The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

XIV PIERO DI LORENZO DE’ MEDICI AND THE FRIAR FROM FERRARA

AT TWENTY-TWO Piero had little of his father’s charm. Strong, healthy and athletic, with a mass of light brown hair which lay in a fringe on his forehead and fell to his shoulders, he was not unattractive; but his personality and manner were far from endearing. He had Lorenzo’s ruthlessness without his tact; he was equally unforgiving towards his enemies but did not remain loyal to his friends. His early letters give the impression of an indulged and rather petulant child. ‘Please send me some figs, for I like them,’ he wrote to his grandmother when he was five. ‘I mean those red ones, and some peaches with stones, and other things you know I like, sweets and cakes and little things like that.’ He asked his father to send him ‘the best sporting dog that can be had’; and when that arrived, he wanted a pony and grew impatient waiting for it. ‘I haven’t had that pony you promised me,’ he complained.’ Everybody is laughing at me.’

As he grew older his temper became more violent and his manner more arrogant. And, either to avoid comparison with a father universally admired if often envied, or because he chose to believe that the Medicean regime had now acquired such permanence that he could behave without due regard for its supporters’ opinions, he shied away from business and public affairs. Much of his time he spent out-of-doors or in writing poems in poor imitation of Lorenzo’s vivid style, leaving the conduct of public affairs to his secretary, Piero Dovizi da Bibbiena, and the supervision of the disintegrating bank to his not very competent great-uncle, Giovanni Tornabuoni. His unpopularity with the Florentines was greatly increased by his wife, Alfonsina, whom he had married when he was seventeen. An Orsini girl, she made it only too plain in her haughty, narrow Orsini manner that she would have preferred to remain in Rome amongst the true nobilità, an attitude that the Florentines, provincials for the most part themselves, found peculiarly irritating.

Piero’s reputation in Florence was also much damaged by his continual quarrels with his cousins, Lorenzo and Giovanni, the two sons of Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, both of whom were older, and – despite their guardian’s misappropriation of part of their inheritance – richer than Piero, and neither of whom took any trouble to hide either their animosity towards the senior branch of the family or their intention to abandon it to its enemies in any future struggle for power that might arise. This struggle was not long to be delayed. For years, indeed, it had been predicted by an eloquent, fiery, ascetic Dominican friar from Ferrara whose apocalyptic sermons had filled the congregations in the crowded Cathedral with shame, remorse and fear.

Girolamo Savonarola was born at Ferrara in 1452. His grandfather, who seems to have been responsible for his education, was a physician from Padua, an acknowledged authority on the curative properties of spa waters and an exponent of the beneficial effects of alcohol which he comfortingly maintained would, if taken in generous measure, help to ensure longevity. His views and reputation secured him a profitable appointment at the Ferrarese court as the Duke’s physician; and, on his retirement, his son succeeded him. His grandson, however, had no taste for court life. After one visit to the Duke’s castle he swore that he would never go there again. Girolamo was an introspective boy, gloomy, pale and withdrawn, given to composing melancholy verses, strumming plaintive, dirge-like strains upon the lute and studying the scriptures. It was later said of him that his demeanour became even more despondent after he had fallen in love with Laodamia Strozzi, the natural daughter of a Florentine exile, who loftily rejected his advances; but he himself maintained that he had never wanted to marry. Certainly his later life was marked by the most rigid austerity. He rarely even spoke to women except to sermonize them; he ate little and forbore to taste those strong liquors by which his grandfather had set such store; his clothes were worn and patched; he slept on a straw mattress laid on a wooden board.

One feast day in 1475, without telling anyone where he was going, he left his father’s house to seek admittance as a novice in the monastery of San Domenico at Bologna, where he was to remain for seven years. ‘You have more reason to thank God than to complain,’ he wrote to his father, explaining his sudden departure.

For God has given you a son and has deemed him worthy to become His militant knight. Do you not think it a great grace to have a son who is a cavalier of Jesus Christ?… I was unable any longer to endure the evil doing of the heedless people of Italy… I too am made of flesh and blood, and as the instincts of the body are repugnant to reason I must fight with all my strength to stop the Devil from jumping onto my shoulders.

To help others fight the Devil, Savonarola was sent out by the Dominicans from Bologna to preach elsewhere in Italy, to Ferrara, to Brescia, to Genoa, and many other towns in Tuscany and Lombardy. In 1481 he came to Florence where he was appointed lector at San Marco and asked to give the Lent sermons at San Lorenzo. In 1489 he settled permanently in Florence at the Monastery of San Marco.

At first he was a far from effective preacher, as he himself well knew, confessing in the days when he could boast that ‘all Italy’ was moved by his preaching that in those early years he did not know ‘how to move a hen’. ‘His gestures and pronunciation pleased none, so that scarcely twenty-five women and children remained to hear him,’ wrote Cinozzi, one of his first biographers. ‘He was so discouraged that he seriously thought of giving up preaching altogether.’ It was not only that his voice was hard and his gestures violent and uncouth; he was a far from prepossessing figure. Small, thin and ugly, with a huge hooked nose and thick, fleshy lips, it was only his eyes that gave any impression of his remarkable personality. Green, intense beneath heavy, black eyebrows, they ‘sometimes gave forth red flashes’.

Although most people in Florence were inclined to prefer the more graceful, cultured and polished sermons of the Augustinian monk, Fra Mariano, for whose order Lorenzo de’ Medici built a monastery outside the Porta San Gallo, the awkward Dominican gradually acquired a following of devoted supporters prepared to overlook all the faults of his delivery for the extraordinary content of his sermons and his passionate, urgent sincerity. By 1491 his congregations had increased so much that San Marco could no longer contain them; and his Lent sermons that year were delivered in the Cathedral.

They caused an uproar throughout Florence. Savonarola had convinced himself that he was gifted with foreknowledge of the future, that his words were divinely inspired and that to deny their truth was to deny the wisdom of God. ‘It is not I who preach,’ he said, ‘but God who speaks through me.’ After prolonged periods of fasting and meditation, visions of the future had been vouchsafed to him. He knew that the Church was to be scourged, then regenerated, and that ‘these things would quickly come to pass’. He knew, too, that unless the people of Italy and, in particular, the people of Florence mended their ways they would be dreadfully punished. Only a return to the simplicity of the early Christian Church could save them. They must turn their back on Aristotle and Plato, who were now rotting in hell; they must abandon the luxuries and sensual pleasures that were destroying their souls, abolish gambling and card games, dissolute carnivals and palio races, fine clothes and scent, powder and paint; and they must give the money they saved to the poor. They must blot out all those pictures so wantonly painted that they made ‘the Virgin Mary look like a harlot’. They must chastise prostitutes – those ‘pieces of meat with eyes’ – and burn sodomites alive. They must reform their political institutions. Cosimo de’ Medici had been quite wrong to declare that states were not ruled by paternosters; they could be governed well in no other way. ‘If you want to make good laws,’ Savonarola pronounced from the Cathedral pulpit, ‘first reconcile yourselves to the laws of God, since all good laws depend on the Eternal Law.’ The Florentines had bartered their ancient liberties for the spectacles provided for them by a tyrant. They must frame a new constitution. ‘I believe the best constitution is that of the Venetians,’ he said. ‘You should copy it; but leave out the worst features, such as the office of Doge.’

To such criticisms of the Medicean regime, Lorenzo had listened with patience and toleration. His friend Pico della Mirandola had assured him that Savonarola was a great and godly man; other friends of his, Poliziano and Botticelli amongst them, had spoken of him with similar respect and awe; Michelangelo as an old man was to say that he could still hear the friar’s voice ringing in his ears. When the name of Savonarola had been put forward as Prior of San Marco, Lorenzo had raised no objection; nor had he shown any displeasure when Savonarola studiedly declined to acknowledge the Medici’s special connection with the monastery to which they had contributed so much. Once, it seems, some senior supporters of the Medicean regime called on Savonarola and suggested that he ‘should not preach such sermons’; but he had replied, ‘Go and tell Lorenzo to repent of his sins, for God will punish him and his.’ Yet Lorenzo on his deathbed had sent for Savonarola, as well as Fra Mariano, and, according to Poliziano, had been blessed by them both.

After Lorenzo’s death, Savonarola’s dire warnings of disaster and criticisms of the Medicean regime increased in intensity and became more explicit. In his sermons of 1492 he spoke of visions of the ‘Sword of the Lord’ hanging threateningly in a darkened sky over the city of Florence; of awful tempests, of plague and war, flood and famine; of a black cross, inscribed with the words ‘The Cross of God’s Anger’, rising from Rome, its arms reaching across the whole earth on which storms raged tumultuously; and of another cross, a golden cross, reaching up to the sky from Jerusalem, bathed in sunlight.

‘Repent, O Florence, while there is still time,’ Savonarola called to a congregation that sat as though petrified by the horror of his vivid images. ‘Clothe thyself in the white garments of purification. Wait no longer, for there may be no further time for repentance.’ He made it clear to them what his visions foretold: unless they turned to the golden cross, disaster would befall them. There would, indeed, be pestilence and war; foreign enemies would pour across the Alps, like ‘barbers armed with gigantic razors’, bringing distress as bitter as a dish of borage and enforcing reforms as relentlessly ‘as a mill grinding out the flour of wisdom’.

‘The Lord has placed me here,’ Savonarola declared, ‘and He has said to me: “I have put you here as a watchman in the centre of Italy that you may hear my words and announce them to the people.”’ The people listened in fear. The Prior of San Marco had foretold the death of Lorenzo; and Lorenzo was dead. He had predicted the death of Pope Innocent VIII and of King Ferrante of Naples; they, too, were dead. He had prophesied that within the lifetime of many of his congregation, the Turks would be converted to Christianity; and though they were still Mohammedans, their conversion would surely now be effected as Savonarola said. So, also, would the Sword of the Lord fall upon Florence, and the armies of a foreign king would pour across the Alps.

On hearing of Lorenzo’s death, Pope Innocent was said to have exclaimed, ‘The peace of Italy is at an end!’ The King of France, Louis XI, was also dead; and his death, too, caused men to think of war. For his successor, Charles VIII, was a young man of energy and ambition, who dreamed romantic dreams of rivalling the exploits of Roland and of gaining glory by brilliant use of that well-organized standing army which his father had raised to crush his enemies within the Kingdom of France. But Charles appeared ill cast for the role of knightly hero. Twenty years old when the Florentines were first warned of the coming of the ‘Sword of God’, he was very small, short-sighted and distressingly ugly with a nose even larger and more hooked than Savonarola’s and with thick, fleshy lips constantly open though partially concealed by the wisps of a scattering, reddish beard. His head and hands twitched convulsively; the few words that ever escaped him were muttered rather than spoken; he walked with a crouch and a limp; his feet were so big that he was rumoured to have a sixth toe; he was notoriously gluttonous and lecherous; he was appallingly ill-educated. Yet there was something about his restlessness, his wayward, adventurous spirit that, for all his naïveté and uneasy affability, made men wary in his presence. His father, though he had enormously increased the area of France, had never been drawn into Italy to claim the Kingdom of Naples as inheritor by force of the rights of the House of Anjou; but it seemed more than probable that Charles would march across the Alps as soon as the opportunity was offered him. A young man who had paid court to the bright, good-looking Anne, Duchess of Brittany, when she was already engaged to Maximilian of Austria, and who had ridden off with her and married her, was not to be discounted.

Charles’s opportunity to go to war was presented to him by Lodovico Sforza, il Moro, uncle of the Duke of Milan. The Duke, Gian Galeazzo, had come of age in 1490, but il Moro had subsequently shown no inclination to give up the powers of Regent which he had assumed. This did not much concern Gian Galeazzo himself, for he was a lazy young fellow, interested more in dogs, horses and food than in his Duchy and disinclined to assert his rights even had he dared to do so. His wife Isabella, however, was a far more positive character. Repeatedly she complained to her grandfather, King Ferrante of Naples, asking him to put her husband’s uncle and his domineering wife in their proper places. King Ferrante at first seemed reluctant to do so, but eventually agreed to do what he could to help.

To forestall any trouble he might have with Naples and any move that might be made against him from elsewhere in Italy, il Moro decided to suggest to Charles VIII that he should reassert the Angevin claim to Naples and, when the claim was denied, lead an expeditionary force into Italy. The Duchy of Milan would lend him its support. Il Moro himself would raise in Italy any loan that might be required, and he did, in fact, succeed in borrowing 100,000 francs from a Genoese bank at fourteen per cent interest.

Charles needed little persuasion, and when King Ferrante died in January 1494 his mind was made up. Announcing his claim to the Kingdom of Naples, and to the Kingdom of Jerusalem which went with it, he prepared to invade Italy and to push Ferrante’s successor, Alfonso II, off his throne. In September the invasion began. A huge army, over thirty thousand strong, marching behind white silk banners embroidered with the arms of France and the words ‘Voluntas Dei’, crossed the Alps and lumbered down into Lombardy where its vanguard was warmly welcomed by il Moro. King Charles then moved on to Pavia to pay his respects to his cousin, the ineffectual Duke Gian Galeazzo, whom he found ill in bed suffering from some mysterious disease which his doctors could not diagnose. The Duchess knelt tearfully at the French King’s feet, begging him not to take his army on to Naples – but Charles had no mind to turn back now. Nor had il Moro. As Charles left Pavia, marching south towards Piacenza, the Duke’s illness took a sudden turn for the worse, a relapse which was naturally attributed to poison. A few days later, he was dead. Immediately his widow and their four children were arrested and imprisoned, and il Moro proclaimed himself Duke of Milan.

The immense French army and its straggling train of camp-followers, cooks, grooms, muleteers, farriers, musicians, sutlers, prostitutes and courtiers continued their ponderous advance unopposed. No efforts to halt it were made in the Papal States; Venice announced her neutrality. Charles drew nearer to the Tuscan frontier, sending envoys on to Florence to ask Piero de’ Medici to acknowledge the justice of the Angevin claim and to allow his army to march through Tuscany. After keeping the envoys waiting for his answer for five days, during which he promised the King of Naples his unqualified support, Piero declared that Florence would remain neutral. The French, however, would not allow Florence to remain neutral. They needed fortresses in Tuscany to give security to their rear while advancing further south. So, protesting grave displeasure at the discourteous way in which his envoys had been treated, Charles advanced on the Tuscan fortress of Fivizzano, sacked it and massacred the entire garrison with alarming brutality.

Suddenly displaying an energy that surprised his fellow citizens, Piero aroused himself to make what arrangements he could to prevent Charles advancing any further into Tuscany. Mercenaries were sent to the frontier forts; condottieri were summoned; Piero’s brother-in-law, Paolo Orsini, was sent to Sarzana with reinforcements; Piero himself prepared to leave for Pietrasanta. His own energy was not matched, however, by any comparable determination on the part of most other leading citizens in Florence. While Savonarola gave vent to further prophecies, seeming to take a gloomy satisfaction in the verification of his predictions, a sense of fatality descended upon the city. ‘A Dominican Friar has so terrified all the Florentines that they are wholly given up to piety,’ the Mantuan envoy in Florence wrote to his master. ‘Three days in the week they fast on bread and water, and two more on wine and bread. All the girls and many of the wives have taken refuge in convents so that only men and youths and old women are now to be seen in the streets.’

