The House Of Medici: Its Rise and Fall
Christopher Hibbert

Cosimo, who had listened to Plethon’s lectures on Plato with the closest attention, was inspired to found in Florence an academy for Platonic studies and to devote much more time to these studies himself. Plethon’s return home and Cosimo’s subsequent preoccupation with other matters had led to his plans being postponed for a time; but, some years later, when Cosimo adopted the son of one of his physicians, a young medical student named Marsilio Ficino, they were revived. Ficino’s enthusiasm for Plato prompted Cosimo to pay for his further education and afterwards to offer to instal him in the villa known as Montevecchio where, in the peace of the country, the young man was to study Greek and to translate all Plato into Latin.
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Bring with you the book of our favourite Plato, which I presume you have now translated into Latin according to your promise; for there is no employment to which I so ardently devote myself as to discover the true road to happiness. Do come then, and do not forget to bring with you the Orphean
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COSIMO’S SUPREME importance as arbiter of Florence’s foreign policy had never been in doubt.
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that they would be far better off with the Milanese as their friends even at the cost of antagonizing their traditional allies, the Venetians.
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Florence had been thankful to have so powerful and rich an ally in her festering quarrel with Milan whose Duke, Filippo Maria Visconti, had been encouraged to make war on Florence by friends of the exiled Albizzi. This Visconti was widely believed to be mad
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In Florence, Cosimo watched the crisis develop with an alert and anxious eye. He had met Francesco Sforza several years before, and had been deeply impressed by his manner and the force of his personality. The friendship then begun
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And it was, in fact, largely through Cosimo’s endeavours that Sforza, after three years of warfare and diplomatic negotiations, triumphantly entered Milan as Duke in March 1450.
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Cosimo argued that Venice could no longer be considered a reliable ally:
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Its repercussions were widespread and immediate: the Venetians urged the German Emperor to break up the new alliance; the Eastern Emperor was induced to withdraw the privileges of all Florentine merchants who were simultaneously expelled from Naples and Venice; Venetian agents were paid to intensify anti-Medicean feeling in Florence. Cosimo countered by closing down the Venetian branch of his firm and opening a new branch in Milan.
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In April 1452, at Montil-les-Tours, a treaty was signed: France undertook to come to the help of Florence and Milan should they be attacked; Sforza was recognized as Duke of Milan; and, in return, Charles VII was assured that there would be no interference from either Florence or Milan if he decided to move against Naples.
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Provoked by this treaty – and anxious to break up the new alliance while France was still preoccupied with England – Venice and Naples both declared war on Florence and Milan;
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Then, to the immense relief of the Medicean party, there came good news from France: Acciaiuoli had succeeded in persuading René of Anjou to come to the help of the alliance in exchange for reciprocal support of driving Alfonso’s Aragonese brood out of Naples. The intervention of a rough, marauding French army, which alarmed its allies even more than its enemies, followed by the Turks’ capture of Constantinople in May 1453,
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Most Holy League formed to guarantee the status quo within Italy and to withstand aggression from without.
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As both the acknowledged arbiter of Italian policy and the papal banker, Cosimo was one of the first recipients of the Pope’s appeal. He was asked to supply two galleys, equipped and manned, which were to be launched against the Turks in return for indulgences for the Florentines’ immortal souls.
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Other Italian states replied to the Pope’s appeal with similar evasions. Only the Venetians, who stood to profit in this life as well as in the next by the successful outcome of a Holy War, were more forthcoming. Undeterred,
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And with their help the business grew more rapidly than ever until the trade mark of the Medici bank the bank’s motto, ‘Col Nome di Dio e di Bona Ventura’, and Medici representatives could be found in almost every important capital and commercial centre in Europe: London, Naples, Cologne, Geneva, Lyons, Bâle, Avignon, Bruges, Antwerp, Lübeck, Ancona, Bologna, Rome, Pisa and Venice.
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As Cosimo’s father had cultivated Baldassare Cossa, the future Pope John XXIII, so Cosimo himself had cultivated Tommaso Parentucelli, the Tuscan doctor’s son who became Bishop of Bologna and finally Pope Nicholas V.
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Nicholas V’s friend Piccolomini, who was elected Pope in 1458 and chose the title Pius II, kept up the papal tradition of friendship with the Medici and continued to entrust them with the Curia’s financial affairs. When he came to Florence in 1469 he stayed as a matter of course at the Palazzo Medici, where he and Cosimo seem to have become quite intimate.
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As well as undertaking all the customary services of a bank, the Medici houses undertook all manner of commissions for their customers, supplying tapestries, sacred relics, horses and slaves, painted panels from the fairs at Antwerp, choir boys from Douai and Cambrai for the choir of St John in Lateran, and even, on one occasion, a giraffe. They were also importers
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Under the arcades were classical busts, statues, columns, inscriptions and Roman sarcophagi including the fourth-century stone coffin used for Cosimo’s great-great-great-great grandfather’s cousin, Guccio de’ Medici, who had been Gonfaloniere in 1299. Perhaps there already, and certainly there later, were Donatello’s bronze statue of David1 and his Judith Slaying Holofernes.
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His other statues, like all statues of his time, had been made to occupy a particular position in a building as an architectural motif or ornamentation, whereas the David was not only an astonishingly beautiful and emotive work of art, it was also a remarkable innovation, the first free-standing figure cast in bronze since classical times.
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To Cosimo such objections seemed wholly unreasonable, obtusely at variance with those classical Greek ideals which were Donatello’s inspiration. In his own devotion to the humanist spirit, Cosimo had accepted the dedication of Antonio Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus which, in the manner of Catullus, celebrates the pleasures of homosexual love. In the same spirit he honoured the genius of Donatello and the ancient art that had inspired
