old opponents harmless; he took care also that none of his
adherents should become too powerful and dangerous to him.
Therefore, remarks Francesco Guicciardini, he retained the
Signoria, as well as the taxes, in his hand, in order to be
able to promote or oppress individuals at will. In other
things the citizens enjoyed greater freedom and acted more
according to their own pleasure than later, in the days of his
grandson, for he let the reins hang loose if he was only sure
of his own position. It was just in this that his great art
lay, to guide things according to his will, and yet to make
his partisans believe that he shared his authority with them.
... 'It is well known' remarks [Guicciardini] ... 'how much
nobility and wealth were destroyed by Cosimo and his
descendants by taxation. The Medici never allowed a fixed
method and legal distribution, but always reserved to
themselves the power of bearing heavily upon individuals
according to their pleasure. ... He [Cosimo] maintained great
reserve in his whole manner of life. For a quarter of a
century he was the almost absolute director of the State, but
he never assumed the show of his dignity. ... The ruler of the
Florentine State remained citizen, agriculturist, and
merchant. In his appearance and bearing there was nothing
which distinguished him from others. ... He ruled the money
market, not only in Italy, but throughout Europe. He had banks
in all the western countries, and his experience and the
excellent memory which never failed him, with his strong love
of order, enabled him to guide everything from Florence, which
he never quitted after 1438." The death of Cosimo occurred on
the 1st day of August, 1464.
_A. von Reumont,
Lorenzo de' Medici,
book. 1, chapters 6 and 8 (volume 1)._
"The last troubled days of the Florentine democracy had not
proved quite unproductive of art. It was the time of Giotto's
undisputed sway. Many works of which the 15th century gets the
glory because it finished them were ordered and begun amidst
the confusion and terrible agitation of the demagogy. ...
Under the oligarchy, in the relative calm that came with
oppression, a taste for art as well as for letters began to
develop in Florence as elsewhere." But "Cosimo de' Medicis had
rare good fortune. In his time, and under his rule, capricious
chance united at Florence talents as numerous as they were
diverse--the universal Brunelleschi, the polished and elegant
Ghiberti, the rough and powerful Donatello, the suave
Angelico, the masculine Masaccio. ... Cosimo lived long enough
to see the collapse of the admirable talent which flourished
upon the banks of the Arno, and soon spread throughout Italy,
and to feel the void left by it. It is true his grandson saw a
new harvest, but as inferior to that which preceded it, as it
was to that which followed it."
_F. T. Perrens,
History of Florence, 1434-1531,
book 1, chapter 6._
FLORENCE: A. D. 1450-1454.
Alliance with Francesco Sforza, of Milan, and war with
Venice, Naples, Savoy, and other States.
See MILAN: A. D. 1447-1454.
FLORENCE: A. D. 1458-1469.
Lucas Pitti, and the building of the Pitti Palace.
Piero de' Medici and the five agents of his tyranny.
Until 1455, Cosmo de' Medici shared the government of Florence
in some degree with Neri Capponi, an able statesman, who had
taken an eminent part in public affairs for many years--during
the domination of the Albizzi, as well as afterwards.
"When Neri Capponi died, the council refused to call a new
parliament to replace the balia, whose power expired on the
1st of July, 1455. ... The election of the signoria was again
made fairly by lot, ... the contributions were again equitably
apportioned,--the tribunals ceased to listen to the
recommendations of those who, till then, had made a traffic of
distributive justice." This recovery of freedom in Florence
was enjoyed for about three years; but when, in 1458, Lucas
Pitti, "rich, powerful, and bold," was named gonfalonier,
Cosmo conspired with him to reimpose the yoke. "Pitti
assembled the parliament; but not till he had filled all the
avenues of the public square with soldiers or armed peasants.
