The Medici Boy (27 page)

I walked beside Fiametta half consumed with pride in my secret commission from Cosimo de’ Medici and half consumed with fear that I would be discovered. I knew only that great things were afoot and I was playing a part in them, though I grew more anxious as I approached the city gates.

I passed through the Porta Romana with no trouble from the guards and it was with a sense of relief that I ascended the great hill to San Miniato where the Prior was expecting me. He seemed both anxious and annoyed at my arrival, as if he had feared I might not come and was troubled afresh now that I had. He unbuckled the straps on one of the pouches and put his hand deep in the pouch and rummaged about. We could hear the dull clink of metal on metal. He nodded then and made a sign to two of the Brothers who were standing by. Without a word they shouldered the bags of gold and disappeared into the sub-basement of the larder. When they reappeared, the bags safely stowed away, the Prior dug down into the side folds of his habit and brought out a velvet purse embroidered with the insignia of the Medici. He slipped it into the breast of the leather apron I wore and beat lightly on my shoulder. “You have,” he said ceremoniously, “done well.” When I was safely back at the
bottega
, I took out the purse and discovered ten gold florins.

It was yet a good thing to be a trusted friend of the Medici.

* * *

W
ITH HIS MONEY
safe and only his palace exposed to confiscation, Cosimo spent an easy summer in the safety of the Mugello surrounded by family and servants and visiting friends. In Florence the insidious rumors died down and Cosimo concluded that perhaps his worries had been unfounded. All the news from the Signoria was reassuring and Bernardo Guardagni, the new Gonfaloniere, in particular seemed to have turned friendly. He sent messages regularly to Cosimo informing him of news of the Signoria and seeking his advice on matters of tax reform and sumptuary laws.

Cosimo was still in the Mugello in early September when an urgent message came from Guardagni summoning him back to Florence. The Signoria was about to make important decisions, he said—though he gave no indication of the nature of those decisions—and Cosimo’s counsel would be essential. Cosimo was wary, as always, but he returned to Florence, without a retinue and without any sense of what was about to happen.

On September 4, as requested, Cosimo presented himself at the Palazzo della Signoria where he received a warm welcome from Guardagni who was vague about the matters to be discussed and who asked Cosimo to wait for three days—“a little patience, my dear friend, it is essential”—until the Signoria would hold their official meeting. Cosimo returned to his palace and waited. During this time he visited his bank and moved further monies from Florence to Venice.

On the morning of September 7 Cosimo arrived early at the Palazzo della Signoria and found the council already in session. There was no sign of Guardagni or any welcoming committee. Instead the captain of the guard, without any explanation, led the way past the council chamber and continued on up the stairs. Cosimo paused at the chamber doors, wondering what this could mean, and then he looked behind him and discovered two more guards, pikes in hand and swords at the ready. Stricken, he realized that the trap had closed on him and it was too late to resist. They continued on up the endless flight of stairs—two guards behind and one in front—until at the very top of the tower they reached the prison cell called the
alberghettino
, the little inn. The captain opened the door to the cell and stepped aside to let Cosimo enter. The two guards took their positions on either side of the door. Then the captain, reciting a formula, assured Cosimo he had been arrested on solid legal grounds as his subsequent trial would make clear and for now he was a prisoner of the state. He moved forward and opened the three windows that looked down on the great piazza far below. Cosimo moved slowly toward the back wall. For an instant he felt sure they intended to fling him from those windows, but the captain only turned to him and said that until further decisions were made the
alberghettino
would be his home. The captain bowed and left, locking the door behind him.

Cosimo looked around him at the long rectangular room with its narrow windows opening onto the great piazza below and realized that this prison might become his tomb as well.

