--- > In the distant plane lies Florence, pink and gray and brown with the ruddy huge dome of the cathedral dominating its center like a captive balloon and flanked on the right by the smaller bulb of the Medici Chapel and on the left by the airy tower of the Palatovio. After 9 months of familiarity with this panorama, I still think that this is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye and the spirit... to see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim and faint and Turn the solid city into a city of dreams is a sight to stir the coldest nature and make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy. > > *[Mark Twain,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain) writing from a house just outside the city in the autumn of 1892 CE* Twain captures the romance and the glory of a place that many would argue is the most beautiful city on Earth. Millions visit each year to see its cathedral, churches, and museums, where artworks like Michelangelo's *David* or Botticelli's *Birth of Venus* are rightly seen as high points of human culture. This perception is perhaps best encapsulated in the film *[A Room with a View](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Room_with_a_View_(1985_film))*, where a character exclaims of a young tourist, "A young girl transfigured by Italy, and why shouldn't she be transfigured? It happened to the Goths." ![[Michelangelo - David - 1504 CE.png]] The period with which Florence has become synonymous, however, comes long after the Goths. It is the Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries—a time when Italians embraced **humanism**, rediscovering classical art and literature with a new spirit of curiosity and self-confidence. One family above all has become the embodiment of Florence's wealth and glory, often seen as the architects and sponsors of this new age: **The Medici.** We will meet them at their zenith in the 15th century, concentrating on three central figures. 1. First is **Cosimo de' Medici**, a wily banker who made himself master of the city. 2. Second is his grandson, **Lorenzo the Magnificent**, the great statesman and patron of the arts whose life is a dramatic story of conspiracies and assassination attempts. 3. And third is the man who succeeded them as master of Florence, a monk named **Girolamo Savonarola**, who attempted to purify the city with a flame of evangelical zeal, culminating in the "bonfire of the vanities" before he himself met a fiery end. It is a dazzling story of melodramatic twists, great art, and profound moral ambiguity. We begin with Cosimo. ## Cosimo de' Medici & The Birth of Capital Cosimo de' Medici was born in September 1389, approximately four decades after the Black Death (peaked 1347-52 CE) and a century before Columbus would sail to the New World. To understand Cosimo, we must first understand his city. For a long time, Florence was an obscure market town on the banks of the River Arno in the heart of Tuscany. From the 12th century onwards, it underwent explosive growth fueled by two commodities: cloth and credit. The cloth was primarily wool, imported from across Europe and especially from England, which served as Florence’s India—a source of raw materials. In Florence, this wool was processed into cheap cloth, an industry that employed roughly a third of the city's population. The profits from this trade were then used to kickstart a financial revolution. ![[European Trade Routes - 1300-1400 CE.png]] The Florentines led the world in finance through key innovations. They adopted [Arabic numerals,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals) which, with the concept of zero, made complex calculations like interest payments far easier than with Roman numerals.[^Numerals] They also embraced paper, an Arab introduction that cost half as much as parchment. This combination of cheap materials and superior notation made them the global leaders in bookkeeping and accountancy. As much as Florence was the home of Dante and Botticelli, it was also the home of accountancy—the mundane foundation upon which its cultural glories were built. The Florentines, for instance, invented double-entry bookkeeping, with its columns for debit and credit, a system familiar to any modern accountant. | | Roman Numerals | Arabic Numerals | | :---------- | :---------------------- | :-------------------------------- | | **System** | Additive & Subtractive | Positional (Base-10) | | **Symbols** | $I, V, X, L, C, D, M$ | $0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9$ | | **Zero** | Lacks a concept of zero | Uses $0$ as a crucial placeholder | [^Numerals]: The practical difference is most obvious in arithmetic. Performing addition in Roman numerals is a complex process of grouping, converting, and rewriting symbols.$ CLXXXVIII + XXXIV \longrightarrow \text{Complex conversion} \longrightarrow CCXXII $In contrast, the Arabic positional system allows for a simple, elegant, and repeatable algorithm for the exact same calculation.