‘Behold!’ cried Savonarola,

the Sword has descended; the scourge has fallen; the prophecies are being fulfilled. Behold, it is the Lord God who is leading on these armies… Behold, I shall unloose waters over the earth… It is not I but God who foretold it. Now it is coining. It has come!

Listening to his voice in the Cathedral, Pico della Mirandola felt a cold shiver run through him and his hair stand on end. Lorenzo Lenzi, the rich diplomat, soon to be appointed ambassador to France, was equally alarmed. When Piero de’ Medici asked for more money for the defence of Florence, Lenzi protested that the city would be ruined; resistance was useless. Piero’s cousins thought so too; and, anxious to dissociate themselves from his anticipated defeat, Lorenzo and Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici dispatched messages to the French camp assuring King Charles that, far from supporting Piero’s actions, they were completely in sympathy with the French invasion. They would lend their influence to promote a sympathetic attitude towards it in Florence and would, if required, advance money to support it. Their message being intercepted, the brothers were arrested and confined in Medici villas – Lorenzo at Cafaggiolo and Giovanni at Castello. Both, however, soon escaped and joined Charles’s headquarters at Vigetano where they assured him that if Piero were to be disposed of, the Florentines would readily join the French against the Neapolitans.

By the end of October Piero, deserted by most of the Medicean party, had himself accepted the hopelessness of his position. No help was to be expected from the Pope or from Venice or from Naples, part of whose army had already been routed in the Romagna by the left wing of the invading forces under the Due de Montpensier. The French right wing, having bypassed Sarzana, were within a few miles of Pisa. So, without troubling to consult the Signoria, Piero left for King Charles’s camp at San Stefano, believing his only chance of saving Florence lay in endeavouring to win his friendship by offering his humble submission. No doubt he hoped to score the same sort of diplomatic triumph that his father had achieved in Naples during the Pazzi war. He sent back to Florence a letter modelled on that which his father had written on the road to Pisa.

Charles greeted him disdainfully, demanding an enormous loan and the right to occupy the fortresses of Sarzana, Pietrasanta, Sarzanello and Librafratta, as well as the towns of Pisa and Leghorn, until what he called his ‘enterprise’ was successfully concluded. To the obvious astonishment of the French staff, who later told Philippe de Commines ‘with smiles and laughter’ how absurdly anxious he was to give way on every point, Piero immediately acceded to Charles’s terms and, on 8 November, returned to Florence to tell the Signoria what he had done.

Early the next morning, a sword at his side and surrounded by an armed guard, he went to the Palazzo della Signoria to make his report. Already aware of the terms of his capitulation, the Priori had the main gate slammed in his face, professing outrage at so abject a surrender yet thankful to have found so convenient a scapegoat for their own helplessness. They sent a message saying that he might enter the palace through a side door, provided the guard remained in the piazza. When Piero did not move, a group of Priori and officials came out of the building to remonstrate with him, but failing to persuade him to dismiss his guard, they returned inside the building, slamming the gate shut once more. Soon afterwards the Vacca began to toll, and crowds of people hurried towards the square. Piero stood there, sword in hand now, as the crowds shouted insults at him, hissed at him and threw stones. He did not seem afraid but he was certainly hesitant, not sure what to do until some of his companions persuaded him to go back to the Medici Palace. His brother, Giovanni, who had been vainly trying to rally support for the family by riding up and down shouting ‘Palle! Palte! Palle!’, met him in the Via Larga, and together they returned to the palace where Luca Landucci later saw Giovanni kneeling at a window in prayer.

At nightfall Piero, with his wife, their two young children and his cousin Giulio fled the city by the Porta San Gallo and made for Venice by way of Bologna, taking with them as many of the most valuable small items from the family collections as they could carry. Giovanni disguised himself as a Dominican monk in order to convey some of the treasures of the Medici library from the palace to San Marco; then he, too, fled from Florence. Following their departure, the Signoria decreed that the family should be banished from the State for ever, and that a reward of four thousand florins should be offered for Piero’s head and two thousand florins for Giovanni’s. Their cousins, the sons of Pierfrancesco, hastily changed their name to Popolano and took down the Medici arms from the walls of their palace.

Apartments at the Medici Palace had been prepared for the French King on the orders of Piero; but as soon as it became known that the Medici had flown from Florence, the French nobleman placed in charge of the apartments ‘fell to rifling the palace upon pretence that the Medici bank at Lyons owed him a considerable sum of money’, so Philippe de Commines reported. ‘And among other things he seized upon a whole unicorn’s horn [highly prized both for detecting poison and as an aphrodisiac] besides two great pieces of another; and other people followed his example. The best of the Medici furniture had been conveyed to another house in the city, but the mob plundered it. The Signoria got some of Piero’s richest jewels, twenty thousand ducats in ready money from his bank in the city, several fine agate vases, besides an incredible number of cameos admirably well cut, three thousand medals of gold and silver, weighing almost forty pounds’ and many pictures and statues.¹

While the plunderers were at work, the French army was marching into Pisa, which Charles VIII immediately declared free from the tyranny of the Republic. To make some sort of protest against the French action and to obtain what modification they could in the terms agreed to by Piero de’ Medici, a delegation of four ambassadors left Florence to wait upon King Charles at Pisa. One of the ambassadors was Savonarola who, far from delivering any kind of protest, greeted the French King as an instrument of the divine will. ‘And so at last, O King, thou hast come,’ he is reported to have said to him.

Thou hast come as the Minister of God, the Minister of Justice. We receive thee with joyful hearts and a glad countenance… We hope that by thee Jehovah will abase the pride of the proud, will exalt the humility of the humble, will crush vice, exalt virtue, make straight all that is crooked, renew the old and reform all that is deformed. Come then, glad, secure, triumphant, since He who sent you forth triumphed upon the Cross for our salvation.

Savonarola went on to beg mercy for God’s chosen city of Florence and to ask the King to pardon those who had attempted to resist his advance; for they had offended in all innocence, not realizing that Charles was ‘sent by God’. Impressed by these assurances, Charles agreed to treat Florence with leniency. He remained determined, however, to enter the city with an enormous, intimidating army.

XV THE EXCOMMUNICANT

KING CHARLES VIII entered Florence through the Porte San Freliano, on 17 November 1494, as though he were a conquering hero. He was wearing gilt armour, a cloak of cloth-of-gold and a crown, and he carried his lance at rest as commanders then did when entering a vanquished city. He rode under a splendid canopy held over his head by four knights, his generals on either side of him. Behind him followed the hundred-strong, magnificently clothed royal bodyguard; then came two hundred knights on foot. These were followed by the King’s Swiss guards, the men armed with steel halberds, the officers in helmets surmounted by thick plumes. Five thousand Gascon infantry and five thousand Swiss infantry marched in front of three thousand cavalry in engraved armour with brocade mantles and velvet banners embroidered with gold. Behind these came four thousand Breton archers and two thousand crossbowmen. The artillery was drawn by horses not by oxen or mules, a sight no Florentine had ever seen before.

The cuirassiers presented a hideous appearance, with their horses looking like monsters because their ears and tails were cut quite short. Then came the archers, extraordinary tall men from Scotland and other northern countries, and they looked more like wild beasts than men.

As the sun was setting Charles arrived in the Piazza del Duomo and dismounted from his immense black war-horse. The people in the streets had been cheering up till then, persuaded to follow Savonarola’s lead in welcoming him as a liberator; but the cheers subsided as they noticed with a shock of surprise how very small he was, how jerky his movements. It was a brief interruption, though, observers said. Soon the acclamations rose again as loud as ever. And while his soldiers billeted themselves upon those apprehensive citizens of Florence – whose houses had been marked with chalk by the French quartermasters – Charles, after attending Mass, rode off to the Medici Palace with shouts of ‘Viva Francia!’ ringing in his ears.

The alarm felt by their unwilling hosts at sight of those northern soldiers proved unjustified. During the eleven days that the twelve thousand troops of the French army remained in Florence there were only a few disturbances and no more than ten men killed. In general it was a surprisingly quiet time; and it was not until afterwards, when the army had moved off, declining to pay for most of the cost of their occupation of the city, that any widespread resentment was felt.

It was also a dispute over money which caused the one serious quarrel between Charles himself and the Signoria. He had agreed with them that they should grant him the use of the fortresses which his troops had occupied, that he should also for the moment retain Pisa, which would be handed back when his ‘enterprise’ was successfully concluded, and that he should be paid 150,000 ducats towards the cost of the expedition. But when he met the city’s representatives on 25 November and a herald read out the terms of the treaty, he heard that the sum inserted into the document was only 120,000 ducats. Standing up, he angrily interrupted the herald. The figure of 150,000 must be restored, otherwise he would order his trumpeters to call out his men who would thereupon sack the city without mercy. Infuriated by such a threat from the unprepossessing youth whom he had known when Charles was a puny child, Piero di Gino Capponi, once Florentine ambassador in France, snatched the treaty out of the herald’s hands and tore it up, scattering the pieces on the floor. Defiantly, and in a voice which Guicciardini described as ‘quivering with agitation’, he shouted the words which were to become a Florentine proverb: ‘If you sound your trumpets, we will ring our bells.’

Unwilling to risk the city being called to arms for the sake of so relatively small a sum, Charles gave way, making a feeble joke: ‘Ah! Capponi, Capponi,’ he said, ‘You are a fine capon indeed.’ Then, having signed die treaty, he headed south for Rome.

Two days after his departure, a Parlamento was summoned in the Piazza della Signoria, and by popular vote a Balìa was established. This was followed by the appointment of twenty Accoppiatori who, having abolished the Medicean councils, were in future to be responsible for selecting the members of the Signoria. Whatever constitutional changes were effected, however, Savonarola’s supporters were anxious to make it known that the real power in Florence now lay with the Prior of San Marco, that a theocratic government was to be established and the State would, indeed, be ruled by paternosters.

Savonarola made this clear enough himself. ‘The Lord has driven my ship into the open sea,’ he declared in a sermon on 21 December.

The wind drives me forward. The Lord forbids my return. I spoke last night with the Lord and said, ‘Pity me, O Lord. Lead me back to my haven.’ ‘It is impossible,’ said the Lord. ‘See you not that the wind is contrary?’ ‘I will preach, if so I must, but why need I meddle with the government of Florence?’ ‘If you would make Florence a holy city, you must establish her on firm foundations and give her a government which favours virtue.’

It was a divine call which Savonarola was not reluctant to obey. In sermons of irresistible force he pointed the way and the citizens followed it. With crucifix in hand he urged the people to put to death all those who advocated the restoration of the Medici. God had called him to reform the city and the Church, and God’s will would be done. There must be continual fasting; the gold ornaments and illuminated books, the silver chalices and candlesticks and jewelled crucifixes must be removed from the convents and monasteries. ‘Blessed bands’ of children, their hair cut short, must march through the streets, singing hymns, collecting alms for the poor, and seeking out those rouge pots and looking-glasses, those lascivious pictures and immoral books, all those ‘vanities’ which were the Devil’s invitations to vice. These children must shame their elders into abandoning the gambling table for the confessional box; they must report to the authorities all infractions of the law, all examples of unbecoming or ostentatious dress, all other children who threw stones.

In future, carnivals must be religious pageants to the glory of God in whose name ‘vanities’ must be destroyed in sacrificial bonfires. And so they were. During one well-remembered carnival, processions of white-robed children marched through the streets, carrying olive branches and red crosses, singing hymns and dancing, ‘so that it seemed’ to Cinozzi that ‘the angels had come down to earth to rejoice with the children of men’. A statue by Donatello of Jesus as a boy, holding the crown of thorns in his hands, was carried from church to church. Later an enormous scaffold in the shape of a pyramid was erected opposite die Palazzo della Signoria. Around the base of the pyramid was arranged a garish collection of expensive dresses and fancy costumes once worn for masquerades, looking-glasses, velvet caps, wigs, masks, false beards, scent bottles and pomade pots, jars of rouge, beads, fans, necklaces, bracelets and trinkets of every kind. On top of these were piled profane books and drawings that might engender lascivious thoughts, chessboards and diceboxes, packs of cards and manuals of magic, busts and portraits of celebrated beauties; sensual pictures by Lorenzo di Credi, Botticelli and Fra Bartolommeo sacrificed by the now reformed artists themselves. At the very summit was an effigy of a Venetian merchant who had offered 20,000 scudi for the works of art now about to be consigned to the flames. The huge pile was surrounded by guards, and while the Signoria looked down from a balcony the whole was set alight. The flames rose to the chanting of a choir, the blowing of trumpets and the ringing of countless bells.

Naturally there were those who objected to such demonstrations of piety, who condemned Savonarola’s dedicated adherents as masticapaternostri (prayer mumblers) or piagnoni (snivellers). They beat drums and made ‘all sorts of noise’ to drown his voice when he was preaching, and they encouraged urchins to throw stones at his followers. But there were many more who saw Savonarola as a great reformer; who shared his dream of a world, simple and pure, in which all men would turn to Christ; who agreed with Cinozzi that Florence was then ‘a glorious place’; who, like Luca Landucci, were proud to have children among those ‘blessed bands and held in such reverence that everyone abstained from scandalous vice’; who, like Giorgio Vespucci, uncle of the navigator, and the Strozzi brothers, hoped one day to see Florence made ‘a new Jerusalem’.

King Charles VIII met little opposition on his march south. Rome fell without a struggle; and Ferrante’s son, King Alfonso II, terrified by weird dreams and portents, haunted by the ghostly victims of his brutality, and hearing the stones beneath his feet cry out ‘Francia! Francia!’, abdicated and fled to a Sicilian monastery. The French army crossed the Neapolitan frontier, massacring the people of Monte di San Giovanni and setting fire to the town as a warning of the dreadful fate that awaited all opponents. They filled the whole kingdom with the greatest terror, so Guicciardini said, by a way of making war that ‘had not been practised in Italy for many centuries’. Choosing to regard him as their deliverer from the House of Aragon, the Neapolitans gave Charles as enthusiastic a welcome as he had enjoyed in Florence. Indeed, the welcome of the people and the delights of their city were so beguiling that all thoughts of going on to Jerusalem as Charles had originally intended were now abandoned. The King settled down to enjoy the pleasures of his new domain and a succession of pretty mistresses, whose portraits he had bound together in a big book. But, as he languished beneath the Neapolitan sun, his rivals to the north were busily plotting his downfall.

None of these rivals was more active than the new Pope, Roderigo Borgia, Alexander VI. He was fat and bald, plain and flamboyant, yet it was not only his riches and his influence that made him attractive to women. He had an undeniable charm, an invigorating energy, a kind of childlike eagerness in his profligacy that endeared him to numerous mistresses. Like so many of his predecessors, he was determined to use his office for the benefit of his family, in particular for the advancement of his six sons of whom the sinisterly beguiling Cesare Borgia was the most talented and the most ambitious. But the Pope recognized that before these ambitions could be fully realized, an attempt must be made to unite Italy against the foreign invader. Accordingly he set about forming what he liked to term a Holy League, dedicated to the expulsion of the French.

