoned them altogether. Cosimo, however, recognizing that his position in Florence would be more secure if Palla Strozzi, so enormously rich and so dangerously impressionable, were to be compelled to leave, decided not to risk his being pardoned. When asked to put in a good word for him for the sake of past friendship, he did so in a characteristically ambivalent manner, raising no protest when the decision to banish him was finally taken. He apparently comforted himself with the thought that Palla Strozzi would be much happier in Padua where, free from the temptation to meddle in politics, which were not his métier, he would settle down contentedly – as, in fact, he did – to a life of quiet study, conversation and bibliomania.

There were to be many times during the next few years when Cosimo had good cause to wish that he could have been left to such a life himself. To assume power in many another Italian state, where executions rather than banishments were commonplace punishments and where the ruler was supported and protected by a powerful army, would have been comparatively simple. But executions and military dictatorships were not in the Florentine tradition, and Florentine tradition was not to be flouted. If Cosimo were to rule successfully, he must appear scarcely to rule at all; if changes in the political structure were to be made, they must be changes calculated to arouse the least offence. Had it been possible to control and expand his bank without political influence he might, perhaps, have been content to remain even further in the background than he actually contrived to do. For he derived the greatest satisfaction from his business, saying that even if it were possible to procure money and possessions with a magic wand he would still continue to work as a banker. But as his father had been forced to recognize, a rich merchant in Florence was ill-advised to try to avoid public office. Even so, Cosimo succeeded in remaining the most powerful man in Florence for years without ever appearing to be much more than an extremely prosperous, generous and approachable banker, prepared to undertake whatever political or diplomatic duties were imposed upon him, and to help direct the financial policies of the State. He acted with the greatest skill to preserve his power, his friend, Vespasiano da Bisticci the bookseller, wrote. ‘And whenever he wished to achieve something, he saw to it, in order to escape envy as much as possible, that the initiative appeared to come from others and not from him.’ Unable to disguise his enormous wealth, he paid tax at a far higher rate than anyone else in Florence; but, like all rich men of prudence, he kept special accounts which, by exaggerating bad debts, showed his taxable income to be much lower than it was. So no one was quite sure just how rich he was. He was Gonfaloniere no more than three times in his entire life; he never considered the possibility of assuming a more obviously permanent control over the government, nor of offending Florentine susceptibilities by attempting any basic reform of the far from satisfactory constitution, other than by establishing a new council known as the Consiglio Maggiore, which was intended to have absolute control over national security and taxation and which later developed into the Council of One Hundred, the Cento. He scrupulously avoided display and ostentation of any kind, riding a mule rather than a horse, and when it suited him to do so, allowing the vain and talkative, flamboyant and ambitious but not over-intelligent Luca Pitti to appear to be the most powerful man in the Republic.

All was not, of course, as it seemed to be. Though the constitutional institutions and offices of the State remained as before, opponents of the Medici were conveniently excluded from election to the Signoria in times of political or military stress by the selection of candidates being entrusted to carefully chosen commissioners known as Accoppiatori. A majority of these Accoppiatori had links with the Medici party to which such prominent citizens as Agnolo Acciaiuoli, now recalled from exile, lent their support and of which the wily, eloquent Puccio Pucci, a brilliant organizer raised by Cosimo from the artisan class, was the acknowledged manager. The party was constantly enlarging its base. At Pucci’s suggestion the Grandi were now all declared Popohmi which gratified the nobles, who were thus theoretically rendered eligible for election to office, while pleasing the Popob Minuto who chose to interpret the measure as commend-ably democratic. The people were given greater satisfaction when it was seen that the most talented amongst them, despite their humble origins, were now considered, for the first time in the history of Florence, worthy of holding official positions in the State, though care was taken to ensure that this process did not go too far. The old noble families were still prevented from exercising any real power; and well over three-quarters of the population remained without any political rights at all. Of the 159 newly qualified citizens from the Santa Maria Novella quarter whose names were placed in the horse in 1453, no less than 145 were sons, grandsons or brothers of men who had been considered eligible for office in 1449.

Within a few years the Medici party was so strongly rooted – if always loosely knit – and so firmly identified with the interests of Florence as a whole that Cosimo had no need to suppress the voices of opposition. His erstwhile friend, Neri Capponi, old-fashioned and staunchly republican, was permitted to give occasional utterance to his concern about Cosimo’s insidiously growing power. So was Giannozzo Manetti, a rich and scholarly merchant who was frequently employed on diplomatic missions. But neither of them had the backing of a party, and both soon departed from the scene: Capponi died in 1455, while Manetti, protesting that he was being ruined by the monstrously heavy taxes levied on his fortune, chose to leave Florence for Naples.

Although the practice was not as widespread as his critics afterwards maintained, there seems little doubt that Cosimo’s party did on occasion use the Florence taxation system to break their enemies. Certainly the taxation officers – in the lists of whose names Puccio Pucci figures prominently – were not noted for their impartiality when assessing the taxes due from critics of the regime. Nor did the party managers – who were often used by Cosimo to do unpleasant work with which he did not want to be associated – shrink from buying up at bargain prices the estates of men banished from the Republic, or from making personal fortunes, as Puccio Pucci did, from buying and selling government stock.

For such reasons, though outspoken opposition was rare, the Medici party was far from universally popular; and in troubled times its position was very precarious. In 1458, indeed, it seemed on the verge of dissolution. In January of that year, following a long period of economic stagnation, the merchants and landowners of Florence were horrified to learn that they were to be assessed for a new catasto. Then, in the early summer, there was talk of a change in the constitution; there were rumours, too, that opponents of the change had been arrested and tortured to elicit confessions of conspiracy. Feelings in Florence ran so high that Cosimo rented a house in Pavia through the Milanese branch of his bank and prepared to move there with his wife should the situation grow more menacing. His daughter-in-law took his grandchild to his villa at Cafaggiolo, which he had had surrounded by walls and towers for just such an emergency.

On 10 August, the Gonfalionere, Luca Pitti, felt obliged to call a complaisant Parlamento into existence in the Piazza della Signoria which he prudently filled with mercenary troops and armed supporters of the regime. The members of the Signoria walked out of their palace, in their crimson, ermine-lined cloaks, to stand on the ringhiera. The Notaio delle Riformagioni read out the text of a law creating a new Balìa; then, following the ancient precedent, he asked the people in the square below whether they approved its creation. He ‘repeated the question three times; but since the Notaio had a very weak voice, only a few understood what he was saying and there were not many voices to answer yea’. Nevertheless the few were enough; the Balìa was approved; ‘the Signoria returned to the palace, the citizens to their workshops and the mercenaries to their billets’.

The Balìa thereupon immediately introduced those measures which the Medici party had proposed. The powers of the Accoppiatori were confirmed for a further ten years, so that the drawing of lots for election to public offices continued to be a mere formality. The power of the Gonfaloniere was at the same time much increased. Luca Pitti, whose tenure of that office was shortly to expire, had himself elected one of the ten Accoppiatori, while Cosimo’s elder son, Piero de’ Medici, became another. As supporters of the Medici paraded through the streets, shouting slogans and waving banners, Cosimo’s family returned to Florence. The supremacy of their party was now assured and Cosimo himself recognized as the undisputed patriarch of Florence. He was now ‘master of the country’, in the words of Aeneas Silvius de’ Piccolomini who became Pope Pius II in 1458. ‘Political questions are settled at his house. The man he chooses holds office… He it is who decides peace and war and controls the laws… He is King in everything but name.’ Foreign rulers were advised to communicate with him personally and not to waste their time by approaching anyone else in Florence when any important decision was required. As the Florentine historian, Francesco Guicciardini, observed, ‘He had a reputation such as probably no private citizen has ever enjoyed from the fall of Rome to our own day.’