$\begin{array}{r}& 188 \\+ & 34 \\\hline& 222\end{array}$ By the early 14th century, Florentines had become bankers to Europe. They were not merely changing money but lending it at interest. The symbol of their success was the **[florin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florin)**, a small coin stamped with a lily, the city's emblem, recognized across the continent as a standard of financial stability. Another symbol of this era, one that would have been visible to Twain, is the cathedral, the **[Duomo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Cathedral)**. Begun at the end of the 13th century, its construction continued throughout the 14th. Its massive scale was a statement of ambition. The Black Death paused its construction, just as it did for the similarly huge cathedral in Florence’s great rival, Siena. But Florence, powered by its wealth, had the muscle to carry on. By the late 14th century, everything was complete except for the dome. The challenge was immense; its planned scale was so vast that no one was certain how to build it. A plan existed for a dome modeled on Roman exemplars yet radically different, but the engineering solution remained elusive. This massive, incomplete cathedral provided the backdrop to Cosimo's life, an emblem of Florentine ambition: a project unprecedented in scale, yet rooted in the classical past. The cathedral’s capacity was around 30,000 people. At its height, Florence had a population of 100,000, which shrank to about 50,000 after the Black Death. That the Duomo could hold more than half the city's population speaks to its central importance. Florence remained one of Europe’s top five cities, alongside Paris, Milan, Venice, and Naples. A walk across it would take half an hour through a warren of narrow streets, stone palaces (*palazzi*), churches, and shops. The historian Donald Weinstein describes it as "crowded with people in doublet and hose, silk-gowned ladies, long-robed clerics, laborers, beggars, hawkers, cut-purses, flesh-peddlers, and gangs of rowdy youths." There were also thousands of slaves, usually young women—Greeks, Turks, and Circassians from the Caucasus—who often served as sex slaves in the households of rich bankers. Cosimo himself would have a son by a Circassian slave. ### The Florentine Republic & Power Politics Unlike many of its neighbors, Florence was a republic, a status it had held since the 12th century. Power resided not with the old landowning nobility, who were formally excluded from office, but with the mercantile elite. The political system was complex. To hold office, one had to belong to a trade guild. Every two months, an "election" was held for the city council, the **Signoria**. The names of all eligible guild members were placed in eight leather bags, and names were drawn supposedly at random—a system that was a cross between ancient Athens and a national lottery. Eight men drawn became *priori*, or councilors, and the ninth became the **gonfaloniere**, the standard-bearer of the city who chaired the council. For their two-month term, these men were required to live in the city hall, the Palazzo della Signoria, attended by servants and even a buffoon for entertainment. This system of short, rotating terms was designed, much like the consulship in the Roman Republic, to prevent any single faction from accumulating too much power. Indeed, there was a deep-seated republican anxiety about powerful men seizing control. In an emergency, the council would ring the great bell of the Palazzo, known as the *vacca* (the cow). All male citizens would pour into the piazza to hold a *parlamento*, a mass meeting, where they would elect an emergency committee, a **bàlia**, vested with extraordinary powers to deal with the crisis. The Florentines boasted of their system, proclaiming, "We are the daughter of Rome." Their civic culture was modeled on Roman virtues: they prized hard work, seriousness, duty, and responsibility. They boasted of raising their children not to hunt and hawk but to fill ledgers, do sums, and make money. The Duomo, simultaneously Roman in inspiration and distinctively Florentine, was the perfect symbol of this identity. By Cosimo's birth in 1389, however, tensions were emerging. A large gap had opened between the super-rich in their *palazzi* and the masses of textile workers in the slums. Furthermore, like Rome, the Republic of Florence had expanded, swallowing up neighboring towns like Arezzo and San Gimignano. This success bred corruption, with wealthy merchant families increasingly rigging the elections by manipulating the names placed in the leather bags. The historian Christopher Hibbert described Medicean Florence as having "a government carried on mainly by the rich and almost exclusively in their own interests," a situation that would inevitably create conflict. This brings us to Cosimo's family, the Medici. They were originally economic migrants from the Mugello, the hills north of Florence, having likely moved to the city in the 12th century. Their coat of arms—red balls on a field of gold—was famous, and their supporters would often chant "Palle, Palle!" ("Balls, Balls!") in the