well as in Tuscan, politics lies in the fact that he was able to unite
the sources of administrative, legislative, and judicial power in
himself. All the public offices in Florence were held by his dependents,
and so entirely was the state machinery controlled by him that we find
such men as Louis XI and the emperor Maximilian, Alfonso of Naples,
and Pope Innocent VIII recognizing his authority and appealing to him
personally, in place of to the seigniory, to effect the ends they
desired. Such power enabled him to avoid the risks his grandfather Cosmo
had been compelled to run to maintain his authority. The Medicean
faction was better in hand than in his grandfather's days, and Lorenzo,
therefore, in playing the _rôle_ of the peacemaker of Italy, at the time
when he held the "balance of power" through his treaties with Milan,
Naples, and Ferrara, could speak with a decision that carried weight when
he found it necessary to threaten a restless "despot" with a political
combination that might depose him.
Lorenzo's services to learning were inspired by feelings infinitely more
noble than those actuating his political plans. A patriotism as lofty as
it was beneficent led him to desire that his country should be in the
van of Italian progress in Renaissance studies. His sagacious prevision
enabled him to proportion the nature and extent of the benefit he
conferred to the need it was intended to supply. Many statesmen do more
harm than good by failing to appreciate this law of supply and demand.
They grant more than is required, and that which should have been a boon
becomes a burden. Charles V, at the time of the Reformation, on more
than one occasion committed this error, as also did Wolsey and Mazarin.
Lorenzo, like Richelieu, recognized the value of moderation in giving,
and caused every favor to be regarded as a possible earnest of others to
come.
The earlier years of his power were associated with many stirring events
which exercised no inconsiderable influence on the state of learning. For
example, his skilful playing off of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan
against Ferrante, King of Naples, led to greater attention being directed
by the Florentines to Neapolitan and Milanese affairs, with the result
that humanists and artists from both these places paid frequent visits to
Florence, where they were welcomed by Lorenzo as his guests. Then when
the revolt of the small city of Volterra from Florentine rule was
suppressed by Lorenzo's agents, with a rigorous severity that cast a
stain on their master's name, owing to many unoffending scholars having
suffered to the extent of losing their all, Lorenzo made noble amends.
Not only did he generously assist the inhabitants to repair their losses,
not only did he make grants to the local scholars and send them copies of
many of the codices in his own library to supply the loss of their books
which had been burned by the soldiery, but he purchased large estates in
the neighborhood, that the citizens might benefit by his residence among
them. In this way, too, he brought the Volterran scholars into more
intimate relations with the Florentine humanists, and thus contributed to
the further diffusion of the benefits of the Renaissance.
All was not plain sailing, however, as regards the progress of the "New
Learning." Despite his efforts, Lorenzo could not prevent its development
being checked during the papal-Neapolitan quarrel with Florence. That war
originated in a dispute with Pope Sixtus IV, who kept Italy in a ferment
during the whole duration of his pontificate, 1471-1484. Were no other
proof forthcoming of Lorenzo's marvellous diplomatic genius than this one
fact, that he checkmated the political schemes of Sixtus, and finally
so neutralized his influence as to render him wellnigh impotent for
evil-doing, such an achievement was sufficient to stamp him one of the
greatest masters of statecraft Europe has known. In any estimate of his
ability we must take into account the unsatisfactory character of many of
the instruments wherewith he had to achieve his purposes, and also the
fact that he had neither a great army at his back with which to enforce
the fulfilment of treaty obligations--for Florence never was a city of
soldiers--nor had he the prestige of an official position to lend weight
to his words. To all intents and purposes he was a private citizen of
the Florentine republic. Yet such was the dynamic power of the man's
marvellous personality, and the reputation he had earned, even in his
early years, for supreme prescience and far-reaching diplomatic subtlety,
that far and wide he was regarded as the greatest force in Italian
politics. Sixtus sallied forth to crush; he returned to the Vatican a
crushed and a discredited man, to die of sheer chagrin over his defeat by
Lorenzo in his designs upon Ferrara.
