Their friendship with the late Pope did not prevent the Medici from coming to a good understanding with the new one. The mark of favour to Giovanni di Bicci already mentioned tells of friendly relations even at a time when Martin V. was not well disposed towards the city, on account of disagreeable occurrences during his residence in Florence in 1420. We have seen how Cosimo accompanied John XXIII. to Constance, where, in the words of a contemporary, the whole world was assembled. On the flight of his patron he left the town in disguise, and resided for some time in Germany and France, till he returned home after about two years’ absence. In 1426, having been entrusted with embassies in Milan, Lucca, and Bologna, he stayed for some months in Rome, employed in State affairs at the time that the tedious strife with Filippo Maria Visconti had, by the conquest of Brescia, taken a favourable turn for the allied Florentines and Venetians; and it was important to persuade the Pope to act as umpire, since all parties, and especially the Florentines, longed for peace. This peace was actually signed at Venice on December 30, the Bishop of Bologna, the excellent Niccolò Albergati, representing Martin V.; and when the duke broke the treaty, which had only just been concluded, new and heavy misfortunes in arms forced him to appeal to the same mediation which he had so lately scorned. But it was only in the spring of 1428 that terms were agreed upon advantageous to Venice, which retained Brescia, but offered no compensation to the Florentines for their enormous expenses, thus justifying the prudence of old Giovanni di Bicci, who had counselled against the war. In gratitude to the Pope for his support, the Florentines, in 1427, bestowed the freedom of their city on his relations, the Colonna family.
At the death of his father, Cosimo was forty years old. In all business, public as well as private, he had proved himself skilful, active, and prudent. All who did not belong to the party which guided affairs since 1380 regarded him as their natural leader. The number of these opponents of the ruling faction was great, not only among the people—in whom more or less indistinct hereditary traditions were instinctively hostile to a government which had now existed for fifty years, and which, though it originated with the people, had from the first been tinctured with the character of an oligarchy—but also among the higher classes, many of whom were considerably oppressed by this faction. Giovanni di Bicci had always avoided appearing as the actual head of a party, perhaps from prudence, perhaps also for fear of exposing himself to the risk of catastrophes such as he had experienced in his youth. It was to be proved whether his son shared this feeling, and Cosimo’s behaviour hitherto implied that he did. It was a question, however, whether the oligarchy would find it advisable to suffer a man beside them whose reputation and wealth daily increased, and who, even without wishing it, must be dangerous to them if misfortune or blunder should arouse discontent. Since the death of Maso degli Albizzi, his son Rinaldo, Niccolò da Uzzano, and Palla Strozzi stood at the head of the party.
The Albizzi, who, as we have said, derived their origin from Arezzo, were at first of the Ghibelline faction, and appeared in Florence about the middle of the thirteenth century. They soon obtained repute among the plebeian families. From 1282 ninety-eight of their family sat in the magistracy of the priors, and fourteen attained to the office of Venner or Gonfalonier. Piero son of Filippo, the first Gonfalonier, was he who in a short time raised the authority of his family above that of all others. He led an active life at a time when the republic claimed much of the time and pecuniary means of the principal citizens, but in return afforded them opportunities of satisfying their ambition, and attaining to a height of power which might become dangerous to the commonwealth. He had repeatedly been charged with embassies to princes and republics; had been present at coronations; concluded treaties, among them those with the plundering mercenary bands, and with Bernabò Visconti; had been sent with congratulatory messages, as in 1367, when Pope Urban V., summoned by all the Italian patriots, returned from Avignon to Rome, unfortunately only for a time. Jealousy of his rising authority induced the heads of the Ricci, a rival family to his own, and their friends, to propose the exclusion from office of all such as were suspected of Guelphism. This measure was directed principally against the Albizzi; but Piero, cleverer than his opponents, helped to carry it through, while they had counted on his opposition. He knew how to make use of them. In 1357, being chosen president of the tribunal entrusted with this political inquisition of the Parte Guelfa, it was he who, with his friends, began that proscription which united all power in the city and government in his hands and those of his adherents, but also created that unendurable condition of affairs against which the rebellion of 1378 broke out. In the following year Piero, banished at first from Florence, having returned to one of his estates, fell a victim to the summary justice executed by the aristocratic leaders of the mob. A false accusation brought him to the scaffold; at a time when no law was respected, he paid the penalty of having himself made the laws subservient to political ends.
