Part 18

The conspiracy of the Pazzi is a matter of history. Attempts to murder the two Medici brothers had been frustrated by Giuliano’s failing, on account of illness, to attend banquets, and by Lorenzo giving up his journey to Rome. But on Sunday, 26th April, 1478, it was arranged that Cardinal Raffaello Riario, the Pope’s great-nephew, was to attend high mass in the cathedral with Lorenzo and Giuliano, and afterwards to dine with them. “The church,” writes Machiavelli, “was filled with people, and divine service had begun, yet Giuliano had not made his appearance. So Francesco de’ Pazzi, with Bernardo, who were to murder him, went to his house, and by entreaties and flattery induced him to go to the Duomo with them. On the way Francesco, under pretext of caressing him, embraced him with hands and arms to see whether he wore a cuirass or any other armour.” At the elevation of the Host Bernardo Bandini plunged his dagger into Giuliano’s breast, who staggered and fell, upon which Francesco de’ Pazzi stabbed him nineteen times with such blind fury, that he wounded himself in the thigh. The two priests who had undertaken to kill Lorenzo, after the refusal of the old soldier, Giovanbattista Montesecco, to commit a murder “where Christ would be sure to see him,” were not skilled in the use of the dagger, and Lorenzo was only wounded in the neck. Bandini, hastening to complete the work, was stopped by Francesco Nori, a friend of the Medici, whom he stabbed to the heart. Lorenzo took refuge in the new sacristy, where one of his adherents, fearing the dagger was poisoned, sucked the wound, and then, surrounded by his friends, Lorenzo walked to his palace. “By this time,” continues Machiavelli, “the whole city was under arms.... There was not a citizen who, armed or unarmed, did not go to the palace of Lorenzo in this time of trouble, to offer to him his person and his goods; such was the position and the affection that the family had acquired by their prudence and their liberality.”

In 1487 Lorenzo’s eldest son Piero de’ Medici married Alfonsina Orsini, a relation of his mother Clarice, and the following year Lorenzo attained a great object of his ambition. He had carefully educated his second son Giovanni for the Church, and Pope Innocent VIII., whose son Francesco Cibo had married Maddalena de’ Medici, made the lad of fourteen a cardinal, “on condition,” as Giovanni Cambi tells us, “that he was not to wear the hat or the habit for three years.” In August, 1488, Clarice died, and Lorenzo’s health became more and more precarious, but in March, 1491, he was well enough to witness the ceremony of bestowing the cardinal’s hat on his son in the abbey church of Fiesole. “The Signoria decided,” continues old Cambi, “that for love of Lorenzo his father, who little by little had made himself the head and the chief personage of the city, great honour should be paid to him. So it was ordered that three hundred citizens should go out to meet him, and it was not necessary to entreat them to do this as was often the case when an ambassador had to be met. They were all clothed in silk, and counting Giovanni’s own people, the bishops, clergy and notaries, there were five hundred horsemen, and on the Sunday morning a solemn mass was said in S. Maria del Fiore.” The young Cardinal soon afterwards left for Rome, and on the 8th April, 1492, Lorenzo de’ Medici died at Careggi. He was buried in S. Lorenzo, and no monument marks the last resting-place of one of the most illustrious men of Florence.

“Lorenzo,” writes Gino Capponi, “represented and united in his own person a whole century; he wrote sacred hymns and carnival songs, sought the society of, and listened to, religious men, whilst he led a dissolute life. An assiduous worker in state affairs, and indefatigable in all things that served his purpose and augmented his fame, yet he appeared only to care for amusement and gaiety and the company of witty and brilliant men. He was so constituted that nothing came amiss to him. The Medici palace was a museum, a school and a place of meeting for all the learned men who flocked thither, and from it proceeded grave counsel and intellectual teaching, as well as shows and festivals and a general corruption of manners. Two popes passed their childhood there, and the Platonic Academy, intended to raise the standards of life and thought, was founded within its walls. Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, one of the greatest men of his time, were constant visitors. There the first chips flew off the marble under the chisel of Michelangelo, and there Luigi Pulci read the _Morgante_ aloud. Such exuberance of life, such magnificence, such gaiety has probably never been witnessed in any other age, and the name of Lorenzo towers above it all.”[75]