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Cosimo grew deeply attached to Donatello, for whom he assumed a kind of paternal responsibility. He saw to it that he was never short of work,
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Donatello knocked it off the parapet into the street where it was ‘shattered into a thousand pieces’.
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Donatello was not really interested in money. In his studio he put what he earned into a wicker basket which hung by a cord from the ceiling; and all his workmen and apprentices and even his friends were allowed to help themselves to what they needed without asking him. Nor was he interested in clothes.
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Fra Filippo’s one virtue. He was a liar, a drunkard, a lecher and a fraud; and his superiors were profoundly relieved when he left the convent, abandoned his vows and was seized by Barbary pirates off the coast of Ancona while out sailing with some friends. On escaping from his chains he made for Naples, then returned to Florence where his lovely altarpiece for the nuns of Sant’ Ambrogio brought his remarkable gifts to the attention of Cosimo de’ Medici. Disregarding his reputation both as whoremonger and scrounger, Cosimo asked him to work for him and it was at the Medici Palace that
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Cosimo was often heard to say thereafter that artists must always be treated with respect, that they should never be considered mere journeymen as they were by most other patrons of his time.
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Every morning before he began work on The Crucifixion, as on every other morning before starting to paint one of those religious subjects to which he devoted the rest of his life, Fra Angelico would kneel in prayer. And each day, as on every other day when painting a picture of Christ suffering on the Cross, he would be so overcome by emotion that the tears would pour down his cheeks.
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A visitor to Florence at this time noticed how drawn and ill and unhappy he looked; and his declining years were, indeed, clouded by sadness. His eldest son, Piero, now forty years old, had never been strong and was not expected to survive him long, if at all. Cosimo’s hopes were centred in his second, his favourite son, Giovanni, for whom Michelozzo had been asked to build the Villa Medici on the slopes of Fiesole.
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conscientious citizen and a capable businessman, carefully trained by his father who relied on him more and more after the death of the bank’s general manager, Giovanni d’Amerigo
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‘Oh, my lords,’ Cosimo replied, not in the least abashed, throwing his arms round the ambassadors’ shoulders. ‘Are you not also fathers and grandfathers? You must not be surprised that I should have made a whistle. It’s a good thing that the boy didn’t ask me to play it for him; because I would have done that too.’
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To his grandfather’s infinite sorrow, this beloved boy died in 1461 shortly before his sixth birthday. And two years later Giovanni himself, having steadfastly refused to diet to lessen his great weight, died of a heart attack. Cosimo never recovered from the shock.
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PIERO WAS forty-eight years old when he became head of the family. The perpetual ill health which had afflicted him since early manhood, and which had been responsible for his nickname, ‘il Gottoso’ (‘the Gouty’), had prevented him from taking as active a part in either the business of the bank or the affairs of Florence as would otherwise have been expected of the heir to the Medici fortune.
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Indeed, his nature displayed little of the edgy irritability so often associated with prolonged illness. He was considerate, patient and courteous.
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In France, in fact, King Louis XI had been so taken with him that, soon after he became head of the family, he was granted permission to decorate one of the balls of the Medici arms with three of the lilies of the House of Valois.
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That most Florentines were prepared for the moment to accord to Piero the privileges and respect enjoyed by his father was due partly at least to the wife he had married and the five attractive, healthy children she had borne him. For Lucrezia Tornabuoni was a remarkable woman,
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Lorenzo, in particular, was precociously gifted. He did not share the good looks which – rare in the Medici – his father and younger brother both enjoyed. But his sallow, irregular features were powerful and arresting; and though his movements were jerky and ungainly, he was tall, strong and athletic. His education, thorough and wide-ranging, had been supervised at first by Gentile Becchi, the Latinist and diplomat, and later by Cristoforo Landino, translator of Aristotle and commentator on Dante, and Marsilio Ficino, his grandfather’s protégé and friend, whose allowance his father continued to pay.
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Luca Pitti and Agnolo Acciaiuoli had recently been joined by the Archbishop of Florence’s brother Dietisalvi Neroni, Florence’s first resident ambassador in Venice and later ambassador in Milan. Between them these three men constituted a formidable opposition to the Medici;
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Soderini returned to his own palazzo convinced – as Pitti, Acciaiuoli and Neroni were all now convinced – that the only chance of success against the Medici lay in armed rebellion.
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the same time he added numerous ancient coins to the collection assembled by his father, bought great numbers of rare manuscript books for the Medici Library, and had many volumes copied out for him and brilliantly illuminated. Antonio Averlino Filarete was told that Piero spent hours looking at these books, turning over the pages ‘as if they were a pile of gold’:
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It had been one of Donatello’s last requests that he should be buried near Cosimo in the church of San Lorenzo. Piero ensured that this request was fulfilled and undertook to bear the cost of his interment in the crypt next to Cosimo’s tomb. When the coffin was carried there, it was followed by the Medici and
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In adapting classical mythology to celebrate the virtues and triumphs of Florence and of her rulers, no artist was more in sympathy with Piero’s ideas than Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, known as Botticelli. At the time of Donatello’s death, he was twenty-two years old.
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Gozzoli painted a memorial to the history of the Medici family
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As in the case of other pictures which he commissioned, Piero took great interest in the painting of this picture, instructing Gozzoli to use the brightest colours and to make the clothes as rich and brilliant as possible.
