Magnifico (34 page)

The transfer caused much consternation among the leaders of Florence. Possession of Imola would place Milan directly astride Florence’s major trade routes to northern Europe and enable the duke to dominate his southern ally. Now, if ever, was the time for Lorenzo to put his friendship with Galeazzo Maria Sforza to the test. Appealing to both personal sentiment and to greed, Lorenzo soon managed to work out a suitable arrangement. Under its terms, kept secret until Florence could secure its new territory, the duke would part with his new acquisition in return for a hefty monetary consideration, ultimately fixed at 100,000 ducats.
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It was an arrangement that suited both parties. Sforza, always hard up for cash, was happy to oblige his old friend as long as he was adequately compensated for his troubles, while the government of Florence was pleased to add another jewel to the imperial crown with so little effort.

But Lorenzo had little time to celebrate his diplomatic triumph. The moment Sixtus got wind of the proposed sale he flew into a rage, for this was exactly the town that he hoped to offer his nephew as a wedding present. “O my son!” wrote the aggrieved pontiff to the duke, “listen to your father’s counsel; depart not from the Church, for it is written: ‘Whoever separates himself from thee, must perish.’” This was no idle threat. Wielding the power of excommunication, the pope could place in jeopardy not only the duke’s immortal soul but those of his subjects, who would be denied the holy sacraments unless and until their leader saw the light. Salaries as well as souls were threatened: excommunication, by rendering invalid all contracts and treaties signed by citizens of the wayward state, could quickly lead to economic collapse. Faced with such dire consequences, the duke beat a prudent retreat, tearing up the agreement. Then, much to the consternation of Lorenzo and his fellow countrymen, he offered the contested city to Pietro Riario for the discounted price of 40,000 ducats.
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Up to this point, relations between Florence and Sixtus had been friendly. Lorenzo in particular, despite continued frustration over his inability to obtain a cardinal’s hat for his brother, strived to remain in the pope’s good graces. But Sixtus’s interference in the sale of Imola strained the relationship to the breaking point. Most troubling, it threatened to drive a wedge between Lorenzo and the people of Florence, since it was clear that on this critical issue the interests of family and state clashed. As if to make the choice even more painful, the pope now turned to the Medici bank to advance him the funds he lacked to make the purchase. Whether or not Sixtus intended in this way to test Lorenzo’s loyalty, it was soon apparent that Sixtus regarded Lorrenzo’s willingness to assist him in this matter as a crucial measure of their future relations.

But on this vital matter Lorenzo would also be judged by the people of Florence. There was no doubt where his own self-interest lay: both for the sake of the family business and for his brother’s future, the wisest course would be to accede to the pope’s demand. Good relations with the Vatican were critical to the Medici bank, since the bulk of their funds were tied up in one way or another in business with the papal curia. But he could not please Sixtus without provoking the wrath of his fellow citizens, whose suspicion of the papacy had ancient roots. Not surprising, Lorenzo agonized over the decision. Though he would have preferred to remain on friendly terms with Sixtus, his patriotism recoiled at the prospect of a powerful papal enclave on Florence’s northern border. Reluctantly, he concluded he had no choice but to refuse the pope’s request, for he could not claim to speak for his people while at the same time putting self-interest above country.

Having made the painful decision, however, Lorenzo thought he could evade its consequences, enlisting Sforza to plead his case. Curiously, the duke seemed more than happy to oblige. He told Lorenzo he would write to Cardinal Riario explaining Lorenzo’s actions in the matter, blithely assuring him that a good word from the duke of Milan was sufficient to restore the Medici’s reputation in Rome. In fact, Sforza had been secretly encouraging Lorenzo to refuse the pope’s request for a loan, despite the fact that the 40,000 ducats would presumably find their way into his pocket. This bizarre scenario illustrates a streak of deviousness in the duke’s character. The truth is that while Sforza could not afford to alienate the pope, he still hoped the deal would fall through, thereby opening the way for the more lucrative and geopolitically advantageous transfer of Imola to Florentine rule.

