The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (7 page)

Texts which could not be purchased he copied out in an exquisite, easily-read and well-spaced hand, using as his model the eleventh-century Carolingian script rather than the tiresome, clumsy Gothic handwriting which had superseded it. When Cosimo de’ Medici saw Poggio’s script he decided to have all his own books copied in a similar manner. It was also admired by the early Italian printers who
used it as a basis for their Roman type, just as they had used Niccolò Niccoli’s cursive script for their italic. In Poggio’s script lay the origins of modern handwriting and of modern printing.

Poggio, however, was not one of those humanists who became so involved in study they lost their taste for life. He loved eating and drinking, making jokes and making love. Ideally he liked to work in the company of pretty girls. He told Niccolò Niccoli how one day, when he was copying an inscription, he had broken off to feast his eye on two girls who were watching him. Niccolò had been rather shocked; but Poggio replied that whenever he was working he would always choose to have well-shaped girls beside him ‘rather than a long-horned buffalo’. He had several mistresses and, by his own admission, fourteen illegitimate children for whom he could afford to care well; with his business sense, and through his connection with the Curia, he had been able to make a great deal of money. It was not until he was fifty-five that he decided to get married. Then, characteristically, he chose a pretty girl of eighteen who brought him a handsome dowry with which he purchased a palazzo where, in due course, six more of his children were born.

Like Poggio, Leonardo Bruni, another of Cosimo’s humanist friends, had come to Florence as a poor young boy, had studied law at the Studio Fiorentino and, having obtained employment at the Curia, had amassed a fortune. But he was far more intense and earnest than Poggio, sharp-nosed, alert, inclined to be arrogant and, so a fellow humanist said of him, ‘unbelievably eloquent’. He strongly disapproved of Niccolò Niccoli’s having a mistress; and Poggio he considered to be really depraved. He himself had abandoned the idea of a career in the Church in order to marry a respectable, and extremely rich, young woman. Thereafter he devoted himself to writing, translating, and to playing his due part in the civic life of Florence, a city which he urged men to consider as the successor of the ancient republics and of which he was to become – and tenaciously to remain – Chancellor. So exalted was his reputation that an envoy from the King of Spain was once seen to fall on his knees before his magnificently red-robed figure.

An equally honourable but far more modest and saintly man was
Ambrogio Traversari, to whom Cosimo was devoted. A little monk who never ate meat, Traversari had come to Florence from the Romagna, where his family owned large estates, and had entered the austere Camaldolite Order of which he had just become Vicar-General. He was a formidable scholar who had taught himself Hebrew, and was as much at his ease in translating Greek as Latin. So rapidly, indeed, could he translate Greek into the most polished Latin that Niccolò Niccoli, who could write as quickly as any man in Florence, could not keep up with his dictation. For Cosimo, who was just three years older than he was, he translated all of Diogenes Laertius’s works overcoming his modesty to include the most impure passages with the rest. Cosimo was a frequent visitor to his rooms at Santa Maria degli Angeli, and was soon to have cause to feel deeply grateful for his firm friendship in his imminent clash with the Albizzi.

Also seen frequently at the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli was Carlo Marsuppini, a scholar from a noble family of Arezzo, who had been appointed lecturer in rhetoric and poetry at the University. At the age of thirty-two he was the youngest of Cosimo’s humanist friends; but his learning was already renowned – during the course of one single celebrated lecture he contrived to quote from every known Greek and Latin author. He was considerably less prolific than Bruni but, not as fastidious as Niccolò Niccoli, he did manage to produce one or two Latin translations from the Greek, some epigrams and poetry, and a funeral oration for Cosimo’s mother.

