Alinari

GIULIANO DE’ MEDICI

The melancholy catalogue of crime contains no blacker atrocity, none more fatal by example and social results, than such concerted murders as those of Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Giuliano de' Medici. Yet when history arraigns their assassins at the bar of human judgment, due consideration should be given to certain extenuating pleas. The age was one of violence, when life was little valued, and religion exercised no vital influence on morals; when their public and private excesses too often rendered those in high places a common nuisance; when justice and vengeance were convertible terms, the dagger or the poisoned draught their ready instruments. As we write these sentences similar outrages are revived. One looked upon as the most enlightened and most practical of Italian liberals is suddenly called to administer the temporal affairs of Rome at a crisis of singular difficulty. His private life is unchallenged, his public policy untried. As he enters the anticipated scene of his future labours,—the first constitutional assembly ever attempted in a city which had long ruled the world,—he falls pierced to the heart by the poignard of a dastardly miscreant. A crime for centuries disused becomes again national, consecrated by pæans of the Roman populace, who tramp the streets chanting—

"Blessings on the hand
That laid the tyrant low."[187]

When the dismal tidings reached Leghorn, the mob hurry to the piazza, prompt, like the old democracy of Florence, to overturn existing powers on the chance of new masters. The governor of the city, and guardian of its peace, accepts and celebrates the cowardly murder, by announcing to them from his balcony that "Pellegrino Rossi, a man hated by all Italy for his principles, has fallen by a son of the ancient Roman republic. May God save his soul, and the liberty of Italy!"

But to return from the melodramatic horrors of modern Italian politics. Confessions by subordinate agents traced the origin of this disgraceful plot of the Pazzi to the Roman court, and Sixtus, so far from repelling the charge, adopted the attitude of a partisan, by excommunicating Lorenzo and all Florence. The manifesto by which he sought to justify this measure affords no sufficient defence, nor any satisfactory contradiction of his privacy to the designs of the Pazzi; indeed, when hard names are substituted for facts, and mixed up with transparent evasions or detected falsehoods, the cause which they defend naturally becomes suspected.

The official documents by which the Pontiff must be judged are accessible to English readers in the Appendix to Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo.[188] Giovanni Sanzi, whose ample details were unknown to that accomplished biographer, confirms generally his account of the conspiracy, but mentions a report that when imparted to his Holiness he refused his consent, and dissuaded its leaders from their design. This, if proved, would still leave him under scandal as an accessory after the fact. We learn from the same chronicle that Duke Federigo, when asked to share the plot, scouted it as utterly revolting to his honour, and calculated to overwhelm its authors with eternal infamy, adding that, during his own long struggle with Sigismondo Malatesta, similar expedients had been repeatedly suggested to him, but that by God's grace he had been enabled to resist them all: at the same time he expressed his readiness to take the field against the Medici, and try the fortune of war in open campaign. Lorenzo having subsequently sent to demand why he concealed the conspiracy thus brought to his knowledge, he denied the necessity of offending a good friend by imparting to an enemy an attempt which he disapproved and abhorred, adding, that he would soon be in Tuscany to settle all differences in honourable warfare.