It was a strategy too subtle and convoluted to succeed. In the end Cardinal Riario found another party willing to lend him the 40,000 ducats and the sale of Imola went through in the winter of 1473 without help from the Medici. This was the worst possible outcome for Lorenzo. Not only had he failed to block Girolamo’s acquisition of the strategic town, but he now had to face the wrath of a pope who viewed the young Florentine as the chief obstacle to his family’s advancement. Vanished was the paternal benevolence Sixtus expressed at their meeting two short years ago, replaced instead by feelings whose bitterness can only be explained by a sense of betrayal. In years to come, when relations between Lorenzo and the pope had descended to murderous depths, the sin Sixtus would most often attribute to him was that of ingratitude, an indication that his fury had less to do with politics—though the issues at stake were very real—than with his outrage over an affection he believed had been treacherously abused.

Imola marks the point on the geopolitical map where the interests of Lorenzo’s family and his country most sharply diverged. Lorenzo’s critics have never given him any credit for apparently putting country above family, arguing that he had no real choice in the matter. To have agreed to the pope’s request would have meant forfeiting the confidence of the people without which he would have lost all status in the republic. But far from proving that Lorenzo cynically manipulated the government of Florence for his own ends, the episode reveals the extent to which his primacy was dependent on the goodwill of the people. This point is succinctly made in Guicciardini’s
Dialogue on the Government of Florence
in which Bernardo del Nero, one of Lorenzo’s staunchest supporters, explains the relationship between the Medici family and the state they ruled: “For the Medici did not enjoy a lordship or a separate state to give them greatness; everything they had depended on the power of the Florentine state. Their prosperity and growth lay in its prosperity and growth, for the greater and more powerful the city became, the more powerful they became too.”

While Guicciardini may have overstated the extent to which the fortunes of the Medici bank depended on the fortunes of the state as a whole—sometimes, as in the crisis over Imola, they were in fact diametrically opposed—the general premise is accurate: over three generations the Medici became so closely identified with Florence that they were compelled to pursue policies that benefited the state, even to the detriment of short-term profits. Though nominally a private family, they could not afford to pursue interests that ran counter to those of the republic they served.

Of course this was not simply a matter of altruistic patriotism, nor were Lorenzo and his forebears above using the instruments of government for their own private gain.
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But the insecurity and irregularity of Lorenzo’s position meant that he was more sensitive to changes in public opinion than a monarch whose right to rule was sanctioned by God and tradition. The peculiar nature of Medici power, and the difficulty Florentines had in distinguishing between private interest and the public good, caused no end of perplexities for Lorenzo. Political power, originally built on the foundation of financial power and pursued in order to protect those interests, had gradually taken on a life of its own until the current head of the family was often forced to neglect the very thing that first brought his ancestors to prominence. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, that is, investing ever larger portions of his capital to the cause of shoring up his political fortunes, was a strategy that could not long be sustained and one that gives Lorenzo’s later career the desperate quality of an acrobat juggling too many balls. As the Imola crisis well illustrates, reconciling the needs of the state with those of the bank was a puzzle not even a man as resourceful as Lorenzo could solve.

Thus far the dispute over Imola remained a little more than a minor irritant. Few could have imagined—least of all Lorenzo—that this obscure international incident would touch off a crisis serious enough to threaten not only his regime but his life. Just as the crisis of Volterra fed off internal divisions in Florence, the crisis of Imola would expose deep wounds within the body politic. The rivalries that characterized Florentine society, sometimes suppressed but never completely eradicated, awaited such moments of stress to reassert themselves, often with shocking ferocity, so it is not surprising that there were among the citizens at least a few willing to exploit Lorenzo’s difficulties for their own ends. As Lorenzo flailed this way and that in an attempt to defend the interests of the republic while protecting the assets of the bank, his policy was undercut by another Florentine family, one whose name was even more prominently featured in the storied annals of the republic. This was the ancient and noble family of the Pazzi, a proud and vigorous lineage who saw in Lorenzo’s quarrel with Sixtus the opportunity they had long been seeking to profit from their rival’s troubles and to place themselves once again in their rightful place at the pinnacle of Florentine society.

