The Ugly Renaissance (32 page)

It was all very well to rig elections. But bitter experience had taught the patricians that restricting office holding too tightly could lead to disaster. Too narrow a base of power looked much too suspicious to be credible. It was clear that the “right sorts of people” had to include a wider range of citizens than in the past. Still, there was no point in having the right sorts of people selected for office if you couldn’t be sure of controlling them. The key to making the committees of scrutiny an effective instrument of power was the transposition of personal, business relationships to the political sphere. Although they often served as priors, the top patricians would ensure that even if they weren’t personally selected, the
Signoria would be packed with their relations, their business partners, or their dependents—in Mafia terms, people they could describe as “friends of ours,” “made men.”
By stacking the government with handpicked individuals who were bound to them either by commercial ties or by the bonds of marriage, the mercantile elite could be certain that their placemen would be absolutely loyal to their interests. As the insightful chronicler
Giovanni Cavalcanti put it, “
Many were elected to the offices, but few to the government.” The business of politics and the politics of business had thus become one, with patronage and family providing the crucial mechanisms of control from behind the scenes.

Merchant bankers swiftly found that they were unusually well placed in this system. Although far from dominant, their involvement in a wide variety of trading concerns and their unique role as providers of credit not only allowed them to nurture peculiarly extensive networks of clients, but also gave them a disproportionate influence
in affairs of state. Simply by virtue of their financial clout they rapidly became some of the strongest and most nimble players in communal politics.

Florence stands out as the most striking example of a city dominated by mercantile elites who were themselves overshadowed by merchant bankers, but it was far from unique. Despite being subject to foreign powers at various points during the Renaissance, the maritime republic of
Genoa was similarly governed by a narrow clique of merchants and—most important—merchant bankers.
After a destructive civil war and especially following the exclusion of old, aristocratic families from the political process by the first doge,
Simone Boccanegra, in 1339, the city was all but run by a “popular” junta of mercantile families such as the Montaldo and the Adorno. Even
Venice—which, in 1297, restricted access to the Great Council to a limited and hereditary nobility—found itself increasingly dominated by the interests of long-distance traders and merchant bankers, including
Marco Corner (doge 1365–68) and
Niccolò Tron (doge 1471–73), whose magnificent tomb can still be seen in the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.

In Florence, it was no surprise that the Medici gradually found themselves drawn into the political world and slowly gravitated from the fringes of the “ruling class” to the centers of power.
The first member of the family to be elected to the
Signoria had assumed office as far back as 1291, and over the next century they were chosen to serve on a further fifty-two occasions. At times, they had stumbled into the middle of some of Florence’s most dramatic political storms. One of their number,
Salvestro de’ Medici, had been
gonfaloniere di giustizia
in the turbid months leading up to the
Ciompi Revolt in 1378, and another, Vieri di Cambio, had been part of the tightly knit group of magnates who set themselves to rebuilding the shattered republic after the rising had been crushed.

Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was no exception. As the first member of the family to become truly wealthy, he was received into the inner circle of Florentine politics almost as a matter of course. Ushered into government by his distant cousin Vieri di Cambio, he was selected as a member of the Signoria in 1408 and 1411 and was later chosen to serve as
gonfaloniere di giustizia
in 1421. He entered the Signoria at a key moment. Between the late fourteenth and the early fifteenth centuries, Florence embarked upon an age of what has become known as “consensus politics.”
The effect of the cunning constitutional cheats developed in the years following the Ciompi Revolt had been to consolidate the position of a relatively small group of super-rich families as a ruling class. Composed largely of merchant bankers bound together by common interests and the common cause of war against
Milan, it was more clearly defined and cohesive than ever before. And since it combined broad-based support, rigorous electoral oversight, and complex networks of social control, the regime established by the ruling elite was, in many senses, much more secure than anything Florence had ever seen. A telling illustration of this is provided by
Cavalcanti’s tale of how the patrician
Niccolò da Uzzano, having slept through the majority of a crucial debate on foreign affairs, suddenly woke up and announced a policy that he had already decided upon with “other powerful men” and that was unanimously approved without further discussion. “Consensus”—both within the patrician class and between the elite and its lower-status placemen—was the order of the day: everyone could feel involved, and the leadership group could put faith in the stability of its hegemony. So great was the confidence of this patrician elite that it consciously propagated an image of a united and harmonious Florence prospering under the rule of a “better” class of people. In his
Panegyric to the City of Florence
(1403–4), for example,
Leonardo Bruni affirmed that “
in Florence, it has always happened that the majority view has been identical with [that of] the best citizens.”

Giovanni di Bicci was, however, unusually reluctant to be drawn too deeply into the political fray. Preoccupied with his business, he was well-known for his intensely private nature. He made a show of withdrawing as far as possible from the rough-and-tumble of political debate and shied away from the limelight as far as he was able. He accepted his election as a prior and as
gonfaloniere
only with serious reservations and avoided taking part in the
pratiche
(advisory meetings). As he advised his sons on his deathbed:

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

Given the choice, he claimed he would have preferred to steer clear of politics altogether.

Far from being a shy and misanthropic aberration, however, Giovanni di Bicci was actually a rather cunning realist. Despite the rhetoric of unity and harmony, Florence’s patricians were deeply divided by the time he was coerced into office for the first time. Although the city’s richest men were united by certain common interests, this was insufficient to sustain long-term coherence within the ruling class. While they may have had some objectives in common, this did not mean either that they agreed about the means to be employed or that they did not have a whole host of other, more important goals that competed with one another.

