Magnifico (77 page)

* Antonio Beccadelli’s
The Hermaphrodite
is filled with references to well-known scholars who seduced and even raped their students. See especially his screeds against “the pederast Mattia Lupi.”

* This is the contention of Hugh Ross Williamson in
Lorenzo the Magnificent.
For an illuminating discussion of the larger topic see Rocke,
Forbidden Friendships.

* Lorenzo once wrote, “The defect which is so common among women and which makes them insupportable is their affectation of understanding everything”(see Williamson, 92).

† Though Florentine democracy was more restrictive than ours in the sense that it denied the franchise to many of its inhabitants—including the unskilled laborers who made up a majority of the population—in some ways it was more inclusive. Those with full citizenship, including many artisans and shopkeepers, were actually expected to participate in their own government, sitting on some of the many committees and assemblies that met in the Palace of the Priors. Florentines were not content to vote once every two years and allow their elected representatives to make decisions for them. Even when a citizen was not serving in elected office, he could be certain that among his friends and neighbors were many in a position to affect his life for good or ill. One peculiarity of the political system that had evolved in the Middle Ages was its reliance on election to office by lot. Periodic “scrutinies” were used to determine all those citizens eligible for office. These names were then placed in purses and drawn at random when an office needed to be filled. Terms for the most important offices were made deliberately brief so that no one could accumulate too much power—for the
Signoria
, the chief executive, only two months. It was a system that guaranteed that each citizen would hold many offices during his lifetime. The Medici controlled the system largely by screening the names of those entered into the electoral purses and removing those they deemed untrustworthy. (See Note on the Government of Florence for further discussion, also Chapters V and IX.)

* Ficino’s natural kindness made him a less than astute judge of character. Two of his regular correspondents, Francesco Salviati and Jacopo Bracciolini, later became involved in a plot to murder Lorenzo. This lapse seems to have led to a temporary chill in their relationship (see later).

* This was particularly true after 1454 when Cosimo engineered the Peace of Lodi, which turned Milan from a perennial threat into Florence’s most stalwart ally.

* The crisis of 1458 never seriously threatened Cosimo’s regime but he used the fear of instability to reform the electoral system.

* Of the republican communes that had arisen in northern and central Italy during the Middle Ages, few now remained. Milan had succumbed first to the Visconti and now to the Sforza; Ferrara and Modena to the Este; Mantua to the Gonzaga; Urbino to the Montefeltro. Only Venice and Florence retained the republican forms of government they had inherited from a more democratic age.

† Palla Strozzi had been a stalwart of the Albizzi regime and was exiled by Cosimo in 1434. He was also a patron of the arts to rival Cosimo himself, commissioning, among other works, the famous Strozzi altarpiece by Gentile da Fabbriano. Interestingly, the subject of the painting (completed in 1423) is the Adoration of the Magi, the same story favored by the Medici themselves. The pageantry of Gentile’s work, which now hangs in the Uffizi, served as a model for subsequent versions, including Gozzoli’s fresco in the Medici palace.

* A
braccia
was a Florentine unit of measure. Literally meaning “arm,” it measured something under a yard.

* Alessandra Strozzi was the wife of Matteo Strozzi, who was exiled by Cosimo after his defeat of the Albizzi faction in 1434. Her letters provide a portrait of Florence under Medici rule.

* Rinuccini’s distrust of the Medici seems never to have led him into active resistance against the regime. He always kept his criticisms private while seeking advancement in Medicean Florence (see Chapter XIX). It is difficult to know if his views represent those of a “silent majority” or merely a small, if articulate, group of malcontents.

* Florentines divided young men into different categories;
fanciulli
(boys) and
giovanni
(young men), usually defined as those who had yet to marry. The average age of marriage for men in Florence was about thirty-four (contrast this with girls, who usually married in their mid-to late teens). Young men were not considered fit for responsible life until they had reached their thirties; before then, these shiftless youths were a constant source of tension and potential dissension in Florence.

* Some of the opposition came from those old enough to remember the bitter wars with the northern giant that time and again had brought the republic to the brink of disaster; they could not forget, nor forgive, the dark days of 1402 when Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti sat with his vast army on the hills overlooking Florence, ready to starve the city into submission and unite the entire peninsula in his iron grasp. That Florence was miraculously delivered by Visconti’s sudden death of the plague—an apparent instance of divine intervention on behalf of the City of the Baptist—did little to soften Florentine hearts toward this bully to the north. Many Florentines preferred an alliance with their sister republic of Venice, whose oligarchic form of government was widely admired as preferable to the more democratic, but more chaotic, Florentine system. (See Felix Gilbert, “The Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought,” in Rubinstein,
Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence,
463–500). Many, however, opposed the Milan alliance simply to undermine the Medici position.

* Now in the Bargello Museum in Florence.

* See, for example, Agnolo Acciaiuoli’s letter to Francesco Sforza, April 23, 1465, in which he declares that while “Piero is as honored in this city as he was before,” nonetheless “because of his illness he cannot handle such burdens and cares” (Rubinstein,
The Government of Florence Under the Medici,
157).

* Tranchedini wrote to Francesco Sforza, September 14, 1465, “Being today with the Magnificent Piero, he told me…that he has it on good authority that his adversaries wish to stir up anger against your Highness that will put you in low repute here, and then to propose a pact of friendship with the Venetians.” (See Rubinstein,
The Government of Florence Under the Medici,
176.)