When Florentines looked back on their troubled history they located the source of their suffering in an ancient act of betrayal. According to legend, the city had been founded in the century before Christ by the legions of Caesar’s army. At the very heart of the new city, built to guard a narrow crossing of the Arno River, these soldiers raised a temple dedicated to the terrible deity to whom they owed their allegiance—Mars, the Roman god of war. When Christianity displaced the old forms of worship the shrine was not destroyed but simply reconsecrated, this time to that most gentle of men, the desert preacher John the Baptist.
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Like most legends, however, this is not a simple story of a triumphal march from barbarism to enlightenment, but rather a cautionary tale about the dangers of courting and then abandoning the vengeful spirits that inhabit the dark corners of the world. Neglected but not entirely forgotten, the angry god who had been present at the city’s birth still exerted his malevolent influence over future generations. It was he who for centuries set Florentine against Florentine, who saw to it that the streets ran red with blood and that such madness filled the minds of men that whole neighborhoods were put to the torch. Even that most pious of Christians, Dante Alighieri, testified to the ineradicable power of the bloodthirsty deity: “I was of the city that changed for the Baptist its first patron,” he wrote in
Inferno,
“who for this will always afflict it with his art; and were it not that at the passage of the Arno there yet remains some semblance of him, those citizens who afterwards rebuilt it on the ashes left by Attila would have labored in vain.”

The “semblance” Dante spoke of was the statue of Mars that the citizens, hedging their bets, had moved to the foot of the Ponte Vecchio when the ancient temple was rededicated. From here his doleful countenance witnessed with grim satisfaction one of the most famous murders in Florence’s bloody history:

Mars’s baleful influence, however, did not end with the triumph of the Guelfs, who, having defeated their Ghibelline rivals, immediately split into two warring factions whose hatred for each other was every bit as lively as that for their vanquished foes.

Among the most prominent of the lawless feudal clans who turned the streets of Florence into a perpetual battlefield was the ancient and noble Pazzi.
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In 1099, Pazzo de’ Pazzi had been the first knight to scale the walls of Jerusalem when Godfrey of Bouillon’s crusading army wrested the holy city from the infidels. As a reward for his bravery Godfrey presented him with a flint chipped from the tomb of Christ in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, a precious relic that Pazzo brought back to his native land as a souvenir of his adventures. It was through a spark struck from this stone that every Easter evening a new flame was kindled on the high altar of the cathedral, a ritual that is still commemorated in Florence with the great fireworks display known as the
Carro de’ Pazzi
.

Over the centuries, the Pazzi continued to render distinguished service to their city. Pazzo’s descendant Jacopo de’Pazzi carried the banner of the republic at the disastrous battle of Montaperti (1260), when the Florentine army was overwhelmed by their ancient rival, Ghibelline Siena; such was his courage that even after the traitorous Bocca degli Abati lopped off his hands, Jacopo continued to hold high the banner of the red lily with his stumps, loosening his grasp only in death. When a few years later the Black Guelfs reclaimed the city, Jacopo’s son Pazzino rose to the first ranks as a leader of the Blacks.
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But Pazzino, while belonging to the faction that would ultimately emerge victorious in Florence, had no better luck than his father. Dino Compagni’s
Chronicle
provides a compelling account of Pazzino’s demise, and a chilling glimpse into the ghastly carnival of death staged daily in the streets of the medieval city:

While the Pazzi were inscribing their names in blood on the pages of Florentine history, the first of the Medici began to trickle into the city from their homeland in the Mugello, hoping to take advantage of the booming economy to lift themselves up from their peasant origins. As families like the Medici clambered up the social and economic ladder by engaging in trade and money-lending, the older landed gentry, represented by families like the Pazzi, were rudely shoved aside. It was “new men” like the Medici, with no pedigree but plenty of cash, to whom the future of the city belonged. With a growing sense of their own power and a growing disdain for their social betters, these citizens of middling rank seized the reins of government in the second half of the thirteenth century. Under the so-called
Primo Popolo,
the First Government of the People (1250), and even more dramatically with the Ordinances of Justice (1293), all power in Florence devolved upon the tradesmen and professionals organized into the trade associations known as
arte,
or guilds.

Empty honors continued to come to the older magnate families, but they no longer controlled the city as they had in the past. Self-interest might argue in favor of an outward conformity to the new social order, but around the dinner table, in the privacy of their own homes, aristocrats like the Pazzi continued to vent bitterly against a topsy-turvy world in which they were forced to grovel before money-changers and shopkeepers. The Pazzi made themselves particularly obnoxious through their obvious disdain for democratic forces. Such was their reputation for arrogance that in the revolutionary period of 1378 angry mobs sought out the family palace and burned it to the ground.