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there were good reasons for breaking the traditional rule and marrying an Orsini. Not only would he thus avoid arousing any jealousy in Florentine houses where there were marriageable daughters whom he had rejected, but he would be contriving an alliance with a family of far-ranging influence. The Orsini, soldiers and ecclesiastics by profession for countless generations, had huge estates within the Kingdom of Naples as well as north of Rome; they could raise soldiers as well as money; and in Clarice’s maternal uncle, Cardinal Latino, they had a firm foothold in the Curia.
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he married her by proxy in Rome,
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Florence and the Papacy came close to war. Lorenzo raised 6,000 men to help defend Vitelli, which the Pope considered the grossest effrontery; and after Vitelli, despite this assistance, had been forced to surrender, he was given an honourable welcome in Florence, which antagonized Sixtus even more.
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Lorenzo succeeded in having his brother-in-law, Rinaldo Orsini, appointed Riario’s successor; but he could not prevent the Pope nominating Francesco Salviati as Archbishop of Pisa, even though an undertaking had been given that no appointments to ecclesiastical benefices within the Republic should be made without the agreement of the Signoria.
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In order to maintain the uncertain peace in north Italy, he had proposed a mutual alliance between Florence, Milan and Venice. But, far from achieving peace, the proposal almost provoked another war, for the Pope angrily condemned the new league as aimed at himself, while King Ferrante of Naples was deeply suspicious of an alliance which had been formed
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Twenty-five at the time of his murder, he had never been married; but earlier that year his young mistress, Fioretta Gorini, had borne him a son who was christened Giulio.1 This boy, whose mother soon afterwards died, was adopted by Lorenzo who treated him as though he were his own child.
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The Tuscan bishops, reacting defiantly to the Bull of Excommunication, had unanimously decided at a meeting in the Cathedral in Florence that the actions which the Signoria had so far taken were completely justified. And, in accordance with this decision, they issued their own decree excommunicating the Pope.
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Mismanagement and excessive loans to King Edward IV during the Wars of the Roses put an end to the
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London branch; the Bruges branch also collapsed; so did the branch in Milan, where the premises which Francesco Sforza had given to Cosimo were sold to Lodovico il Moro. The branches in Lyons, Rome and Naples were all in difficulties, the result partly of managerial incompetence, partly of that general collapse in Florentine banking which
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So it was agreed that a deputation comprising members of leading Florentine families would go to Rome, make vague apologies for the city’s misbehaviour and, in return, receive His Holiness’s forgiveness.
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Twice war broke out; and twice Lorenzo’s personal intervention brought peace. On the second occasion, in August 1484, when the Pope’s representative returned to Rome to report that the terms of the peace treaty denied his nephew the towns of Cervia and Ravenna for which the war had been fought, Sixtus, already excessively ill-tempered because of his gout, was at first so angry that he could not speak. Then he burst out furiously that he would never countenance such humiliating terms. The next day he collapsed, and within a few hours was dead.
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Innocent was gratified by Lorenzo’s attentions and convinced by his arguments; he recognized in Lorenzo a man whom he could trust. So completely, indeed, did he come to share his opinions that, as the disgruntled Ferrarese ambassador put it, ‘the Pope sleeps with the eyes of the Magnificent Lorenzo’.
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The Pope was delighted. Lorenzo’s hold on him was confirmed and tightened, and it was now accepted throughout Europe that the policies of the Curia were in future to be directed by Florence, that, as in the time of Cosimo, a Medici was once again to be the virtual arbiter of Italian policy.
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Yet in his own lifetime Lorenzo’s high standing as a statesman was rarely questioned: he was ‘the needle of the Italian compass’. In Florence he won immensely enhanced credit by finding plausible excuses to relieve the Genoese of the city of Pietrasanta and to retake from them the fortress of Sarzana, thus finally atoning for the humiliations suffered during the course of the War of the Pazzi Conspiracy.
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He longed to be able to spend more time with his friends, with that brilliant circle of scholars, writers and artists who gathered when they could at one or other of his country villas – at Fiesole, or at Careggi where every year on 7 November a banquet was given in honour of Plato’s birth; at Poggio a Caiano, twelve miles north-west of Florence where an old villa was transformed by Giuliano da Sangallo;1 or at the remote, fortress-like villa of Cafaggiolo in the valley of the Mugello on the road to Pistoia.
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When Lorenzo asked Ghirlandaio to recommend some promising pupils for a new school that he had founded, Ghirlandaio had no hesitation in including Michelangelo among the list of names.
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He resolved that he would help and favour the young Michelangelo; and first he sent for his father, Lodovico, and asked whether he could have the boy, adding that he wanted to keep him as one of his own sons. Lodovico willingly agreed, and then Lorenzo arranged to have Michelangelo given a room of his own at the Palazzo Medici and looked after him as one of the Medici household. Michelangelo always ate at Lorenzo’s table with
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Well aware that Pisa resented her subjection to Florence almost as much as Volterra, Lorenzo had taken great pains to improve relations between the two cities and to gain credit for the Medici as benefactors of them both. He had developed the port of Pisa, bought land outside the city and a riverside house within the walls where he often took his family to stay,
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Above all, Lorenzo had sought to reconcile the Pisans to Florence and the Medici by reviving Pisa’s once renowned but now decayed university. In 1472 he had established it as the principal university in Tuscany, and he personally contributed more than twice the amount of the grant of six thousand florins a year that the foundation received from the State.
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He also contributed handsomely to the funds of the University of Florence, which now had the reputation of being the only one in Europe where the Greek language
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Lorenzo shared these scholars’ enthusiasm for Greek philosophers and Latin poets, but he had no patience with those humanists who regarded the Italian language with disdain and caustically belittled the achievements of the Tuscan poets of the immediate past.
