The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (33 page)

each given a white waistcoat, a pair of stocking, half red and half white, a white cap, shoes, and an iron breastplate. Most also had lances; some of them had arquebuses. They were soldiers but lived in their own homes, being obliged to appear when needed, and it was ordered that many should be equipped in this way throughout the country, so that we should not need any foreigners. This was thought the finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence.

Landucci’s confidence in the militia was not dispelled when the Spanish forces of the Holy League began to march for the Florentine frontier from Bologna under command of Raymond de Cardona. Even when the Spaniards, repeatedly demanding a change of government in Florence, reached Barberino and advanced on Campi and frightened peasants ran in from the hills to seek shelter behind the walls of the city, it seemed to Landucci as to all ‘intelligent people’ that there was ‘no need of fear. On the contrary it was rather for the enemy to fear, because if they came down into these plains, they would fare badly. Many battalions of militia had been levied, and all the men-at-arms were eager to encounter the enemy.’

Although Machiavelli, who had been busy organizing the defences of the Mugello, took a more realistic view of the situation,
Soderini in Florence shared Landucci’s confidence. He had nine thousand men under arms; he knew that the Spanish army was much smaller, and mat, although the Medicean party in Florence were growing stronger as the Spaniards advanced on the city, their hopes of a revolution in Florence were ill-founded.

Cardona 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. When the Duke of Urbino declined to supply Cardona with artillery, Giovanni offered the money to buy two cannon himself. When Cardona complained of a lack of provisions, he paid for these also himself. And when a Florentine delegation approached the Spanish army with an offer of reasonable terms, it was Giovanni who insisted that no terms could be accepted which did not provide for the restoration of the Medici. The Cardinal was already in touch with sympathizers in Florence, sending messages to them by means of a peasant who deposited them in the wall of a cemetery in Santa Maria Novella. His cousin, Giulio, had arranged a secret meeting at a country villa with Antonfrancesco degli Albizzi, one of their most influential supporters, who assured him that, while Soderini would put on an act of defiance, the spirit of his supporters would collapse as soon as they heard the roar of the Spaniards’ cannon.

Faced with the cardinal’s demand that he should deliver up the city, Soderini gave orders for the imprisonment of all known supporters of the Medici; and in an eloquent speech before the assembled citizens in the Piazza della Signoria he gravely warned of the dangers of allowing the Medici to return to Florence even though they professed themselves anxious to do so only as private citizens. After all that had happened, they could not possibly remain private citizens; they would certainly set themselves up as tyrants. It was true, Soderini continued, that Lorenzo di Piero had never made an ostentatious display of power but had covered his real prerogative with a mantle of private equality; but his son had never done so; and his young grandson, Lorenzo, whom Cardinal Giovanni represented,
could remember nothing of the traditions of the family. ‘It is therefore for you to decide whether I am to resign my office (which I shall cheerfully do at your bidding) or whether I am to attend vigorously to the defence of our country if you want me to remain.’ The people loudly voiced their support of Soderini; and preparations for the defence of Florence were continued with renewed vigour.

While Machiavelli’s militia manned the city’s strong-points, the Spanish army approached the gates of Prato, twelve miles northwest of Florence, where, so the hungry troops had been promised, they would find food enough to spare. When Giovanni himself had entered Prato twenty years before a triumphal arch created to welcome him had crashed down into the street killing two children dressed as angels in his honour. This tragic event was remembered now when, at the cardinal’s second coming, even more dreadful events were foretold by the old men standing beneath the city’s high, brown, crumbling walls.

A hole in these walls was soon torn out by Cardona’s cannon. It was scarcely bigger than a window, Jacopo Nardi recorded. Behind it was a high monastery wall, and behind that again were pikemen and bowmen who could perfectly well have covered the breach. But at the approach of the Spanish infantry, they all ‘ran away, scandalously throwing their arms to the ground, as though the enemy had suddenly jumped on their backs’. ‘The Spaniards, amazed that military men as well as humble inexpert civilians should show such cowardice and so little skill,’ Guicciardini recorded,

broke through the wall with scarcely any opposition, and began to race through the town, where there was no longer any resistance but only cries, flight, violence, sack, blood and killing, the terrified Florentine foot soldiers casting away their weapons and surrendering to the victors.