Piero de’ Medici was twenty-one when his father died, and was in all respects different from him. “This is not to be wondered at,” remarks Guicciardini, “as he was born of a foreign mother, whereby the Florentine blood got mixed, and he acquired foreign manners and a style too haughty for our habits of life.” On hearing of the approach of Charles VIII., in 1494, he quitted Florence in a panic, and rode to Sarzana, where he had an audience of the King, and granted all his demands. On his return to Florence, he dismounted at the Palazzo Vecchio, and informed the Signoria that he had ceded Sarzana, Sarzanella, Pietrasanta, Pisa, Leghorn and Ripafratta to Charles. Next day he was saluted in the streets with the cry of _Popolo! Libertà!_ and Giovanni Cambi went home and wrote in his diary: “I note how on the 9th November, 1494, by the grace of God and of the Virgin Mary, Piero di Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, the tyrant of his country, was expelled by the people at the hour of vespers.... The Signoria put the price of 2,000 scudi on his head and the same on the head of his brother, Messer Giovanni the Cardinal, and 5,000 if they were taken alive. They fled by the Porta S. Gallo and went to Bologna, and with them went Ser Piero da Bibbiena, his chancellor, who was the king of all evil; a vainglorious peasant, and the chief cause of the ruin of the said Piero.”

The Medici brothers having escaped, the mob wreaked their vengeance on the valuable contents of the magnificent palace, so that the Signoria were obliged to borrow or buy furniture in great haste to make it fit to receive Charles VIII. when he entered Florence on the 19th November. He was followed by his whole army, “a very grand sight,” exclaims Guicciardini, “but for which the spectators had small liking, by reason of the dread and the terror which filled their souls.” It was in the Palazzo Medici that the memorable scene took place between a plain burgher of the city and the King of France. The demands made by him were impossible for the Signoria to comply with, and Pier Capponi was sent to remonstrate. Charles angrily replied that if the huge sums of money he asked for were not forthcoming, he would command his trumpets to be sounded. Capponi snatched the paper on which the conditions were written from his hands, and tore it to pieces, crying, “If you sound your trumpets, we shall ring our bells.” It was a bold deed, and those present were astounded at his daring. But the King, who wanted money and not war, gave way, and covered his discomfiture by a sorry joke on the name of the Florentine citizen. _Ah Ciappon, Ciappon, voi siete un mal ciappon._ (Ah Capon, Capon, you are a bad capon.)

The agreement, signed on the 25th November, stipulated an offensive and defensive alliance between France and Florence, the payment by the latter of 120,000 golden ducats, the retention by Charles of the citadels, but not of the towns, of Pisa, Leghorn, Pietrasanta and Sarzana, until the end of his war with Naples, when they were to revert to Florence. Finding the King showed no disposition to leave his luxurious quarters on the next day, as the Florentines had hoped, they sent Savonarola to the Medici palace. He accosted Charles in these words: “Most Christian Prince, thy delay in going is causing serious harm to this city and to the enterprize in which thou art engaged. Thou art losing thy time, forgetful of the task imposed on thee by Providence, to the grave detriment of thy spiritual welfare and thy worldly renown. Listen, therefore, to the words of the servant of God. Go on thy way without further delay; take heed not to bring ruin on this city and on thyself the anger of God.” Two days later Charles departed, and with him went many of the most valuable works of art in the palace. De Comines mentions, among other things, beautiful agate cups, wonderful cameos, and more than 3,000 gold and silver medals, “more than I thought could have been found in all Italy.” Courtiers, officers and soldiers, robbed right and left, and quitted the city laden with spoil. Eight years later Cambi writes in his diary: “On the 8th January, 1502, came letters saying that Piero was at Gaeta which was held for the King of France; and the Spaniards beat the French, who put all their artillery on a ship in which was also Piero de’ Medici, and he was drowned, thanks be to God.”

