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.