The family retired into exile; their houses were plundered and burnt. One of the branches, in a quarrel with relations, had discarded the name and altered the coat of arms, and flourishes still under the name of the Alessandri. The reaction of the year 1381 brought the exiles back, and they were soon more powerful than ever. Maso (Tommaso), Piero’s nephew, had been first banished to Barletta, on the Apulian coast, and then made a ‘Grande,’ i.e. disqualified for holding communal offices. He now attained almost dictatorial power, and exercised it with political insight, and a consistency which essentially aided in raising the republic to that height of power and repute on which it remained thenceforward, and long after his own faction was destroyed, till the revolution in Italian affairs at the end of the fifteenth century. If he acted intolerantly in home affairs; if proscriptions did not cease, and the prosecution of the Alberti, who were concerned in the insurrection of 1378 and in the execution of Piero degli Albizzi, showed cruelty in the enactment which commanded their houses to be razed to the ground, their coats of arms to be destroyed, and their property confiscated; a law that punished alliances by marriage and commercial transactions with them, extended even to their posterity;[57] it is less the fault of the man than of the spirit which had prevailed in the republics for centuries, and which led even the most discerning to make the commonwealth ever subservient to party policy, and to look upon their own faction as the State. Embassies to Gian Galeazzo Visconti, to King Rupert of the Palatinate, Pope Gregory XII., &c., alternated for Maso with a continuous series of the most important offices. Even when he was out of office, nothing was done without him. When the republic manfully resisted the progress of Gian Galeazzo in Central Italy, enlarged and secured her own territory by the conquest of Pisa, actively contributed to ecclesiastical union, and brought the dangerous war with King Ladislaus to a successful end, it was all really due to Albizzi. He was a rich man; the street outside the oldest district of the town, still named after his family, was almost entirely occupied by their houses and those of the Pazzi; and in our time, the palace belonging to his descendants, as well as that of the Alessandri, the half-ruined tower, the walled-up loggia, the passage to the market of San Piero, with the portico of the demolished church built by a descendant of Maso, remind us of the brilliant days of the family, whose coat of arms is still to be seen on the buildings—two concentric golden circles on a black field, and above it on a silver field the cross of the German order granted to Maso. In the lower valley of the Arno, on the right bank of the river, where a low range of hills stretches between the Lake of Bientina, reaching to the foot of the mountains of Pisa, and the green level of the marshes of Fucecchio, lies the large Villa Montefalcone, which came into the possession of the family in the second half of the fourteenth century. It was formerly a castle (destroyed by Castruccio) with a splendid view over the valley, strewn with villages lying mostly on low hills, and the beautiful wooded heights of Monte Albano, behind which the fertile Pistojan plain joined the Florentine valley of the Arno, which, while more varied, rivalled it in fertility.