V ARCHBISHOPS AND ARCHITECTS

NOTHING CONTRIBUTED more lustre to Cosimo’s prestige in the early years of his power than the General Council of the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches which he helped to persuade his friend, Pope Eugenius IV, to transfer to Florence in 1439.

Apparently irreconcilable differences, mainly doctrinal, had kept the two great Churches of Christendom at loggerheads for six centuries; and, within the last two centuries, ever since the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade had sacked Constantinople at the instigation of their Venetian paymasters, the quarrel had grown more bitter. But now that the Ottoman Turks, who had been gnawing at the Eastern Empire for generations, were almost at the gates of Constantinople, Pope Eugenius realized that the chances of reconciliation had never been better. The Eastern Emperor, John Paleologus, had appealed for help in the name of Christ, and was even prepared to make submission to the Pope if soldiers and seamen from the Catholic west would help to save Byzantium from impending calamity. The Pope accordingly decided to summon a Great Council to meet in Italy without further delay.

He did not only have the unity of the Church in mind. There was already another Council in session at Bâle; and this Council, called into existence by the German Emperor, had proposed various reforms in the Church and propounded doctrines which the Pope was not prepared to accept. He had, therefore, attempted to dissolve it. Declining to disperse, the obstinate delegates at Bâle had proclaimed their intention both of making radical changes in the finances of the Curia and of coming to terms with the Eastern Church. But the Pope was not prepared to listen patiently to suggestions of a reduction in papal income; and as for any settlement with the Eastern Church, he was determined to make it himself. So, to put an end to the messages passing between Bâle and Constantinople, the Pope issued an invitation to the Eastern Emperor to come to meet him at Ferrara.

Towards the end of 1437 John Paleologus sailed for Venice, accompanied by the Patriarch of Constantinople and their attendant bishops, theologians, scholars, interpreters and officials – a huge concourse of delegates, seven hundred strong. The great assembly began their deliberations at Ferrara on 8 January 1438. The town was overcrowded and very cold; there were disagreements about precedence; there were quarrels about rites. The Catholic bishop refused to allow the Greeks to celebrate Mass in their own way in his churches; the Patriarch expressed his strongest disapproval of the ban; the Pope was edgy and ill at ease. There were reports that his enemies were hatching plots against him in nearby Bologna, a city which theoretically formed part of the Papal States but which, after declaring itself independent, was now under the lordship of the Bentivoglio family. The Pope was further worried by his embarrassing shortage of money. He had to pledge his towering medieval castle at Assisi as security for the large sums he had borrowed. But even so, he was obliged to stop paying the expenses of his numerous Greek guests.

Cosimo heard of the troubles at Ferrara with satisfaction. He had been much annoyed when that city had been chosen in preference to Florence as a meeting-place for the Council. Any city that acted as host to so important a conference would benefit not merely financially but politically and culturally too. If unity between the Churches were to be achieved this could not but reflect honour upon the place where Christendom was once again made whole. Besides, closer contact with the rulers of the Eastern Empire might well bring much new business to the bankers, traders and merchants of Florence, while conversation with the Greek scholars in the Emperor’s entourage would be a relaxation and a delight. When plague broke out in Ferrara towards the end of the year, Cosimo’s hopes were fulfilled. His brother, Lorenzo, arrived in the city with assurances that Florence was a much healthier place, that there was ample accommodation there for which no charge whatsoever would be made, and that the Council could avail itself of a loan of 1500 florins a month for as long as the delegates remained in session. Lorenzo’s offer was immediately accepted, and preparations were made for leaving Ferrara at once.

The entry into Florence of the Eastern Emperor and his enormous train of attendants was not as impressive as the city’s officials had planned. A fierce winter storm of torrential rain drove the thousands of expectant observers off the streets and brought them down from the roof-tops where they had clustered to watch the great procession pass by. The banners and standards lay bedraggled beneath the window-sills; the sounds of the trumpet blasts were carried away by the wind. Cosimo, who had himself been elected Gonfaloniere for the occasion, confessed himself much relieved when the city’s guests were safely installed in their lodgings.

The Pope and his suite were lodged in the monastery of Santa Maria Novella; the Patriarch was given apartments in the Palazzo Ferranti in the Borgo Pinti; the Eastern Emperor and his attendants moved into the palaces and houses of the exiled Peruzzi family where they were presented with wine and candles, crystallized fruits, marzipan and sweetmeats. The meetings of Council committees were held in Santa Maria Novella, while full sessions took place in Santa Croce.

Attending these sessions as a spectator, Vespasiano da Bisticci was profoundly impressed by the learned speeches and the skilful manner in which the interpreters translated Greek into Latin and Latin into Greek. Yet, as the days passed, it became only too clear that little headway was being made and that tempers on both sides were becoming excessively frayed. A principal point at dispute concerned the origin and nature of the third Person of the Trinity, the Greek opinion in this matter being strongly contested by the Pope’s spokesman and his principal adviser, Ambrogio Traversari. Ancient texts were produced, and the Greeks’ arguments confounded when a nervous delegate, alarmed by a passage which he recognized as being unfavourable to their case, attempted to scratch it out but in his haste and anxiety scratched out a different one. The Emperor endeavoured to compose the uproar which this attempted fraud produced by suggesting that other and more authoritative manuscripts should be fetched from Constantinople, a proposal that brought forth from a Roman cardinal the magisterial rebuke, ‘Sire, when you go to war you should take your arms with you, not send for them in the middle of the battle.’

To the Florentine citizens, however, the Council proved a delightful spectacle. The sight of the bearded men from Constantinople walking through the streets in their astonishingly opulent clothes and their bizarre head-dresses, attended by Moorish and Mongol servants and accompanied by strange animals, was a never-ending source of interest as well as an inspiration to many a Florentine painter from Gentile da Fabriano to Benozzo Gozzoli.

Ultimately, after lengthy private discussions between Traversari and the patient and clever Johannes Bessarion, Archbishop of Nicaea, a compromise on the delicate subject of the Holy Ghost was reached; and this opened the way for agreement on other matters, including the partial authority of the Papacy over the Eastern Church. The crucial document setting forth the terms of the oecumenical compromise was solemnly signed on 5 July 1439; and the following day, during a ceremony in the Cathedral, this dramatic pronouncement was made: ‘Let the heavens rejoice and the earth exult, for the wall which divided the Western and Eastern Churches has fallen. Peace and concord have returned.’

The words were spoken by Cardinal Cesarini in Latin, and by Archbishop Bessarion in Greek. Then the Italian cardinal and the Greek archbishop embraced each other and, joined by all the other prelates and the Eastern Emperor, they knelt before the Pope. Afterwards their message to the Christian world, celebrating the triumph of reason, was inscribed on one of the great stone pillars which were to support the Cathedral dome.