For two days the Spaniards raged through the city, raping, killing priests at their altars, ransacking churches, burning monasteries, breaking into convents. The inhabitants were tortured to disclose the hiding places of their treasure chests; they were then killed, stripped of their clothes, and their naked bodies flung into ditches or wells already choked with severed limbs. ‘Nothing would have been
spared the avarice, lust and cruelty of the invaders,’ Guicciardini added, ‘had not the Cardinal de’ Medici placed guards at the main church and saved the honour of the women who had taken refuge there. More than two thousand men died, not fighting (for no one fought) but fleeing or crying for mercy.’

As yet unaware of the worst of what Machiavelli was later to describe as ‘an appalling spectacle of horrors’ and afterwards unable to prevent them, the Cardinal wrote blandly to the Pope on 29 August 1512:

This day, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the town of Prato was sacked, not without some bloodshed such as could not be avoided… The capture of Prato, so speedily and cruelly achieved, although it has given me pain, will at least have the good effect of serving as an example and a deterrent to the others.

Certainly it had this effect. Even as the reports of the sack of Prato were still coming into Florence, a party of Medici supporters marched to the Palazzo della Signoria to demand that Soderini should resign. He was fully prepared to do so, and thought it as well to escape while he still could. So, having sent Machiavelli to ask for a safe passage for him, he was escorted from the city on his way into exile on the Dalmatian coast.

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. Soon afterwards, denied the opportunity of serving the Medici which he would have welcomed, Machiavelli left Florence for his country house at Sant’ Andrea in Percussina where, the following year, he wrote
The Prince
.

XVII

‘
God has given us the papacy.
Let us enjoy it!
’

O
N THE
day that Soderini left Florence – 1 September 1512 – Cardinal Giovanni’s younger brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, entered it. Having shaved off the beard he had grown in exile and dressed himself in an inconspicuous
lucco
, he walked unattended through the streets. Workmen were already busy removing the crimson cross of the Florentine citizens which had replaced the Medici
palle
on various buildings in the city, and, to the cheers of a crowd of onlookers in the Via Larga, painters and masons were hard at work restoring the Medici emblems on the family palace. But Giuliano did not go to the palace. He went instead to the house of Antonfrancesco degli Albizzi, seeming anxious by the modesty of his demeanour to demonstrate his willingness to be accepted as a private citizen of Florence with little interest in the control of its government.

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.

He seemed at first content to allow the republican institutions of the State to remain outwardly unchanged. But two days after his ceremonial entry into the city a demonstration was organized in the Piazza della Signoria which was filled with people shouting ‘
Palle!
Palle! Palle!
’ and demanding a
Partamento
. The request was granted; a
Portamento
was called; and power was handed to a
Balla
of forty members, nearly all of them members of the Medicean party.

Yet although the Florentines were to be left in no doubt that they now had a master, Cardinal Giovanni appeared ready to reassure them that his rule would not be severe, nor would their burdens be heavy. The significance of his personal device – an ox-yoke – was unmistakable; but the motto beneath it was ‘
Jugum enim meum suave est
’ – ‘Truly my yoke is easy’. Indeed, from the beginning, the Cardinal was careful to persuade the Florentines that the restoration of the Medici would lead to a return to the happy days of his father, not to the dismal interregnum of Savonarola. Entertainments and pageants were to be encouraged; the carnival songs, which Lorenzo had so much enjoyed and which Savonarola had so rigorously denounced, were now once more to be heard in the streets; and the presence in the city of the Cardinal’s kindly brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, was to be a pledge that the government would be understanding and humane.

Less than six months after his family had been returned to 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.

Exhausted by the journey, in great pain from a stomach ulcer and troubled by an anal fistula, he arrived in Rome on 6 March 1513. Weeping women, mourning the death of their patriotic Pope, were kissing the pontifical feet which had been left protruding from the grille of the mortuary chapel. The Cardinal had missed the opening ceremonies of the conclave, including the Mass of the Holy Spirit which, since St Peter’s was being reconstructed, was sung in the chapel of St Andrew, where the wind had howled through the cracks in the walls repeatedly extinguishing the candles on the altar. For several days Giovanni was too ill to get out of bed, submitting gloomily to the painful ministrations of his doctor, while the other
cardinals, in little groups, argued and plotted. After a week, in order to force them to a decision, their daily meal was reduced to a single unappetizing dish which, combined with the stale air of the building whose doors were locked and whose windows were sealed as custom directed, soon led to a decision.