Maso degli Albizzi died in 1417, aged seventy-four. His eldest son, Rinaldo, was the heir to his position in the Senate. He was a boy eight years of age when his relations fell in the tumult of Ciompi, had grown up in the traditions of his house, and from the year 1399 was active in affairs of State. No citizen was employed so much as he in embassies and commissions of all kinds. We meet with him in great and small matters; for the statesmen of the free city as little thought of declining small matters, as the greatest artists thought it beneath their dignity to paint shields and domestic implements, or to carve coats of arms on door-posts and chimney-pieces. Fifty different commissions were entrusted to Rinaldo, some in the vicinity, and some to the Popes, King Sigismund, to Naples, Lombardy, Genoa, Ferrara, Romagna, &c. The hard-working man left careful and detailed notes of all, which, with the documents and letters relating thereto, he first collected in 1423, and afterwards continued. They are models of a natural, pure, perspicuous, and always appropriate diction, at a time when the Tuscan dialect was threatened with an overgrowth of learned affectation and distortion, and was losing its popular simplicity. These notes are a source of the amplest knowledge of details for any one who earnestly studies the history of this period, remarkable in so many ways.[58] While he was so frequently employed in foreign service—for the year before his exile we find him at Rome—his opponents laboured at home for his ruin. It is as if Gino Capponi, Neri’s son, had thought of him when he wrote the advice intended for his son: ‘He who wishes for a great position in his native city, should not leave it too often, except in important cases.’ ‘Messer Rinaldo,’ says Giovanni Cavalcanti, a contemporary and adherent of the Medici, ‘knew not what fear is. He had clean hands, was well read in the sciences, was full of perseverance and love of justice, so that the multitude accused him of being hard and cruel. He lived only on simple fare, and hated feastings, and was accustomed to say that he who wished to keep in health must be no gormandizer; which his enemies interpreted as meanness. Would to God that we could not have said of this man that he was proud! for else he would have excelled many others in good qualities. But his pride clouded his own virtues, and misjudged those of others.’[59]
Beside the two Albizzi, none exercised greater influence in the guidance of affairs in the half-century of the oligarchy than Niccolò da Uzzano. The name of the family, extinct in the second half of the seventeenth century, was Miglioretti; but they were generally named after a little castle, now a gentleman’s villa, lying south of Florence, in the Greve valley, the environs of which are renowned for their excellent wine. The Da Uzzano appeared first in Florence in the days of the Emperor Henry VII. Niccolò, the son of Giovanni and Lena de’ Bardi, born about the middle of the fourteenth century, represented the moderate principle in the ruling party, as Giovanni di Bicci did among the opposition. He wished for an oligarchy, but did not desire the supremacy of a single family. As long as he lived, a restraint was laid upon the Albizzi; nay, he was even reported to have said, that, if he must live to see one stand at the head of affairs, he would sooner endure Cosimo than Rinaldo. For he feared the violent ambition of the latter more than the crafty calculation of his rival, and said of Rinaldo, that he would see no citizen by his side, but all beneath him, and did not think so much of destroying the Medici as of acquiring unlimited authority over his own party.[60] Niccolò did not, however, trust to its unity, and sought, therefore, to hold and preserve matters equally balanced. His repute was so high, that the faction was indeed named after him, and his beneficence equalled his wealth. In the Via de’ Bardi we still see the great palace which he is said to have had built by the painter Bicci di Lorenzo, and which, as he had no sons, passed with his daughter Ginevra to a branch of the Capponi, which still possesses it.[61] The severe unadorned façade of Opus rusticum still represents the simplicity of the time, which was soon replaced by the greater richness of form of the Medicean epoch; and his statue in marble, said to be a work of Donatello’s, is still shown in the house; whereas another likeness, painted by Masaccio, and once in one of the houses of the Corsican,[62] is said to have disappeared.
But Niccolò wished to leave his native town a memorial of his affection, and began building a lyceum for young men after a design by the same Bicci. By his last will he left a considerable sum invested in the national funds for completing the work and endowing lectureships; but the State expended the money for other purposes, and in the present day only the name of the broad Via della Sapienza, leading from the Piazza di San Marco to the Annunziata, reminds us of Niccolò da Uzzano’s patriotic intention. ‘He who wishes to be of use to the world, and to found of himself an honourable memory,’ remarks Giorgio Vasari, ‘must work himself as long as he lives, and not trust to posterity and heirs.’