Then followed the memorable dispute, in 1472-1473, over the bishopric of
Pisa, when the Pope's nominee, Francesco Salviati, was refused possession
of his see, Pisa being one of the Tuscan towns under the control of
Florence. To this Sixtus retaliated by seeking the friendship of Ferrante
of Naples, a move Lorenzo anticipated by forming the league between
Florence, Milan, and Venice. This league thoroughly alarmed both the Pope
and Ferrante, and on the latter visiting Rome in 1475 a papal-Neapolitan
alliance was formed.
Even then hostilities might not have broken out had the young Duke
of Milan not been assassinated in 1476, leaving an infant heir. This
entailed a long minority, with all its dangers, and the apprehensions
regarding these were not fanciful, inasmuch as Lodovico Sforza, uncle of
the baby Duke, usurped the position under pretext of acting as regent.
These crimes were plainly responsible for the Pazzi conspiracy in 1478
against the Medici themselves, a conspiracy which resulted in Giuliano,
the younger brother of Lorenzo, being murdered in the cathedral, during
mass, on the Sunday before Ascension, while Lorenzo himself was slightly
wounded. That Sixtus and his nephew were accessories before the fact
is now regarded as unquestionable. The vengeance taken by the enraged
Florentines on the conspirators, their relatives, friends, and property,
was terrible; the innocent, alas! being sacrificed indiscriminately with
the guilty.
The Archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, had entered eagerly into
the scheme, and, although his sacred office prevented him from actually
assisting in the deed, he was present in the cathedral until the signal
was given for the perpetration of the deed, when he left the building to
secure the Palazzo Publico. He was therefore summarily hanged with
the others from the windows of the civic buildings. Sixtus made the
execution, or the "murder" as he called it, of Salviati, his pretext for
calling on his allies to make war on Florence. When he saw, however, that
this action was only throwing the city more completely than ever into the
arms of the Medici, he changed his tactics and said he had no quarrel
with "his well-beloved children of Florence," but only with "that son of
iniquity and child of perdition, Lorenzo de' Medici," and those who had
aided and abetted him, among whom the humanists were expressly mentioned.
Against Lorenzo and his associates a brief of excommunication was
launched, and the city was urged to regain the papal favor by
surrendering the offenders.
The result might have been predicted. The "brief" only tended to knit the
bonds of association closer between Lorenzo and the "City of the Flower,"
while the humanists to a man rallied round their patron. Even the
choleric Filelfo, now a very old man, who had been on anything but
friendly terms with the Medici, addressed two bitter satires to Sixtus,
in which the Pope was styled the real aggressor, while the great humanist
offered to write a history of the whole transaction, that posterity might
know the true facts. The only power which gave its adhesion to Sixtus was
Naples, while Venice, Ferrara, and Milan declared for Florence.
Thus commenced that tedious war which not only ruined so many Florentine
merchants, but retarded the cause of learning so materially. When the
people were groaning under heavy taxes, when all coin which Lorenzo
could scrape together had to be poured out to pay the _condottieri_, or
soldiers of fortune, by whom the battles of Florence were fought, there
was of course but short commons for the humanists who had made Florence
their home. Many of those adapted themselves to circumstances, but
others, to whom money was their god, left the banks of the Arno for those
southern cities where the pinch of scarcity did not prevail.
In this campaign the Florentines gained but little prestige. The larger
share of the cost was quietly suffered by their allies to fall on the
city of bankers. The Milanese were occupied with their own affairs,
owing to the _coup d'état_ accomplished by Lodovico Sforza. The Duke of
Ferrara withdrew owing to some disagreement with the condottieri
engaged by Lorenzo. The Venetians only despatched a small contingent
under Carlo Montone and Diefebo d'Anguillari; accordingly, in the end,
the whole burden of the struggle fell on Florence. The Magnifico's
position gradually became precarious, inasmuch as many persons declared
the war to be in reality a personal quarrel between Pope Sixtus and
the Medici. Complaints began to be heard that the public treasury was
exhausted and the commerce of the city ruined, while the citizens were
burdened with oppressive taxes. Lorenzo had the mortification of being
told that sufficient blood had been shed, and that it would be expedient
for him rather to devise some means of effecting a peace than of making
further preparations for the war.