It was an alliance that Lodovico Sforza was only too anxious to join. For Il Moro was now deeply regretting the consequences of having enticed the French into Italy where the Duke of Orleans, jealous of Charles VIII’s success in Naples, was making claims upon the Duchy of Milan. As well as Milan, Venice joined the Pope’s Holy League, so did the Emperor Maximilian, so did Ferdinand King of Aragon and Castile. Despite this threat to their position in Naples, the French army did not withdraw from the city immediately. It was not, in fact, until seven weeks after the Holy League had been established that Charles, leaving a large garrison behind him to hold the kingdom in his name, led his army north again.

It was a long, slow march. May passed and the whole of June, 1495. July began and still the French army, accompanied by a mule loaded with treasure to every two men, had not crossed the Appenines. By now the Holy League had managed to bring a strong army together under command of the fierce-looking, bulging-eyed Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. Slowly the two armies drew closer together; and this time there would be no deft avoidance as in the earlier fashion of Renaissance warfare. As Francesco Guicciardini observed, the French invasion had for ever ended those prolonged, choreographic campaigns so beloved by the old condottieri who had protracted their wars – as one of them, Jacopo Piccinino, himself admitted – in order to increase their pay, who had safeguarded their men by spending ‘most of their time retreating to the security of river banks and ditches’, who, when they had fought at all, had fought for prisoners rather than to kill. The picture of Italian warfare before the French invasion as a bloodless parade has, of course, been exaggerated. In the battle of Anghiari in 1440, for instance, about nine hundred men were killed, not ‘one man’ as Machiavelli claimed. But all the same, it was not unusual for engagements, in which thousands of men took part, to end without a single casualty and with congratulatory handshakes exchanged between the rival commanders. The Italian soldier fought bravely when he had to fight; but most of the time his commanders made sure that he occupied himself in plundering rather than in conflict, in driving cattle with his lance rather than in shooting at the enemy with his cross-bow. Troops of infantry pass through the pages of contemporary chronicles, wearing smart jerkins and parti-coloured tights, marching along to the music of drum and fife, occasionally shouting the name of the prince who paid them, looking more like strolling players than men of war. In sharp contrast, the soldiers of Charles VIII’s army were experienced, professional, trained to kill. ‘They would face the enemy like a wall without ever breaking rank.’ Above all, as Guicciardini said, they had brought with them

a great quantity of artillery of a sort never before seen in Italy [which] rendered ridiculous all former weapons of attack… These were called cannon and they used iron cannon balls instead of stone as before, and this new shot was incomparably larger and heavier than that which had previously been employed. Furthermore, they were hauled on carriages drawn not by oxen as was the custom in Italy but by horses… and were led right up to the walls and set in position there with incredible speed. And they used this diabolical weapon not only in besieging cities but also in the field.

When the French and Italian armies finally clashed by the banks, of the river Taro in July 1495, the mercenary troops of the Holy League were no match for King Charles’s artillerymen and cavalry. The battle was short and ferocious, more savage and bloody, indeed, than any battle fought in Italy since the end of the thirteenth century. Italian losses were enormous; and, as the greatly outnumbered French army continued its northward march, hundreds of French camp-followers ran on to the field with knives and axes to hack apart the screaming, wounded Italians. Since he retained possession of the battle-ground and had captured the French baggage train – which included a sword and helmet said to have belonged to Charlemagne, jewels and plate, the royal seals, a piece of the Holy Cross, a sacred thorn, a vest of the Blessed Virgin, a limb of St Denis and a book depicting naked women ‘painted at various times and places… sketches of intercourse and lasciviousness in each city’ – the Marquis of Mantua claimed the victory. But by the end of August Charles and his army, still a powerful force, though mauled and weary, were across the Alps and safely home in France, leaving the Italians shocked by the realization that for all their virtues, talents, wealth, past glory and experience, for all their skill as military engineers, they had been utterly unable to withstand the advance of the ruthless men from the north.

In this traumatic campaign Florence had played no part. Firm in his allegiance to ‘God’s instrument’, Savonarola had declined to have anything to do with the Holy League. Amazed that an obscure Dominican should wield such influence, and annoyed not only by his sermons in support of the invader but also by his claims to be God’s chosen mouthpiece, the Pope asked Savonarola to come to Rome to explain himself. Savonarola replied that Florence could not spare him, that he was not well enough to travel, and that, in any case, it was contrary to God’s will that he should do so. Thus had begun a correspondence which, growing increasingly less restrained, had ended with the Pope’s forbidding Savonarola to deliver any further sermons. For a time Savonarola had obeyed the Pope’s commands, his place in the pulpit being taken by his devoted disciple, Fra Domenico da Pescia; but in February 1496, choosing to suppose that the Pope’s ban was no longer in force, Savonarola began a course of sermons which were given every day in the Cathedral until 3 April.

The Pope used every means at his disposal to bring Savonarola to heel. He gave instructions that the Tuscan Dominicans, who had been granted independence, should revert to Roman control since this would enable him to send Savonarola to another monastery far from Florence. Savonarola declined to accept the Pope’s jurisdiction in the matter. Alexander even offered him a cardinal’s hat if he would give up preaching his sermons. Savonarola replied that another sort of red hat would suit him better, ‘one red with blood’.

At length, in June 1497, the Pope took the final step and excommunicated him. For six months Savonarola pondered his dilemma, fasting and praying, until God guided him to the decision that it was his duty to defy the Pope. On Christmas Day he did so publicly by celebrating High Mass in the Cathedral. Alexander responded by demanding of the Signoria that they either dispatch ‘that son of iniquity, Fra Hieronymo Savonarola’ to Rome or lock him up in Florence. If they did not do so, he would lay the entire city under an interdict.

‘You have not listened to my expositions,’ Savonarola replied to the Pope.

I can no longer place any faith in your Holiness, but must trust myself wholly to Him who chooses the weak things of this world to confound the strong. Your Holiness is well advised to make immediate provisions for your own salvation.

With the Signoria, whom he considered to have been far too mild in their response to the Pope’s threats, Savonarola was even more harshly admonitory. ‘Tell those who are seeking to make themselves great and exalted that their seats are prepared for them – in Hell… Tell them that the rod has come. Someone has his seat in Hell already.’

But the Pope had timed his threat well. Savonarola’s supporters were losing ground in Florence where, indeed, they had been only partly responsible for the impermanent changes which had taken place in the government of the city. There had been poor harvests that year in Tuscany; starving people had fallen down and died in the streets; there had also been an outbreak of plague. Savonarola’s hero, King Charles, had not returned Pisa to Florence as he had promised to do, but had handed it over instead to its inhabitants who had taken up arms to defend their independence. And the subsequent war, fought as usual by ill-paid mercenaries, dragged on indeterminately. Making much of these calamities, Savonarola’s opponents had been more and more outspoken in their criticisms of his regime. A party of high – spirited young men known as Compagnacci, mostly sons of rich families, had gone so far as to smear the Cathedral pulpit with grease, hanging round it the putrid skin of an ass, and to contrive the fall of a heavy chest which came crashing down to the stone floor of the nave, sending the panic-stricken congregation rushing out of the Cathedral in the middle of the Prior’s sermon.

It was one of the last sermons which Savonarola was to deliver; for it had been decided in Florence that, in view of the Pope’s warnings, he must be asked to preach no more. He agreed to desist on condition that he be allowed the opportunity of vindicating himself. He attempted to do so on 18 March in a sermon in which he insisted on his right to resist unlawful authority, made reference to the fulfilment of his prophecies and castigated the Church as a Satanic institution for the promotion of whoredom and vice. He had not preached because he wanted to but because he had been compelled to by a raging fire within the very marrow of his bones: ‘I feel myself all burning, all inflamed with the spirit of the Lord. Oh, spirit within! You rouse the waves of the sea, as the wind does. You stir the tempest as you pass. I can do no other.’

After this final sermon the Franciscans, who had long challenged the Dominicans’ claims to a special relationship with God, renewed their request that Savonarola should produce some evidence of His peculiar favour. Fra Francesco da Puglia, a Franciscan monk, in particular insisted that Savonarola’s claims to divine inspiration were false, and that he could not prove they were otherwise. He offered to walk through fire in company with Savonarola to satisfy the world that the Dominican was not under God’s protection. Savonarola declined to take part in the ordeal, protesting that he was reserved for higher work; but he agreed that his passionately devoted supporter, Fra Domenico da Pescia, might represent him. Fra Domenico eagerly accepted the challenge. Fra Francesco, however, refused to match himself with anyone other than Savonarola; so another Franciscan, Fra Giuliano Rondinelli, was found to take his place.

Most members of the Signoria were horrified by this suggested reversion to the barbarism of past ages. One suggested that their ancestors would be ashamed of them if they could hear them even so much as discussing the propriety of the proposed ordeal. Another put forward the idea that walking across the Arno without getting wet would be ‘just as good a miracle’ to settle the dispute. Yet it was felt that the populace had by now become so excited by the prospect of an ordeal by fire that it might prove dangerous to disappoint them. It was settled that if the Dominican, Fra Domenico, died then Savonarola would be banished from Florence; if the Franciscan, Fra Giuliano, perished – as, indeed, he expected to do – but the Dominican did not, then Fra Francesco da Puglia would be banished. It was also settled that the ordeal should take place in the Piazza della Signoria on Saturday 7 April 1498 between ten o’clock in the morning and two in the afternoon, that on the appointed day all strangers must leave the city, the streets be barricaded, and the approaches to the Piazza held by armed guards.

An avenue thirty yards long and ten yards across was constructed in front of the Loggia dei Lanzi. Each side of the avenue was lined with piles of sticks soaked in oil leaving a passage in the middle about three feet broad through which the monks had to pass. The Loggia dei Lanzi was divided into two for the accommodation of the rival supporters.

The Franciscans were the first to enter the arena, where they were kept waiting for the arrival of the Dominicans, who marched towards the Loggia in pairs behind a crucifix, chanting an appropriate psalm. At the end of the procession walked Fra Domenico next to Savonarola in ‘whose excommunicated hands’ the Franciscans were appalled to see the Host. There was further consternation when it became apparent that Fra Domenico intended to take a crucifix with him into the flames. He eventually agreed that he would not do this, but he could not be persuaded to be parted from the consecrated Host. The arguments continued until a heavy thunderstorm broke above then-heads, and it was announced that no ordeal would take place that day after all.

This was too much for the people to bear. The next day, Palm Sunday, an angry mob attacked a congregation who had assembled in the Cathedral to hear a sermon by one of Savonarola’s disciples. The congregation fled from the Cathedral and, pursued by sticks and stones and the execrations of the Compagnacci, ran for the shelter of San Marco. Here, unknown to Savonarola who urged them to seek protection only in prayer, the monks had assembled a small store of weapons and were prepared to withstand a siege. Some of them loosened a pinnacle at the top of the monastery church and sent it hurtling down on the heads of the mob in the square below; others struck out with lances at men trying to set fire to the monastery walls. Several rioters and monks were killed before the assailants managed to clamber over the walls and down into the choir. Savonarola took refuge in the library where, soon afterwards, a guard arrived from the Signoria with orders for his arrest. He was escorted through the streets, hooted and jeered at by the mob, and cast into the Alberghettino in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria where Cosimo de’ Medici had been imprisoned sixty-five years before.

Orders were given for Savonarola to be tortured. Suffering the exquisite agonies inflicted by the strappado, he made all such confessions as were required of him, retracting the confessions when the ropes were removed from his body, and then being tortured again. Together with Fra Domenico and another of his most faithful disciples Fra Silvestro, he was found guilty of heresy and schism and condemned to death. A scaffold, surrounded by tinder, was erected in the Piazza della Signoria and on this Savonarola and his two companions were hanged in chains and burned. As the flames leapt towards the early summer sky, a voice called out derisively, ‘O prophet, now is the time for a miracle! Prophet save thyself.’

‘In a few hours the victims were burned, their legs and arms gradually dropping off,’ Landucci recorded in his diary.

Part of their bodies remaining hanging to the chains, a quantity of stones were thrown to make them fall, as there was a fear of the people getting hold of them; and then the hangman and those whose business it was, hacked down the post and burned it on the ground, bringing a lot of brushwood, and stirring the fire up over the dead bodies so that the very last piece was consumed. Then they fetched carts, and accompanied by the mace-bearers, carried the last bit of dust to the Arno near the Ponte Vecchio in order that no remains should be found.

VI RETURN OF THE MEDICI

THEIR TREASURES lost, their palaces and villas forfeited, the Medici wandered over Europe like the members of an outcast tribe. Piero remained in Italy, occasionally pawning a gem or a cameo, offering his services to the Republic’s enemies, making repeated attempts to reinstate himself in Florence by force, joining forces with Cesare Borgia, who was creating an empire for himself in the Romagna and who hoped that by re-establishing the Medici in Florence he would make a valuable ally for himself in Tuscany. Once Piero actually appeared at the Porta Romana with a band of men-at-arms, who trotted away to Siena when it became clear that the Florentines were not in the least disposed to favour a Medicean restoration under Piero’s leadership. Eventually Piero decided to offer his services to the French in return for some vague, unfulfilled promises of their support in yet another attempt to regain Florence.

King Charles VIII was now dead, having struck his head violently against a beam at his chateau at Amboise; but his successor, Louis XII, reasserted the family’s right to the throne of Naples. He also claimed the Duchy of Milan on the grounds that his grandfather had married Valentina Visconti. Both these claims were, however, strongly contested by King Ferdinand of Spain; and although in 1500 Ferdinand made an agreement with Louis to share Naples with him, he and the French, quarrelling over their prospectivespoils, were soon at waragain.

In December 1503, the French were defeated by the Spaniards under the spirited command of Gonsalvo de Córdoba. Attempting to escape across the Garigliano to Gaeta, Piero de’ Medici, who had been serving in the French army, was drowned in the swollen waters of the river when his boat capsized. His body was later recovered and buried in the abbey of Monte Cassino.¹ He left two children, a daughter, Clarice, and a son, Lorenzo, who was eleven. Their uncle, Giovanni, who became head of the family on Piero’s death, was already recognized as a most remarkable man.

Born in the Medici Palace on 11 December 1475, Giovanni was now twenty-eight. From his earliest years his parents had entertained great hopes for him. The night before his birth his mother had had a strange and alarmingly vivid dream. She had seen herself in the Cathedral, writhing in agony and about to be delivered; but the baby when it came was not a human child. It was an immense lion.