The people, menaced and trembling within this circle,
consented to name a new balia, more violent and tyrannical
than any of the preceding. It was composed of 352 persons, to
whom was delegated all the power of the republic. They exiled
a great number of the citizens who had shown the most
attachment to liberty, and they even put some to death." When,
in 1463, Cosmo's second son, Giovanni, on whom his hopes were
centered, died, Lucas Pitti "looked on himself henceforth as
the only chief of the state. It was about this time that he
undertook the building of that magnificent palace which now
[1832] forms the residence of the grand-dukes. The republican
equality was not only offended by the splendour of this regal
dwelling; but the construction of it afforded Pitti an
occasion for marking his contempt of liberty and the laws. He
made of this building an asylum for all fugitives from
justice, whom no public officer dared pursue when once he
[they?] took part in the labour. At the same time individuals,
as well as communities, who would obtain some favour from the
republic, knew that the only means of being heard was to offer
Lucas Pitti some precious wood or marble to be employed in the
construction of his palace. When Cosmo de' Medici died, at his
country-house of Careggi, on the 1st of August, 1464, Lucas
Pitti felt himself released from the control imposed by the
virtue and moderation of that great citizen. ... His [Cosmo's]
son, Pietro de' Medici, then 48 years of age, supposed that he
should succeed to the administration of the republic, as he
had succeeded to the wealth of his father, by hereditary
right: but the state of his health did not admit of his
attending regularly to business, or of his inspiring his
rivals with much fear. To diminish the weight of affairs which
oppressed him, he resolved on withdrawing a part of his immense
fortune from commerce; recalling all his loans made in
partnership with other merchants; and laying out this money in
land. But this unexpected demand of considerable capital
occasioned a fatal shock to the commerce of Florence; at the
same time that it alienated all the debtors of the house of
Medici, and deprived it of much of its popularity. The death
of Sforza, also, which took place on the 8th of March, 1466,
deprived the Medicean party of its firmest support abroad. ...
The friends of liberty at Florence soon perceived that Lucas
Pitti and Pietro de' Medici no longer agreed together; and
they recovered courage when the latter proposed to the council
the calling of a parliament, in order to renew the balia, the
power of which expired on the 1st of September, 1465; his
proposition was rejected.
{1141}
The magistracy began again to be drawn by lot from among the
members of the party victorious in 1434. This return of
liberty, however, was but of short duration. Pitti and Medici
were reconciled: they agreed to call a parliament, and to
direct it in concert; to intimidate it, they surrounded it
with foreign troops. But Medici, on the nomination of the
balia, on the 2d of September, 1466, found means of admitting
his own partisans only, and excluding all those of Lucas
Pitti. The citizens who had shown any zeal for liberty were
all exiled. ... Lucas Pitti ruined himself in building his
palace. His talents were judged to bear no proportion to his
ambition: the friends of liberty, as well as those of Medici,
equally detested him; and he remained deprived of all power in
a city which he had so largely contributed to enslave. Italy
became filled with Florentine emigrants: every revolution,
even every convocation of parliament, was followed by the
exile of many citizens. ... 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 Bartolomeo Coleoni,
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.
Pietro 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. ... 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. Pietro, 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 2d of December, 1469. His two
sons, Lorenzo and Giuliano, the elder of whom was not 21 years
of age, ... given up to all the pleasures of their age, had
yet no ambition. The power of the state remained in the hands
of the five citizens who had exercised it under Pietro."
_J. C. L. de Sismondi,
History of the Italian Republics,
chapter 11._
FLORENCE: A. D. 1469-1492.
The conspiracy of the Pazzi.
The government of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
The death of liberty.
The golden age of letters and art.