But the concord thus joyfully celebrated was of brief duration. No sooner had the delegates returned home to Constantinople than the agreement reached in Florence was so strongly denounced that it had to be abandoned; and the Emperor was to find that the protestations of sympathy and promises of help against the Turk which he had received in Italy were to count for little. Fourteen years later the Sultan’s janissaries were to clamber over the smoking walls of Constantinople and the severed head of its last Emperor was to be displayed to the jeers of its conquerors at the top of a column of porphyry.

Yet for Florence, as Cosimo had foreseen, the Council had far happier consequences. As well as profiting the trade of the city, it was an important influence on what was already being spoken of as the Rinascimento. The presence of so many Greek scholars in Florence provided an incalculable stimulus to the quickening interest in classical texts and classical history, in classical art and philosophy, and particularly in the study of Plato, that great hero of the humanists, for so long overshadowed by his pupil, Aristotle. Bessarion, whose lodgings had been crowded night after night with Greek and Italian scholars, was prevailed upon to remain in Italy where he was created a cardinal and Archbishop of Siponto. Gemistos Plethon, the great authority on Plato, who had travelled from Constantinople with Bessarion, also agreed to remain in Florence for a time before going home to the in his own country.

Cosimo, who had listened to Plethon’s lectures on Plato with the closest attention, was inspired to found in Florence an academy for Platonic studies and to devote much more time to these studies himself. Plethon’s return home and Cosimo’s subsequent preoccupation with other matters had led to his plans being postponed for a time; but, some years later, when Cosimo adopted the son of one of his physicians, a young medical student named Marsilio Ficino, they were revived. Ficino’s enthusiasm for Plato prompted Cosimo to pay for his further education and afterwards to offer to instal him in the villa known as Montevecchio where, in the peace of the country, the young man was to study Greek and to translate all Plato into Latin.¹ Ficino eagerly accepted the offer and, as he grew older and more learned, Cosimo would call him over from Montevecchio to the nearby villa of Careggi, and either alone or with other friends, such as the Greek scholar, John Argyropoulos, whom Cosimo persuaded to come to Florence in 1456, they would discuss philosophical questions far into the night. From these foundations grew the Platonic Academy which was to have so profound an influence upon the development of European thought.

As well as firing Cosimo with the ambition to found a Platonic Academy, the Council of Florence had also enabled him to make several marvellous additions to his library, which was beginning to be recognized as one of the most valuable in the world. For years past, his agents all over Europe and in the Near East had been buying on his instructions rare and important books and manuscripts whenever they became available, particularly in German monasteries where the monks were supposed to have little idea of their worth. In 1437 the death of Niccolò Niccoli, who was deeply in Cosimo’s debt, placed eight hundred more volumes in his hands. The religious books he gave to the monastery of San Marco; the others he kept for himself. Open to all his friends who cared to study there, it was the first library of its kind in Europe, and a generation later served as a model for the Vatican Library in Rome. Constantly increased by Cosimo and his heirs, it was eventually to contain no less than ten thousand codices of Latin and Greek authors, hundreds of priceless manuscripts from the time of Dante and Petrarch as well as others from Florence’s remoter past.²

While spending immense sums on his library, Cosimo also followed his father’s example in lavishing money upon the adornment of Florence. Giovanni di Bicci had never much cared for books. Indeed, according to an inventory of his possessions made in 1418, he only owned three books altogether, a Latin life of St Margaret, a sermon by Fra Giovanni also in Latin, and a copy of the Gospels in Italian. But he had always recognized that the honour of the city, and the personal credit of the rich citizen who cared for honour, demanded donations to public building and to the enrichment of buildings already in existence.

The first important project with which Giovanni may have become involved was the provision of new doors for San Giovanni Battista. The Baptistery, ‘il mio bel Giovanni’ as Dante called it, was already at least two hundred and fifty years old.³ Its southern doors, depicting scenes from the life of the saint to whom the church was dedicated, were made by Andrea Pisano in 1330; and in 1402, a year of plague, it had been decided to provide new doors for the northern front as a votive offering, a plea to God not to repeat that dreadful visitation of 1348 when so many thousands of citizens had died in a fearful epidemic that had swept northwards across Europe from Naples. The doors were to be cast in bronze of the most exquisite workmanship, and seven of the leading artists of the day had each been asked to submit a design for a competition of which Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was probably one of the judges.

The design was to be for a bronze panel representing the sacrifice of Isaac; and, when all the works had been handed in, the judges decided to give special consideration to the submissions of three young artists, all of them in their twenties, Jacopo della Quercia from Siena, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, both Florentines. After lengthy deliberations the choice fell upon Ghiberti and Brunelleschi; but when these two were asked to collaborate, the suggestion so annoyed the fiery-tempered Brunelleschi that he stormed out of Florence and went to study architecture in Rome, handing the bronze he had made to Cosimo de’ Medici who afterwards placed it in the old sacristy at San Lorenzo where it was displayed behind the altar.

Ghiberti, to whom the sole responsibility was now entrusted, was highly versatile, as a true Renaissance artist was required to be. Trained as a goldsmith, he was painter and architect as well as sculptor. He designed windows for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore as well as golden tiaras for Martin V and Eugenius IV, the gold setting for a cornelian cameo depicting Apollo and Marsyas which belonged to Giovanni de’ Medici, and, for Cosimo, a reliquary for the bones of three now forgotten martyrs. At the time of his first commission for the Baptistery he was twenty-three; he was to be seventy-three before his work there was completed. A most exacting perfectionist, he cast and re-cast panel after panel before he was satisfied that the reliefs were as perfect as he could make them, exasperating his assistants by his exhausting, relentless, wearisome striving ‘to imitate nature to the utmost’. After twenty-two years’ work the doors were finished at last; and, in celebration of so important an event, the Priori came out in procession from the Palazzo della Signoria – an exodus permitted them only upon the most solemn occasions – to pay their respects to the artist and his great work.⁴ No sooner was the ceremony over, however, than Ghiberti returned to his foundry in the Via Bufalini opposite the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova,⁵ and immediately began to work on another set of doors for the eastern front of the Baptistery. He settled down to his task with that same determination to produce an unsurpassable masterpiece as he had brought to the earlier commission. After a further twenty-eight years’ work, a frail old man close to death, he was forced reluctantly to conclude that he could make no further improvement. The gilded bronze panels, representing scenes from stories in the Old Testament, were mounted at last, in 1456, in the eastern door of the Baptistery where Michelangelo was later to stand transfixed in wonderment before them and to declare that they were ‘fit to be the gates of Paradise’.⁶

Giovanni de’ Medici, himself an old man even before Ghiberti’s first doors were finished, had by then, together with his son, Cosimo, arranged for the Baptistery to be provided with another masterpiece, the monument to his friend, Pope John XXIII.⁷ He had also concerned himself with the building and endowing of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, a hospital for the foundlings of Florence built for the Arte di Por Santa Maria,⁸ and with the restoration and enlargement of San Lorenzo which, consecrated by St Ambrose in 393, was now falling into ruins. Eight of the leading men of the parish of San Lorenzo agreed to pay for the building of a family chapel, Giovanni undertaking to pay not only for a Medici chapel but also for the sacristy. This work, as also the Ospedale degli Innocenti, was entrusted to Brunelleschi, who had now returned from Rome anxious to display his newly acquired talents and to show Ghiberti how much more there was to art than the casting of bronze panels. His church of San Lorenzo, which became the family church of the Medici and was later to be enriched with their tombs, is one of the masterpieces of the early Renaissance.⁹

