The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (5 page)

The acquisition of these ports – celebrated at Pisa by the launching of the first Florentine armed galley – immensely increased the wealth of the Republic, and gave a new impetus to the trade in wool and cloth upon which its prosperity had long depended. From England and the Low Countries, as well as from the hills and valleys of Tuscany, vast quantities of wool had for generations come into Florence to be refined, dyed and re-exported. Before the Black Death the industry was believed to have supported as many as 30,000 people. This explained the importance and influence of the
Arte di Calimak
and the
Arte della Lana
, the cloth and wool trade guilds, which for so long had played an essential part in the government of the city and had been responsible for the construction of so many of its finest buildings. The building of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, for instance, had been entrusted to officials of the
Arte della Lana
whose emblem of a lamb was a notable feature on its walls.

The owner of two wool workshops in Florence, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was a member of the
Arte della Lana
; but, since his main interest was banking, he was also a member of the
Arte del Cambio
, a guild whose prestige had been increasing ever since 1252 when the bankers of the city had issued a beautiful small gold coin, stamped on its reverse side with the city’s Latin name, Florentia, and on the obverse with its emblem, the lily.
⁵
This was the famous
Jiorino d’oro
which became internationally known as the flower, the florence or the florin. It contained fifty-four grains of fine gold, and in terms of purchasing power the florin of the 1430s might be considered the equivalent of about
£
20 today: certainly a man could live very comfortably indeed on an annual income of 150 florins; a small house and garden in the city could be rented for about thirty-five florins a year; a handsome palazzo could be bought for a thousand; a maidservant would cost him no more than ten florins a year and a slave could be bought for fifty. The florin had rapidly gained universal confidence and was soon in common use throughout Europe, to the great credit of the city of its origin and to the banking
houses which conducted business there. In 1422 there were two million golden florins in circulation and seventy-two bankers and bill-brokers in the neighbourhood of the Mercato Vecchio. One of the most prosperous and certainly the most rapidly expanding of these businesses was that of the Medici.

An office in Rome had been established in the previous century by Giovanni’s distant cousin, Vieri di Cambio de’ Medici; there were also branches in Venice and Genoa, Naples and Gaeta. Giovanni de’ Medici, who had begun his career as an apprentice to his cousin Vieri, opened a new branch in Geneva, a second branch in Rome, and, as a consequence of the growth in trade following the conquest of Pisa, established correspondents in Bruges and London. But Giovanni’s success as a banker was not so much due to the prosperity of the Florentine wool trade as to his friendship with the Pope.

It seemed a most improbable friendship, for Baldassare Cossa, who was elected Pope in 1410, was not at all the sort of man with whom a rather staid and provident banker might be expected to associate. Sensual, adventurous, unscrupulous and highly superstitious, Baldassare Cossa came of an old Neapolitan family and had once been a pirate. When he decided to enter the Church it appeared to those who knew him best that he sought further adventure rather than the service of God. Adventures he certainly had.

The Church at this time was in a deplorable condition with a pope at Avignon contesting the rival claims of a pope at Rome. In an attempt to end this ‘great schism’, which was dividing Europe into rival camps, a Council had met at Pisa in 1409. The Council’s solution had been to depose both the Avignon pope, Benedict XIII, and the Italian pope, Gregory XII, and to elect a new pope, Alexander V, who promptly adjourned the Council. Since neither of the previous rivals was prepared to accept the verdict of the Council there were now three popes instead of two, a situation which was not improved when Alexander V died and Baldassare Cossa succeeded him, choosing the title of Pope John XXIII. In a fresh attempt to resolve the difficulty, the German Emperor Sigismund summoned a new Council at Constance, and towards the end of 1414 Pope John left for
Constance, apparently taking with him a representative of the Medici bank as his financial adviser.