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By the beginning of 1492 it was clear that Lorenzo, although only forty-three, was already a dying man. For years his intermittent attacks of gout had been increasingly painful and incapacitating; and now his general health was failing
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AT TWENTY-TWO Piero had little of his father’s charm. Strong, healthy and athletic, with a mass of light brown hair which lay in a fringe on his forehead and fell to his shoulders, he was not unattractive; but his personality and manner were far from endearing. He had Lorenzo’s ruthlessness without his tact; he was equally unforgiving towards his enemies but did not remain loyal to his friends. His early letters give the impression of an indulged and rather
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Piero’s reputation in Florence was also much damaged by his continual quarrels with his cousins, Lorenzo and Giovanni, the two sons of Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, both of whom were older, and – despite their guardian’s misappropriation of part of their inheritance – richer than Piero, and neither of whom took any trouble to hide either their animosity towards the senior branch of the family or their intention to abandon it to its enemies in any future struggle for power that might arise. This struggle was not long to be delayed.
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Ferrara, to Brescia, to Genoa, and many other towns in Tuscany and Lombardy. In 1481 he came to Florence where he was appointed lector at San Marco and asked to give the Lent sermons at San Lorenzo. In 1489 he settled permanently in Florence at the Monastery of San Marco.
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the awkward Dominican gradually acquired a following of devoted supporters prepared to overlook all the faults of his delivery for the extraordinary content of his sermons and his passionate, urgent sincerity. By 1491 his congregations had increased so much that San Marco could no longer contain them; and his Lent sermons that year were delivered in the Cathedral.
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He knew, too, that unless the people of Italy and, in particular, the people of Florence mended their ways they would be dreadfully punished. Only a return to the simplicity of the early Christian Church could save them. They must turn their back on Aristotle and Plato, who were now rotting in hell; they must abandon the luxuries and sensual pleasures that were destroying their souls, abolish gambling and card games, dissolute carnivals and palio races, fine clothes and scent, powder and paint; and they must give the money they saved to the poor. They must blot out all those pictures so wantonly painted that they made ‘the Virgin Mary look like a harlot’. They
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Yet Lorenzo on his deathbed had sent for Savonarola, as well as Fra Mariano, and, according to Poliziano, had been blessed by them both.
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On hearing of Lorenzo’s death, Pope Innocent was said to have exclaimed, ‘The peace of Italy is at an end!’ The King of France, Louis XI, was also dead; and his death, too, caused men to think of war. For his successor, Charles VIII, was a young man of energy and ambition, who dreamed romantic dreams of rivalling the exploits of Roland and of gaining glory by brilliant use of that well-organized standing army which his father
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His father, though he had enormously increased the area of France, had never been drawn into Italy to claim the Kingdom of Naples as inheritor by force of the rights of the House of Anjou; but it seemed more than probable that Charles would march across the Alps as soon as the opportunity was offered him.
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Charles’s opportunity to go to war was presented to him by Lodovico Sforza, il Moro, uncle of the Duke of Milan. The Duke, Gian Galeazzo, had come of age in 1490, but il Moro had subsequently shown no inclination to give up the powers of Regent which he had assumed.
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To forestall any trouble he might have with Naples and any move that might be made against him from elsewhere in Italy, il Moro decided to suggest to Charles VIII that he should reassert the Angevin claim to Naples and, when the claim was denied, lead an expeditionary force into Italy. The Duchy of Milan would lend him its support.
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King Charles then moved on to Pavia to pay his respects to his cousin, the ineffectual Duke Gian Galeazzo, whom he found ill in bed suffering from some mysterious disease which his doctors could not diagnose.
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a relapse which was naturally attributed to poison. A few days later, he was dead. Immediately his widow and their four children were arrested and imprisoned, and il Moro proclaimed himself Duke of
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The French, however, would not allow Florence to remain neutral. They needed fortresses in Tuscany to give security to their rear while advancing further south. So, protesting grave displeasure at the discourteous way in which his envoys had been treated, Charles advanced on the Tuscan fortress of Fivizzano, sacked it and massacred the entire garrison with alarming brutality.
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While Savonarola gave vent to further prophecies, seeming to take a gloomy satisfaction in the verification of his predictions, a sense of fatality descended upon the city. ‘A Dominican Friar has so terrified all the Florentines that they are wholly given up to piety,’ the Mantuan
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how absurdly anxious he was to give way on every point, Piero immediately acceded to Charles’s terms and, on 8 November, returned to Florence to tell the Signoria what he had done.
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At nightfall Piero, with his wife, their two young children and his cousin Giulio fled the city by the Porta San Gallo and made for Venice by way of Bologna, taking with them as many of the most valuable small items from the family collections as they could carry. Giovanni disguised himself as a Dominican monk in order to convey some of the treasures of the Medici library from the palace to San Marco; then he, too, fled from Florence.
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KING CHARLES VIII entered Florence through the Porta San Freliano, on 17 November 1494, as though he were a conquering hero.
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With crucifix in hand he urged the people to put to death all those who advocated the restoration of the Medici.
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fell without a struggle; and Ferrante’s son, King Alfonso II, terrified by weird dreams and portents, haunted by the ghostly victims of his brutality, and hearing the stones beneath his feet cry out ‘Francia! Francia!’, abdicated and fled to a Sicilian monastery. The French army crossed the Neapolitan frontier, massacring the people of Monte di San Giovanni
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The King settled down to enjoy the pleasures of his new domain and a succession of pretty mistresses, whose portraits he had bound together in a big book. But, as he languished beneath the Neapolitan sun, his rivals to the north were busily plotting his downfall. None of these rivals was more active than the new Pope, Roderigo Borgia, Alexander VI. He was fat and bald, plain and flamboyant, yet it was not only his riches and his influence that made him attractive to women.