Brunelleschi’s most important commission, however, was to provide the massive dome for the cathedral. Men had almost despaired of this ever being done, since the space to be crowned – 138 feet in diameter – was so great. But Brunelleschi, who had made a careful study of the Pantheon and other buildings in Rome, insisted that it could be executed perfectly well and without scaffolding. The committee appointed by the Masons’ guild to consider the problem were highly sceptical, particularly as Brunelleschi, petulant and ill-tempered as always, declined to explain to them how he intended to set about the task, insisting that the matter must be left entirely in his hands and that no board of untrained busybodies should be given the opportunity of interfering with his design. The story is told that at one of the committee’s inconclusive meetings, Brunelleschi produced an egg, announcing that only he knew how to make it stand on its end: when all the others had confessed their failure to do so, he cracked its top on the table and left it standing there. ‘But we could all have done that,’ they protested. ‘Yes,’ replied Brunelleschi crossly, ‘and you would say just that if I told you how I propose to build the dome.’ On a later occasion Brunelleschi became so obstreperous that the committee gave orders for him to be forcibly removed from their presence. Attendants seized him, carried him out of the palace and dropped him on his back in the Piazza. Thereafter people pointed him out to each other in the streets, shouting, ‘There goes the madman!’

Ultimately, after numerous other architects had been consulted and various ideas, such as a dome made of pumice-stone, had been rejected, the Committee gave way and in 1420 Brunelleschi was entrusted with the complicated task. To his exasperation, however, he was required to accept the collaboration of Ghiberti, whose assistance in the early stages was probably more useful to Brunelleschi than Brunelleschi would ever allow or posterity would recognize.

Sixteen years later the dome, as much an extraordinary feat of engineering as of architecture, was finished; and on 25 March 1436, the Feast of the Annunciation, the first day of the year according to the idiosyncratic Florentine calendar, it was consecrated in a splendid five-hour ceremony.¹⁰ A wooden walk, raised on stilts, hung with banners and garlands and covered by a scarlet canopy, was constructed between the Pope’s apartments in the monastery of Santa Maria Novella and the door of the Cathedral. At the appointed hour the Pope appeared, clothed in white and wearing his jewelled tiara, and began the slow procession along the carpet which had been laid over the raised boards beneath the canopy. He was followed by seven cardinals, by thirty-seven bishops and archbishops, and by the leading officials of the city led by the Gonfaloniere and the Priori. At the sound of the choir singing their hymn of praise many of the spectators were seen to be in tears.

After his father’s death Cosimo continued to pour Medici money into the building, restoration and embellishment of churches, convents and charitable institutions all over Florence and in the surrounding countryside, as though determined to leave his mark on Tuscany. ‘I know the humours of my city,’ he once remarked to his friend, Vespasiano da Bisticci. ‘Before fifty years have passed we shall be expelled, but my buildings will remain.’ First of all, as a member of a committee of four appointed by the Arte del Cambio, he had a share in commissioning Ghiberti to make a statue of St Matthew, patron of bankers, for one of the fourteen niches on the outside walls of Orsanmichele which had each been adopted by a guild.¹¹ In paying for the work, Cosimo contributed more than his fellow bankers, as befitted his wealth, but only slightly more, in accordance with his accustomed discretion. After Orsanmichele, the novices’ dormitory and chapel at Santa Croce,¹² the choir of Santissima Annunziata,¹³ the library of the now demolished church of San Bartolommeo, the monastery known as La Badia at San Domenico di Fiesole – where Cosimo had his own room¹⁴ – and San Girolamo nei Monti at Fiesole, all appear to have benefited from Cosimo’s munificence and from his undoubted knowledge of architectural matters, to which even the leading craftsmen and designers seem to have deferred. Cosimo was also responsible apparently for the restoration of a college for Florentine students in Paris, the renovation of the church of Santo Spirito in Jerusalem and for additions to the Franciscan monastery at Assisi. The year after the completion of the Cathedral dome he undoubtedly provided funds for Michelozzo to rebuild the monastery of San Marco; this was a charitable enterprise which, according to Vespasiano da Bisticci, Cosimo was induced to undertake by Pope Eugenius IV whom he had consulted at a time when his conscience troubled him. He eventually spent the enormous sum of 40,000 ducats on this Dominican monastery, whose exacting, ascetic and intimidating Prior, Antonio Pierozzi – known as Antonino because he was so small – became Archbishop of Florence in 1445, and in 1523 a saint. Antonino was one of Cosimo’s closest friends, and the two men could often be found talking together, and with other members of the community, in the large cell which Cosimo reserved for his own private use and to which he retreated by himself when feeling the need for quiet reflection. They often talked, so it was said, of usury and how that besetting sin of a banker’s life might be expiated. The Church’s ruling was that the usurer might obtain forgiveness only by restoring during his lifetime, or at his death, all that he had gained unrighteously; and cases were known of penitent bankers who had appalled their heirs by stipulating in their wills that the first charge upon their assets must be the payment of full restitution. The distribution of charity was an insufficient atonement; but practical churchmen were quick to suggest that it was a help; and no doubt Cosimo considered it to be so. Certainly he paid out enormous sums. According to his grandson, who came upon an account book covering the thirty-eight years 1434 to 1471,’ the incredible sum of 663,755 florins’ had been spent on ‘buildings, charities and taxes’. So generous was Cosimo towards San Marco, indeed, that the friars ‘in their modesty’ felt obliged to protest. But Cosimo passed over their complaints. ‘Never,’ he used to say, ‘shall I be able to give God enough to set him down in my books as a debtor.’ He subscribed money to endow the monastery when the restoration was completed, presented the friars with vestments, chalices and illustrated missals, as well as most of Niccolo Niccoli’s library, and employed numerous scribes to copy out codices to add to their collection.¹⁵

When the work on San Marco was finished, Cosimo decided to build a new palazzo for his own family. He had moved some years before from the Palazzo Bardi to his father’s house in the Piazza del Duomo which he had improved and extended; but while this old family house might have been large enough for his family’s personal needs, it was far too small for his business which urgently required new store-rooms and counting-houses. As the site for the new building he chose the corner of the Via Larga, the widest street in the city, and the Via de’ Gori which lay beneath the northern wall of the church of San Giovannino degli Scolopi.¹⁶ The architect he selected was the brilliant, cantankerous Filippo Brunelleschi whose work on the nave of the nearby church of San Lorenzo was now almost completed. But when he saw Brunelleschi’s plans and wooden model he thought them altogether too splendid and ornate, and rejected them as tactfully as he could. All the buildings which he had commissioned, and which he liked to consider as much his own works as those of the architects who had designed them, were quiet, restrained, composed and unemphatic and he wished his own palace to be the same. So, setting Brunelleschi’s plans aside, he turned instead to the younger architect, Michelozzo Michelozzi, a decision which so angered Brunelleschi that, in a bout of fury, he smashed his model ‘into a thousand pieces’.