As though encouraged by this vision to believe that the House of Medici would derive great profit from a son being made a prince of the Church, Lorenzo determined to launch Giovanni on an ecclesiastical career. As soon as the boy displayed sufficient promise to merit early preferment, orders were given to the manager of the Lyons branch of the bank to keep a sharp look out for vacancies, French benefices being easier to obtain than Italian. Early preferment Giovanni certainly achieved. Having received the tonsure at the age of eight he was presented with the abbey of Fontdouce by the King of France who would also have made him Archbishop of Aix in Provence had it not been discovered just in time that the present Archbishop was still alive. To compensate him for this disappointment, Giovanni was given the priory of Saint-Gemme near Chartres, made a canon of every cathedral in Tuscany, and presented with the abbeys of Passignano and Monte Cassino as well as with over twenty other honourable and profitable offices. After the death of Sixtus IV and the election of Giovanni Battista Cibò as Innocent VIII, the way lay open to even higher preferment. Fearing that the new Pope might the before his hopes were fully realized, Lorenzo did all he could to persuade him to create Giovanni a cardinal at the earliest possible date. And after the marriage of his daughter, Maddalena, to the Pope’s son, Franceschetto Cibò, he instructed the Florentine ambassador in Rome to miss no opportunity of pressing Giovanni’s claim. He enlisted the help of two cardinals, Roderigo Borgia and Ascanio Sforza, both of whom had great influence at the Curia; and he wrote letter after personal letter reminding the Pope of his ‘chief desire’. In March 1489 Innocent gave way, making the appointment conditional, however, upon Giovanni’s leaving Florence to study canon law at Pisa and upon his elevation remaining secret for three years. Lorenzo had no objection to the first condition, but, constantly apprehensive that Innocent might the within the stipulated period and that a new Pope would declare his predecessor’s unusual appointment invalid, he tried to have his son’s elevation made public immediately. He was unsuccessful. The old Pope, his health declining slowly month by month, refused to give way. Lorenzo afterwards confessed that scarcely a day passed when he did not expect to receive the dreaded news from Rome. Innocent died on 25 July 1492, but he had lived just long enough for Lorenzo’s ambitions to be fulfilled. Three months before the Pope’s death and three weeks before his father’s, in March 1492 Giovanni had entered the ancient Badia at Fiesole and there the insignia of his rank had been blessed before the High Altar and the papal brief had been read out.

Emerging from the church wearing his mantle, scarlet hat and sapphire ring, the sixteen-year-old boy had not presented a prepossessing appearance. He was tall enough and looked both good-natured and intelligent; but his face was pasty and flabby, his body already extremely fat, and his eyesight evidently failing. His nose was markedly snubbed and he kept his mouth half open. Nor did his appearance belie his nature. He was intelligent, his tutors all agreed; he was of a happy and generous disposition; but they had due cause to complain of his laziness, his precocious and excessive predilection for good food, good drink and pleasure. In Rome he had ample opportunity to indulge these tastes, and he did not stint himself. ‘He will not get out of bed in the morning,’ one of his tutors reported. ‘And he will sit up late at night. I am most concerned, since these irregular habits are likely to injure his health.’

Well aware of these faults, his father had thought it as well to write him a long letter of advice in the hope that he might be persuaded to lead a life more befitting his exalted rank:

The first thing that I want to impress upon you is that you ought to be grateful to God, remembering always that it is not through your merits, or your wisdom that you have gained this dignity, but through His favour. Show your thankfulness by a holy, exemplary, and chaste life… During the past year I have been much comforted to see that, without being told to do so, you have often of your own accord gone to confession and to Holy Communion. I do not think mere is a better way of keeping in God’s grace than to make this a regular practice. I know only too well that in going to live in Rome, which is a sink of iniquity, you will find it hard to follow this advice because there will be many there who will try to corrupt you and incite you to vice, and because your promotion to the cardinalate at your early age arouses much envy… You must, therefore, oppose temptation all the more firmly… It is at the same time necessary that you should not incur a reputation for hypocrisy, and in conversation not to affect either austerity or undue seriousness. You will understand all this better when you are older… You are well aware how important is the example you ought to show to others as a cardinal, and that the world would be a better place if all cardinals were what they ought to be, because if they were so there would always be a good Pope and consequently a more peaceful world…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

each given a white waistcoat, a pair of stocking, half red and half white, a white cap, shoes, and an iron breastplate. Most also had lances; some of them had arquebuses. They were soldiers but lived in their own homes, being obliged to appear when needed, and it was ordered that many should be equipped in this way throughout the country, so that we should not need any foreigners. This was thought the finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence.

Landucci’s confidence in the militia was not dispelled when the Spanish forces of the Holy League began to march for the Florentine frontier from Bologna under command of Raymond de Cardona. Even when the Spaniards, repeatedly demanding a change of government in Florence, reached Barberino and advanced on Campi and frightened peasants ran in from the hills to seek shelter behind the walls of the city, it seemed to Landucci as to all ‘intelligent people’ that there was ‘no need of fear. On the contrary it was rather for the enemy to fear, because if they came down into these plains, they would fare badly. Many battalions of militia had been levied, and all the men-at-arms were eager to encounter the enemy.’

Although Machiavelli, who had been busy organizing the defences of the Mugello, took a more realistic view of the situation, Soderini in Florence shared Landucci’s confidence. He had nine thousand men under arms; he knew that the Spanish army was much smaller, and mat, although the Medicean party in Florence were growing stronger as the Spaniards advanced on the city, their hopes of a revolution in Florence were ill-founded.

Cardona himself was not at all sure that his army was large enough to reduce Florence if threats proved not enough to gain the ends of the League. He had been reluctant to advance into Tuscany at all. The Pope’s nephew, the hot-tempered Duke of Urbino, had also disapproved of the expedition. But Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici was insistent. When the Duke of Urbino declined to supply Cardona with artillery, Giovanni offered the money to buy two cannon himself. When Cardona complained of a lack of provisions, he paid for these also himself. And when a Florentine delegation approached the Spanish army with an offer of reasonable terms, it was Giovanni who insisted that no terms could be accepted which did not provide for the restoration of the Medici. The Cardinal was already in touch with sympathizers in Florence, sending messages to them by means of a peasant who deposited them in the wall of a cemetery in Santa Maria Novella. His cousin, Giulio, had arranged a secret meeting at a country villa with Antonfrancesco degli Albizzi, one of their most influential supporters, who assured him that, while Soderini would put on an act of defiance, the spirit of his supporters would collapse as soon as they heard the roar of the Spaniards’ cannon.

Faced with the cardinal’s demand that he should deliver up the city, Soderini gave orders for the imprisonment of all known supporters of the Medici; and in an eloquent speech before the assembled citizens in the Piazza della Signoria he gravely warned of the dangers of allowing the Medici to return to Florence even though they professed themselves anxious to do so only as private citizens. After all that had happened, they could not possibly remain private citizens; they would certainly set themselves up as tyrants. It was true, Soderini continued, that Lorenzo di Piero had never made an ostentatious display of power but had covered his real prerogative with a mantle of private equality; but his son had never done so; and his young grandson, Lorenzo, whom Cardinal Giovanni represented, could remember nothing of the traditions of the family. ‘It is therefore for you to decide whether I am to resign my office (which I shall cheerfully do at your bidding) or whether I am to attend vigorously to the defence of our country if you want me to remain.’ The people loudly voiced their support of Soderini; and preparations for the defence of Florence were continued with renewed vigour.

While Machiavelli’s militia manned the city’s strong-points, the Spanish army approached the gates of Prato, twelve miles northwest of Florence, where, so the hungry troops had been promised, they would find food enough to spare. When Giovanni himself had entered Prato twenty years before a triumphal arch created to welcome him had crashed down into the street killing two children dressed as angels in his honour. This tragic event was remembered now when, at the cardinal’s second coming, even more dreadful events were foretold by the old men standing beneath the city’s high, brown, crumbling walls.

A hole in these walls was soon torn out by Cardona’s cannon. It was scarcely bigger than a window, Jacopo Nardi recorded. Behind it was a high monastery wall, and behind that again were pikemen and bowmen who could perfectly well have covered the breach. But at the approach of the Spanish infantry, they all ‘ran away, scandalously throwing their arms to the ground, as though the enemy had suddenly jumped on their backs’. ‘The Spaniards, amazed that military men as well as humble inexpert civilians should show such cowardice and so little skill,’ Guicciardini recorded,

broke through the wall with scarcely any opposition, and began to race through the town, where there was no longer any resistance but only cries, flight, violence, sack, blood and killing, the terrified Florentine foot soldiers casting away their weapons and surrendering to the victors.

For two days the Spaniards raged through the city, raping, killing priests at their altars, ransacking churches, burning monasteries, breaking into convents. The inhabitants were tortured to disclose the hiding places of their treasure chests; they were then killed, stripped of their clothes, and their naked bodies flung into ditches or wells already choked with severed limbs. ‘Nothing would have been spared the avarice, lust and cruelty of the invaders,’ Guicciardini added, ‘had not the Cardinal de’ Medici placed guards at the main church and saved the honour of the women who had taken refuge there. More than two thousand men died, not fighting (for no one fought) but fleeing or crying for mercy.’

As yet unaware of the worst of what Machiavelli was later to describe as ‘an appalling spectacle of horrors’ and afterwards unable to prevent them, the Cardinal wrote blandly to the Pope on 29 August 1512:

This day, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the town of Prato was sacked, not without some bloodshed such as could not be avoided… The capture of Prato, so speedily and cruelly achieved, although it has given me pain, will at least have the good effect of serving as an example and a deterrent to the others.

Certainly it had this effect. Even as the reports of the sack of Prato were still coming into Florence, a party of Medici supporters marched to the Palazzo della Signoria to demand that Soderini should resign. He was fully prepared to do so, and thought it as well to escape while he still could. So, having sent Machiavelli to ask for a safe passage for him, he was escorted from the city on his way into exile on the Dalmatian coast.

Later the Florentines were required to agree to the return of the Medici, to join the Holy League and to elect a new Gonfaloniere. The militia was abolished; and in the purge of Soderini’s officials, Machiavelli was replaced by a Medicean. Soon afterwards, denied the opportunity of serving the Medici which he would have welcomed, Machiavelli left Florence for his country house at Sant’ Andrea in Percussina where, the following year, he wrote The Prince.

XVII ‘PAPA LEONE!’

ON THE day that Soderini left Florence – 1 September 1512 – Cardinal Giovanni’s younger brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, entered it. Having shaved off the beard he had grown in exile and dressed himself in an inconspicuous lucco, he walked unattended through the streets. Workmen were already busy removing the crimson cross of the Florentine citizens which had replaced the Medici palle on various buildings in the city, and, to the cheers of a crowd of onlookers in the Via Larga, painters and masons were hard at work restoring the Medici emblems on the family palace. But Giuliano did not go to the palace. He went instead to the house of Antonfrancesco degli Albizzi, seeming anxious by the modesty of his demeanour to demonstrate his willingness to be accepted as a private citizen of Florence with little interest in the control of its government.

This was an attitude quite contrary to his elder brother’s plans. The Cardinal had not gone to all this trouble just to find the Medici a home. He himself returned to Florence with 1,500 troops, and entered his former palace in the full panoply of his rank with the air of a man who had returned to his native city in order to rule it.

He seemed at first content to allow the republican institutions of the State to remain outwardly unchanged. But two days after his ceremonial entry into the city a demonstration was organized in the Piazza della Signoria which was filled with people shouting ‘Palle! Palle! Palle!’ and demanding a Partamento. The request was granted; a Portamento was called; and power was handed to a Balla of forty members, nearly all of them members of the Medicean party.

Yet although the Florentines were to be left in no doubt that they now had a master, Cardinal Giovanni appeared ready to reassure them that his rule would not be severe, nor would their burdens be heavy. The significance of his personal device – an ox-yoke – was unmistakable; but the motto beneath it was ‘Jugum enim meum suave est’ – ‘Truly my yoke is easy’. Indeed, from the beginning, the Cardinal was careful to persuade the Florentines that the restoration of the Medici would lead to a return to the happy days of his father, not to the dismal interregnum of Savonarola. Entertainments and pageants were to be encouraged; the carnival songs, which Lorenzo had so much enjoyed and which Savonarola had so rigorously denounced, were now once more to be heard in the streets; and the presence in the city of the Cardinal’s kindly brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, was to be a pledge that the government would be understanding and humane.

Less than six months after his family had been returned to power in Florence, the Cardinal was informed that his benefactor, Pope Julius II, was dying. Giovanni, now aged thirty-seven, was himself ill; but in order to attend the enclave he gave orders that he should be carried south to Rome in a litter.

Exhausted by the journey, in great pain from a stomach ulcer and troubled by an anal fistula, he arrived in Rome on 6 March 1513. Weeping women, mourning the death of their patriotic Pope, were kissing the pontifical feet which had been left protruding from the grille of the mortuary chapel. The Cardinal had missed the opening ceremonies of the conclave, including the Mass of the Holy Spirit which, since St Peter’s was being reconstructed, was sung in the chapel of St Andrew, where the wind had howled through the cracks in the walls repeatedly extinguishing the candles on the altar. For several days Giovanni was too ill to get out of bed, submitting gloomily to the painful ministrations of his doctor, while the other cardinals, in little groups, argued and plotted. After a week, in order to force them to a decision, their daily meal was reduced to a single unappetizing dish which, combined with the stale air of the building whose doors were locked and whose windows were sealed as custom directed, soon led to a decision.

In the early discussions the name of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici had been little mentioned but as time went by he was admitted to be notably papabile. He was amiable and well liked, tactful, gregarious and approachable. He was relatively young, but had been a cardinal for over twenty years and so was not inexperienced. He took his religious duties seriously and fasted twice a week. He was evidently prepared to be ruthless when the interests of his family were threatened; but how many popes were not? Moreover, he was not in good health, so if his election proved ill-considered his Papacy might well be of no lengthy duration. The younger cardinals from ruling families such as Ippolito d’Este of Ferrara, Ghismondo Gonzaga of Mantua and Alfonso Petrucci of Siena were all anxious for the election of a man like themselves, rather than another rough peasant like Julius II who might march them off again on some tiresome campaign. Cardinal Francesco Soderini, Piero’s brother, naturally did not favour him; but Giovanni’s secretary, Bernardo Dovizi, gradually won Cardinal Soderini over by suggesting the possibility of a marriage between the Medici Cardinal’s nephew, Lorenzo, and some young lady from the Soderini palace. So, on 11 March, when the votes were taken out of the urn and counted by Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici himself as Senior Deacon, he was able to announce his own nomination. He did so with becoming modesty, announcing that he would, if the Sacred College approved the choice, be known as Leo X.

The news of the election of a Medici pope was greeted by the Palleschi in Florence with the wildest excitement. For four days the celebrations continued to the constant clanging of bells, the explosion of fireworks and crackers, the boom of cannon fired from the surrounding hills, the lighting of bonfires fuelled with the furniture of former Piagnoni, the repeated drunken shouts of ‘Palle! Palle! Papa Leone I Palle! Palle!’ ‘In the Mercato Nuovo youths tore boards and planks from the establishments of the silk-merchants and the bankers, so that by next morning every single roof belonging to them was burned. If the authorities had not intervened, no doors or roofs in the whole area would have remained.’ On the ringhiera of the Palazzo della Signoria the citizens were offered sweet white wine from rows of gilded barrels; and in front of the Medici Palace trestle tables were piled with food to welcome a procession bearing the miraculous statue of the Virgin, arrayed in cloth of gold, from Impruneta.¹

In Rome the celebrations were more controlled, though the Sacro Possesso, the formal entry into the Vatican, was as splendid an occasion as the new Pope, who delighted in pageantry, could possibly have hoped for. It had to be admitted that Leo himself did not cut a very imposing figure. As he rode in the procession sitting side-saddle on a white Arab horse, it was noticed how his face, almost purple with the heat, ran with sweat despite the canopy of embroidered silk which was held over his head by eight Romans of distinguished birth. It was noticed, too, how corpulent he was, how vast his paunch, how fleshy his short neck, how fat the rolls beneath his chin, how bulging his weak eyes. Those whose duties brought them close to him were also distatesfully aware of the smell that now and again was emitted from the huge bottom on the saddle. Yet there was something endearing about the pleasure he so obviously took in the pageant; the nods of satisfaction he gave when his attendants read out to him the inscriptions on the triumphal columns which his own eyes did not enable him to see; the amiable expression with which he regarded the cheering onlookers to whom his chamberlains flung coins from their money-bags; the friendly smiles bestowed upon them when he gave them his papal benediction, raising the plump yet shapely white hands of which he was so proud though they were now encased in perfumed gloves sewn with pearls. His contentment was so transparent as to be infectious. The days of exile and poverty were over and he was about to enjoy the benefits of power and riches.’ God has given us the Papacy,’ he is reported to have said to his brother, Giuliano. ‘Let us enjoy it.’