streets. The origin of the balls is debated; they could be apothecary pills (linking to the name Medici, meaning "doctors"), or pawnbroker's balls. Either way, they were a reminder of the family’s humble origins, a standing affront to the old families of Florence who viewed the Medici as vulgar upstarts for centuries to come. Through banking, the family worked their way up. By Cosimo's birth, they had branches in Florence, Rome, Venice, Genoa, and Naples. This wealth brought political clout, and Medici relatives frequently appeared in the lists of those elected to the **Signoria**. One Medici, for instance, sat on the board that voted for Brunelleschi's design for the great dome. To the old families, this was a challenge. Chief among their rivals were the Albizzi. Cosimo's father, **Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici**, was a remarkably shrewd man who built up the family business by investing heavily in Rome. The papacy was a massive market for Florentine banks, which charged high interest rates for handling its business and made fortunes lending to cardinals who needed to build their own power bases. At this time, the Great Schism was ongoing; there were often two, and sometimes three, popes simultaneously. Giovanni made a consequential bet in the late 1390s on a Neapolitan aristocrat and former pirate named Baldassare Cossa. Cossa borrowed 10,000 ducats from the Medici and successfully engineered his rise, first to cardinal and then, in 1410, to Pope John XXIII. Though he was later deposed as an antipope—accused, perhaps with some exaggeration, of sleeping with over 200 women in seven years—the venture proved enormously profitable for Giovanni. The Medici made crucial connections, and by 1420 they became the official bankers for the universally recognized pope, Martin V. The Medici were now among the richest people in Florence, and Giovanni became a major political player. His influence was a combination of genuine respect and extensive patronage, which operated on a scale considered normal for the time. While this was unfolding, Cosimo was growing up in the Casa Vecchia, the old Medici stone palace. He was schooled at a nearby monastery, learning Latin, German, and French. His tutor was a rich patrician named Roberto de' Rossi[^Robertode'Rossi], a classic **humanist** scholar. Humanism—the study of the classical world, including grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry—was becoming fashionable. It was a sign of status, as it required affording private tutors. Cosimo embraced it fully. An inventory of his house from his late twenties reveals a library filled with works by Cicero, Julius Caesar, Virgil, Ovid, and Tacitus. To own a text by Tacitus, who had only recently been rediscovered, positioned Cosimo at the absolute cutting edge of scholarship—almost avant-garde for a banker, not a scholar. [^Robertode'Rossi]: **Roberto de' Rossi** was an early [humanist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism "Humanism") in Florence,[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_de%27_Rossi#cite_note-1) a follower of [Coluccio Salutati](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coluccio_Salutati "Coluccio Salutati") and, as the first pupil of [Manuel Chrysoloras](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Chrysoloras "Manuel Chrysoloras"), one of the first Florentines to read Greek. Roberto de' Rossi was a wealthy patrician who never married and avoided public office but devoted his life to books and his studies in his house and garden in the Oltr'Arno district of [Florence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence "Florence").[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_de%27_Rossi#cite_note-2) His translations of [Aristotle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle "Aristotle") and other classical Greek writers made them widely available to the Latin-reading public, but his modern claim to fame is as the tutor of [Cosimo de' Medici](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosimo_de%27_Medici "Cosimo de' Medici"), a role for which he was selected by [Giovanni di Bicci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_di_Bicci_de%27_Medici "Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici"). Roberto's friends [Leonardo Bruni](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_Bruni "Leonardo Bruni") and [Niccolo Niccoli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccolo_Niccoli "Niccolo Niccoli") were inherited by Cosimo and formed part of his circle. We have few glimpses of the young Cosimo. He was said to be soberly dressed, avoiding a large retinue, with a terse and sardonic sense of humor. He married Contessina de' Bardi, from another banking family, and they had two sons. He also had an illegitimate son, Carlo, by a Circassian slave girl, who was raised alongside his legitimate children. Trained as a banker from an early age, Cosimo effectively took over the family business in 1420. The Medici bank was now one of Europe's most sophisticated trade and political networks. They operated