Michelozzo was also a Florentine by birth, the son of a tailor whose family originally came from Burgundy. Formerly a pupil of Donatello, Michelozzo had already made a name for himself as a sculptor of exceptional promise, notably as the executor of the tomb for John XXIII in the Baptistery. His designs were less grand than those of Brunelleschi, much more in tune with Cosimo’s taste for spacious simplicity and restraint of colour. Envy, Cosimo used often to say, was a weed that should not be watered; and he was anxious to ensure that the Palazzo Medici should give no offence to any of his critics. Since it was to contain offices and counting-houses for the family’s business interests as well as private apartments it could not, of course, be too small. Cosimo’s enemies, naturally, vastly exaggerating his intentions, condemned the palazzo as a monument to his greed. ‘He has begun a palace which throws even the Colosseum at Rome into the shade,’ wrote one of them. ‘Who would not build magnificently if he could do so with other people’s money?’ Yet when compared with other palaces which were to be built within the next two decades, such as the Palazzo Rucellai and the formidable Palazzo Pitti, the Medici Palace was far from grandiose. In the middle of the fifteenth century it was considered to be worth about 5,000 florins. Certainly, as time passed and it was altered and enlarged by both Cosimo’s descendants and the Riccardi family into whose hands it eventually passed, the palace took on a more imposing appearance; but in the beginning it was remarkable less for its grandeur than for its originality. The days had passed when town houses had also to be fortresses with towers at the corners and machicolated battlements overhanging the street; but not until Michelozzo set to work on the Palazzo Medici had a house appeared in Florence which combined the delicacy of early Italian Gothic with the calm, considered stateliness of the classic taste.¹⁷

The walls of the ground floor were faced with those massive rough-hewn stones which give the effect known as rustica and which Michelozzo used so as ‘to unite an appearance of solidity and strength, with the light and shadow so essential to beauty under the glare of an Italian sun’. Originally, there were no windows at ground level on the Via Larga front, the fortress-like appearance being broken only by a huge arched gateway. But above the gateway, where the family were to live, the sombre effect was softened by rows of arched windows, flanked by columns Doric on the first floor, Corinthian on the second, the whole being overhung by a cornice eight feet high, the top of which towered, like the cornices of classical Rome, in a powerful line over the Via Larga. Facing the Via de’ Gori there was an open loggia, the arches of which were later filled in by those curved, barred windows known as ‘kneeling windows’ which were designed by Michelangelo. On the corner of the loggia was one of those beautiful iron lamps made by Niccolò Grosso, who was known as ‘il Caparra’,¹⁸ and above it the Medici arms carved in stone, with Cosimo’s personal device of three peacocks’ feathers, signifying the three virtues he most admired – temperance, prudence and fortitude – sprouting from the shield.

Before the Palazzo Medici was finished, Michelozzo began work on another house for Cosimo, a new villa in the Mugello. Cosimo never tired of country life. Whenever possible he left Florence to spend as long as he could at I1 Trebbio or at his beloved villa of Careggi where he was able to read in peace, go out and perform those country tasks from which he derived such solace, pruning his vines and tending his olives, planting mulberry and almond trees, and talking to the country people from whom he acquired those peasant proverbs and fables with which, on his return to the city, he enlivened his own conversation. Here at Careggi he could talk to his friends without the irritation of constant interruption; he could summon his young protégé, the little, clever, ugly Marsilio Ficino, to come over from the villa of Montevecchio to keep him company, to have a meal with him, or perhaps to play chess, the only game Cosimo ever did play. He wrote to Ficino in one characteristic letter in 1462,

Yesterday I arrived at Careggi not so much for the purpose of improving my fields as myself. Let me see you, Marsilio, as soon as possible. Bring with you the book of our favourite Plato, which I presume you have now translated into Latin according to your promise; for there is no employment to which I so ardently devote myself as to discover the true road to happiness. Do come then, and do not forget to bring with you the Orphean lyre.

Cosimo had no intention of leaving Careggi; but he wanted another villa, more remote, one which would serve as a place of retreat in times of trouble or plague and which would help to bind the country people of the Mugello more closely to his family. He chose a site at Cafaggiolo where the Medici had owned land for generations; and here, to Michelozzo’s designs, a new villa began to take shape in 1451.¹⁹

A few years later Michelozzo began work on yet another Medici villa. This was at Fiesole where Cosimo’s son, Giovanni, chose to reconstruct the castle-like villa known as Belcanto.²⁰ The land around it was steep and stony, useless for farming, as Cosimo disapprovingly observed, cross with his son for spending so much money merely to enjoy a view. But, as Giovanni protested, that was the whole point of Fiesole. His villa there would be built for pleasure alone: on summer evenings he and his family and friends would be able to sit upon the shaded terrace looking down upon the roofs of Florence.

But this was not Cosimo’s idea of a pleasant outlook. As he told Giovanni, he far preferred looking out from the windows at Cafaggiolo where all the surrounding land belonged to him. Besides, he was growing old, too old to think about new houses. When work on the Villa Medici at Fiesole was finished in 1463 he was seventy-four. For thirty difficult years he had been controlling the foreign policy of the Republic and the strain had weighed heavily upon him.

VI WAR AND PEACE

COSIMO’S SUPREME importance as arbiter of Florence’s foreign policy had never been in doubt. Official correspondence was conducted through the Signoria; but no important decision was ever reached without reference to the Medici Palace. Foreign ambassadors were frequently to be seen passing through the gateway; Florentine ambassadors invariably called upon Cosimo before taking up their appointments.

For years his main preoccupation had been Milan. Patiently, doggedly, he had done all he could to persuade the Florentines that their standard policy of hostility to the Duchy was misguided and inexpedient, that they would be far better off with the Milanese as their friends even at the cost of antagonizing their traditional allies, the Venetians. At the beginning of the century Venice had enormously increased her possessions by conquering Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Belluno and Feltre, and, after defeating the Turkish fleet, had extended the frontiers of the Most Serene Republic far down the Dalmatian coast. In those years Florence had been thankful to have so powerful and rich an ally in her festering quarrel with Milan whose Duke, Filippo Maria Visconti, had been encouraged to make war on Florence by friends of the exiled Albizzi.

This Visconti was widely believed to be mad and was certainly unbalanced. He had been known on summer days to strip the rich clothes from his grotesquely fat and dirty body and to roll about naked in his garden. So ugly that he refused to have his portrait painted, so weak on his deformed legs that he could not rise from his chair without leaning on a page; so nervous that he had been known to scream at the sight of a naked sword; so frightened of thunder that he had a sound-proof room built in his palace; so fond of practical jokes that he would suddenly produce a snake from his sleeve when talking to an unsuspecting courtier, he was also wilful, secretive and inordinately suspicious. Nevertheless, he was undeniably an astute politician who, during the thirty-five years of his rule, succeeded in recovering much of the territory in Lombardy which his father had conquered but which had been lost while he was still a boy. His attempts to extend the Duchy southwards into Tuscany were not, however, so successful, despite assurances from the Albizzi and other Florentine exiles that he had merely to appear in force in the territories of the Republic for the people to take up arms against their oppressors, the Medici. His invading forces were defeated in 1437 at the battle of Barga; they were thwarted again in 1438. And in June 1440 one of his most talented condottieri, Niccolò Piccinino, was routed by an army of Florentine mercenaries in a savage battle near Anghiari on the Arno. After this defeat, Piccinino and the remnants of his army marched quickly out of Tuscany, followed by the Albizzi whose hopes of returning to power were finally dashed. Rinaldo degli Albizzi rode dispiritedly off on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, while the Florentines took possession of large tracts of lands in the mountainous district of the Cesentino, formerly the domain of an anachronistic feudal lord who had misguidedly joined forces with the Milanese.