By this time the Medici were well established as the Pope’s bankers. Other Florentine banking houses, notably the Alberti, the Ricci and the Spini, had acted as financial agents for the Curia in the past; and the amount of business which the Medici had conducted at Rome was relatively small, though Giovanni had much increased its volume while he was working there between 1386 and 1397. During the pontificate of John XXIII, however, it was the Medici who were most closely associated with the affairs of the Curia. It was said that they had helped to secure this position for themselves by providing the Pope with the money – 10,000 ducats – with which he had purchased his cardinal’s hat; certainly, while he had been Cardinal Legate at Bologna from 1403 until 1410 he had constantly been in correspondence with Giovanni, with whom he had conducted a great deal of business and to whom he referred as ‘my very dear friend’.

After Cardinal Cossa’s election as Pope the Medici had begun to enjoy an exceptionally profitable relationship with the Papal Chamber, by which the Curia’s revenues were collected and disbursed. They had also been the principal backers of John XXIII during his war with King Ladislaus of Naples who supported the claims of Gregory XII one of the two rival popes; and when Pope John made peace with King Ladislaus in June 1412 it was again the Medici who played the main part in finding the 95,000 florins which were to be paid to the King of Naples under the terms of the treaty. Two valuable mitres, as well as a quantity of papal plate, were handed over to one of the Rome branches of the Medici bank as a pledge. This sort of transaction was not to Giovanni’s taste; but it was a small and necessary price to pay for the enormous profits to be made from the handling of papal finances. How truly immense these profits were may be judged from the fact that over half the astonishing profits of the Medici bank now came from the two Rome branches.

At the Council of Constance, however, the Medici suffered a setback. Pope John arrived at Constance at the end of October 1414 to find himself accused of all kinds of crimes including heresy, simony, tyranny, the murder by poison of Alexander V and the seduction of
no fewer than two hundred of the ladies of Bologna. After escaping from Constance disguised as a layman with a cross-bow slung over his shoulder, he was betrayed and brought back to face the Council, which deposed both him and Benedict XIII, accepted the resignation of Gregory XII, and elected a new pope, Martin V.

Pope John, ill and destitute, was held prisoner for three years in the Castle of Heidelberg until the Medici once more came to his help by arranging, through their Venetian branch, to pay a ransom for his release of 38,500 Rhenish gulden. Accompanied by Bartolomeo de’ Bardi (soon to become the Medici’s manager in Rome), the deposed Pope made his way to Florence where Giovanni de’ Medici welcomed him, provided him with a home for the remaining few months of his life, and interceded on his behalf with Martin V, who agreed to appoint him Cardinal-Bishop of Tusculum.

Martin V was then also living in Florence where he remained for two years at the monastery of Santa Maria Novella.
⁶
He was a gentle, simple man, but his relations with the Medici were not as close and friendly as Giovanni would have liked. There was trouble over a pearl-encrusted mitre which had come into Medici hands at the time of Pope John’s flight from Constance and which was only returned to the papal chancellor after Giovanni had been threatened with excommunication. There was trouble, too, over Pope John’s will, under the terms of which the Medici received a finger of St John the Baptist which the testator, whose trust in relics was unbounded, had carried with him always. Later there was a quarrel over Pope John’s tomb in the Baptistery, which contained upon its base the words ‘
Ioannes Quondam Papa XXIII
’, an inscription which Pope Martin V considered an affront to his own authority.

On 9 September 1420 Pope Martin left Florence for Rome accompanied by twelve cardinals. An immense procession of the city’s officials, representatives of the guilds and the colleges, and uniformed standard-bearers escorted him to the Porta di San Pier Gattolini where he gave them all his apostolic blessing. He then rode out of the city to the convent of San Gaggio. Here ‘he got down from his horse’, so a contemporary chronicler reported, ‘and asked for all the nuns of the convent to be brought before him. He blessed
them one after the other and kissed them on the forehead over their veils.’