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For II Moro was now deeply regretting the consequences of having enticed the French into Italy where the Duke of Orleans, jealous of Charles VIII’s success in Naples, was making claims upon the Duchy of Milan.
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When the French and Italian armies finally clashed by the banks of the river Taro in July 1495, the mercenary troops of the Holy League were no match for King Charles’s artillerymen and cavalry. The battle was short and ferocious,
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victory. But by the end of August Charles and his army, still a powerful force, though mauled and weary, were across the Alps and safely home in France, leaving the Italians shocked by the realization that for all their virtues, talents, wealth, past glory and experience, for all their skill as military engineers, they had been utterly unable to withstand the advance of the ruthless men from the north. In this traumatic campaign Florence had played no part. Firm in his allegiance to ‘God’s instrument’, Savonarola had declined to have anything to do with the Holy League.
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At length, in June 1497, the Pope took the final step and excommunicated him. For six months Savonarola pondered his dilemma, fasting and praying, until God guided him to the decision that it was his duty to defy the Pope.
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Savonarola’s supporters were losing ground in Florence where, indeed, they had been only partly responsible for the impermanent changes which had taken place in the government of the city. There had been poor harvests that year in Tuscany; starving people had fallen down and died in the streets; there had also been an outbreak of plague.
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Most members of the Signoria were horrified by this suggested reversion to the barbarism of past ages. One suggested that their ancestors would be ashamed of them if they could hear them even so much as discussing the propriety of the proposed ordeal.
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Savonarola took refuge in the library where, soon afterwards, a guard arrived from the Signoria with orders for his arrest. He was escorted through the streets, hooted and jeered at by the mob, and cast into the Alberghettino in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria where Cosimo de’ Medici had been imprisoned sixty-five years before.
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Together with Fra Domenico and another of his most faithful disciples Fra Silvestro, he was found guilty of heresy and schism and condemned to death. A scaffold, surrounded by tinder, was erected in the Piazza della Signoria and on this Savonarola and his two companions were hanged in chains and burned.
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‘In a few hours the victims were burned, their legs and arms gradually dropping off,’ Landucci recorded in his diary.
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Attempting to escape across the Garigliano to Gaeta, Piero de’ Medici, who had been serving in the French army, was drowned in the swollen waters of the river when his boat capsized. His body was later recovered and buried in the abbey of Monte Cassino.1 He left two children, a daughter, Clarice, and a son, Lorenzo,
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As though encouraged by this vision to believe that the House of Medici would derive great profit from a son being made a prince of the Church, Lorenzo determined to launch Giovanni on an ecclesiastical career. As soon as the boy displayed sufficient promise to merit
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After the death of Sixtus IV and the election of Giovanni Battista Cibò as Innocent VIII, the way lay open to even higher preferment. Fearing that the new Pope might die before his hopes were fully realized, Lorenzo did all he could to persuade him to create Giovanni a cardinal at the earliest possible date.
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Three months before the Pope’s death and three weeks before his father’s in March 1492, Giovanni had entered the ancient Badia at Fiesole and there the insignia of his rank had been blessed before the High Altar and the papal brief had been read
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Lorenzo’s reference to Rome as a sink of iniquity was not unjust. There were reckoned to be almost seven thousand prostitutes in a population of less than 50,000, most of them working in brothels licensed by the papal authorities and many of them suffering from syphilis, ‘a kind of illness very common among priests’, according to Benvenuto Cellini, who caught the disease himself. There were almost as many professional criminals as prostitutes, many if not most of whom avoided punishment by paying bribes. There were alleged to be an average of fourteen murders a day; and although the stench from the rows of rotting corpses of executed men hanging from the battlements of the Castel Sant’ Angelo made it an ordeal to cross the bridge beneath, most murderers, if caught, were soon released.
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Julius II, who after the twenty-six-day Papacy of Alexander VI’s successor, the decrepit Pius III, had been elected Pope in November 1503, was the grandson of a fisherman, a tall, handsome, rough, talkative, syphilitic, irascible man. He was much given to boasting of his poor childhood – when
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follow. So Julius, unable to rouse Italians by his call for a crusade against the French, turned to the Spaniards, now in firm possession of Naples. With them he formed a new Holy League whose forces marched north to Bologna which, having been retaken with French help by Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, had been returned to Bentivoglio. At the same time, Julius announced that once Bologna had been recaptured his Legate there would be Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici. Julius had been much impressed by Giovanni’s good-natured
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Since the execution of Savonarola, Florence, no longer an important power, had failed to regain the vitality and gaiety of the golden age it had enjoyed during the last years of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
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appointing a Gonfaloniere for life. The man chosen for this appointment was Piero Soderini, an honest, hard-working but unremarkable administrator whose fame has been eclipsed by that of the relatively minor official in the government whom he came to consult on all matters of importance, Niccolò Machiavelli.
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and it was his strongly held view, as it had been of other Florentines before him, including Leonardo Bruni, that the Republic’s traditional system of hiring troops to fight its battles would have to be abandoned in favour of a national militia.
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Soderini agreed to have the formation of a national militia approved by the Signoria and he entrusted Machiavelli with the task of organizing it. Machiavelli began to do so with energy and enthusiasm, and by February 1506 he was able to hold a parade
LOCATION: 3210