At the time of his setback at Anghiari, Duke Filippo Maria Visconti was forty-eight. He had been married twice, first to the rich widow of one of his father’s condottieri whom he charged with adultery and had executed, then to a younger woman whom he had locked up after a dog had howled on their wedding night. By neither wife did he have a child; but a mistress bore him a daughter whom he called Bianca. This Bianca had many suitors but none more persistent than Francesco Sforza.

Francesco Sforza, too, was illegitimate. His father, an illiterate peasant from the Romagna whose name was Giacomo Attendolo, had been kidnapped by a gang of adventurers. After the death of their leader he himself had taken command of them, had adopted the name of Sforza and, before being drowned in the Pescara River while trying to save the life of a young page, had led his men into battle in the service of both Naples and the Pope. At the age of twenty-two, in 1424, Francesco had succeeded his father in command of what was by then one of the best trained bands of mercenaries in Italy, and had subsequently shown exceptional military skill in fighting for the Visconti, the Venetians, the Pope and anyone else prepared to pay the high price he demanded for his services. He was an extremely strong, amiable, down-to-earth man, blunt of speech, with a big, honest face and the simple tastes of a man accustomed to the rough life of a camp. Pope Pius II later wrote of him:

He was very tall and bore himself with great dignity. His expression was serious, his way of speaking quiet, his manner gracious, his character in general such as became a prince. He appeared the only man of our time whom Fortune loved. He had great physical and intellectual gifts. He married a lady of great beauty, rank and virtue by whom he had a family of very handsome children [eight in all, as well as eleven illegitimate children]. He was rarely ill. There was nothing he greatly desired which he did not obtain.

To the annoyance of his occasional employer, the Duke of Milan, he had already carved out a small empire for himself in the Marches; but his ambitions were far from satisfied by that. By marrying Bianca he might, upon her father’s death, succeed to the great Duchy of Milan.

Visconti did not much care for the idea of having this peasant’s bastard as a son-in-law; but Sforza was not only the best soldier in Italy but a political force of consequence. So in November 1441 the Duke at last agreed to the marriage, giving his daughter Pontremoli and Cremona to present to her bridegroom as a dowry and making some rather indeterminate promises about the succession to the Duchy of Milan.

Visconti promises being notoriously unreliable, it came as no surprise when, upon Duke Filippo Maria’s death six years later, it was learned that he had nominated Alfonso, the Aragonese King of Naples, as his heir. Italy was now plunged into uproar. The Duke of Orleans also put forward a claim to the Duchy of Milan as a son of Valentina Visconti. At the same time the German Emperor asserted his ancient rights to Milan; while Venice announced that she would brook no interference in her own claims in Lombardy. As Francesco Sforza prepared to march to take possession of what he considered to be his rightful inheritance, the Milanese – attempting to settle the problem to their own satisfaction – declared themselves masters of their city and re-established their old republic.

In Florence, Cosimo watched the crisis develop with an alert and anxious eye. He had met Francesco Sforza several years before, and had been deeply impressed by his manner and the force of his personality. The friendship then begun had since become more intimate and had been much strengthened by the generous loans which Sforza, in constant financial difficulties, had little difficulty in raising from the Medici bank. As well as lending him money and ensuring that he received additional subsidies from Florentine taxpayers, Cosimo exercised all the political and diplomatic influence he could bring to bear on his behalf. And it was, in fact, largely through Cosimo’s endeavours that Sforza, after three years of warfare and diplomatic negotiations, triumphantly entered Milan as Duke in March 1450.

Cosimo’s unremitting support of Sforza had aroused much angry criticism in Florence, particularly from two of the city’s most prominent citizens, Neri Capponi, who had played an important part in the defeat of Piccinino at Anghiari, and Giannozzo Manetti, the distinguished diplomat. Protests became even more outspoken when, to the extreme annoyance of Naples and Venice, Cosimo recognized Sforza as Lord of Milan before any other state had done so. It was outrageous, so opponents of the Medicean regime maintained, that Florentines should be taxed for the sake of an erstwhile condottiere, now a self-proclaimed duke, the declared enemy of a sister republic which was a traditional ally. Was not Cosimo’s anxiety to back Sforza dictated by fear of losing the huge sums of money he had lent him, and by his expectations of having a more profitable and stable relationship with a despot than he could hope to have with a republic?

Cosimo argued that Venice could no longer be considered a reliable ally: her interests in the Levant clashed with those of Florence; her territorial possessions in the eastern Mediterranean made her an enemy of Turkey with whose empire Florence enjoyed a mutually profitable trade; her shipping was a tiresome rival of Florence’s growing fleet. On the other hand, Milan in the firm grasp of the grateful Sforza would prove an enormously valuable ally both against the encroachments of Venice and in Florence’s still unfulfilled ambition to gain possession of Lucca. Above all, an alliance of Florence with Sforza was the one sure way of bringing peace to Italy, and without peace the commerce of the city could never hope to thrive. Cosimo’s arguments were strongly and ably supported by Nicodemo Tranchedini da Pontremoli, Sforza’s clever and persuasive ambassador in Florence who was to remain there for seventeen years.

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.’

VII ARTISTS AND MOURNERS

ON PASSING through the archway in the Via Larga, the visitor to the Medici Palace entered a charming and graceful inner courtyard, a square, arcaded cortile with pillars supporting a sweep of arches above which were eight marble medallions, several of them copies of cameos and the reverse side of medals in the Medici collection. Under the arcades were classical busts, statues, columns, inscriptions and Roman sarcophagi including the fourth-century stone coffin used for Cosimo’s great-great-great-great grandfather’s cousin, Guccio de’ Medici, who had been Gonfaloniere in 1299. Perhaps there already, and certainly there later, were Donatello’s bronze statue of David¹ and his Judith Slaying Holofemes.²

Donatello was born in Florence in 1386, the son of Niccolo di Betto Bardi, a merchant who had been ruined by his support of the Albizzi. Like Ghiberti he had been trained as a goldsmith and had worked for a time in Ghiberti’s studio, but rather than work on the Baptistery doors he had left with Brunelleschi for Rome where he studied classical art while working in a goldsmith’s shop. On his return to Florence he turned his hand to all manner of work, as happy to execute a coat-of-arms for a chimney-piece, or a small bronze panel in low relief, as he was to carve a big marble figure. He received commissions for work in the Cathedral, in Giotto’s campanile, in Orsanmichele and in the Basilica of San Lorenzo where he later designed the bronze pulpits. But although his works were much admired – his marble St George at Orsanmichele, in particular, was recognized as a masterpiece – it was not until his bronze David was completed that his genius and originality were fully understood. His other statues, like all statues of his time, had been made to occupy a particular position in a building as an architectural motif or ornamentation, whereas the David was not only an astonishingly beautiful and emotive work of art, it was also a remarkable innovation, the first free-standing figure cast in bronze since classical times.

Some of his contemporaries found it shocking. That Donatello was a homosexual was bad enough; that he should have portrayed the young male form so lovingly, realistically and sensually, with so obvious a delight in the flesh, was outrageous. To Cosimo such objections seemed wholly unreasonable, obtusely at variance with those classical Greek ideals which were Donatello’s inspiration. In his own devotion to the humanist spirit, Cosimo had accepted the dedication of Antonio Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus which, in the manner of Catullus, celebrates the pleasures of homosexual love. In the same spirit he honoured the genius of Donatello and the ancient art that had inspired it.