"Lorenzo inherited his grandfather's political sagacity and
far surpassed him in talent and literary culture. In many
respects too he was a very different man. Cosimo never left
his business office; Lorenzo neglected it, and had so little
commercial aptitude that he was obliged to retire from
business, in order not to lose his abundant patrimony. Cosimo
was frugal in his personal expenses and lent freely to others;
Lorenzo loved splendid living, and thus gained the title of
the Magnificent; he spent immoderately for the advancement of
literary men; he gave himself up to dissipation which ruined
his health and shortened his days. His manner of living
reduced him to such straits, that he had to sell some of his
possessions and obtain money from his friends. Nor did this
suffice; for he even meddled with the public money, a thing
that had never happened in Cosimo's time. Very often, in his
greed of unlawful gain, he had the Florentine armies paid by
his own bank; he also appropriated the sums collected in the
Monte Comune or treasury of the public debt, and those in the
Monte delle Fanciulle where were marriage portions accumulated
by private savings--money hitherto held sacred by all.
Stimulated by the same greed, he, in the year 1472 joined the
Florentine contractors for the wealthy alum mines of Volterra,
at the moment in which that city was on the verge of rebellion
in order to free itself from a contract which it deemed
unjust. And Lorenzo, with the weight of his authority, pushed
matters to such a point that war broke out, soon to be
followed by a most cruel sack of the unhappy city, a very
unusual event in Tuscany. For all this he was universally
blamed. But he was excessively haughty and cared for no man;
he would tolerate no equals, would be first in
everything--even in games. He interfered in all matters, even
in private concerns and in marriages: nothing could take place
without his consent. In overthrowing the powerful and exalting
men of low condition, he showed none of the care and
precaution so uniformly observed by Cosimo. It is not then
surprising if his enemies increased so fast that the
formidable conspiracy of the Pazzi broke out on the 26th April
1478. In this plot, hatched in the Vatican itself where Sixtus
IV. was Lorenzo's determined enemy, many of the mightiest
Florentine families took part. In the cathedral, at the moment
of the elevation of the Host, the conspirators' daggers were
unsheathed. Giuliano dei Medici was stabbed to death, but
Lorenzo defended himself with his sword and saved his own
life. The tumult was so great that it seemed as though the
walls of the church were shaken. The populace rose to the cry
of 'Palle! Palle!' the Medici watchword, and the enemies of
the Medici were slaughtered in the streets or hung from the
windows of the Palazzo Veechio. There, among others, were seen
the dangling corpses of Archbishop Salviati and of Francesco
Pazzi, who in their last struggles had gripped each other with
their teeth and remained thus for some time. More than seventy
persons perished on that day, and Lorenzo, taking advantage of
the opportunity, pushed matters to extremity by his
confiscations, banishments, and sentences of death. Thereby
his power would have been infinitely increased if Pope Sixtus
IV., blinded by rage, had not been induced to excommunicate
Florence, and make war against it, in conjunction with
Ferdinand of Aragon. On this Lorenzo, without losing a moment,
went straight to Naples, and made the king understand how much
better it served his interests that Florence should have but
one ruler instead of a republican government, always liable to
change and certainly never friendly to Naples. So he returned
with peace re-established and boundless authority and
popularity. Now indeed he might have called himself lord of
the city, and it must have seemed easy to him to destroy the
republican government altogether.