Throughout their rise to prominence and power the Medici were most closely identified with “the little people,” the artisans and shopkeepers who vied with the great magnates for control of the government. A distant relative of Lorenzo’s, Salvestro de’ Medici, had been one of the leaders of the rebellion of the
Ciompi
(when the city’s working poor had seized power in the late fourteenth century) and a contemporary noted that Cosimo had triumphed “because the masses had chosen him as their champion and looked on him as a god.” Even after they had been in power for many years, the Medici could not shake the faint whiff of their disreputable past.

It is one of the ironic twists of Florentine history, then, that among the beneficiaries of Medici rule were the aristocratic Pazzi. In 1458, during a period of political tension, Cosimo arranged to have the magnate stigma removed from the Pazzi and other families, thereby allowing them to participate fully for the first time in over a century in the electoral process.
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But while the Pazzi and their peers could now serve in office, the political landscape had changed drastically in the intervening years. The polity they rejoined was one in which a single family, supported by a motley assortment of collaborators and hangers-on, some well-born, others plucked by Medici hands from the mass of the great unwashed, held sway in the city. For the Pazzi to take advantage of their newly won privileges they would have to swallow their pride, roll up their sleeves, and get down to the business of making money, a far more useful commodity in Renaissance Florence than an ancient name.

It was Andrea de’ Pazzi who first began to restore the family’s fortunes. As early as 1422 Andrea was actively lobbying the government to have the magnate label removed, assuring his fellow citizens that “since childhood he has been continually involved in mercantile activities and in honest affairs, and he has tried always to imitate the life and the mores of the people.” This was a far cry from his forebears, who prided themselves on their disdain for business. Like the Medici, the Pazzi would make their money primarily as bankers, following them to Rome where they, too, tapped the lucrative market associated with the papal court. The two families did a good deal of business together. In fact Andrea’s principal partner in the Roman branch of the Pazzi bank was none other than Averardo de’ Medici, Cosimo’s cousin. Andrea de’ Pazzi further consolidated his position in Florence’s ruling class by marrying Caterina Salviati, from a respectable family living close-by in the neighborhood of Santa Croce.
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To advertise their restored standing in the city, Andrea’s son Jacopo began construction in 1462 of a palace that would rival that of the Medici on the Via Larga. Located in their traditional neighborhood in San Giovanni, the
gonfalone
of the Keys, the Pazzi palace was every bit as elegant as the Medici’s. Today one can still see the palace with its distinctive family crest sporting two savage-looking dolphins whose bellicose appearance mars the otherwise serene and harmonious classical facade.

An even more telling sign of the Pazzi’s growing prominence was the erection of a family chapel in the Franciscan basilica of Santa Croce. It was in the family chapel that the aspirations of Florence’s great clans were most fully realized. Here wealth, culture, and piety came together. Here a man served his immortal soul, providing a focus for prayer and place of burial that would ease his passage into heavenly realms, but here, also, he expressed in fullest his civic pride and worldly ambition. The church in which the family chapel was situated became the focus of patronage and a source of identity. Particular families and particular churches would be forever linked in the minds of Florentines: the Medici with San Lorenzo, the Sassetti with Santa Trinità, the Tornabuoni with Santa Maria Novella, and now the Pazzi with Santa Croce.

The family chapel also served as the most visible expression of a patron’s cultivation. In this, as in many other things, Andrea and his children seemed deliberately to be following the lead of the masters of the city, perhaps even trying to do them one better. It was in Andrea de’ Pazzi’s chapel that the architect Brunelleschi created perhaps the finest expression of the Renaissance ideal of measure and harmonious proportion, employing the classical language he had derived from his study of Roman monuments and that he had already used to fine effect in the Medici chapel in San Lorenzo. Delicate arches and vaults traced in the gray stone known to Florentines as
pietra serena
play off surfaces of pristine white, with bright accents provided at strategic points through terra-cotta reliefs modeled by Luca della Robbia. It is a space that encourages a serenity at odds with the ferocious reputation of the family that built it.
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