Giovanni de’ Medici, who had accompanied the procession as one of the four
Cavalieri
, those honoured citizens of Florence who had the right to wear golden spurs, watched him depart and cannot have felt other than concerned that his bank’s relationship with the Papacy had become so strained. The Medici were not entirely excluded from curial business, but they no longer enjoyed the special privileges they had had in the time of Pope John XXIII. Now it was their ancient rivals, the Spini, who were favoured by the Papal Chamber.
⁷
But towards the end of 1420 the Spini company suddenly failed and were forced into bankruptcy. Soon afterwards the Medici manager in Rome took over their business, and his bank recovered its former position. Within a few years, indeed, the Medici bank became not only the most successful commercial enterprise in Italy, but the most profitable family business in the whole of Europe. For this as much credit was due to the elder son as to the father.

Cosimo had been born on 27 September 1389, the day upon which are commemorated the early Christian martyrs, Cosmas and Damian, the patron saints of physicians, whom he was often to have introduced into paintings commissioned by him or painted in his honour. He had received his early education at the school of the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where he had begun to learn German and French as well as Latin and a smattering of Hebrew, Greek and Arabic.
⁸
Later, together with the young sons of other rich Florentine families, he had attended the lectures and lessons of Roberto de’ Rossi, one of the leading scholars of the day and himself a member of an old and wealthy Florentine family. Under Roberto de’ Rossi’s enlightened guidance, and thereafter in discussion groups at the Santa Maria degli Angeli monastery which he continued to attend in his middle age, Cosimo acquired and developed that deep respect for classical learning and classical ideals, combined with an interest in man’s life on earth which was to remain with him for ever. He became, in fact, a humanist.

He was not as learned as many other humanists in his circle, though Pope Pius II, who had a very low opinion of Florentines in general, condemning them as ‘traders, a sordid populace who can be persuaded to nothing noble’, allowed that Cosimo was a highly cultured, clever and knowledgeable man, ‘more lettered than merchants are wont to be’. Certainly there were few Florentine humanists with a wider knowledge of classical manuscripts which he began to collect at an early age, and there were scarcely any who were more intensely concerned with the importance of humanistic ideals in the conduct of public life. Although he himself never became a master of those arts and disciplines, such as rhetoric, which the humanist was taught to practise, he never questioned the right of those who did master them to occupy the most honoured positions in Florentine society. Most of them, after all, came from the same sort of background as himself. But in one important respect Cosimo was different, as his father had always urged him to be, from most of the humanists of Florence: he seemed anxious to remain, as far as possible, out of the public eye.

He was rarely to be seen walking the streets of the city, never with more than one servant in attendance, and always quietly dressed, scrupulous in giving the wall to older citizens and ‘showing the utmost deference to the magistrates’. He left it to the scions of other rich families to play the parts of paladins: at a big tournament in the Piazza Santa Croce in 1428,
⁹
when Lorenzo, son of the great Palla Strozzi,
¹⁰
won the victor’s laurels, Cosimo was not even mentioned as having been present, nor was any other member of his family. When people came to him for help or to ask his advice about some business matter, he would listen to them carefully and quietly and then tell them what he thought in a few, short words, almost brusquely, as though unwilling to commit himself to friendship. Ordinary people liked him, though, and trusted him; and, even in later years, when age had withered his sallow features giving them a sardonic twist, when his curt and often ambiguous observations assumed an increasingly sarcastic and derisive note, there was something in his manner that commanded affection rather than awe.

He was still in his early twenties when he married Contessina de’ Bardi, eldest daughter of Giovanni de’ Bardi, one of his father’s
partners in the Rome branch of their bank. The Bardi were an old Florentine family and had once been immensely rich; but, like the Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli families, they had lent far more than was ever repaid to various rulers, including King Edward III of England and Robert, the Angevin King of Naples, so that they had consequently fallen on hard times. The dowry which Contessina was able to bring to her husband was therefore not a large one, although it included the Palazzo Bardi, the family palace in the Via de’ Bardi, a street whose houses had once all belonged to her family.
¹¹
She and Cosimo moved into the palace, whose rooms were soon unobtrusively decorated with the Medici insignia; and it was here that their first child, Piero, was born – in accordance with the hopes of a well-wisher who had written to Cosimo, ‘God preserve you and arrange that the first night you sleep with your noble and illustrious wife, you may conceive a male child.’