Cadorna himself was not at all sure that his army was large enough to reduce Florence if threats proved not enough to gain the ends of the League. He had been reluctant to advance into Tuscany at all. The Pope’s nephew, the hot-tempered Duke of Urbino, had also disapproved of the expedition. But Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici was insistent.
LOCATION: 3226

For two days the Spaniards raged through the city, raping, killing priests at their altars, ransacking churches, burning monasteries, breaking into convents.
LOCATION: 3254

Later the Florentines were required to agree to the return of the Medici, to join the Holy League and to elect a new Gonfaloniere. The militia was abolished; and in the purge of Soderini’s officials, Machiavelli was replaced by a Medicean.
LOCATION: 3267

ON THE day that Soderini left Florence – 1 September 1512 – Cardinal Giovanni’s younger brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, entered it.
LOCATION: 3276

This was an attitude quite contrary to his elder brother’s plans. The Cardinal had not gone to all this trouble just to find the Medici a home. He himself returned to Florence with 1,500 troops, and entered his former palace in the full panoply of his rank with the air of a man who had returned to his native city in order to rule it.
LOCATION: 3283

power in Florence, the Cardinal was informed that his benefactor, Pope Julius II, was dying. Giovanni, now aged thirty-seven, was himself ill; but in order to attend the enclave he gave orders that he should be carried south to Rome in a litter.
LOCATION: 3297

So, on 11 March, when the votes were taken out of the urn and counted by Cardinal Giovanni de’Medici himself as Senior Deacon, he was able to announce his own nomination. He did so with becoming modesty, announcing that he would, if the Sacred College approved the choice, be known as Leo X.
LOCATION: 3314

‘God has given us the Papacy,’ he is reported to have said to his brother, Giuliano. ‘Let us enjoy it.’
LOCATION: 3335