Pope Leo’s determination to enjoy the Papacy did not, however, interfere with his equally determined ambition not only to make the House of Medici once more a dominating influence in Italian politics but also to drive the foreigner from Italian soil. To achieve the first of these aims he intended to form central Italy into a single strong state by uniting the duchies of Ferrara and Urbino, and by joining to them the cities of Parma, Modena and Piacenza. This new unified state was intended eventually to be placed under the rule of the Medici, perhaps under that of the Pope’s nephew, Lorenzo, Piero’s son, an ambitious, good-looking, energetic young man, who was now at the age of twenty sent to Florence as Leo’s representative in company with a secretary whose orders were to send daily reports to Rome upon his youthful master’s progress. At the same time, by diplomacy rather than by war, the Spaniards, who had helped the family to regain power in Florence, were to be driven out of Milan and the Kingdom of Naples. It might even be that the Kingdom of Naples would subsequently be given to Giuliano de’ Medici who, after his brother’s election as Pope, had been recalled from Florence to be created Gonfaloniere of the Church and who seemed prepared to embark on greater enterprises.

It appeared to the Pope a promising augury for his intended policies when on the first day of 1515 Louis XII died, exhausted by the demands and antics of his energetic young English bride, Princess Mary, daughter of Henry VII. Louis was succeeded by Francis I, a youth whom Leo had high hopes of bringing under his influence, particularly after a marriage was arranged between Francis’s aunt, Princess Philiberte of Savoy, a sister of the widowed Duchess of Orleans, and the Pope’s charming brother Giuliano.

The new French King, however, proved to be a far less pliable young man than the Pope had hoped. Tall, handsome and restless, Francis I was both intelligent and attractive, with a fixed determination to regain for France that influence in Italy which she had held for so short a time in the days of Charles VIII. Deeply perturbed by reports of Francis’s independence and of his ambitions in Italy, the Pope consulted his advisers, who in turn sought the advice of others, including Machiavelli. It was Machiavelli’s well-reasoned opinion that they should throw in their lot with the French; but the Pope hesitated to do so, and ultimately decided to ally himself with King Ferdinand of Spain, the Emperor and the Swiss.

Undeterred by this alliance, of which he professed himself contemptuous, King Francis crossed the Alps and marched down into Piedmont with an army of nearly 100,000 men. Hastily the allies assembled their forces, a motley collection of Spaniards under Cardona, Swiss mercenaries commanded by Matthew Schinner, the fierce Cardinal of Sion, and Florentines under the leadership of Lorenzo de’ Medici as Captain General and of Cardinal Giulio as Papal Legate. The Italians were not in the least anxious to fight; and after both Lorenzo and Giulio had entered into negotiations with Francis, his army brushed their troops aside and then defeated the Swiss with heavy loss of life at Marignano. Having disposed of his unworthy opponents, Francis despatched troops to occupy Milan and marched on to Bologna, where a conference was to be held with the Pope.

The Pope left for Bologna by way of Florence. Here his nephew, Lorenzo, had now consolidated the Medici power. A few months before, Lorenzo had paid a visit to Rome, leaving Florence in the hands of his uncles, Jacopo Salviati and Piero Ridolfi. In Rome he had been authorized to adopt the title of Captain General of the Florentine Republic which the Signoria had obediently bestowed upon him on his return. Thereafter he had become increasingly authoritarian, requiring councils to meet in the Medici Palace rather than in the public places of government, rejecting the advice of the more moderate and experienced citizens while surrounding himself with young dandies as subservient as courtiers.

A splendid reception for the Pope was prepared in Florence under the direction of Lorenzo and of Piero Ridolfi, who had been elected Gonfaloniere for the occasion. Two thousand men were put to work making decorations, obelisks, trophies and emblems, statues of classical gods and triumphal arches ornamented with classical quotations, at a total cost, so it was said, of 70,000 florins. Supervised by Jacopo Sansqvino, Baccio Bandinelli and Andrea del Sarto, churches were turned into workshops, and houses were demolished to open up fresh vistas. The Piazza Santa Trinita was overshadowed by a huge castle resting on twenty-two columns, and the Mercato Nuovo by a painted obelisk fifty feet high. The Cathedral was given a temporary facade which

made everybody marvel, with so many pictures and ornaments; and it was said that it was done as a model for the building of a permanent façade because it pleased everybody, so proud and lovely did it appear.

Indeed, such transformations were being effected in Florence that when the Pope arrived rather earlier than expected he was asked not to enter the city straight away but to wait for a few days at the Gianfigliazzi villa at Marignolle until the preparations had been completed.² Never a man either to disappoint his admirers or to decline an invitation to play an honoured role in a pageant, Leo readily agreed to the suggestion and left for Marignolle to wait until the last triumphal arch had been erected, the final screen had been painted and decorated with allegorical figures, and the beautiful façade of wood and plaster, painted by Andrea del Sarto and designed by Jacopo Sansovino, had been placed against the Cathedral’s western front.

When all was ready, on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November 1515, the Pope, wearing a jewelled tiara and a dazzling cope, entered Florence through the Porta Romana accompanied by a huge train of attendants, men-at-arms and cardinals. At the sight of a bust of his father which had been erected on a screen by the church of San Felice and beneath which, through his spy-glass, he discerned the words, ‘This is my beloved Son’, the tears came to his eyes. He was also thinking, no doubt, of his sister Contessina who had recently died, a bereavement which gave her husband, the Gonfaloniere, an excuse to appear among the scarlet robes in a ‘black satin cloak lined with sable, not minding that in such an office and on such a day mourning should be suspended’. By the time he had proceeded down the Via Maggio, across the bridge of Santa Trinità and into the Piazza della Signoria, the Pope was smiling once more, raising his hands in benediction and nodding complacently as his attendants tossed silver coins towards the cheering crowds. Now and again he would halt the cavalcade to admire the decorations. In the Cathedral, where a raised platform had been erected in the nave so that the congregation could get a better view of him, he stood still in his white brocade rochet, crimson cape and skull cap, then turned from side to side before offering up his prayers.

The Pope’s reception in Bologna was in sad contrast to this glorious day in Florence. He proceeded through the streets in a silence broken only by an occasional shout in support of the recently expelled Bentivoglio, and waited at the Palazzo Pubblico for the arrival of the French King. When Francis arrived, very late, he curtly informed Giulio de’ Medici, who had been sent to meet him at the city gates, that he ‘cared not a jot for processions’ and wished to get down to the negotiations without delay. He greeted the Pope courteously enough, but it was soon plain that he had not come to bargain. He insisted on the surrender of the cities of Parma and Piacenza, which he claimed by right as conqueror of Milan. He also insisted that Reggio and Modena, which the Pope had recently acquired from the Emperor, should be handed back to France’s ally, Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara. Faced by the King’s uncompromising attitude, the Pope declined to abandon his known intention of ejecting Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino, and refused, for the moment, to lend any support to Francis’s plans for assuming power in Naples, protesting that this would be out of the question while King Ferdinand of Spain was still alive.

It was not in the Pope’s nature, though, to provoke a quarrel. Eventually he undertook to restore Reggio and Modena to the Duke of Ferrara, though without any intention of abiding by the agreement; and he indicated that he might change his mind – as indeed he did change his mind – about ultimately helping Francis in his claim to Naples. He graciously created the King’s tutor a cardinal, and expressed profound satisfaction when, in return, Francis created Giuliano de’ Medici Duke of Nemours. He even smiled agreeably when Francis made the astonishingly importunate request that the Pope should present to him the marble group of Laocoön which, recently discovered in Rome, was one of the most prized treasures of the papal collection.³

Outwardly complacent but, according to one of his companions, inwardly disgruntled by his unsatisfactory dealings with the French King, the Pope returned to Florence to find that the Arno was in flood, that the citizens were sullenly enduring a food shortage and that his brother was seriously ill with consumption at the Medici Palace. He had Giuliano moved to Fiesole, though there was little hope of his recovery there. He appeared ‘utterly shrunken and spent like an expiring candle’. The Pope visited him often, but their meetings were small comfort to Giuliano who, knowing of his brother’s intentions to oust Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino, begged him not to do so. Giuliano was fond of Della Rovere and his wife, Eleonora, who had always been kind to him during the days of his exile. The Pope brushed his pleas aside. ‘Do not bother yourself with politics, dear Giuliano,’ he would say to him. ‘You must concentrate on getting well.’

Giuliano grew rapidly worse, and on 17 March he died. He had no children by his wife, Philiberte of Savoy; but, like his uncle and namesake, he left an illegitimate child, Ippolito.

A month before Giuliano’s death, the Pope had left Florence never to return. He had been recalled to Rome by the death of King Ferdinand of Spain, and the accession to power in Spain and Naples of the Archduke Charles. This supremely important event, which brought an end to the series of wars initiated by the League of Cambrai, gave Lorenzo and the Pope their opportunity to deal with the Duke of Urbino, which they had been reluctant to do while Ferdinand and Giuliano were both still alive.

First of all a dreadful, half-forgotten scandal was raked up: five years before, the savage-tempered Duke had attacked and killed in a street in Ravenna his arch-enemy, Cardinal Francesco Alidosi. At the time a court of inquiry, of which the Pope himself had been a member, had decided that the Duke’s provocation by the unpleasant Alidosi – supposedly Julius II’s catamite – had been virtually irresistible. The Duke was now informed, however, that the murder, whether pardonable or not, made it impossible for him to hold Urbino any longer in the name of the Church. At the same time he was reminded of his refusal to comply with Pope Julius II’s request to assist in the restoration of the Medici to Florence and of his subsequent refusal to help to defend Italy against the invading army of King Francis I. He was summoned to Rome to explain his disgraceful conduct.

When he declined to go, the Pope excommunicated him and Lorenzo de’ Medici marched out of Florence to take Urbino from him. Lorenzo experienced little trouble in doing so. The Duke was forced to flee from Mantua, and Lorenzo entered Urbino in May. Less than a year later, however, the dispossessed Duke returned with Spanish troops to take his Duchy back. The short but arduous campaigns in the mountainous districts of Urbino cost the Florentines and the Pope a great deal of money. They aroused lasting resentments and resulted in Lorenzo’s being so badly wounded by an arquebus that he was gradually to waste away both in body and in will. The Pope, however, was for the moment well satisfied. Lorenzo was proclaimed Duke of Urbino and Lord of Pesaro, and seemed well on the way to becoming master of that large, unified, Medici-dominated state in central Italy which Leo dreamed of creating.

With Italy at peace and his family established in Urbino, Leo settled down happily to enjoy the pleasures of the Vatican. His expenditure was prodigious. It has been claimed that within a year he had got through not only all the savings of his parsimonious predecessor, but the entire revenues of himself and his successor. He ‘could no more save a thousand ducats’, Machiavelli’s friend, Francesco Vettori, remarked, ‘than a stone could fly through the air.’ Soon deeply in debt to almost every banking house in Rome, some of which were charging him interest at forty per cent, Pope Leo made not the slightest attempt either to reduce the enormous number of his household or to curtail the extravagance of his almost constant entertainments and banquets.

The cardinals followed his example. ‘Yesterday,’ the Marquis of Mantua was informed by his wife’s secretary,

Cardinal Riario gave us a dinner so extraordinarily sumptuous that it might well have sufficed for all the queens in the world. We sat for four full hours at table, laughing and chatting with those most reverend cardinals.

‘The meal was exquisite,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador, describing another dinner at the palace of Cardinal Cornaro.

There was an endless succession of dishes, for we had sixty-five courses, each course consisting of three different dishes, all of which were placed on the table with marvellous speed. Scarcely had we finished one delicacy than a fresh plate was set before us, and yet everything was served on the finest of silver of which his Eminence has an abundant supply. At the end of the meal we rose from the table both gorged with rich food and deafened by the continual concert, carried on both within and without the hall and proceeding from every instrument that Rome could produce – fifes, harpsichords and four-stringed lutes as well as the voices of a choir.

Cardinals and Roman patricians alike vied with each other to provide entertainments of unparalleled splendour. The immensely rich Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi, whose bathroom fixtures were all of solid silver, once invited the Pope to dinner in a magnificent room hung with the most exquisite tapestries. The sumptuous meal was served to the guests on plate specially engraved with their individual crests. When the last course had been served the Pope congratulated Chigi on the excellence of the meal and the beauty of his new dining-hall. ‘Your Holiness, this is not my dining-hall,’ replied Chigi giving a signal to his servants to pull down the tapestries which concealed rows of mangers. ‘It is merely my stable.’ On another occasion Chigi invited the entire Sacred College to dinner and placed before each of the assembled cardinals food specially brought from his own district or country. Chigi had even been known to order his servants to toss his silver into the Tiber after every course to show that he had so much he never had to use the same piece twice – though afterwards other servants were seen pulling up nets in which the discarded dishes had been caught.

The Pope’s own dinners were noted for their rare delicacies, such as peacocks’ tongues, of which he himself, however, ate but sparingly. They were also noted for their jocularity, for such surprises as nightingales flying out of pies or little, naked children emerging from puddings. Dwarfs, buffoons and jesters were nearly always to be found at his table where the guests were encouraged to laugh at their antics and at the cruel jokes which were played upon them – as when, for instance, some half-witted, hungry dwarf was seen guzzling a plate of carrion covered in a strong sauce under the impression that he was being privileged to consume the finest fare. The Pope himself derived a peculiar pleasure from watching his favourite jester, Fra Mariano Fetti, a Dominican friar who had once been a barber and was eventually appointed to the office of Keeper of the Papal Seals. Quick-witted, shrewd and outrageously coarse, Fra Mariano could make the Pope laugh more heartily than any other member of his court, not merely by the wit of his vulgarity, but also by his celebrated capacity to eat forty eggs or twenty chickens at a sitting and by the apparent relish with which he savoured pies specially prepared for him at his master’s instigation containing ravens cooked complete with beaks and feathers.