W
HAT FOLLOWED WE
know from Cosimo’s own confidential notebooks, his
libri segreti
. After a week of fasting, since he refused even to taste the prison food and since everyone agreed that poisoning was both a danger and a possibility, Cosimo was permitted to have meals brought to him from the Palazzo Bardi, though guards were assigned to supervise the cooking and the delivery of his food. He was allowed no visitors at all. When he insisted on seeing his confessor, a priest was brought to hear his confession and give spiritual counsel, though even at these private times some government official was always present. What was specifically forbidden was any communication between Cosimo and his friends, his family, or his bank.

The personal guard assigned by day was sympathetic to Cosimo, however, and like most guards he was susceptible to bribes. Thus, in a matter of days messages were passed into and out of the
alberghettino
and in time Guardagni, the Gonfaloniere himself, accepted a bribe of a thousand florins. In return Guardagni found himself too ill to attend the council that would decide Cosimo’s fate and so delegated his vote to another Priore who had already been bribed by Cosimo’s people. In his
libro segreto
Cosimo noted that the price was low; he would gladly have paid ten times more to guarantee Guardagni’s timely illness.

Meanwhile ambassadors from Venice and Rome had arrived to protest this persecution of the Medici whose banks were so important to them. In Cafaggiolo Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo was raising an army among Medici followers and readying them to march against Florence. And in the city itself there was a mood of unrest, a rising distrust of the Albizzi and a concern for Cosimo who had for so long been a defender of the poor.

His trial came down to this: Cosimo was accused of raising himself above the rank of ordinary citizens—a high crime against the state—and of conspiring to take over the city and become its despot. The penalty was death.

It was a terrible situation for everyone. The council, threatened on all sides, had no choice but to go forward with the trial. Desperate to have all this behind them, they met in haste and on 28 September, after a long dispute about death versus exile, they chose exile over death. Rinaldo degli Albizzi exhausted himself arguing for the death penalty—it was well deserved; it was essential for the safety of the Republic—and he was on fire with rage but he could not bend the council to his will. Their decision was binding. By decree of the council Cosimo was banished to Padua for ten years and his brother Lorenzo to Venice for a period of five. Both Cosimo and Lorenzo, and the entire Medici family, were forbidden to hold office in Florence for however long they should live.

Cosimo was summoned from his freezing accommodations in the
alberghettino
. He stood before the full council—this great man now a lowly prisoner—and the decree of banishment was read aloud to him. He made no effort to refute the charges. He merely insisted that he had always declined to be nominated as a government official, that as a citizen he had paid taxes in excess of what was required, that he had supported the war against Lucca with money and men, and that he remained a simple law-abiding citizen of the great Republic of Florence. He concluded by accepting the judgment of the Signoria which he would obey without question. “I will go into Padua most willingly; in truth I would go wherever you might command, whether to live among the Arabs or any other people however strange and distant they might be. I am, Signori, the loyal servant of our state.”

But knowing the Albizzi and their gangs and foreseeing treachery in the streets below, he added a demand that he expressed in the form of a request.

“One thing I beg of you, Signori, that since you intend to preserve my life, you will make certain that it should not be taken by wicked citizens, and in this way you be put to shame. Take care that those who stand outside in the Piazza desiring my blood should not have their way with me. In such a case my pain would be small, but you would earn perpetual infamy.”

The Signoria took his meaning and, aware of what would befall them individually if harm should come to Cosimo, they took care to spirit him out of the city by night through the Porta San Gallo, and under armed guard they turned him over to men of his house who would escort him through Ferrara to his exile in Padua. This took place on 28 September 1433.

* * *

W
HEN NEWS OF
Cosimo’s exile spread in the city—and it spread almost at once—a kind of panic started among the friends and debtors of the Medici. The levy of new taxes was inevitable, of course, but it was anyone’s guess what other burdens the Albizzi might lay upon them. Meanwhile friends of the Albizzi celebrated openly, though there were some who suspected they had merely postponed a terrible retribution by sending Cosimo to exile rather than to death. The Palazzo Bardi was confiscated in the name of the state and the Medici banking tables disappeared from the Mercato Vecchio, but for a while the life of the city continued on as it had. There were no prosecutions of Medici servants and—so it seemed—there were no secret lists of Medici followers who were marked out for “accidents.” Still, no one felt secure.