In these circumstances, and confronted by one of the most dangerous
crises of his whole life, Lorenzo rose to the occasion and effected a
solution of the difficulty by daring to perform what was undoubtedly one
of the bravest acts ever achieved by a diplomatist. By some statesmen
it might be condemned as foolhardy, by others as quixotic. Its very
foolhardiness and quixotry fascinated the man it was intended to
influence, the blood-thirsty, cruel, and pitiless Ferrante of Naples, who
was restrained from crime by the fear neither of God nor man, and who
had actually slain the condottiere Piccinino when he visited him under a
safe-conduct from the monarch's best ally. But the Renaissance annals are
filled with the records of men and women whose natures are marvellous
studies of contrasted and contradictory traits. Such was the Neapolitan
tyrant. While a monster in much, he had his vulnerable points. He was
ambitious to pose as a friend of the "New Learning," and he knew that
Lorenzo was not only the most munificent patron, but also one of the most
illustrious exponents, of the Renaissance principles.
Although his enemy, Ferrante received Lorenzo with every demonstration of
respect and satisfaction. He lost sight of the hostile diplomatist in
the great humanist. Two Neapolitan galleys were sent to conduct him
to Naples, and he was welcomed on landing with much pomp. Never did
Lorenzo's supreme diplomatic genius, never did his versatile powers as a
statesman, as a scholar, as a patron of letters, and as a brilliant man
of the world, blaze forth in more splendid effulgence than during his
three-months' stay in Naples. Though opposed by all the papal authority
and resources; though Sixtus by turns threatened, cajoled, entreated,
promised, in order to prevent Lorenzo having any success, the successor
of St. Peter was beaten all along the line, and the Magnifico carried
away with him a treaty, signed and sealed, which practically meant that
henceforth Naples and the papacy would be in antagonistic camps.
It was the Renaissance card which won the trick. With startling boldness,
yet with consummate art, Lorenzo played the game of flattering Ferrante.
No ordinary adulation, however, would have had success with the
Neapolitan Phaleris. He was too strong-minded a man for anything of that
kind. But to be hailed by the great Renaissance patron of the period,
by one also who was himself one of the leading humanists, as a
brother-humanist and a fellow-patron of learning, was a delicate incense
to his vanity which he could not resist. He liked to be consulted on
matters of literary moment, and, when he blundered, Lorenzo was too
shrewd a student of human nature to correct him.
Another fact in Lorenzo's favor was that he had the warm support not only
of the beautiful Ippolyta Maria, daughter of Cosmo's friend, Francesco
Sforza of Milan, and now wife of Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, King
Ferrante's heir, as well as of Don Federigo, the monarch's younger son,
who, along with Ippolyta, was a friend to the "New Learning," but he also
had the whole body of Neapolitan humanists on his side, scarce one of
whom but had experienced in some form or another the Medicean bounty.
Such powerful advocacy was not without its influence in bringing about
the result; while Ferrante more and more realized that if the Florentine
Medici were crushed he would have no ally to whom to look for help when
the inevitable shuffle of the political cards took place on the death of
Sixtus.
In February, 1480, therefore, Lorenzo returned in triumph to Florence,
to be received with rapture by his fellow-citizens. Had he delayed a few
months longer, his visit and his _ad-miseri-cordiam_ appeals would not
have been needed. In August of that year Keduk Achmed, one of the Turkish
Sultan's (Mahomet II) ablest generals, besieged and took the city of
Otranto. In face of the common danger to all Italy, Sixtus was compelled
to accept the treaty made by Ferrante with Lorenzo, and a general peace
ensued. The decade accordingly closed with an absolution for all offences
granted by the Pope to Florence, conditional on the Tuscan republic
contributing its share to the expenses of the military preparations to
resist the invasion of the Turk.
