[1466-1470 A.D.]
Italy was astonished at the exile of so many illustrious persons. At Florence, the citizens who escaped proscription trembled to see despotism established in their republic; but the lower orders were in general contented, and made no attempt to second Bartolommeo Colleoni, when he entered Tuscany, in 1467, at the head of the Florentine emigrants, who had taken him into their pay. Commerce prospered; manufactures were carried on with great activity; high wages supported in comfort all who lived by their labour; and the Medici entertained them with shows and festivals, keeping them in a sort of perpetual carnival, amidst which the people soon lost all thought of liberty.
Piero de’ Medici was always in too bad a state of health to exercise in person the sovereignty he had usurped over his country; he left it to five or six citizens who reigned in his name. Tommaso Soderini, Andrea de’ Pazzi, Luigi Guicciardini, Matteo Palmieri, and Pietro Minerbetti, were the real chiefs of the state. They not only transacted all business, but appropriated to themselves all the profit; they sold their influence and credit; they gratified their cupidity or their vengeance: but they took care not to act in their own names, or to pledge their own responsibility; they left that to the house of Medici. Piero, during the latter months of his life, perceived the disorder and corruption of his agents. He was afflicted to see his memory thus stained, and he addressed them the severest reprimands; he even entered into correspondence with the emigrants, whom he thought of recalling, when he died, on the 2nd of December, 1469. His two sons, Lorenzo and Giuliano, the elder of whom was not twenty-one years of age, were presented by Tommaso Soderini to the foreign ambassadors, to the magistrates, and to the first citizens of the ruling faction; which last he warned, that the only means of maintaining their party was to preserve the respect of all for its chiefs. But the two younger Medici, given up to all the pleasures of the age, had yet no ambition. The power of the state remained in the hands of the five citizens who had exercised it under Piero.
PIERO’S SONS AND THE CONSPIRACIES
Italy had reached the fatal period at which liberty can no longer be saved by a noble resistance, or recovered by open force. There remained only the dangerous and, most commonly, the fatal resource of conspiracy. So far from experiencing the repugnance we now feel to assassination as a means of delivering our country, men of the fifteenth century perceived honour in a murder, virtue in the sacrifice, and historic grandeur in conspiracy. Danger alone stopped them; but that danger must be terrible. Tyrants, feeling themselves at war with the universe, were always on their guard; and as they owed their safety only to terror, the punishment which they inflicted, if victorious, was extreme in its atrocity. Yet these terrors did not discourage the enemies of the existing order, whether royalist or republican. Never had there been more frequent or more daring conspiracies than in this century. The ill success of some never deterred others from immediately treading in their steps.
The first plot was directed against the Medici. Bernardo Nardi, one of the Florentine citizens, who had been exiled from his country in the time of Piero de’ Medici, accompanied by about a hundred of his partisans, surprised the gate of Prato, on the 6th of April, 1470. He made himself master of the public palace, and arrested the Florentine podesta; he took possession of the citadel and afterwards, traversing the streets, called on the people to join him, and fight for liberty. He intended to make this small town the stronghold of the republican party, whence to begin his attack on the Medici. But although he had succeeded by surprise in making himself master of the town, the inhabitants remained deaf to his voice, and not one answered his call—not one detested tyranny sufficiently to combat it, at the peril of the last extremity of human suffering. The friends of the government, seeing that Nardi remained alone, at last took arms, attacked him on all sides, and soon overpowered him by numbers. Nardi was made prisoner, led to Florence, and there beheaded with six of his accomplices; twelve others were hanged at Prato.
Street Costume of an Italian Nobleman, Fifteenth Century
[1476 A.D.]