{1142}
With his pride and ambition it is certain that he had an
intense desire to stand on the same level with the other
princes and tyrants of Italy; the more so as at that moment
success seemed entirely within his grasp. But Lorenzo showed
that his political shrewdness was not to be blinded by
prosperity, and knowing Florence well, he remained firm to the
traditional policy of his house, that of dominating the
Republic, while apparently respecting it. He was well
determined to render his power solid and durable; but to that
end he had recourse to a most ingenious reform, by means of
which, without abandoning the old road, he thoroughly
succeeded in his object. In place of the usual five-yearly
Balia, he instituted, in 1480, the Council of Seventy, which
renewed itself and was like a permanent Balia with still wider
power. This, composed of men entirely devoted to his cause,
secured the government to him forever. By this Council, say
the chroniclers of the time, liberty was wholly buried and
undone, but certainly the most important affairs of the State
were carried on in it by intelligent and cultivated men, who
largely promoted its material prosperity. Florence still
called itself a republic, nominally the old institutions were
still in existence, but all this seemed and was nothing but an
empty mockery. Lorenzo, absolute lord of all, might certainly be
called a tyrant, surrounded by lackeys and courtiers. ... Yet
he dazzled all men by the splendour of his rule, so that
[Guicciardini] observes, that though Lorenzo was a tyrant, 'it
would be impossible to imagine a better and more pleasing
tyrant.' Industry, commerce, public works had all received a
mighty impulse. In no city in the world had the civil equality
of modern States reached the degree to which it had attained
not merely in Florence itself, but in its whole territory and
throughout all Tuscany. Administration and secular justice
proceeded regularly enough in ordinary cases, crime was
diminished, and, above all, literary culture had become a
substantial element of the new State. Learned men were
employed in public offices, and from Florence spread a light
that illuminated the world. ... But Lorenzo's policy could
found nothing that was permanent. Unrivalled as a model of
sagacity and prudence, it promoted in Florence the development
of all the new elements of which modern society was to be the
outcome, without succeeding in fusing them together; for his
was a policy of equivocation and deceit, directed by a man of
much genius, who had no higher aim than his own interest and
that of his family, to which he never hesitated to sacrifice
the interests of his people."
_P. Villari,
Machiavelli and his Times,
chapter 2, section 2 (volume 1)._
"The state of Florence at this period was very remarkable. The
most independent and tumultuous of towns was spellbound under
the sway of Lorenzo de' Medici, the grandson of Cosimo who
built San Marco; and scarcely seemed even to recollect its
freedom, so absorbed was it in the present advantages
conferred by 'a strong government,' and solaced by shows,
entertainments, festivals, pomp, and display of all kinds. It
was the very height of that classic revival so famous in the
later history of the world, and the higher classes of society,
having shaken themselves apart with graceful contempt from the
lower, had begun to frame their lives according to a pagan
model, leaving the other and much bigger half of the world to
pursue its superstitions undisturbed. Florence was as near a
pagan city as it was possible for its rulers to make it. Its
intellectual existence was entirely given up to the past; its
days were spent in that worship of antiquity which has no
power of discrimination, and deifies not only the wisdom but
the trivialities of its golden epoch. Lorenzo reigned in the
midst of a lettered crowd of classic parasites and flatterers,
writing poems which his courtiers found better than
Alighieri's, and surrounding himself with those eloquent
slaves who make a prince's name more famous than arms or
victories, and who have still left a prejudice in the minds of
all literature-loving people in favour of their patron. A man
of superb health and physical power, who can give himself up
to debauch all night without interfering with his power of
working all day, and whose mind is so versatile that he can
sack a town one morning and discourse upon the beauties of
Plato the next, and weave joyous ballads through both
occupations--gives his flatterers reason when they applaud
him. The few righteous men in the city, the citizens who still
thought of Florence above all, kept apart, overwhelmed by the
tide which ran in favour of that leading citizen of Florence,
who had gained the control of the once high-spirited and
freedom-loving people. Society had never been more dissolute,
more selfish, or more utterly deprived of any higher aim.
Barren scholarship, busy over grammatical questions, and
elegant philosophy, snipping and piecing its logical systems,
formed the top dressing to that half-brutal,
half-superstitious ignorance which in such communities is the
general portion of the poor. The dilettante world dreamed
hazily of a restoration of the worship of the pagan gods;
Cardinal Bembo bade his friend beware of reading St. Paul's
epistles, lest their barbarous style should corrupt his taste;
and even such a man as Pico della Mirandola declared the
'Divina Commedia' to be inferior to the 'Canti
Carnascialeschi' of Lorenzo de' Medici. ... Thus limited
intellectually, the age of Lorenzo was still more hopeless
morally, full of debauchery, cruelty, and corruption,
violating oaths, betraying trusts, believing in nothing but
Greek manuscripts, coins, and statues, caring for nothing but
pleasure. This was the world in which Savonarola found
himself."
_Mrs. Oliphant,
The Makers of Florence,
chapter 9._