Conflict was inevitable. Business rivalries rapidly blurred into political rivalries, and as new factions formed, disputes boiled over into civil disturbances that harked back to the dark days of the early fourteenth century. The stakes were high, and the struggles were bitterly, if not always violently, fought. In the mid-1390s, for example,
Maso degli Albizzi and
Rinaldo Gianfigliazzi succeeded in gaining a momentary hold over the
Signoria and immediately had their rivals
Filippo Bastari and
Donato Acciaiuoli exiled.
Only a few years later, in 1400, a “conspiracy” was uncovered, and two members of the Ricci family were accused of heading a plot to kill the Albizzi-Gianfigliazzi faction, a drama vividly recounted by an anonymous Florentine diarist. A sequence of similar such “coups,” banishments, and confiscations followed as the Albizzi warred with their rivals for control of government.

As an ambitious merchant banker, Giovanni di Bicci saw how easily he could be drawn into such factional disputes and how devastating the effects could be. His own relatives had got caught up in the maelstrom on several occasions, often in the most damaging way possible. The family was not immune to dividing against itself. In the 1370s, for instance, Vieri di Cambio had ended up on the opposite side to his cousin Salvestro. And when the Medici
did
take sides, they often ended up on the wrong one. In the aftermath of the Ricci conspiracy, several of their number had been implicated. Unwilling to risk exile or the confiscation of his property, Giovanni preferred to keep his distance.

The big problem was that although Florence had a lot of wealthy merchant bankers, none of them was dominant. As long as the financial clout of the major families remained broadly comparable, none could
expect to acquire an unquestionable hold on political power. All that was about to change. By the 1420s—that is, just as
Cosimo de’ Medici was taking over control of the family bank—the center of gravity was shifting. Cosimo discovered that as management of the papal accounts swelled his coffers, he was in control of an extremely large network of clients working in a wide range of industries and including people who were exceptionally wealthy in their own right. At the same time, financial pressures on the Florentine Signoria were about to ensure not only that merchant bankers were to be consecrated as the dominant figures in civic politics, but also that power would be concentrated in the hands of a rapidly narrowing group of the super-wealthy.

The key issue was debt. Although the relatively limited role played by communal governments in the late Middle Ages had kept budgets mostly balanced, the spiraling costs of prolonged wars and the increasing complexity of the administrative apparatus of emergent states contrived to send overheads skyrocketing. While trade continued to boom, ordinary tax revenues were simply inadequate to keep up, and the city-states scrabbled around desperately for a solution to a mounting cash-flow crisis. It was in this heady atmosphere of impending financial disaster that the idea of government debt was born. Communes had no option but to borrow money wherever they could, and while the first green shoots of the modern bond market burst forth from the sterile soils of the cities’ empty coffers, the notion of the bailout was also given its first airing. But whereas in today’s world, governments staring bankruptcy in the face can pin their hope on avaricious bond traders or, at worst, a hefty injection of capital from the International Monetary Fund or the European Central Bank, in the Renaissance the cash-strapped communes of northern Italy had only one recourse—the seemingly bottomless reserves of the merchant bankers. More than anything else, it was debt that catapulted the merchant bankers to the forefront of urban politics and catalyzed the gradual collapse of broad-based “republican” regimes into barely concealed tyrannies.

Almost every state in northern Italy experienced a debt crisis of one sort or another during the Renaissance, and none appear to have been more vulnerable than the city-republics.
Genoa—often unjustly overlooked by historians of the period—was convulsed by a series of crippling financial crises from the first dogate of Simone Boccanegra through the very beginnings of the fifteenth century, and it is no understatement to
say that its chronic inability to meet its financial obligations not only underpinned the growing dominance of the new mercantile elite, but also inspired the city’s decision to submit itself to foreign domination at various points. No city is, however, a better illustration of the impact of debt on the position of the merchant bankers than Florence.

In 1424, Florence had become embroiled in a major conflict with
Milan that lasted—on and off—for the next nine years. Things went badly from the beginning, and as the war spiraled out of control, the city found itself increasingly dependent on the services of mercenaries. The costs of maintaining a largely mercenary army were exorbitantly high, and although Florence was no stranger to paying enormous sums for its military adventures, this was on an altogether different scale.
For much of the war, Florence faced bills of almost 500,000 florins per year, far above the sums it could raise from taxation. Running a deficit that peaked at 682,000 florins in 1426, the city needed to find a way of raising more money, and fast.

Despite its unpopularity, the
catasto
—a new form of property taxation—was the obvious solution. From 1427 on, every household in Florence was compelled to submit a declaration of its net worth (less exemptions), which the city would then use as the basis for its assessment of tax liabilities. A household’s net assets were taxed at a rate of 0.5 percent at each collection, and the city could announce collections several times a year.
As the surviving records show, it was one of the more equitable forms of tax ever to be seen in Florence. Many poorer households did not pay any tax at all, and the greater part of the burden fell on the richest members of society, that is, on the merchant bankers.
Whereas some owed no more than a few soldi,
Palla Strozzi’s declared net wealth of 101,422 florins meant he owed 507 florins at each collection, and Giovanni di Bicci’s declared assets of over 79,000 florins lumbered him with a bill of 397 florins.

The only problem was that because the cost of war was so high, the city had to impose many collections each year.
Between 1428 and 1433, it has been calculated that a grand total of 152 collections were gathered in. And because the
catasto
evaluated tax in relation to assets rather than income, the sheer number of collections meant that—even at a low rate of taxation—tax bills were becoming a crippling burden for many Florentines. As
John Najemy has observed, “
entire patrimonies were being consumed” as families tried desperately to sell property off
just to pay what was demanded of them. Even the famously rich
Palla Strozzi, whose wealth was tied up in land, had to beg for a reduction in his assessment in 1431. Florence was bankrupting itself.