No practical joke in Leo’s entire pontificate seems to have afforded him more amusement than that played upon poor Baraballo, an elderly priest from Gaeta, who seems to have persuaded himself that his feeble and even ludicrous attempts at verse were the products of commanding genius. It was suggested to him that he ought to press his rightful claim to a public coronation on the Roman Capitol, an honour once accorded to Petrarch. The Pope eagerly entered into the spirit of the enterprise, assuring Baraballo that his verses undeniably merited such a mark of distinction and offering to make available to him His Holiness’s beloved elephant, Hanno, which had recently arrived in Rome as a present from King Manuel I of Portugal and which was housed in the Belvedere. On this creature, suitably caparisoned, Baraballo was to make his stately progress from the Vatican to the Capitol, clothed in a scarlet toga fringed with gold. ‘I could never have believed in such an incident if I had not seen it myself and actually laughed at it,’ wrote the Pope’s first biographer, Paolo Giovio: ‘the spectacle of an old man of sixty bearing an honoured name, stately and venerable in appearance, white haired, riding upon an elephant to the sound of trumpets.’

But the resounding fanfares, combined with the shouts and cheers of the spectators, so frightened the elephant that he stood trumpeting loudly before the bridge of Sant’ Angelo, refusing to cross it. Baraballo had to climb down from his ornately decorated saddle and the joke was over, much to the evident mortification of Leo who had been sitting on a nearby balcony happily watching the proceedings through his spy-glass.

Although this kind of display could not often be arranged, the Pope was able to indulge himself more frequently in his palace with a succession of those dramatic performances, plays, masques, ballets, mummings and moresche, in which he took a far deeper delight. Two of the earliest blank verse historical tragedies, Giovanni Rucellai’s Rosmunda and Gian-Giorgio Trissino’s Sophonisba, were both performed in his presence. But apparently he preferred the broad comedies and more or less indecent farces of Ariosto, Machiavelli and Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena. He witnessed with evident pleasure the performances of Ariosto’s Cassaria and Suppositi; Machiavelli’s Mandragola was performed for him in 1519; and his favourite piece of all appears to have been Dovizi’s Calandria, whose plot, involving a stupid young man in love with a girl who changes clothes with her twin brother to play a trick upon her paramour, presented the kind of situation which made a strong appeal to Pope Leo’s taste.

He would happily spend hour after hour watching these performances, or sitting at the gambling table playing primiero – an undemanding card game rather like beggar-my-neighbour – losing money without complaint or throwing his winnings over his shoulder. Whole days at the time of the Carnival were spent attending bull-fights, sitting through endless banquets, watching cardinals and their ladies dancing at masked balls, or contemplating the Romans enjoying their favourite sports, their regattas and processions, their orange-throwing contests, and the violent, dangerous game of rolling barrels down the grass slopes of Monte Testaccio, at the bottom of which crowds of peasants risked broken limbs to seize the pigs inside.

Yet Leo’s life was not entirely given over to frivolity. If he spent vast sums on entertainments, on French hounds and Cretan falcons, on furs and gold chains, and on his ever growing household, he lavished money, too, on the improvement and development of Rome. He built the Via Ripetta so as to provide a new outlet from the congested old town up towards the Piazza del Popolo; he restored the church of Santa Maria in Domnica and provided it with its splendid porticoed façade; above all, he enthusiastically continued the reconstruction of the Vatican Palace and the rebuilding of St Peter’s, retaining Julius II’s architect, Donato d’Angelo Lazzari, known as Bramante, who had begun work on the new church in 1505. Pope Leo also conceived an ambitious plan to drain the Pontine Marshes and asked Leonardo da Vinci to devise an appropriate method.

Determined to make Rome the most cultured city in Europe, he offered numerous inducements to attract the most accomplished artists, writers and scholars to live there, making freely available to them his extensive library to which he was constantly adding valuable new manuscripts. He loved books himself, both the reading and possessing of them, and could quote long passages from his favourite authors. Even when his finances were peculiarly strained he always contrived in some way – often selling benefices or cardinals’ hats – to help those writers and scholars, poets and dramatists, who came to him for help. He gave his support to the Roman Academy; he helped to reorganize the University, increasing the range of facilities and the number of professors; he encouraged the use and study of the Latin language and made money available to Latin prose writers and poets; he brought Lascaris to Rome and suggested that he should edit and print the Greek manuscripts in his possession.

It had to be admitted, though, that his own taste was far from impeccable. Those few of his writings that have survived display none of his father’s talent. His attempts at musical composition were even less successful; and, although he engaged the best European choristers for the Sistine Chapel, the music that he liked to listen to best, humming to himself and waving his plump, white hands in the air, was considered trivial. So, too, was his taste in the literature of his own times. Apart from their comedies, he did not esteem Machiavelli or Ariosto highly; nor did he admire Guicciardini. Indeed, those who profited most from his lavish patronage were far inferior writers such as Bernardo Accolti, whose work Leo professed to admire almost as highly as did Accolti himself.

The Pope’s neglect of Michelangelo, however, seems to have been due less to his failure to appreciate his greatness than to his lack of patience with the artist’s abrasive temperament. Michelangelo, who had been encouraged to come to Rome by Julius II, was gloomy, touchy, independent and self-absorbed, choosing to work in a locked room, quite unwilling to follow unquestioningly any patron’s brief or to undertake to finish a work in any given period. The Pope professed to feel a deep affection for him and would relate ‘almost with tears in his eyes’ how they had been brought up together as boys; but they never really got on well together. The Pope encouraged Michelangelo to become an architect and urged him to leave Rome and return to Florence in order to provide a new façade for Brunelleschi’s San Lorenzo.⁴ Leo far preferred to deal with the younger, more complaisant, unobtrusive and polite Raffaello Sanzio.

Raphael, a native of Urbino, had already been set to work on the decoration of the official apartments of the apostolic palace by Julius II to whose notice he had been recommended by Bramante. Pope Leo asked Raphael to continue with the work; and under their combined direction the Loggie di Raffaello and the lovely halls known as the Stanze di Raffaello were completed.⁵

XVIII THE MARCH ON ROME

AS OFTEN as he could Pope Leo rode out of Rome to the Villa Magliana, his country house on the road to Porto. Here, continuing to use the advice of the court physicians as his excuse for a flagrant breach of canon law, he indulged to the full his passion for hunting, hawking and ferreting. Huge tracts of land around the villa were reserved for his use. In the grounds an immense netted enclosure was filled with the doves, jays and herons which provided the hawks with their prey, and there was also a conigliare well stocked with rabbits for the ferrets.

At the Villa Magliana, where the Pope would remain for six weeks at a time, he abandoned his stole and rochet, and to the consternation of the papal master of ceremonies actually put on ‘long riding boots, which is most improper, seeing that the people consequently cannot kiss the Pope’s feet’. His poor eyesight did not permit him to participate in the early stages of the hunt, so he rode out on his favourite white horse to watch the killing through his spy-glass from a high mound or specially constructed platform.

The ground to be hunted had already been sealed off by tall strips of tough sail-cloth attached to poles. To prevent any animals inside the pen escaping into nearby thickets or marshes, soldiers of the Swiss guard and mounted gamekeepers assisted by peasants were drawn up in ranks around it. When the grooms holding the greyhounds and mastiffs in leash were ready, and the cardinals, gentlemen the papal court and all their friends had also taken up their positions, the Pope raised a white handkerchief as a signal for the horn to be sounded. Then the under-keepers, shouting, blowing trumpets and exploding charges of gunpowder, entered the pen and began to drive the game towards a gap in the canvas screen. Soon a torrent of animals came rushing out into the open, stags and boars, hares and rabbits, wolves, goats and porcupines. The waiting sportsmen would then eagerly fall upon their chosen target with spear or sword, axe or halberd, or gallop away after the greyhounds in pursuit of any animal that might have escaped their swinging blades.

The Pope would watch these scenes of slaughter through his glass, laughing at the antics of Fra Mariano, who would usually contrive to get into some sort of ludicrous difficulty, or admiring the strength of the enormous Cardinal Sanseverino who, on these occasions, habitually wore a lion skin across his shoulders. If an animal became entangled in a net or rope, the Pope would then proceed closer and, holding his glass to his left eye and taking up a spear, he would kill the struggling creature, cheerfully acknowledging the congratulations of his attendants.

The Pope especially enjoyed one day, according to the poet Guido Silvester. It was a day of many accidents. First a member of the papal court killed a hound in mistake for a wolf, which appears to have much amused the Pope when shown the result of the man’s stupidity. Then there was a fight over the carcass of a boar in which one of the disputants lost an eye. Finally one of Cardinal Cornaro’s kennel-men, notorious for his drunkenness, made a lunge with his spear at a wounded boar running for safety into the woods, missed his aim, killed his favourite hound, and, infuriated, threw himself onto the back of the boar which he tried to throttle. The boar shook the drunkard from his back and gored him to death. His companion carried the body back to Cardinal Cornaro who ordered the face to be washed with the best old wine while he composed an epitaph to commemorate his servant’s fate. As the Pope rode back, followed by the carcasses slain, he was heard to observe, ‘What a glorious day!’

To his description of these violent events, Guido Silvester adds the comment that after such a day’s hunting, the Pope would invariably be in so good a mood that he would happily agree to anything that was proposed to him, sign documents with contented smiles, grant requests with genial words; whereas a bad day’s hunting would produce only growls and complaints. A courtier or churchman with some special favour to ask would accordingly wait until the Pope’s return from a successful hunt in the Campagna, or from a happy day’s fishing in the artificial salt-water lake he had had constructed near Ostia, or from a visit to Cardinal Farnese’s estate at Viterbo where pheasants, partridges and quails could be bagged in their thousands and flocks of ortolans, thrushes, larks and goldfinches could be snared in the cardinal’s uccellari.

Well liked as the Pope was by those country people upon whom he extravagantly bestowed his largesse when riding out to hunt or fish, and by those churchmen and members of his court to whom he had granted some ambitious request, there were cardinals in Rome who had cause to feel dissatisfied with his behaviour. The costly war with Urbino was not the only Medicean cause which was straining the resources of the papal treasury; nor, when it became plain that Leo was attempting to arrange a marriage between his nephew, Lorenzo, and a French princess, was Francesco Soderini the only cardinal who felt outraged by a broken promise.

Cardinal Raffaele Riario had never forgiven the Pope for driving his kinsman Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino to provide a duchy for the wretched Lorenzo; nor had Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci overcome the anger that had swept over him when Leo had helped to remove his brother Borghese Petrucci from the governorship of Siena. They and many other cardinals had been further offended when Leo raised to the cardinalate various intimate friends and relations, ignoring the claims of more worthy members of their own families. Within months of his election he gave Bernardo Dovizi a scarlet hat; he also gave one to another Tuscan friend, Lorenzo Pucci; a third went to his nephew, Lorenzo Cibò. And, so as to do equal honour to Giulio de’ Medici, whom he had already appointed Archbishop of Florence, he established a commission to inquire into the circumstances of his cousin’s birth, making it clear enough to its members that he wished them to find – as dutifully they did find – that his uncle, Giuliano, had been secretly married to Simonetta Gorini and that Giulio was their legitimate son. This might not have been so objectionable had Giulio been better liked; but as Francesco Guicciardini observed

he was rather morose and disagreeable, disinclined to grant a favour, reputedly avaricious and very grave and cautious in all his actions. Perfectly self-controlled, he would have been highly capable had not timidity made him shrink from what he should have done.

By no one in the Sacred College was Giulio more disliked than by Alfonso Petrucci, the handsome, arrogant, dissolute, twenty-two-year-old cardinal whom the Pope had so deeply offended by interfering in his family’s affairs at Siena. His outspoken attacks on Leo, whom he had helped to elect, met with a good deal of sympathy in Rome, particularly from Cardinals Riario and Soderini, from Petrucci’s rich young friend, Cardinal Sauli, and from Cardinal Adriano Castellesi, formerly Cardinal Protector of England. Castellesi had no family grudge against the Pope, but he was said to have taken so seriously the prophecies of a soothsayer, who foretold that the next pope would be ‘Adrian, a learned man of humble birth’, that he had conceived it his sacred duty to do all he could to bring about the prophecy’s fulfilment as soon as possible.

It was at first decided that the easiest way to dispose of the present Pope would be to pay an assassin to stab him while he was out hunting. But then a more subtle plan was devised: His Holiness would be dispatched by means of poisoned bandages which a quack doctor from Vercelli, aided by Petrucci’s secretary and a Sienese friend of his, would in some way find reason to apply to the Pope’s anal fistula. Having satisfied himself of the likely efficacy of this complicated plot, Petrucci left to discuss its consequences with Francesco Maria della Rovere, the deposed Duke of Urbino. In his absence the conspiracy was uncovered through the indiscretions of a page; and the quack, Petrucci’s secretary and his Sienese friend were all handed over to the attentions of the papal rack-master.

Soon afterwards Petrucci was asked to return to Rome to discuss certain matters with the Pope who at the same time sent him promise of safe conduct. Either trusting in this guarantee, or supposing that the Pope had repented of his previous conduct to his family, the ingenuous Petrucci returned immediately to Rome where, in company with Cardinal Sauli, he presented himself at the Vatican. Both men were promptly arrested and thrown into ‘the most horrible dungeon’ of Sant’ Angelo, Petrucci cursing the treacherous Leo at the top of his voice, Sauli furiously tearing his rochet to pieces. Like their minions, they, too, were tortured on the rack. Their confessions having been duly elicited, orders were given for the arrest of Cardinal Riario, who was discovered in a state of such abject terror that he had to be carried to his place of confinement in a litter.

Rather than arrest the other sympathizers with Petrucci’s plot, the Pope now convoked the consistory, before whom he appeared in so unaccustomed a rage that some of his audience believed him to be playing a part in order to intimidate them. His obese body trembling and his voice so loud that it could be heard ringing round the adjoining corridors, he demanded the names of the other guilty men. Cardinal Soderini and Cardinal Castellesi both confessed their knowledge of the conspiracy, and knelt in humble submission at the Pope’s feet.

Castellesi managed to escape from Rome and disappeared into oblivion. Soderini, having paid a vast fine which helped to settle some of Leo’s more pressing debts, thought it best to follow Castellesi’s example. Riario was relieved of a sum even greater than that taken from Soderini and went to live in Naples. Sauli, who had powerful friends in France as well as in Italy, was allowed to leave his dungeon and to live under house arrest at Monte Rotondo, where he died in mysterious circumstances the next year. Petrucci was executed in his dungeon by the Pope’s Muslim hangman who either strangled him or cut off his head. The Vercelli quack, Petrucci’s secretary and his friend, were dragged by horses through the Roman streets; gouts of flesh having been nipped from their bodies with red-hot pincers, they were then gibbeted on the parapet of the bridge of Sant’ Angelo.

Although his finances had been much improved by the huge fines imposed on Riario and Soderini, the Pope still felt it necessary to bring in further sums of money to his treasury by creating numerous new cardinals to fill up the vacant places in the Sacred College, and by requiring the richer of those elected to make suitable contributions. Money, however, was not Leo’s only reason for the creation of thirty-one new cardinals. He hoped to create a far more reliable College than its predecessor, and one that would raise no objections to the advancement of Medicean interests. So, while there were several worthy men on the Pope’s list, there were also those who had been selected for more selfish reasons. Among these were young princes of the royal houses of France and Portugal; Ercole Rangone, the son of Bianca Rangone of Modena, Leo’s former benefactress; Pompeo Colonna, whose unruliness it was hoped a scarlet hat might serve to moderate; two Florentine nephews, Niccolò Ridolfi and Giovanni Salviati; and a third Florentine relation, Luigi Rossi.