The terrible sack of Prato by the Spaniards in 1512, at which the Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici assisted, struck terror into the hearts of the Florentines. They agreed to pay 140,000 ducats to the Spanish Viceroy on condition that he quitted Tuscany; to allow the Medici to return to Florence in the quality of private citizens, and to permit them to buy back their private possessions. Giuliano, the third son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, then entered the city; “having first doffed his rich Spanish habit and put on a _lucco_, the everyday dress of a Florentine burgher. He came in the company of Anton Francesco degl’Albizzi and dismounted at his palace, that of the Medici being empty and in a ruinous condition.” But the Medicean party soon found that Giuliano lacked energy, and Cardinal Giovanni, with Messer Giulio, the illegitimate son of the murdered Giuliano, came from Campi with four hundred lances, and took up his abode in the Palazzo Medici with all the state pertaining to a prince of the Church. His nephew Lorenzo, Piero de’ Medici’s only son, came with him, and the house of Medici, after an exile of eighteen years, once more ruled in Florence.

The old palace regained much of its pristine splendour. Festivals and gay pageants “in order,” writes old Cambi with bitter irony, “to let it be seen that the city was festively inclined and in a flourishing condition,” succeeded each other. But there was a strong under-current of hatred, and plots to assassinate Lorenzo, Giuliano and Giulio de’ Medici, were rife. Whilst the two young men, Pietro Pagolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi were lying under sentence of death in the Bargello (see p. 222), two pageants, rivalling those of the Magnificent himself, issued on two successive days out of the great door of the Medici palace. Giuliano had instituted a company of noble youths called, after the device of Cosimo, the Diamond. Andrea Dazzi, who held the chair of Greek and Latin literature, was the inventor and poet of Giuliano’s pageant, while Pontormo painted and decorated the cars. Lorenzo, competing with his uncle, was the head of a company called _Il Broncone_, whose emblem was a withered laurel branch whence sprouted fresh leaves, and for him, Jacopo Nardi, the historian, invented a pageant symbolizing the Golden Age, for which Pontormo also painted the cars. “Thus,” exclaims Cambi, “the people were fed with rubbish and follies, and took no heed to penitence. Yet they had seen the scourge at Brescia, and again at Prato. They beheld Italy from one end to the other full of barbarian troops, they perceived that God was threatening us--ay, even now scourging us, and yet they did worse. Oh! may God in His mercy not look upon these our sins.”

The election of Giovanni de’ Medici to the papal chair in March, 1513, was hailed with exultant joy in Florence, and Leo X. did not disappoint the hopes of his fellow-citizens, or those of his own family. Three out of four new cardinals created by him were Florentines, one being his cousin Giulio de’ Medici, in despite of the canon law excluding any one of illegitimate birth. Giuliano, the Pope’s brother, became Captain-General of the Church and married Filiberta of Savoy, and Leo’s young nephew, Lorenzo, was selected to govern Florence.

When Leo X. passed through Florence on his way to meet Francis I. at Bologna, he rested for a day or two in the apartment set aside for the popes in Sta. Maria Novella, but on his return journey he spent several weeks with his nephew in the Palazzo Medici. Contemporary chroniclers devote many pages to describing the magnificence of his reception and the entertainments given in his honour, amongst them the representation of _Rosmunda_ in the Rucellai gardens. Splendid were the gifts he bestowed on churches and on private individuals. To the cathedral he gave “a mitre of great beauty, adorned with many pearls, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds and rubies, worth more than 10,000 ducats, as a mark of the tender affection he bore the church in which he had been a canon when a little child.” The cathedral chapter was endowed with the right of legitimatizing children born out of wedlock, the revenue of the officiating clergy was increased, and indulgences of many days were granted to the principal altars.

A few days after Leo X. left Florence for Rome, his brother Giuliano died. He left no children by his wife Filiberta of Savoy and the title of Duc de Nemours, bestowed on him by Francis I. when he married, lapsed to the French crown. His illegitimate son, Ippolito, we shall have occasion to mention hereafter. Lorenzo persuaded his uncle, the Pope, to deprive Francesco Maria della Rovere of the Duchy of Urbino in his favour, and soon afterwards married Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, who died after giving birth to a daughter, Catherine, destined to become Queen of France. Duke Lorenzo of Urbino died, worn out by dissipation at the age of twenty-seven, six days after his young wife; and his only claim to fame is Michelangelo’s noble statue, _Il Pensieroso_, above his tomb in the Medici chapel in S. Lorenzo. The statue of his uncle, Giuliano, who also died before he was thirty, is opposite to him in the same chapel holding the baton of command as Gonfalonier of the Church.