“Now it will begin,” Agnolo said.

“What will begin?”

“The persecution of men like me.”

This was not like him. Had he become a man who had some sense of himself, who understood how he failed to fit into the world?

I thought for a while and then said, “You make too much of yourself,” but as I turned over in my mind what he had said, I realized he could be speaking truly. Under the Albizzi there would surely be persecution of men like Agnolo. And if Agnolo was in danger, so too was my lord Donatello.

CHAPTER
28

A
SHUDDER RAN
through all of Florence at the exile of Cosimo. It was an unimaginable thing and it affected everyone. In the taverns men drank less and talked more cautiously. At the banking tables in the Mercato Vecchio business slowed and even the chink of coins seemed more discreet. In our
bottega
there was the constant strain of things unsaid and the suspicion of friends who might at any moment be revealed as enemies: Donatello knew that as an intimate of Cosimo he was being watched by the Albizzi. He took care that in speech and action he was ever restrained.

But as the constant spy, I noticed there had been a thaw in the relations between my lord Donatello and the newly humble youth Agnolo. For months now Agnolo had made himself useful in the
bottega
, running errands, feeding the chickens and looking after Fiametta, doing whatever he was asked to do but without his old insistence on being noticed at all times. And now my master Donatello seemed to have softened toward him.

“How do you live,” I asked Agnolo, “you two alone in that small house?”

“Peacefully. He asks nothing of me.”

“He is fifty years of age. There is little he could ask.”

Agnolo gave me a wry look and then a half smile. “It’s little you know about these things,” he said.

“Then you must tell me,” I said, but he withdrew into the humble, quiet, self-possessed Agnolo he had lately become.

I could tell nonetheless that there was increasing warmth between them.

* * *

E
ARLY IN
J
ULY
, when Cosimo’s arrest and exile were still unimagined, Donatello had taken on the commission to create a great marble pulpit for the new sacristy of the Duomo. It was to be of the finest marble. It would be placed above the door of the sacristy on the south side of the Cathedral as a complement to the pulpit of Luca della Robbia on the north. I have the documents before me and what I find of greatest interest is the strict determinations of the contract. It is as if from the very start the Operai of the Cathedral had learned from Prato to deal firmly with Donatello, however
intricato
he might be. They demanded a guarantee that “Donatello must finish each piece within three months after receiving the block, which will be furnished by the Operai but for which he must give security through a reliable bondsman.”

Donatello read the conditions of the contract and smiled that cryptic smile. All through July and August he worked at the design of the pulpit. By September, when Cosimo was arrested and sent into exile, Donatello had already produced in miniature the magnificent pulpit that would become known as the Cantoria—the singing choir—for its frieze of babies who riot in joy at hearing the proclamation of the Good News. He made preparations, slowly, to carve.

He was distraught for a while at Cosimo’s exile, but he allowed nothing to come between him and his work . . . and he found other consolations as well.

* * *

R
INALDO DEGLI
A
LBIZZI
had driven his great enemy from Florence and, though he now found himself unofficial ruler of the city, his own position was not what he had hoped. For one thing, the enormous Medici wealth he had planned to secure for himself had disappeared into Rome and Venice and, locally, into monasteries that he dared not plunder. For another, Cosimo remained popular in Florence while in Padua he was welcomed as a visiting dignitary, rich and distinguished and much to be admired. And who could tell what Cosimo’s followers might be up to?

Rinaldo found it increasingly difficult to rule. The ancient noble families that had supported his attack on Cosimo remained supportive in words but when it came to gold florins their support wavered. The banking families, too, were reluctant to provide financial backing since they regarded the regime as unstable and perhaps even illegal. Increasingly, through manipulation of the Signoria, Rinaldo assumed the role of despot, banishing Medici supporters who called for Cosimo’s return and thus depriving the city of further tax revenue. Frustrated and furious, Rinaldo grew daily more erratic.