With the Sacred College thus conveniently packed with Medici friends and relations and those who had cause to be grateful to the Medici, the Pope felt that the time was now propitious for the marriage of his nephew Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, to Madeleine de la Tour Auvergne, cousin of Francis I, King of France. Accordingly, in March the next year, 1518, Lorenzo was sent north across the Alps with an immense train of crimson-clad attendants and his uncle’s lavish presents, amongst which were to be found thirty-six horses and an astonishing nuptial bed made of tortoise-shell inlaid with mother-of-pearl and enriched by precious stones.

Much as they were impressed by the evident riches of his family, the denizens of the French court were far from struck with the Duke of Urbino himself, whose arrogant nature they found objectionable and whose physique at the age of twenty-five was now pitiable. After a few months of marriage, indeed, it became evident that the Duke did not have much longer to live. Nor, as it happened, did his wife. She died at the end of April 1519 soon after the birth of a daughter, who was christened Caterina and was one day to be Queen of France. Her husband died a few days later of tuberculosis aggravated by syphilis. Even in the villas of Careggi and Poggio a Caiano, where he had spent the last months of his life in the company of a Pistoian secretary and another male companion of sinister reputation, there was little evidence of grief.

Ever since Lorenzo had returned from France, the Florentines had been grumbling about his increasingly lordly manner, his political ambitions that enfeebled health had in no way diminished, his mismanagement of the city’s finances and the influence of his haughty, greedy and domineering mother, Alfonsina, whose interests were wholly bound up in her son and whose death in Rome eight months after his was received with as little sorrow.

Well aware of Florence’s discontent, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, who had hurriedly left Rome to secure the family’s hold upon the city, was careful to give no offence. He arrived just before the news of Lorenzo’s death became generally known, and was able to ensure that there was no unrest and that the people were prepared to leave the administration of the Republic to him, and to those leading citizens whose advice he tactfully sought, until the Pope’s future plans for Florence were settled.

It was fortunate for the Medici party in Florence that Giulio’s conduct of affairs was so conciliatory and astute, and that under his conscientious administration of its financial affairs the city enjoyed a period of prosperity. For the Pope seemed far from decided what to do about either Florence or Urbino now that the Medici heir was a half-French baby girl and the only boys on his side of the family were both bastards – Ippolito, the son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, by a sensuous lady from Pesaro; and Alessandro, presented as the son of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, but rumoured to be Cardinal Giulio’s son either by a Moorish slave from Naples or by a peasant woman from the Roman Campagna.

The Pope eventually decided to create Caterina de’ Medici Duchess of Urbino and to annex her Duchy to the states of the Church, calling upon the Florentines to contribute a large part of the money which had been expended on driving out della Rovere, while compensating the Republic with the fortress of San Leo and the conquered district of Montefeltro. There still remained, however, the problem of what to do about the government of Florence, a problem which was complicated at the beginning of 1519 by the long-awaited death of the Emperor Maximilian and by the subsequent election as his successor of Charles V.

Both the King of France and the Pope did their utmost to prevent this election of a young ambitious man who was not only the King of Spain and Naples, but master of the Netherlands and an Austrian Grand Duke; But having failed to prevent the election, Leo decided, after many tergiversations and vacillations, to abandon the French and to enter into secret negotiations with Charles V whose help he needed to settle a matter which could no longer be ignored, the matter of that tiresome Augustinian friar, Martin Luther.

For years the Pope had been endeavouring to dismiss from his mind all thoughts of Luther and of German demands for reform in the Church, hoping that the problems would eventually resolve themselves in the pettifogging arguments of German monks. But Luther would not go away; and the Pope had been driven to excommunicate him. He now hoped that Charles V as a good Catholic would finally settle the matter for him by having the heretic tried and executed. The Emperor had no particular objections to doing so; but the German princes, who listened with some sympathy to Luther’s impassioned declarations, were of a different mind. Charles could overrule them, of course; and, so the Pope was informed, he would overrule them. There was, however, to be a quid pro quo: in exchange for the condemnation of Luther, the Emperor would require the Pope’s support in his intended attack upon France’s remaining possessions in Italy, including Milan. Leo agreed to this on condition that once the French had been divested of the occupied territories, the Papacy could not only take back from them the towns of Parma and Piacenza, which Francis I had declined to return at the conference at Bologna in 1515, but also receive Charles’s help in taking Ferrara. So the bargain was struck and the Emperor’s army prepared to march.

A dispatch from Cardinal Giulio with news of the Emperor’s victory over Francis I, the fell of Milan, and the flight of the French army towards the Alps was awaiting the Pope at Villa Magliana where, despite a recent operation on his anal fistula, he had gone for a day’s hunting. The day had been humid; the night was cold and windy; and as Leo sat in his bedroom in front of a blazing fire, with his back to an open window to which he moved from time to time to watch a celebratory bonfire blazing in the courtyard below, he caught a severe and feverish cold. Two days later he was carried back to Rome where he was told of the capture of Piacenza and Parma.

On Sunday, the first day of the month of December [1521] at about the seventh hour, Pope Leo expired of a violent chill without anyone warning him that his sickness was mortal, since the physicians all protested that he was but slightly indisposed owing to the cold he had taken at the Magliana.

Immediately on receipt of the news of the Pope’s sudden death, Cardinal Giulio hurried back for the conclave, which began on 28 December, evidently hoping to succeed his cousin. But Cardinal Francesco Soderini had also made haste for Rome and, having arrived first, had already succeeded, with the help of Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, in forming so strong an opposition to Giulio’s election that he decided to support the candidature of Charles V’s former tutor, an obscure, virtuous and ascetic Flemish cardinal, Adrian Dedel, of whom many members of the Sacred College had scarcely even heard. The subsequent election of this modest scholar, which had been engineered to thwart the ambitions of more powerful candidates such as Alessandro Farnese and Thomas Wolsey, caused no one more surprise and consternation than the new Pope himself, who received the news with horror. Choosing the title of Adrian VI – tardily to fulfil the prophecy of the soothsayer whose prognostications had so excited Cardinal Adriano Castellesi – the Pope reluctantly left for Rome where he contrived to live, spending a ducat a day, upon frugal meals served to him by an old Flemish harridan of whom he seemed unaccountably fond. The failure of his forlorn attempts to reform the Church, the struggle to make stringent economies in the papal household and the deep enmity of those whose previously enjoyable lives were transformed by his parsimony, all proved too much for him. He contracted a kidney disease, and this, combined, so it was inevitably said, with poison, resulted in his death in just over a year. The thankful citizens of Rome, who never since have been required to put up with a Pope who was not Italian, laid festive garlands at the door of his doctor, naming him their liberator.

Satisfied that Florence – where the bastards, Ippolito and Alessandro, as well as Caterina de’ Medici were all now living – was securely in the hands of the Medici party, Cardinal Giulio had set up house in Rome in the fine palace which had been wrested from Cardinal Riario for condoning the plot against the life of Leo X. Without undue ostentation he had lived there as a generous Medici was expected to live, a patron of artists and musicians, a protector of the poor, a lavish host. Neither his cold manner nor his saturnine appearance fitted him for such a part; but it was as well that he had played it, for in the tedious conclave which followed the death of Adrian VI he needed all the friends he could muster. At first it seemed impossible that he could win the election. The French were strongly opposed to him, and his other enemies were many and implacable, none more determined to thwart him than the powerful Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, who hoped to secure the election himself. Weeks passed; a month went by, two months; there were demonstrations and riots in Rome. There had never been a longer conclave in living memory. Then at last, after many bribes had changed hands, when many secret promises had been made, when Cardinal Colonna removed his objections for fear that in the impasse his rival, Cardinal Orsini, might be chosen, and when it was known that a Medici election was acceptable to both Charles V and to Henry VIII as well as to Francis I – who thought it unlikely that the Medici would remain loyal to the Emperor – Cardinal Giulio emerged from the conclave, after sixty days’ incarceration, as Pope Clement VII. He was twenty-five years old. Few of his opponents in the conclave had been converted to friendship, but there were many in Rome who wished him well and ‘trusted to behold again a flourishing court, a liberal Pontiff and a revival of the arts and letters which had been banished under the late barbarian rule of Adrian’.

Certainly Pope Clement did prove himself both a generous and a discriminating patron. He was not open-handed by nature, and far from convivial or gregarious: he preferred to spend his time listening to music or discussing theological and philosophical questions to the more ebullient pursuits of Leo X. But he understood the value and rewards of liberality. He was as munificent in his almsgiving as Leo, and quite as bountiful a patron. He continued his family’s patronage of Raphael, asking him to submit designs for a villa to be built on the cypress-covered slopes of Monte Mario.¹ He gave several commissions to that most versatile, most quarrelsome and most boastful of Florentines, Benvenuto Cellini. He gave his encouragement to the Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Koppernigk, known as Copernicus. He put Giulio Romano and Gian Francesco Penni to work in the Vatican, where he had already arranged for Leonardo da Vinci to be provided with his own apartments. And he confirmed the commission which Leo X had already given to Michelangelo to design a chapel at San Lorenzo in Florence to house the tombs of their fathers, Giuliano and Lorenzo, and of their two cousins, Lorenzo Duke of Urbino, and Giuliano, Duke of Nemours.² Michelangelo was also asked to design a library at San Lorenzo to which the family’s collection of books could one day be returned.³

As Francis I had foreseen when withdrawing his objections to his election, Pope Clement soon proved himself a far from faithful ally of the Emperor; and towards the end of 1524, after many tortuous turns of policy, he had allied the Papacy once more with France, whose army was again on the march. No sooner had this decision been taken than Clement, more indecisive and irresolute with each passing month, began to regret it. He had due cause to do so, for in February 1525 news reached Rome that the Emperor, in alliance with the Duke of Milan, had defeated the French army at Pavia and that Francis I had been taken prisoner. The Pope, now virtually a prisoner of Charles himself, endeavoured to extricate himself from his unfortunate position not by openly coming to terms with the Emperor, as sensible men expected him to do, but by entering into secret negotiations with Francis who, released from imprisonment, determined to cross the Alps once more.

These negotiations, secret as the papal agents endeavoured to keep them, did not long remain hidden from the Emperor, who well understood what the Pope was trying to do and took appropriate measures to forestall the formation of an anti-imperial alliance. In September 1526, abetted by Don Ugo di Moncada, the Emperor’s envoy, Cardinal Pompeo Colonna with a strong force of retainers and hired men-at-arms fell upon Rome, occupied the suburbs around St Peter’s, and pillaged the apostolic palace from which the Pope was forced to flee to the greater safety of Castel Sant’ Angelo. There he was constrained to sign a treaty by which he undertook to abandon the league against the Emperor and to pardon Colonna for his insulting attack.

It was a treaty which Clement had no intention of keeping. A few weeks after signing it, papal troops were dispatched to the Colonna estates with orders to destroy their strongholds and castles, to intimidate their tenants, and to serve notice upon the family that they were to be declared outlaws and deprived of all their titles. In a rage so furious that he was seen to tremble at the very mention of Pope Clement’s name, Cardinal Colonna offered his services and that of all the men he could muster to Charles de Lannoy, Charles V’s Viceroy at Naples, who now landed at Gaeta with a strong army dispatched to ‘teach the Pope a lesson he would never forget’.

Even more alarming threats had already come from Germany where the old warrior, Georg von Frundsberg, had assembled an immense army of Landsknechte, mostly Lutherans from Bavaria and Franconia, fired with a missionary zeal to have their revenge upon the Roman Anti-Christ and with a more practical but no less intense desire to relieve him of his valuable possessions. This intimidating force, undeterred by torrential rains and Alpine snowstorms, descended into Lombardy. And although the Pope’s other enemies, Colonna and Lannoy, were checked in their advance on Rome at Frosinone, nothing seemed capable of halting the further progress of von Frundsberg’s tough Germans.

The courageous warrior, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, who had married Lorenzo il Magnifico’s granddaughter, made a brief attempt to halt their relentless advance; but he was hit in the right leg by a ball from a falconet as he was trying unsuccessfully to prevent them crossing the Po. He held up a torch so that a surgeon could amputate the smashed limb. The surgeon wielded his saw so incompetently, however, that the wound proved fatal, and Giovanni delle Bande Nere died on 30 November. Francesco Guicciardini, who had been appointed the Pope’s Lieutenant-General, had repeatedly warned Giovanni not to take so many risks and had urged the Pope to give the same advice. ‘His person is of too great value,’ Guicciardini had written to Clement, ‘and it is clear the enemy seek his life with great determination. If we lose him we shall be losing too much.’ Now Guicciardini bitterly regretted that the warnings had gone unheeded. ‘It has pleased God,’ he lamented, ‘to extinguish so much courage at the time when we needed it most.’

Soon after the death of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, von Frundsberg – who had already accepted the help of a young adventurer in the Emperor’s service, Philibert, Prince of Orange – was joined by a large army of Spanish soldiers from Milan. The combined forces which now marched south towards Bologna numbered over 30,000 men.

Recognizing at last the true measure of his dreadful plight, the Pope endeavoured to secure a truce to which the commanders of the advancing host seemed disposed to agree. But the Landsknechte had not come so far to be turned away empty-handed now. Shouting their determination to pillage Rome or to be well paid for not doing so, they rounded upon von Frundsberg, whose fat and ancient frame had not well withstood the rigours of the campaign, and reduced him to apoplexy. As he was carried away rigid to Ferrara, the march continued under the uncertain leadership of Charles, Duke of Bourbon, the Germans having made it clear that they were prepared to obey the orders of the new commander no longer than it pleased them.

A far more forthright leader than the Duke of Bourbon would have found it difficult to control the motley force that now hurried on to Rome. Almost starving, their clothes ragged, their filthy bodies washed by the pouring rain and the roaring mountain streams through which they stumbled, holding hands to keep their balance, they reached Isola Farnese, seven miles from Rome, on 4 May. From here, Bourbon sent messengers into Rome offering to spare it for a ransom sufficiently generous to satisfy his men.

The Pope declined to treat with him, turning his attention to long-postponed measures for the city’s defence. Many prelates and nobles, with a keener awareness of their danger, had long since fled. Others had hidden their treasures, stoutly fortified their palaces, and employed men to defend them. Yet Clement himself had appeared to be ‘struck by a kind of paralysis’. It was not until 26 April that he had asked the Commune for a gift towards the cost of Rome’s defence; it was not until 3 May that, after repeated urgings, he himself raised 200,000 ducats by agreeing to create six rich men cardinals – ‘suffering’, so Guicciardini said, more scruples over this ‘than over ruining the Papacy and the whole world’. And it was not until 4 May that he at last summoned the Great Council of Rome and urged the people to defend the city under the leadership of Renzo da Ceri.