With Leo X. died the last legitimate descendant of Cosimo Pater Patriae, and the Medici palace was inhabited by the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, son of the Magnificent Lorenzo’s younger brother Giuliano, by a lady of the Gorini family. He left his mark on the Palazzo by closing the open loggia on the first floor, where Cosimo had always received the citizens who visited him, thus turning it into a long gallery. Even the thorough-going old Republican Jacopo Nardi admits that the Cardinal’s rule was better than any the city had known for many a long year, and everything went smoothly until in 1522 a plot was discovered to murder him. Most of the conspirators, belonging to well-known Florentine families, fled, but young Diaceto and his friend Alamanni were beheaded. The old Palazzo Medici was too small to contain the crowd of citizens of all classes who flocked thither to assure the Cardinal of their heart-felt joy at his escape. According to Ammirato their joy was sincere, for the city would probably have been attacked by the Imperial forces, which had just sacked Genoa and would have seized on such a good excuse as the murder of the Cardinal-Governor to obtain so rich a prize.

In November, 1523, the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici became Pope under the title of Clement VII. and his election was hailed with demonstrations of joy in Florence. Ippolito, the handsome illegitimate son of Giuliano, Duc de Nemours, was sent from Rome under the charge of Silvio Passerini, Cardinal of Cortona, installed in the Palazzo Medici with great magnificence and, although he was only thirteen years of age, declared eligible to all offices of state in the Republic. Alessandro, the reputed son of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, but more probably the child of Clement himself, together with the young Duchess Catherine, was sent to Poggio a Cajano, a Medici villa about nine miles out of Florence. The two lads hated one another, so the Pope thought it best to separate them. Ippolito was handsome, his manners were engaging and he already had a right royal way of spending money. Alessandro, commonly supposed to have been the son of a Moorish slave woman, a report his crisped hair, thick lips and swarthy complexion, tended to confirm, was ugly, violent in temper and abrupt in manner. The appointment of Passerini was not a happy one. “Besides being,” writes Varchi, “like most prelates, extremely avaricious, he had neither the intellect to understand the Florentine character, nor the judgment to manage it had he understood it.” The sack of Rome, and the imprisonment of Clement in Castel S. Angelo, offered too good an opportunity for the Republican party in Florence to lose, and the dreaded cry of _Popolo, Libertà_, resounded in the streets. Ridolfi had come into town with his young pupil Alessandro, and the anxiety of the inmates of Palazzo Medici was not lessened by a visit from their imperious kinswoman, Clarice, daughter of Piero de’ Medici, who had just escaped from Rome with her husband Filippo Strozzi. He followed her to the Palazzo Medici to ask for information as to how things were in Florence pretending, that having just arrived, he was ignorant. Ippolito, with the impetuosity of youth, recounted how ill the city was behaving and then complained bitterly that Madonna Clarice sided with rebels against her own kith and kin. Strozzi professed great sorrow for the behaviour of the Florentines, and still greater for that of his wife, but the fact was, he added with a sigh, that, as a Medici, Clarice was so superior to himself that he had not such control over her as might be desired. Nevertheless, as the Cardinal and the two lads still hesitated about following his advice and quitting the city, he summoned his wife to his help. “Standing in the long gallery she poured forth,” writes old Segni, “her scorn of the base-born scions of her family. ‘You show plainly, what is already known, that you are not of the blood of the Medici. I say this, not only of you, but of Pope Clement, wrongfully a Pope, and now most righteously a prisoner in S. Angelo. As for you, leave a house and a city, neither of which are yours by the right of either birth or of merit. Go, and lose no time.’”