Marsuppini’s bitter rival at the University was a young man of his own age, Francesco Filelfo, who was born at Tolentino near Ancona where his parents, both Florentines, were then living. Before he was twenty he had already gained a reputation as a classical scholar that enabled him to obtain an important diplomatic appointment in the Venetian service at Constantinople. Here he married the pretty daughter of his Greek tutor, John Chrysoloras, whose brother, Emmanuel Chrysoloras, had been Professor of Greek at the University of Florence. Filelfo himself came to teach in Florence at the invitation of Niccolò Niccoli who was, at first, delighted by his versatility and energy. Filelfo rushed from lecture to lecture, talking from dawn to dusk and with equal facility about Cicero and Terence,
Homer and Livy, Thucydides and Xenophon. He also lectured on moral philosophy, and once a week in the Cathedral gave a public discourse on Dante. In addition to these activities he found time to write numerous epigrams and odes, speeches and histories, and to undertake translations whenever these promised to be sufficiently profitable. But after a time Niccolò Niccoli began to regret ever having asked the bustling young man with the Byzantine beard to come to Florence. Filelfo proved to be vain, ill-tempered, insolent, avaricious, prodigal and spiteful. Cosimo’s friends took to avoiding him, and in his quarrels with Carlo Marsuppini they took his rival’s side. Filelfo then courted the Albizzi and offered them his services as a master of invective. Cosimo, who had greeted him warmly on his arrival in Florence and had offered to pay his rent, was to become the most virulently savaged of all his victims.

Yet so long as the other humanists in Florence remained his friends and, what was even more important, so long as Niccolò da Uzzano was alive, Cosimo had no reason to fear that the Albizzi could mobilize forces strong enough to ruin him. Even though he was generally sympathetic towards the political views of the Albizzi, Niccolò da Uzzano had always respected the Medici and had actually been moved to tears at the funeral of Cosimo’s father. But in 1432 Niccolò himself died and, thereafter, Rinaldo degli Albizzi’s anti-Medicean plot quickly matured. Malicious stories about Cosimo, many doubtless inspired by Filelfo, began to circulate in the streets of Florence: he dressed so plainly, it was said, only the more easily to avoid accusations about his ill-gotten riches; his supposed sympathy for the people was no more than the calculated duplicity of the self-seeker; had he not been heard to say that the people never did anything honest except for their own advantage or out of fear? His well-publicized donations to religious charities and building funds were utter hypocrisy, the conscience-money of a usurer, given with an eye to his family’s glory and nothing more; did he not always make sure that the Medici insignia were prominently displayed on any building that he had paid for? Why, he had emblazoned ‘even the monks’ privies with his balls’! One night in the early months of 1433 the doors of Cosimo’s palace were smeared with blood.

Once again, as in the autumn of 1430 when he had gone to Verona, Cosimo withdrew from Florence, this time to his estate il Trebbio in the Mugello where he stayed for several months.
⁴
Meantime, he discreetly transferred huge sums of money from his bank in Florence to his branches in Rome and Naples, giving orders for bags of coins to be desposited for safe keeping with the Benedictine hermits of San Miniato al Monte and the Dominican friars of San Marco, where they would be safe from confiscation should the Albizzi move against him.

While Cosimo was away in the country, Rinaldo degli Albizzi set about manipulating the elections to the new
Signoria
which was due to meet in September. He completed the work with unobtrusive skill. Of the nine
Priori
chosen, seven were definitely prepared to support him, while only two, Bartolommeo Spini and Jacopo Ber-linghieri, were believed to be possible Medici adherents. The man elected as
Gonfaloniere
was Bernardo Guadagni whose debts Rinaldo had settled in order to render him eligible for office.
⁵

During the first week in September, Cosimo who was still in the Mugello, received an urgent summons from Guadagni to return to the city immediately. There were, he was told, ‘some important decisions to be made’. He decided to face them.

Cosimo arrived back in Florence on 4 September 1433. That afternoon he went to the Palazzo della Signoria to see the
Gonfaloniere
, Bernardo Guadagni, who was evasive and uncommunicative: the ‘important decisions’ which had necessitated Cosimo’s return from the Mugello would be discussed when the
Signoria
met in council three days later; in the meantime there was no way of accounting for the rumours of impending trouble which had been circulating in the city for the past few days.

After leaving the
Gonfaloniere
, Cosimo went to sec one of the
Priori
whom he believed to be a friend and from whom he received the same kind of vague reassurance. He then went to his bank, no doubt to arrange for the transfer of further sums from Florence. After that he could do nothing but await the imminent meeting of the
Signoria
.