* This is something of an oversimplification. Francesco’s title came through his wife, illegitimate daughter of the last of the ruling Visconti clan. After Visconti’s death the people of Milan had risen up and briefly established a republic, which Francesco overthrew with an army funded largely by Cosimo’s money. His son’s accession would not be without drama (he was away campaigning in France when word reached him of his father’s death; he was forced to sneak back to Milan through hostile Savoy in disguise), but in the end it went off with no serious opposition. The Sforza title was never officially acknowledged by the Holy Roman Emperor, their ostensible feudal overlords, but this was a mere formality and was no real threat to their legitimacy.

* This was especially the case during the reign of Galeazzo Maria. Francesco, an old soldier, was unaccustomed to and uncomfortable with the ways of the court. His son, however, had a taste for luxury and an inability to deny himself any indulgence that eventually contributed to his downfall. The Fortezza da Basso in Florence, which somewhat resembles the Sforza residence for sheer intimidating mass, was built by the Medici grand dukes in the sixteenth century and symbolized the city’s loss of its ancient liberties.

* The creation of the
Accoppiatori
was typical of the methods the Medici employed to manipulate the republican government to their own ends without eradicating democratic forms and practices. Even Cosimo could resort to such tactics only on the understanding that such departures from constitutional practice were merely temporary responses to emergencies. Though most histories seem to work on the assumption that it was the
Accoppiatori
who actually picked the government, the truth is that they only picked the names—inscribed on little paper tickets—of the candidates, who continued to be drawn, as before, at random from the purses. When the government no longer felt itself threatened by foreign powers or domestic enemies, there were many who naturally clamored for a restoration of traditional methods. Those chosen to serve as
Accoppiatori
included the most powerful and trusted members of the regime. Among those serving on the committee in these years were Piero, Dietisalvi Neroni, and Agnolo Acciaiuoli. (See Rubinstein,
The Government of Florence Under the Medici
, Appendix I for a complete list.)

* Nicodemo Tranchedini was among those who believed that “the leading citizens will regret closing the bags, and do not understand the good and well-being of the state”(see Rubinstein,
The Government of Florence Under the Medici,
chapter 8, note 2).

† There is a wonderful portrait bust of Niccolò da Uzzano by Donatello. The terra-cotta bust in the Bargello depicts him in the guise of a Roman senator, very much the image every Florentine patrician cultivated, but despite its rhetorical formulas it is a portrait full of lively character.

* Lorenzo Soderini was the illegitimate child of the prominent merchant Tommaso Soderini and a French woman of lowly status. Though Tommaso raised his bastard son, Lorenzo did not inherit his father’s wealth or position. In order to redress the wrongs done to him because of his illegitimacy, Lorenzo forged a document purporting to show that his father had actually married his mother, thus entitling him to a substantial portion of the Soderini inheritance. The forgery was discovered, however, leading to Lorenzo’s eventual hanging (see Clarke,
The Soderini and the Medici,
chapter 1).

* See “Note on the Government of Florence.”

* The exact nature of the reforms Soderini was proposing have been hotly debated by historians. His proposal to combine the closing of the bags with new criteria for holding high office would have widened the franchise but also permanently fixed the number of eligible families. Some insist that the effect would have been to make the government more democratic; others insist his reforms would have created a closed oligarchic caste, modeled on that of Venice, that would have killed off the kind of social mobility that Florentines believed was an important part of their political system. (See Rubinstein,
The Government of Florence Under the Medici,
especially chapter 8 and Pampaloni, “Fermenti di Riforme Democratiche nella Firenze Medicea del Quattrocento,” in Archivio Storico Italiano 119 (1961): 11–62. It is impossible to judge Florentine politics by modern standards, since often reformers were those who actually favored a return to a more oligarchic form of government.

* Thus, for instance, the Medici were proud to display the
fleurs de lis
, granted to them by the French king, on their coat of arms, while others jockeyed for knighthoods and foreign titles of nobility. It is typical of Florentine ambivalence toward such feudal titles that while knights were given a special prominence in the city’s festivals and ceremonies, anyone stigmatized with the label “magnate” was excluded from participation in the city’s government. Suspicion of the hereditary aristocracy stemmed from the centuries of violence committed by the native nobility.

† Votes in the
palazzo
were counted by means of black and white beans.

* In an earlier crisis, one Florentine declared, “He who creates party, sells his liberty” (see Dale Kent,
The Rise of the Medici Faction,
chapter 2). This fear of faction reflects the violent history of the city in which Guelfs and Ghibellines, and later Black and White Guelfs, murdered each other with abandon in the streets. There is an interesting parallel to the early days of the American republic. The almost universal support for George Washington initially masked the quarrels between the followers of Thomas Jefferson and those of Alexander Hamilton. Each side accused the other of “faction” and disloyalty. But, unlike fifteenth-century Florence, the American system quickly adapted, leading to the formation of political parties that pursued their aims openly.

† Lorenzo was qualified to replace a deceased relative. Replacements were supposed to be at least twenty-five, but exceptions were made in a few cases, including not only Lorenzo but Piero de’Pazzi’s son Renato. The following year Lorenzo was appointed to the board of trade (
Mercanzia
).