Spaniards, who had helped the family to regain power in Florence, were to be driven out of Milan and the Kingdom of Naples. It might even be that the Kingdom of Naples would subsequently be given to Giuliano de’ Medici who, after his brother’s election as Pope,
LOCATION: 3343

The new French King, however, proved to be a far less pliable young man than the Pope had hoped. Tall, handsome and restless, Francis I was both intelligent and attractive, with a fixed determination to regain for France that influence in Italy which she had held for so short a time in the days of Charles VIII. Deeply
LOCATION: 3350

Undeterred by this alliance, of which he professed himself contemptuous, King Francis crossed the Alps and marched down into Piedmont with an army of nearly 100,000
LOCATION: 3355

The Pope left for Bologna by way of Florence. Here his nephew, Lorenzo, had now consolidated the Medici power.
LOCATION: 3361

title of Captain General of the Florentine Republic which the Signoria had obediently bestowed upon him on his return. Thereafter he had become increasingly authoritarian, requiring councils to meet in the Medici Palace rather than in the public places of government, rejecting
LOCATION: 3363

He graciously created the King’s tutor a cardinal, and expressed profound satisfaction when, in return, Francis created Giuliano de’ Medici Duke of Nemours.
LOCATION: 3400

resulted in Lorenzo’s being so badly wounded by an arquebus that he was gradually to waste away both in body and in will. The Pope, however, was for the moment well satisfied. Lorenzo was proclaimed Duke of Urbino and Lord of Pesaro, and seemed well on the way to becoming master of that large, unified, Medici-dominated state in central Italy which Leo dreamed of creating.
LOCATION: 3425

The Pope’s own dinners were noted for their rare delicacies, such as peacocks’ tongues, of which he himself, however, ate but sparingly. They were also noted for their jocularity, for such surprises as nightingales flying out of pies or little, naked children emerging from puddings. Dwarfs, buffoons and jesters were nearly always to be found at his table where the guests were encouraged to laugh at their antics and at the cruel jokes which were played upon them – as when, for instance, some half-witted, hungry dwarf was seen guzzling a plate of carrion covered in a strong sauce under the impression that he was being privileged to consume the finest fare.
LOCATION: 3451

Yet Leo’s life was not entirely given over to frivolity. If he spent vast sums on entertainments, on French hounds and Cretan falcons, on furs and gold chains, and on his ever growing household, he lavished money, too, on the improvement and development of Rome. He built the Via Ripetta so as to provide a new outlet from the congested old town up towards the Piazza del Popolo; he restored the church of Santa Maria in Domnica and provided it with its splendid porticoed façade; above all, he enthusiastically continued the reconstruction of the Vatican Palace and the rebuilding of St Peter’s, retaining Julius II’s architect, Donato d’Angelo Lazzari, known as Bramante, who had begun work on the new church in 1505.
LOCATION: 3486

Determined to make Rome the most cultured city in Europe, he offered numerous inducements to attract the most accomplished artists, writers and scholars to live there, making freely available to them his extensive library
LOCATION: 3492

Michelangelo, who had been encouraged to come to Rome by Julius II, was gloomy, touchy, independent and self-absorbed, choosing to work in a locked room, quite unwilling to follow unquestioningly any patron’s brief or to undertake to finish a work in any given period. The Pope professed to feel a deep affection for him and would relate ‘almost with tears in his eyes’ how they had been brought up together as boys; but they never really got on well together.
LOCATION: 3506

Leo far preferred to deal with the younger, more complaisant, unobtrusive and polite Raffaello Sanzio. Raphael, a native of Urbino, had already been set to work on the decoration of the official apartments of the apostolic palace by Julius II
LOCATION: 3510

With the Sacred College thus conveniently packed with Medici friends and relations and those who had cause to be grateful to the Medici, the Pope felt that the time was now propitious for the marriage of his nephew Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, to Madeleine de la Tour Auvergne, cousin of Francis I, King of France.
LOCATION: 3604

It was fortunate for the Medici party in Florence that Giulio’s conduct of affairs was so conciliatory and astute, and that under his conscientious administration of its financial affairs the city enjoyed a period of prosperity.
LOCATION: 3622

The Pope eventually decided to create Caterina de’ Medici Duchess of Urbino and to annexe her Duchy to the states of the Church, calling upon the Florentines to contribute a large part of the money which
LOCATION: 3626

what to do about the government of Florence, a problem which was complicated at the beginning of 1519 by the long-awaited death of the Emperor Maximilian and by the subsequent election as his successor of Charles
LOCATION: 3629

Both the King of France and the Pope did their utmost to prevent this election of a young ambitious man who was not only the King of Spain and Naples, but master of the Netherlands and an Austrian Grand Duke. But having failed to prevent the election, Leo decided, after many tergiversations and vacillations, to abandon the French and to enter into secret negotiations with Charles V
LOCATION: 3631