Cosimo grew deeply attached to Donatello, for whom he assumed a kind of paternal responsibility. He saw to it that he was never short of work, either by giving him commissions himself or by recommending him to his friends. With the work that Donatello did for the Medici collection such as a bronze head of Contessina de’ Medici, Cosimo was never disappointed; for, as Giorgio Vasari said, ‘Donatello loved Cosimo so well that he could understand all he wanted, and he never let him down.’ With other patrons, however, Donatello was not so fortunate. One of these, a Genoese merchant who had commissioned a bronze head on Cosimo’s recommendation, complained, when Donatello had finished it, that it was much too expensive. The dispute was referred to Cosimo who, having had the bronze carried up to the roof of the Medici Palace and placed in a good light against the blue of the sky, suggested that the price the merchant was offering was really not enough. The Genoese insisted that, on the contrary, it was more than generous, adding that since Donatello had finished the work in a month, the cost worked out at over half a florin a day. Infuriated by this remark, protesting that the merchant was obviously more accustomed to bargaining for beans than bronzes, Donatello knocked it off the parapet into the street where it was ‘shattered into a thousand pieces’. The mortified merchant offered Donatello twice as much if he would do the head again, but neither his promises nor Cosimo’s entreaties could persuade him to do so.

Donatello was not really interested in money. In his studio he put what he earned into a wicker basket which hung by a cord from the ceiling; and all his workmen and apprentices and even his friends were allowed to help themselves to what they needed without asking him. Nor was he interested in clothes. Cosimo, distressed by the simple not to say ragged attire in which he walked about the streets, gave him a smart suit with a red cloak and cap as a present one feast day. But Donatello wore them for a few days only, before putting his old clothes back on again. When he was too old to work he was given a small farm on the Medici estates near Cafaggiolo; but he did not like it there. He was muddled by the accounts and irritated by the peasant who worked the land for him and who kept complaining about the wind that had blown the roof off his dovecot, or about the authorities that had confiscated his cattle because the taxes had not been paid, or about the storm that had ruined his fruit and vines. Donatello begged that the farm should be taken back into the family estate. This was done and he was given instead the income that he ought to have received from it. ‘Donatello was more than satisfied with this arrangement,’ so Vasari said,’ and, as a friend and servant of the Medici family, he lived carefree and happy all the rest of his life.’

While Donatello was carving statues and medallions for the Medici Palace, Fra Filippo Lippi was also there painting pictures. Twenty years younger than Donatello, Fra Filippo was born in Florence, the son of a butcher who died when Filippo was a child. His mother also being dead, he was placed at the age of sixteen as a novice in the community of the Carmelite friars of Santa Maria del Carmine.³ But he had not the least taste for the religious life, and the only benefit he seems to have derived from his time with the Carmelites was a desire to emulate the great Masaccio whom he saw at work in their chapel of the Brancacci. Indeed, his interest in art appeared to the friars to be Fra Filippo’s one virtue. He was a liar, a drunkard, a lecher and a fraud; and his superiors were profoundly relieved when he left the convent, abandoned his vows and was seized by Barbary pirates off the coast of Ancona while out sailing with some friends. On escaping from his chains he made for Naples, then returned to Florence where his lovely altarpiece for the nuns of Sant’ Ambrogio brought his remarkable gifts to the attention of Cosimo de’ Medici. Disregarding his reputation both as whoremonger and scrounger, Cosimo asked him to work for him and it was at the Medici Palace that several of his earlier masterpieces were produced, including the Coronation of the Virgin.⁴ Later Cosimo obtained work for him at Prato where, in frescoes painted on the walls of the chapel of the high altar in the church of St Stephen, Filippo introduced a portrait of the Rector of the church, Cosimo’s natural son, Carlo.

It was while working on an altarpiece for the nuns of Santa Margherita in Prato that Fra Filippo’s lustful eye fell upon one of the young novices, Lucrezia, the daugher of Francesco Buti of Florence. He made advances to her and, having persuaded the nuns to allow him to use her as a model for the Madonna in his painting, he seduced her and carried her off. She bore him a son, Filippino; and Cosimo, thinking it was high time the father settled down, obtained a dispensation for him to marry from the Pope to whom he had tactfully presented some small examples of Fra Filippo’s work.

Filippo’s lechery had already caused Cosimo a good deal of difficulty in Florence. When seized by feelings of unassuageable lust, Filippo found it quite impossible to concentrate on his work and would repeatedly slip away from his studio in the Medici Palace, hurry through the courtyard and disappear down the Via Larga in search of a woman. Eventually Cosimo, whose methodical practice it was always to obtain an artist’s agreement to finish a commissioned work for a settled price on an agreed date, locked Lippi up in his room, telling him that he would not be let out again until the picture he was engaged upon was finished. Lippi thereupon got hold of a pair of scissors, cut up the coverings of his bed into strips, tied them together, and, using them as rope, climbed down into the street and ran away. Having found him and persuaded him to come back, Cosimo was so thankful that he ‘resolved in future to try to keep a hold on him by affection and kindness and to allow him to come and go as he pleased’. Cosimo was often heard to say thereafter that artists must always be treated with respect, that they should never be considered mere journeymen as they were by most other patrons of his time.

An artist whom it was difficult not to treat with respect was Giovanni da Fiesole, known as Fra Angelico, a small and saintly friar whom Cosimo evidently commissioned to paint frescoes on the walls of the chapter-house, cloisters and corridors of San Marco. He was born at Vicchio in the Mugello in 1387 and christened Guido. On becoming a novice in the monastery of San Domenico at Fiesole in 1407 he took the name of Giovanni. After a time spent at Cortona, where he painted the frescoes in the Dominican monastery, he returned to Fiesole in 1418; and it was not until 1436, when he was nearly fifty, that he came to Florence and was asked to take up his brushes again by Cosimo. Thereafter Cosimo took a deep interest in his work, giving him’ much help, and advice with regard to the details’ of The Crucifixion,⁵ which was painted for the Chapter House, and choosing as the subject for the frescoes in the Medici cell the Adoration of the Magi, whose example in laying down their crowns at the manger in Bethlehem Cosimo liked to have ‘always before his eyes for his own guidance as a ruler’.⁶

Every morning before he began work on The Crucifixion, as on every other morning before starting to paint one of those religious subjects to which he devoted the rest of his life, Fra Angelico would kneel in prayer. And each day, as on every other day when painting a picture of Christ suffering on the Cross, he would be so overcome by emotion that the tears would pour down his cheeks. He was a man of the utmost simplicity, modesty and holiness; hisfellow friars never once saw him angry. Cosimo once said, ‘Every painter paints himself.’ Looking upon the faces and attitudes of the figures in the painting of Fra Angelico it was impossible not to believe that this was so.

When Fra Angelico died in 1455, Cosimo’s health was failing fast. Often totally incapacitated by arthritis and gout, he had to be carried about the house and would cry out as though in agony as he approached a doorway. ‘Why do you scream so?’ his wife once asked him, ‘Nothing has happened.’ ‘If anything had happened,’ he replied, ‘it wouldn’t be any use crying out.’