Notwithstanding the war, the progress of the Renaissance during the first
decade of Lorenzo's rule was very marked. To the rapid diffusion of
printing this was largely due. Lorenzo had not imbibed the prejudices
against the new art entertained by Cosmo and Federigo of Montefeltro. He
looked at the practical, not the sentimental, side of the question as
regards the new invention. Having seen that the press could throw off, in
a few days, scores of copies of any work, of which it took an amanuensis
months to produce one; also that the scholars of all Italy could be
furnished almost immediately, and at a low price, with the texts of any
manuscript they desired, while they had to wait months for a limited
number of copies whose cost was wellnigh prohibitive, he supported the
new invention from the outset. Having resolved to further his father's
efforts to establish printing in Florence, he stimulated the local
goldsmith, Bernardo Cennini, to turn his attention to type-casting in
metal, and even agreed to pay him an annual grant from the year 1471
until he had fairly settled himself in business. Nor did he confine his
favors to him. John of Mainz and Nicholas of Breslau, who arrived in
Florence, the former in 1472 and the latter in 1477, also participated
in his open-hearted liberality. Printing struck its roots deep into the
Tuscan community and flourished excellently. Though the Florentine craft
never attained the reputation of the Venetian Aldi and Asolani, the
Giunti of Rome, the Soncini of Fano, the Stephani of Paris, and Froben
of Basel, it had the name, for a time at least, of being one of the most
accurate of all presses.
To Lorenzo it owed this celebrity. At an early date he perceived that the
new art would be of little value if there were not careful press readers.
He was therefore among the first to induce scholars of distinction to
engage in this task. For example, he enlisted the aid of Cristoforo
Landino, who in his _Disputationes Camaldunenses_ had really inaugurated
the science of textual criticism by urging that a careful comparison
of the various codices should constitute the preliminary step in any
reproduction of the classics. Landino's work on Vergil and Horace merits
the warmest praise. Lorenzo also impressed Poliziano into the work, whose
labors in marking the various readings, in adding _scholia_ and "notes"
illustrative of the text of Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, etc., were of the
utmost value. To Lorenzo and to his younger brother Giuliano, another
great humanist, Giorgio Merula of Milan, dedicated his _Plautus_,
published in Venice in 1472, showing at how early an age the Magnifico
had taken his place among the recognized patrons of the Italian
Renaissance.
We ought not, moreover, to omit mention of another achievement of
Lorenzo, though performed in a sphere of effort lying outside of the
strict limits of our Renaissance survey. Seeing it was the "Revival of
Letters," however, which induced the revival of the cultivation of the
vernacular Italian literature, surely it is not out of place to refer to
it here. Early in life Lorenzo became imbued with the conviction that his
native tongue was unsurpassed as a medium for "the expression of noble
thoughts in noble numbers." Not only did he encourage others to study
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, but by following out his own precepts
he became one of the great Italian poets. His _Selve d'Amore,_ his
_Corinto_, his _Ambra_, his _La Nencia da Barberino_, his _Laude_, his
_Sonetti_, his _Cansoni_, etc., are all poems that live in the Italian
literature of to-day. Not as a man ashamed of the vernacular, and forced
to use it because he can command no better, does Lorenzo write. "He is
sure of the justice of his cause, and determined by precept and example
and by the prestige of his princely rank to bring the literature he loves
into repute again."
But of these poems we cannot here take further note. By the scholars of
the Renaissance such work was looked askance at. If they did produce any
of these "trifles," as they were called, they almost blushed to own them,
and were ashamed to communicate them to each other. That he dared to
be natural says much for Lorenzo, and it was largely due to his
encouragement that Cristoforo Landino undertook his great work on
"Dante," to which we owe so much to-day.
In conjunction with his patronage of printing, there was no line of
effort in which Lorenzo did more real good than in collecting manuscripts
and antiquities, and in making them practically public property. On this
account he is styled, by Niccolo Leonicino, "Lorenzo de' Medici, the
great patron of learning in this age, whose messengers are dispersed
through every part of the earth for the purpose of collecting books on
every science, and who has spared no expense in procuring for your use,
and that of others who may devote themselves to similar studies, the
materials necessary for your purpose." The agents he employed travelled
through Italy, Greece, Europe, and the East--Hieronymo Donato, Ermolao
Barbaro, and Paolo Cortesi being the names of some of his most trusted
"commissioners." But the coadjutor whose aid he principally relied on, to
whom he committed the care and arrangement of his vast museum and great
library, was Poliziano, who himself made frequent excursions throughout
Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa to discover and purchase such remains
of antiquity as suited the purposes of his patron. Another successful
agent, though at a later date, was Giovanni Lascaris, who twice journeyed
into the East in search of manuscripts and curios. In the second of these
he brought back upward of two hundred copies of valuable codices from the
monasteries on Mount Athos.