There was, however, to be a quid pro quo: in exchange for the condemnation of Luther, the Emperor would require the Pope’s support in his intended attack upon France’s remaining possessions in Italy, including Milan. Leo agreed to this on condition that once the French had been divested of the occupied territories, the Papacy could not only take back from them the towns of Parma and Piacenza, which Francis I had declined to return at the conference at Bologna in 1515, but also receive Charles’s help in taking Ferrara.
LOCATION: 3640

The subsequent election of this modest scholar, which had been engineered to thwart the ambitions of more powerful candidates such as Alessandro Farnese and Thomas Wolsey, caused no one more surprise and consternation than the new Pope himself, who received the news with horror. Choosing the title of Adrian
LOCATION: 3656

He contracted a kidney disease, and this, combined, so it was inevitably said, with poison, resulted in his death in just over a year. The thankful citizens of Rome, who never since have been required to put up with a Pope who was not Italian, laid festive garlands at the door of his doctor,
LOCATION: 3662

when many secret promises had been made, when Cardinal Colonna removed his objections for fear that in the impasse his rival, Cardinal Orsini, might be chosen, and when it was known that a Medici election was acceptable to both Charles V and to Henry VIII as well as to Francis I – who thought it unlikely that the Medici would remain loyal to the Emperor – Cardinal Giulio emerged from the conclave, after sixty days’ incarceration as Pope Clement VII. He was twenty-five years
LOCATION: 3673

He continued his family’s patronage of Raphael, asking him to submit designs for a villa to be built on the cypress-covered slopes of Monte Mario.1 He gave several commissions to that most versatile, most quarrelsome and most boastful of Florentines, Benvenuto Cellini. He gave his encouragement to the Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Koppernigk, known as Copernicus.
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Pope Clement soon proved himself a far from faithful ally of the Emperor; and towards the end of 1524, after many tortuous turns of policy, he had allied the Papacy once more with France, whose army was again on the march.
LOCATION: 3690

In September 1526, abetted by Don Ugodi Moncada, the Emperor’s envoy, Cardinal Pompeio Colonna with a strong force of retainers and hired men-at-arms fell upon Rome, occupied the suburbs around St Peter’s, and pillaged the apostolic palace from which the Pope was forced to flee to the greater safety of Castel Sant’ Angelo. There he was constrained to sign a treaty by
LOCATION: 3698

THE FIRST attack, launched at dawn on 6 May 1527, was repulsed by the papal gunners; but soon afterwards a thick mist rose from the Tiber and, unobserved beneath its cover, the Duke of Bourbon’s men were able to mount scaling ladders made from vine-poles against the city walls.
LOCATION: 3746

It has been estimated that on the first day alone 8,000 people were killed.
LOCATION: 3770

At the beginning of June, after more than a month’s incarceration in the Castle, he was forced to surrender to the Emperor’s envoy. His fellow refugees were dying of hunger and disease around him; and the army, which he had hoped would come to rescue him, was retreating towards Viterbo. He was obliged to deliver up Civitavecchia, Ostia and Modena as well as Parma and Piacenza to the imperial forces. He was also required to find a huge ransom, to restore the Colonna to their possessions and to hand over seven
LOCATION: 3796

Early on the morning of 7 December he did so, wearing the clothes of his major-domo. With a few companions, he got away to Orvieto where, in the remote fastness of the episcopal palace which could be reached only by a mule track from the valley of the Paglia, he endeavoured to rebuild his shattered power and reputation. It was at Orvieto, in this ‘ruinous and decayed old palace’ with the ‘roofs fallen down and thirty persons, riff-raff and others, standing in the chambers for a garnishment’, that an embassy from England sought him out in order to obtain his authority for Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
LOCATION: 3805

Catherine was Charles V’s aunt and the now penniless Pope could do no more than make vague promises that he would grant the King’s request once he was free to move back to Rome again. In fact, the Pope’s mind was occupied by other matters that seemed to him more important. None of these appears to have concerned him more than the problem of Florence, where the sack of Rome and his own subsequent imprisonment had had the most unfortunate repercussions.
LOCATION: 3811

To replace them in the government of the city, the Pope dispatched the dark, frizzy-haired, now nineteen-year-old youth, Alessandro de’ Medici, for whom he had bought the Dukedom of Penne from Charles V and to whom he hoped to marry the Emperor’s natural daughter, Margaret.
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Having thus roughly and decisively settled the future of Florence, to which he himself never again returned – and having created Ippolito a cardinal, an honour to which that cheerful, gregarious, extravagant and sensual young man in no way aspired – the Pope now concentrated his attentions upon the family’s one remaining asset, the little Caterina de’ Medici,
LOCATION: 3879

And so it was that on 28 October 1533, the Pope himself conducting the ceremony in Marseilles, the fourteen-year-old Caterina de’ Medici, Duchess of Urbino, was married to Henri de Valois, Duke of Orleans, second son of Francis
LOCATION: 3889

Cellini confessed that the tears filled his eyes as he kissed the dead Pope’s feet; but there was no one else to mourn for him. On the contrary, Rome rejoiced.
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