When he arrived at the Palazzo della Signoria on the morning of 7 September the session had already begun. As the captain of the guard escorted him up the stairs, he passed the shut door of the Council Chamber. Soon after being locked inside his little cell he was told that he had been ‘arrested on good grounds, as would be soon made clear’.

Two days later, on 9 September, the huge
Vacca
boomed in the belfry above his head to call the citizens of Florence to a
Parlamento
in the Piazza. As the low, mooing notes of the bell sounded through the city, crowds of people began to converge upon the Piazza in response to its summons; but armed supporters of the Albizzi halted them at the entrances to the square and all those who were known to be, or suspected of being, Medici adherents were denied entry. Looking down from the window of his cell, Cosimo afterwards claimed to have counted no more than twenty-three heads in front of the
ringhiera
, the ground-floor stone terrace upon which the
Priori
were standing. In the name of the
Signoria
these few citizens were asked by the
Notaio delle Riformagioni
if they agreed to the establishment of a
Balìa
, a committee of two hundred members ‘to reform the city for the good of the people’. Obediently they gave their approval and a
Balìa
was accordingly appointed.

Although Rinaldo degli Albizzi now seemed to be in full control of the government, the
Balìa
could not be persuaded to recommend the execution of Cosimo as he strongly urged it to do. Its discussions were apparently stormy and indecisive, some members supporting the proposal that Cosimo should be beheaded, others arguing that banishment would be punishment enough, one or two suggesting that the prisoner ought to be released. It was clear that many members of the
Balìa
were reluctant to go to the extremes advocated by the Albizzi not only for fear of the violent disapproval of those thousands of Florentines who, though for the moment intimidated, still looked to the Medici as their champions, but also because his arrest had already called forth strong protests from abroad. The Marquis of Ferrara, a customer of the Medici bank, had intervened on Cosimo’s behalf. The Venetian Republic, also financially indebted to him, had immediately dispatched three ambassadors to Florence who did all
in their power to secure his release; and if, after a heated talk with Rinaldo, they failed to do so, their arrival in Florence, as Cosimo said himself, had ‘a great effect on those who were in favour of executing’ him. Rinaldo also had a visit from Cosimo’s old friend, Ambrogio Traversari, Vicar-General of the Camaldolite Order, and supposedly the representative of an even more influential customer of the Medici bank, Eugenius IV, the austere son of a Venetian merchant, who had succeeded Martin V as Pope two years before. By this time Rinaldo had succeeded in bringing a charge of treason against Cosimo by having two of his supporters tortured on the rack. One of these, Niccolò Tinucci, a celebrated notary and occasional poet, had been forced by the city rackmaster to confess that Cosimo had intended to enlist foreign help in bringing about a revolution in the city. Neither Traversari nor the Venetian ambassadors believed in this confession; nor did most of the citizens of Florence. Rinaldo, indeed, was gradually being forced to conclude that he would have to be content with a sentence of banishment rather than the death penalty which his henchman Francesco Filelfo was so insistently demanding.

In his cell in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria, Cosimo had been allowed to see a few selected visitors, in addition to Ambrogio Traversari. He had also been permitted to have his meals brought over from the Palazzo Bardi as he was afraid of being poisoned. But the greatest care was taken to ensure that he neither received nor gave any messages, and that no communications passed between him and his bank: an official watched over the cooking, carrying and serving of his food, while a guard remained within earshot when he was talking to his visitors. But the guard, Federigo Malavolti, was sympa-pathetic: messages
did
pass out of the cell, and bribes
were
offered and accepted. The
Gonfaloniere
himself, the impecunious Bernardo Gua-dagni, readily pocketed a thousand florins as soon as they were offered to him – he was a feeble fellow, Cosimo afterwards commented derisively, as he could have had ten thousand or more if he had asked for them. Anyway, in return for the relatively modest bribe, Gua-dagni announced that he had suddenly been taken so ill that he could no longer participate in the council’s deliberations; he delegated his
vote to another
Priore
, Mariotto Baldovinetti, who, equally impecunious, had also received a bribe from the Medici coffers.