To still another service rendered by Lorenzo to the cause of the
Renaissance attention must be called--the founding of the Florentine
Academy for the study of Greek. This institution, distinct, be it
remembered, from the _Uffiziali dello Studio_ (or high-school),
exercised a marvellous influence on the progress of the "New Learning."
Accordingly, as Roscoe says, succeeding scholars have been profuse in
their acknowledgments to Lorenzo, who first formed the establishment from
which, to use their own classical figure, as from the Trojan horse,
so many illustrious champions have sprung, and by means of which the
knowledge of the Greek tongue was extended not only throughout Italy,
but throughout Europe as well, from all the countries of which numerous
pupils flocked to Florence--pupils who afterward carried the learning
they had received to their native lands.
Of this institution the first public professor was Joannes Argyropoulos,
who, having enjoyed the patronage of Cosmo and Piero, and directed the
education of Lorenzo, was selected by the latter as the fittest person to
be the earliest occupant of the chair. During his tenure of it he sent
out such pupils as Poliziano, Donato Acciaiuoli, Janus Pannonius, and
the famous German humanist Reuchlin. Argyropoulos did not hold the
appointment long. His death took place at Rome in 1471, and he was
succeeded first by Theodore of Gaza, and then by Chalcondylas. Poliziano
certainly discharged the duties of the office frequently, but at first
only as _locum tenens_. He was then almost incessantly engaged in
travelling for his patron in Greece and Asia Minor, and was too valuable
a coadjutor to be tied down to the routine of teaching until he had
completed his work. During the next decade he became the "professor," and
discharged the duties with a genius and an adaptability to circumstances
that won for him the admiration and love of all his students.
This decade was also remarkable for the commencement of the devotion to
the cultivation of literary style, a pursuit yet to reach its culmination
in Poliziano in Florence and in Bembo and Sadoleto in Rome. Originality
gradually gave place to conventionality, until men actually came to
prefer the absurdities of Ciceronianism, and a cold, colorless adherence
to hard-and-fast rules of composition, to a work throbbing with the
pulsation of virile life. Humanism was beginning to take flight from
Italy, to find a home and a welcome beyond the Alps.
The final decade of Lorenzo's life constituted the midsummer bloom of
the Tuscan renaissance, the meridian of the intellectual and artistic
supremacy of Florence. In Lorenzo it found its fullest expression. He was
typical of its spiritual as well as of its moral meaning; typical, too,
of that mental unrest which sought escape from the pressing problems of
an enigmatic present by reverting to the study of a classic past whose
ethical, social, and political difficulties were rarely of a complex
character, but concerned themselves principally with what may be termed
the elementary verities of man's relations to the Deity and to his
fellows.
Lorenzo's amazing versatility has been pronounced a fault by some who
believed they detected in him the potential capacity of rivalling
Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto on their own ground, had he only
conserved his energies. This is a foolish supposition. Lorenzo's
many-sidedness was but the reflection in himself, as the most accurate
mirror of the time, of all that wondrous susceptibility to beauty, that
eager craving after the realization of the [greek: to kalon] ("the Good")
so characteristic of the best Hellenic genius, whether we study it in the
dramas of Sophocles or the _Republic_ of Plato or in the statesmanship of
Pericles. If Lorenzo had resembled his grandfather and concentrated his
energies upon finance and politics, there might have been a line of
reigning Medicean princes in Florence half a century earlier than
actually was the case, but Europe would have been distinctly the loser
by the absence of the greatest personal force making for culture which
characterized the Renaissance.
This last decade of Lorenzo's life--from his thirty-first to his
forty-second year--was memorable in many respects. In the year 1481 he
was again exposed to the danger of assassination. Battista Frescobaldi
and two assistants in the Church of the Carmeli, and again on Ascension
Day, made an attempt to stab him, but were frustrated by the vigilance of
Lorenzo's friends. There is no doubt that this second attempt was also
instigated by Girolamo Riario, the nephew of Sixtus IV. Thereafter
Lorenzo never moved out without a strong bodyguard of friends and
adherents--a precaution rendered necessary by the repeated plots that
were being hatched against him by his enemies.