The people, however, were not much inclined to do so. They preferred to believe that if the approaching army did make themselves masters of Rome, they ‘would prosper and have the same advantages as they had had under the dominion of priests’. They prevented Renzo da Ceri from blowing up the bridges over the Tiber; and had Renzo not stopped them, they would have sent out their own envoys to make a separate peace with the Duke of Bourbon. Few of them turned out of their homes at the sound of the great bell of the Capitol ringing the tocsin. In all Renzo had scarcely more than eight thousand men, including two thousand Swiss Guards and two thousand former members of Giovanni de’ Medici’s Black Bands, with which to defend the long expanse of the city wall.

XIX SIEGE AND MURDER

THE FIRST attack, launched at dawn on 6 May 1527, was repulsed by the papal gunners; but soon afterwards a thick mist rose from the Tiber and, unobserved beneath its cover, the Duke of Bourbon’s men were able to mount scaling ladders made from vine-poles against the city walls. Bourbon himself was hit by a stray shot from an arquebus and carried away to a nearby chapel by the Prince of Orange. By the time of his death, the assaulting troops, followed by vengeful men from the Colonna estates and other pillagers, had forced their way through breaches in the wall and were threatening to break into the centre of the city. The defenders fought bravely but were no match for the far greater numbers of the imperial army. Soon a vast mass of people were rushing headlong for the drawbridge of Castel Sant’ Angelo until the bridges spanning the river were so blocked by those struggling to get across that scores of bodies were trampled underfoot.

The Pope was also running for the Castle. The Bishop of Nocera had found him in an agony of indecision in his oratory and had induced him to make use of the stone corridor that linked the apostolic palace to the Castle. The Bishop held up the Pope’s skirts to enable him to run the faster, and flung his purple cloak over his head and shoulders ‘lest some barbarian villain in the crowds below might recognize [him] by his white rochet, as he was passing a window, and take a shot at his flying form’.

Some Spanish troops did fire at him; but he reached the Castle in safety. So did some three thousand other fugitives, including thirteen cardinals, one of whom was dragged aloft in a basket. But when the drawbridge was pulled up all the remaining inhabitants of Rome, except those in well-fortified palaces, were left to the mercy of the invaders. Scant mercy was shown to anyone. The army spent most of the rest of that day in securing food and a comfortable place to spend the night, but the next morning, 7 May, the town was sacked and its inhabitants murdered and mutilated with appalling ferocity. The doors of churches and convents were smashed, their contents hurled out into the streets, their bells and clocks, chalices and candlesticks beaten into fragments, their sacred treasures defaced, their holy relics used as targets by arquebusiers, and their ancient manuscripts as litter for horses. Priceless vestments were tossed over the shoulders of drunken whores, and nuns changed hands on the throw of a dice. The name of Martin Luther was carved with a pike on one of Raphael’s frescoes in the Stanze. Shops and houses were so thoroughly plundered that even the hinges were wrenched from the shutters and the handles from the gates. The rich were held as hostages for ransom, the poor being tortured or slaughtered out of hand. Priests were stripped naked and obliged to take part in profane travesties of the Mass and to utter blasphemies on pain of death; orgies and gambling games were held round altars splashed with blood and wine; crucifixes were hurled about the streets. Fingers were cut off for the sake of rings; arms were lopped off for bracelets, ears for pendants. A merchant who could not pay the ransom demanded of him was tied to a tree and each day one of his finger nails was pulled off; eventually he died. It has been estimated that on the first day alone 8,000 people were killed.

Inside the Castel Sant’ Angelo, according to his own lurid and vainglorious account, Benvenuto Cellini was a tireless, brilliant and inspiring gunner. ‘So there I was in the castle,’ he recalled.

I went up to some guns that were in charge of a bombardier [who] was staring out over the battlements to where his poor house was being sacked and his wife and children outraged. He dared not fire in case he harmed his own family, and flinging his fuse on the ground he started tearing at his face and sobbing bitterly. Other bombardiers were doing the same. When I saw this I seized one of the fuses, got help from some of the men who were not in such a sorry state, and lined up some heavy pieces of artillery and falconets, firing them where I saw the need. In this way I slaughtered a great number of the enemy… I continued firing, with an accompaniment of blessings and cheers from a number of cardinals and noblemen. Inspired by this I forced myself to try to do the impossible. Anyway, all I need say is that it was through me that the castle was saved… I carried on with the work all day until evening approached.

Throughout the ensuing days Cellini applied himself ‘with unimaginable energy and zeal’, to helping ‘a great Roman nobleman called Antonio Santa Croce, whom Pope Clement had put in charge of all the bombardiers’. Not everyone appreciated Cellini. He ‘made bitter enemies’ of two particular cardinals whom he ordered off the high platform where the guns were ranged as their ‘nasty red birettas could be seen a long way off’; and he nearly killed two other cardinals when the blast from one of his cannonades dislodged a barrel of stones which crashed on to the terrace at their feet. But the Pope himself, so Cellini said, had nothing but praise for him. ‘Not a day passed without [his] achieving some outstanding success’; and as a result, his ‘stock with the Pope went up and up’. When Cellini asked the Pope to absolve him of all the killing he had done

while serving the Church in the castle, the Pope raised his hand, carefully made a great sign of the cross above [his] head, and said that he gave [him] his blessing, that he forgave [him] all the homicides [he] had ever committed and all those [he] ever would commit in the service of the Apostolic Church.

Cellini continued,

After I left him, I climbed back to the tower and spent all my time firing away at the enemy, hardly ever wasting a shot… If I told in detail all the great things I did in that cruel inferno I should astonish the world… I shall skip a good deal and come to the time when Pope Clement, in his anxiety to save the tiaras and mass of wonderful jewels belonging to the Apostolic Camera, sent for me… and ordered me to remove them from their gold settings. I did as I was told; and then, after I had wrapped them up in pieces of paper, we sewed them into the linings of the Pope’s clothes [and into those of his faithful servant, Cavalierino]. When this was done they gave me all the gold – which came to about two hundred pounds – and told me to melt it down as secretly as I could.

Every morning when it was light the Pope looked north hoping to catch sight of the army which was supposed to be advancing to Rome’s relief. But he looked in vain. At the beginning of June, after more than a month’s incarceration in the Castle, he was forced to surrender to the Emperor’s envoy. His fellow refugees were dying of hunger and disease around him; and the army, which he had hoped would come to rescue him, was retreating towards Viterbo. He was obliged to deliver up Civitavecchia, Ostia and Modena as well as Parma and Piacenza to the imperial forces. He was also required to find a huge ransom, to restore the Colonna to their possessions and to hand over seven important men as hostages, including Jacopo Salviati and Lorenzo Ridolfi.

Yet although he had surrendered he was not permitted to leave Castel Sant’ Angelo, which had now become his prison, until the ransom demanded from him had been paid. The summer passed and the autumn, and still he was detained there. The imperial army was driven from Rome by plague and hunger, but two thousand troops were left behind to guard the city and to make sure that the prisoner remained where he was. Then, at the beginning of December, after German and Spanish troops, having plundered the surrounding countryside, had returned to Rome threatening to hang their captains and cut the Pope to pieces if they did not receive the arrears of pay that were due to them, the captive was told that his guards would look the other way if he made his escape. Early on the morning of 7 December he did so, wearing the clothes of his major-domo. With a few companions, he got away to Orvieto where, in the remote fastness of the episcopal palace which could be reached only by a mule track from the valley of the Paglia, he endeavoured to rebuild his shattered power and reputation.

It was at Orvieto, in this ‘ruinous and decayed old palace’ with the ‘roofs fallen down and thirty persons, riff-raff and others, standing in the chambers for a garnishment’, that an embassy from England sought him out in order to obtain his authority for Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Clement would have welcomed the opportunity of obtaining Henry’s friendship, but Catherine was Charles V’s aunt and the now penniless Pope could do no more than make vague promises that he would grant the King’s request once he was free to move back to Rome again. In fact, the Pope’s mind was occupied by other matters that seemed to him more important. None of these appears to have concerned him more than the problem of Florence, where the sack of Rome and his own subsequent imprisonment had had the most unfortunate repercussions.

The Florentines had deeply resented the presence in the Medici Palace of the Pope’s representative, the ill-mannered and avaricious foreigner, Cardinal Silvio Passerini, who had been followed to Florence by two other papal representatives, Cardinals Innocenzo Cibò and Niccolò Ridolfi. Nor had the Florentines taken kindly to Passerini’s charges, the two young Medici bastards, in particular to the unprepossessing Alessandro. Both these boys had been upbraided in public by Piero di Lorenzo’s daughter, Clarice Strozzi, who had indignantly attacked them for being utterly unworthy of their great name, adding that Clement himself no more deserved to be Pope than Passerini deserved to be his representative.

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

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

His two charges, Guicciardini considered, were equally reprehensible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Guicciardini arrived on 24 September he found

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus assured of the excellent qualities of his prospective son-in-law, the Emperor declined to accept the exiles’ charges. Alessandro’s marriage to the fourteen-year-old Margaret accordingly took place, and the Duke returned to Florence in firmer control of the city than ever and evidently anxious to make the most of his good fortune. Within a few months, though, he was dead.

There had arrived in Florence a thin, plain, sad-faced young man of eccentric habits and unwholesome reputation, Lorenzaccio de’ Medici, son of Pierfrancesco and cousin of Giovanni delle Bande Nere. He had spent much of the past few years in Rome, but his habit of slashing off the heads of antique statues when drunk had led to his being asked to leave and to his coming to Florence where he had become a constant companion of his kinsman, Alessandro, who was just three yean older. Together they went out drinking and whoring; they indulged a mutual taste for disguising themselves as women; they galloped through the streets on the same horse, shouting insults at the passers-by; sometimes they shared the same bed. Alessandro was obviously fond of Lorenzaccio, though he seems not to have known what to make of him. Intrigued by his mysterious smile and subtle, ambivalent remarks, he nicknamed him ‘the philosopher’. But it was equally clear that Lorenzaccio did not really like Alessandro, that he resented his power and rank, that he fancied himself in the role of hero, in any role, in fact, that would bring him fame or even notoriety. The role in which he eventually decided to cast himself was that of tyrannicide.

He evolved a complicated plan. He had a good-looking cousin, Caterina Soderini Ginori, a rather supercilious woman who was celebrated for her virtuous demeanour and her affection for an elderly, boring husband. Lorenzaccio suggested to Alessandro that anyone who could get Caterina to bed was a seducer of uncommon distinction : if Alessandro wanted to try his luck he would arrange to bring her to him one night and leave them alone together. He suggested a Saturday evening, the night of Epiphany, a public holiday, when everyone in Florence would be out enjoying themselves, and when no one would take much notice of either Caterina or Alessandro entering Lorenzaccio’s house. Alessandro eagerly agreed and on the appointed evening went to Lorenzaccio’s house. Having left his bodyguard outside the door, he unbuckled his sword, took off his clothes and lay waiting for Caterina on a bed. He was almost asleep when the door of the bedroom opened to admit not Caterina but Lorenzaccio and a hired murderer, Scoroncolo. Lorenzaccio approached the bed and, murmuring ‘Are you asleep?’, lunged with all his power at Alessandro’s naked stomach. As Lorenzaccio pushed his hand over Alessandro’s screaming mouth, Alessandro bit one of his fingers to the bone. Scoroncolo stabbed Alessandro through the throat. Spattered with his blood, his bleeding, savagely bitten hand encased in a glove, Lorenzaccio ran out into the street and galloped off to Bologna by way of Scarperia, leaving the citizens of Florence to make what use of the assassination they could when the body was found.

He had taken care to ensure that the body would not be found until he was safely across the frontier by taking the key of his room with him. He had also made it impossible for opponents of the government to take immediate advantage of the murder by keeping his plans dark from them. It was Benedetto Varchi’s belief that if a single man had come forward immediately to lead a revolution, the Medicean party might well have been overthrown. Realizing this, ‘Guicciardini, who without any doubt was the leader of the Palleschi, Cardinal Cibò and all Alessandro’s former courtiers trembled with fright… as the populace was most hostile and they themselves were without arms’ – the captain of the Duke’s guard, Alessandro Vitelli, together with several of his men, being away at Città di Castello.

Cardinal Cibò was first made aware of his danger when, on Sunday morning, Alessandro’s bodyguard asked how long they were expected to stand on duty outside Lorenzaccio’s house. Cibò told them to stay there until further notice, ordering them not to breathe a word to anyone about their reason for being there. Then, having made sure that Alessandro had not returned to his own house, he gave it out that the Duke had had a particularly exhausting night and was now in bed resting. It was not until evening that he had the door of Lorenzaccio’s bedroom broken open to reveal Alessandro’s body. And it was not until the following day that the news of his murder became known to the opponents of the regime. By then it was too late for successful action. Vitelli had returned, and the Palleschi were in command of the situation. A group of would-be revolutionaries approached Francesco Vettori, the most prominent of those distinguished citizens supposed to be anti-Medicean. Vettori, however, while making some vague promises of support, recognized that the time for an uprising was now past. He immediately went to Guicciardini and threw in his lot with the Palleschi.

The Palleschi met on Monday morning to discuss the succession at the Palazzo della Signoria, now renamed the Palazzo Vecchio. Cardinal Cibò suggested that Alessandro’s illegitimate son, Giulio, then four years old, should be created Duke with himself as Regent. But this suggestion was rejected by the others who proposed calling upon Cosimo de’ Medici. Cosimo was the son of the great Giovanni delle Bande Nere and of Maria Salviati, granddaughter of Lorenzo il Magnifico, a young man, politically inexperienced and morally unexceptionable, in no way compromised by the evils of Alessandro’s rule. In fact, Guicciardini, who had hopes not only of using Cosimo to win the government for himself but also of arranging a marriage between him and one of his daughters, had already sent an invitation to the seventeen-year-old boy to come to Florence without delay from his villa of Il Trebbio in the Mugello.

When the Council was asked to approve this solution the following day, however, not all its members agreed to do so. One of them, Palla Rucellai, bravely announced that he ‘wanted neither Dukes nor Lords nor Princes in the Republic’, and, picking up a white bean to toss into the urn on the table, added, ‘Here is my vote and here is my head!’

Giucciardini riposted by declaring that he, ‘for one, would not endure that a mob of ciompi should ever again govern Florence’. He was not proposing that Cosimo should be created Duke but merely elected head of the Republic and subject to constitutional limitations as well as to what were to be known as ‘magnificent counsellors’. The discussion continued for hours and would have continued longer had not Vitelli, the captain of the guard, who had been promised the lordship of Borgo San Sepolcro for his support of Cosimo’s nomination, intervened decisively. Tiring of the wrangle in the council chamber, he contrived a noisy scuffle between his soldiers under its windows. There were shouts that ‘Cosimo, son of the great Giovanni, must be Duke of Florence! Cosimo! Cosimo! Cosimo!’ And an authoritive voice cried out, ‘Hurry up. The soldiers can’t be held any longer!’

This settled the matter. Cosimo’s nomination was approved, and Guicciardini looked forward to the exercise of power in his name. Yet those who knew Cosimo took leave to doubt that Guicciardini would be able to control him in the manner he intended. As Benvenuto Cellini commented:

They have mounted a young man on a splendid horse – then told him you must not ride beyond certain boundaries. Now tell me who is going to restrain him when he wants to ride beyond them? You can’t impose laws on a man who is your master.