Quitting the Medici palace, the Cardinal and the two lads rode out of the Porta S. Gallo and for the third time the Medici were exiled, and their noble palace was attacked by the mob who were with difficulty restrained from setting it on fire. The arms of the Medici were everywhere defaced and the waxen counterfeits of the Popes Leo and Clement were torn from their places in the church of the Annunziata and destroyed (see p. 380).

After the terrible privations suffered by Florence during the siege under the Prince of Orange, her citizens were fain to bow their necks once more to the Medicean yoke. In obedience to an order _motu proprio, et de plenitudine potestatis_, from Clement VII., they declared that considering the excellent qualities, life and habits of the Most Illustrious Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, son of the late Magnificent Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, and in recognition of the many and great benefits received, both spiritual and temporal from the house of Medici, he was eligible to all offices of State. Ippolito, who had entered the Church unwillingly, had been made a Cardinal before he was twenty. “He was handsome and agreeable,” writes Varchi, “with a quick understanding and gifted with every grace and accomplishment, affable and pleasant to every man and most liberal towards all who excelled in war or letters, or in any of the liberal arts.... He knew Latin well, and wrote gracefully, both in prose and verse, in the Florentine idiom.... It is true that by nature he was superficial and fickle, and did many things solely out of vainglory and ambition.... When he understood, or heard from others, that Pope Clement had decided that the riches and the greatness of the house of Medici were to be continued by Alessandro and not by himself, a great change took place in him. He was seized with incredible anger and grief, as it seemed to him that being older, a nearer relation to the Pope and better endowed by nature, so rich an inheritance and so brilliant a marriage should rather be his: either not knowing, or not believing, the secret rumours that Alessandro was the son of Clement.” He left Rome in haste for Florence with the idea of seizing the State before Alessandro, who was in Flanders with his future father-in-law the Emperor, could arrive. The Pope despatched Bacio Valori after him laden with entreaties and promises, and after passing a few days in Florence and finding that he had no following, he returned to Rome. On the 4th July, Alessandro, who had been created Duke of Cività di Penna, entered Florence and dismounted at the Palazzo Medici, where he was received by the principal citizens.

The exiled Florentines, who were plotting against the stern and dissolute rule of Alessandro, often met in Filippo Strozzi’s house in Rome, and their deliberations were always communicated to the Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici. At last it was decided to send an embassy to Charles V. to complain of the tyranny of the Duke Alessandro and to expose his evil life. This sealed the fate of Ippolito. He died of poison in August, 1535, and the man he accused on his deathbed and who cynically admitted his crime, took refuge in Alessandro’s house in Via Larga.

Splendid was the reception of the Emperor Charles V. when he entered Florence on the 24th April, 1536. During the seven days he passed in the Palazzo Medici grand entertainments were given; but old Varchi complains that, unlike other Emperors, he bestowed no privileges on the city and left no memorial of his visit. The old palace witnessed yet grander festivals on the 19th June, for the marriage of the Duke Alessandro with Margaret of Austria, the illegitimate daughter of Charles V. She came from Naples, accompanied by the Vice-queen, the Grand Penitentiary Cardinal of Santi Quattro and the Cardinal Cibo. After the marriage service in S. Lorenzo there was a grand banquet, to which all the Florentine nobility were invited, and then dancing; followed by a comedy and a sham fight by torchlight on the Piazza S. Lorenzo.

The young Duchess, according to a contemporary chronicler, was very happy, “for the Duke paid her great court and she knew not that he paid even more to other women of all grades.” Banquets, masked balls and comedies, were given in the old palace, and one of the constant guests was a cousin of the Duke’s, a descendant of the younger branch of the Medici family, called Lorenzo. His father died when he was a child and his mother, Maria Soderini, devoted herself to his education. Gifted with an excellent memory and good abilities he learnt with ease; but Varchi describes him as of a restless and dissatisfied temperament, and fond of low company. Being small and slightly made he was generally known as Lorenzino, which was changed to Lorenzaccio, when his real character was known. Of a dark complexion and melancholy aspect, he dressed carelessly, affected contempt for all who exposed themselves to danger and openly proclaimed himself a coward. He made himself necessary to Alessandro, whose inseparable companion he became, encouraging him in all his vices, which he shared, and amusing him by his scurrilous wit.