Over the years he had become increasingly sardonic, ever more terse and caustic. It was said that when his old friend the Archbishop asked him to introduce a measure making it illegal for priests to gamble, he had riposted with curt cynicism, ‘Better to begin by forbidding them loaded dice.’ A visitor to Florence at this time noticed how drawn and ill and unhappy he looked; and his declining years were, indeed, clouded by sadness. His eldest son, Piero, now forty years old, had never been strong and was not expected to survive him long, if at all. Cosimo’s hopes were centred in his second, his favourite son, Giovanni, for whom Michelozzo had been asked to build the Villa Medici on the slopes of Fiesole.

Giovanni was thirty-seven when work began on the villa in 1458. An able, shrewd and cheerful man, he was ill-favoured in appearance with the large Medici nose, a lumpy swelling between his eyebrows and a skin troubled by eczema. Very fond of women, he was also a dedicated trencherman and extremely fat. He was a good judge of painting; he loved music; and was so taken with the ribald wit of the Florentine barber, Burchiello, that even after Burchiello’s talents for burlesque had been turned against the Medici, he invited him to come to entertain him while he was taking a cure at the sulphur baths at Pietrolo. But although so cheerful and carefree, Giovanni was a conscientious citizen and a capable businessman, carefully trained by his father who relied on him more and more after the death of the bank’s general manager, Giovanni d’Amerigo Benci.

Having worked for a time in the Ferrara branch of the family bank, Giovanni became a Priore in the Signoria in 1454, and in the following year served as ambassador to the Curia, where he seems to have spent a large part of his time eating and drinking with the more worldly cardinals. Like his father he had bought a Circassian slave girl from the market in Venice, a ‘delightfully pretty girl aged about seventeen or eighteen… with black hair, delicate features, vivacious and intelligent’. Yet he was evidently quite fond of his wife, Ginevra degli Albizzi, and he loved their only child, Cosimino. Cosimo, too, was devoted to this little boy. There is a story related by his contemporary, Lodovico Carbone of Ferrara, that one day, when Cosimo was discussing some matter of state with an embassy from Lucca, the boy walked into the room with a bundle of sticks, interrupting the conference to ask his grandfather to make him a whistle. Much to the annoyance of the Lucchese delegates, the meeting was promptly adjourned while Cosimo set to work; and no further business was discussed until the whistle had been made to the boy’s satisfaction. ‘I must say, Sir,’ the leader of the delegation felt constrained to protest when recalled to Cosimo’s presence, ‘we cannot be other than surprised at your behaviour. We have come to you representing our commune to treat of grave matters, and you desert us to devote your time to a child.’

⁴ Oh, my lords,’ Cosimo replied, not in the least abashed, throwing his arms round the ambassadors’ shoulders. ‘Are you not also fathers and grandfathers? You must not be surprised that I should have made a whistle. It’s a good thing that the boy didn’t ask me to play it for him; because I would have done that too.’

To his grandfather’s infinite sorrow, this beloved boy died in 1461 shortly before his sixth birthday. And two years later Giovanni himself, having steadfastly refused to diet to lessen his great weight, died of a heart attack. Cosimo never recovered from the shock. As his servants carried him through the big rooms of the Medici Palace, which at the height of his career had contained a household of fifty people, he was heard repeatedly to murmur, ‘Too large a house now for so small a family.’ At his villa at Careggi he spent long hours in silence. Why did he spend so much time alone, without speaking, his wife wanted to know. ‘When we are going away, you spend a fortnight preparing for the move,’ he replied. ‘So, since I have soon to go from this life to another, don’t you understand how much I have to think about.’ On another occasion she asked him why he sat so long with his eyes shut. His reply on this occasion was briefer and even more resigned: ‘To get them used to it.’

In the early summer of 1464, Francesco Sforza’s envoy in Florence, Nicodemo Tranchedini, went to call upon him. He had been there often in the past, and once had found Cosimo and both his sons in bed together, all suffering from gout and each one as ill-tempered as the other. But Cosimo was weary now rather than irritable, almost despairing. As well as gout and arthritis he was ‘afflicted with suppression of urine which caused frequent fever’. ‘Nicodemo mio,’ he said to his visitor, ‘I can bear no more. I feel myself failing and am ready to go.’ Two months later, on i August, he died. He was in his seventy-sixth year. A few days before, he had insisted on getting out of bed and, fully dressed, making his confession to the Prior of San Lorenzo. ‘After which he caused Mass to be said,’ so his son Piero told his two surviving grandsons,

making the responses as though he were quite well. Afterwards being asked to make profession of his faith, he said the creed word for word, repeated the confession himself, and then received the Holy Sacrament, doing so with the most perfect devotion, having first asked pardon of everyone for any wrongs he had done them.

There were those he had wronged, as he well knew. Had he been more lenient, more forebearing he could never have won for himself so much power and wealth. He had never thought it prudent to pardon or to allow back to Florence those rivals whom the Signoria had banished in 1434; he had not hesitated to ruin families or businesses that had appeared to threaten his own; he had always been careful to ensure that his own family’s friends were given profitable or honourable appointments which the Medici’s opponents were rigorously denied. Yet to the Florentines as a whole, to those fellow citizens who had due cause to feel grateful for all he had done for them and for their city, he died revered and sincerely lamented, honoured for his generosity, his political acumen and the wide range of his many accomplishments. As his friend, Vespasiano da Bisticci, wrote of him, his knowledge, taste and versatility were truly remarkable.

When giving audience to a scholar he discoursed concerning letters; in the company of theologians he showed his acquaintance with theology, a branch of learning always studied by him with delight. So also with regard to philosophy. Astrologers found him well versed in their science,

for he had a certain faith in astrology, and employed it to guide him on certain private occasions. Musicians in like manner perceived his mastery of music, wherein he took great pleasure. The same was true about sculpture and painting; both of these arts he understood completely, and showed much favour to all worthy craftsmen. In architecture he was a consummate judge; and without his opinion and advice no public building of any importance was begun or carried to completion.

Some years before the Signoria, of which he was not at that time even a member, had described him as ‘Capo delta Repubblica’; now they passed a public decree conferring upon him the title Pater Patriae – a title once accorded to Cicero – and they ordered that the words should be inscribed upon his tomb.

They would have liked to have built a tomb at least as magnificent as that which his family had had made for Pope John XXIII in the Baptistery. But on his deathbed he had requested that he should be buried without ‘any pomp or demonstration’.

His father had made a similar request; but the request had been ignored. Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici’s body had been carried to the church of San Lorenzo in an open coffin followed by his sons, accompanied by twenty-eight other Medici and a long procession of foreign ambassadors and Florentine officials, to be buried in the centre of the old sacristry in a tomb which was later to be far more extravagantly ornamented than he himself would have considered appropriate.⁷ Cosimo’s funeral was conducted rather more quietly yet it, too, was imposing enough. After a long and solemn ceremony in the basilica of San Lorenzo, which glittered with innumerable candles, his remains were interred below a marble memorial which was surmounted by a circle of serpentine and porphyry decorated with the Medici arms and placed at the foot of the altar. Since San Lorenzo is the basilica of St Ambrose and contains many martyrs’ relics beneath the altar, the Church’s rules did not allow the body to be buried in the nave immediately below the memorial. So it was placed in the vault; but, so as to join the tomb to the porphyry and serpentine memorial, a massive stone pillar, eight feet square, was placed between them. On this pillar are the words ‘Piero has placed this here to the memory of his father.’⁸