Palla Strozzi was not made for the strife of factions; his heart belonged to study. ‘Messer Leonardo of Arezzo,’ remarks the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci,[63] ‘who has left us a whole gallery of interesting portraits of remarkable and meritorious men, used to say of him, that he was the happiest man he had known; for he possessed all that is requisite for human happiness, in intellectual as well as physical gifts. He was very useful to his native city, and obtained all the honours in the home and foreign administration which could be granted to a citizen. As ambassador he received honourable commissions, and, at the same time, always promoted the welfare of his country. With these gifts he united the strictest sense of honour, and was personally the most cultivated and respected burgher of the city. His modesty extended from his private life to his public position. He sought to avoid envy as much as he could, well knowing what harm is wrought by it to the commonwealth, and how it pursues deserving men. He did not like to be seen in public; he never appeared on the square of the Signoria, or the new market-place, except when he was summoned thither. If he went to the Piazza, he took the way past Sta. Trinità, through the Borgo Sant’Apostolo, stayed there only a short time, and then repaired to the palace. He was sparing of time, never wandered about the streets and squares, and scarcely had he arrived at home than he studied Greek and Latin, and lost not an hour.’ He was a rich man. In the registers of 1427 he opened the list of the tax-payers with a sum exceeding the valuation of Giovanni di Bicci by more than a fifth. A great part of his income he employed in the purchase of manuscripts and for scientific purposes. The origin of his family is unknown: the name occurs towards the end of the thirteenth century. That the Strozzi were Guelphs and plebeians is shown by their whole position; that they were popular, we see from the circumstance that the names of more than a hundred of their family occur among the priors of the corporations, while not less than sixteen attained the office of Venner. Their wealth increased rapidly, as did the branches into which they were divided, and in the territory they possessed lands and castles. One of them, Tommaso, was among those of higher rank who turned the popular insurrection of 1378 to their own purposes, and had to esteem himself fortunate in escaping the victorious reaction by a flight to Mantua, where he founded a branch of his family, which is still flourishing. Onofrio (Noferi), Palla’s father, who had died in 1417, seventy-two years old, was one of the most respected men of the republic. He was twice elected Gonfaloniere, and, beside other offices, he filled that of superintendent of the Mint; while embassies led him to the Popes Gregory XII. and Alexander V., when Florence tried her best to restore unity in the Church. It was he who determined on building the beautiful chapel in Sta. Trinità which now serves as sacristy, a building which was completed by his son, and the exterior of which is adorned with the three crescents, the arms of the Strozzi. The epoch of their greatest brilliancy had not yet begun, but they were approaching it rapidly.
As long as the different elements which formed the political parties held the balance of power, peace remained intact at home. The city had never been so rich or so splendid, trade and industry never so flourishing as then; the great burghers had never shown more lively common feeling, or created more beautiful public works, or devoted more helpful interest to science. It was felt that any inconsiderate step, from whatever side it might come, would disturb this peace; but it was this very consciousness of responsibility which enforced prudence. Niccolò da Uzzano used to say that he who summoned a parliament—i.e. who would bring about any decided change in the existing state of things—would dig his own grave.[64] Many respected burghers shared his views. It was natural however that an event should at last occur to cause open discontent in the city, and a more hostile position of the parties. The conquest of Pisa had not satisfied Florentine ambition; Lucca, with which Florence had so often quarrelled, remained a thorn in her side. When, a hundred and twenty six years after the time of which we are treating, Giorgio Vasari was employed in painting the great hall in the former palace of the Signoria with representations from the history of Florentine conquests, he was visited by the Lucchese ambassador at his work, and on his question, what he intended to portray on the remaining space, gave the bold answer, ‘The conquest of Lucca.’ This is only an insolent expression of the popular wish. In the Milanese war, Lucca, where, for nearly thirty years, a citizen, Paolo Guinigi, had ruled with almost absolute power, had taken sides for the Visconti, and thereby certainly placed Florence in some danger. Rinaldo degli Albizzi stood at the head of those who demanded that their neighbours should be chastised. But division arose in his own party; Niccolò da Uzzano, Palla Strozzi, Agnolo Pandolfini, and others, opposed him. The attitude of Cosimo de’ Medici was ambiguous. The reproach of having agreed to the plan of war in order to ruin the hopes of his rival, cleaves to him in spite of its being contradicted.[65] The war party, supported by Neri Capponi, one of the most influential burghers, and son of him who had taken Pisa, prevailed. In the Council the opponents were scarcely allowed to speak; a pretext was easily found, and the determination was taken at the end of 1429. Rinaldo degli Albizzi undertook the guidance of affairs as Commissary of the Republic, with extensive authority.