through loans, gifts, and favors—a network of *amici*, or friends, whose names were never explicitly mentioned in correspondence. This network appealed particularly to other newcomers: self-made, aspirational families who had migrated to Florence after the Black Death and felt snubbed by the established oligarchy. For a fabulously wealthy man, there was an opportunity to play the part of the friend of the people, a dynamic inherent in republics from ancient Rome to modern America. Giovanni died in 1429, reputedly offering his son a final piece of advice: be wary of political office, wait to be summoned, and never be proud. Whether true or not, it was prescient. By the late 1420s, the Medici's rivals were sharpening their knives. ### The Medici’s Rivals & The Exile Chief among these rivals was the Albizzi family. They too were a mercantile family, who had made their money from wool, but they had been major players for longer than the Medici. Their leader was **Rinaldo degli Albizzi**, a grizzled and haughty former soldier who viewed the Medici with contempt. In a speech from 1426, he lamented: "We are well-born, yet now we find ourselves companions in the government with men from the Mugello... Those who were once our household servants, they treat us as servants while they themselves behave like lords." Months after Giovanni's death, a crisis emerged. The Albizzi, led by Rinaldo, pushed for a war against the neighboring city-state of Lucca to bolster their prestige. Cosimo argued it was a bad idea, as Lucca was supported by the regional superpower of Milan. The vote went against him. The war began and, as Cosimo predicted, went badly for Florence. As the city ran out of money, Cosimo capitalized on the situation, lending money to the Florentine government at $33\%$ interest. He had been proven right and was making a fortune. The Albizzi were furious. By 1433, storm clouds were gathering. Rumors spread that Cosimo was planning to seize power. One night, he reportedly found the doors of his palazzo smeared with blood. He began moving his money out of the city, lodging 8,000 florins with the Dominican monks at San Marco and sending the rest to Medici banks in Rome and Naples. That summer, he moved his family to their country estate. While he was away, Rinaldo fixed the upcoming Signoria elections. At the end of August, a new council was chosen: seven of the nine members were Albizzi loyalists, and the new *gonfaloniere* was a man whose debts Rinaldo had just paid off. On September 1st, the new council took office. The next day, a message reached Cosimo in the country: "You must return to the city. We need your help." He could have fled, but that would mean losing everything. He chose to face the music. On September 7th, he went to the Palazzo della Signoria. The council session had already begun. The captain of the guard led him up the stairs, past the closed doors of the council chamber, and into a small cell. "You are under arrest on good grounds," the captain said, before slamming and locking the door. Two days later, on the morning of September 9th, Cosimo heard the great bell, the *vacca*, tolling overhead, summoning the citizens to an emergency *parlamento*. But as people flooded the square, armed Albizzi loyalists guarded the entrances, turning away any suspected Medici supporters. The assembled crowd approved the formation of a **bàlia**, an emergency committee to "reform the city." In reality, this was an anti-Medici coup. The *bàlia* formally charged Cosimo with high treason, ironically accusing him of prolonging the war with Lucca to line his own pockets—a charge likely true, though the witnesses had been tortured. Rinaldo demanded the death penalty, but he now found his position weakening. The Medici bank's vast international network meant that foreign powers, like Venice, sent envoys pleading for Cosimo's release. The supposedly loyal *gonfaloniere* took a bribe from the Medici and feigned illness to avoid participating. Most critically, Rinaldo was not sufficiently ruthless. He failed to arrest other key Medici family members, who were now raising mercenaries outside the city. He had scotched the snake, not killed it. The *bàlia*'s verdict was not execution, but banishment to Padua for ten years. Brought to hear his sentence, Cosimo gave a disingenuous speech, echoing Cicero, the great Roman humanist model who had also been exiled by a rival before making a triumphant return. "My troubles will be easy to bear," Cosimo declared, "as I know that my adversity will bring peace and happiness to the city." With these words, he was signaling to everyone who understood the classical reference: "I will be back." Cosimo's exile was a triumphant progress. He was greeted as an honored guest wherever he went, eventually settling in Venice, where he lived like a prince. Back in Florence, Rinaldo raged at his supporters, recognizing they had achieved the worst of all worlds. Over the winter, the Albizzi failed to dismantle the Medici network or win over their clients. Momentum drained away from their cause. In the late summer of 1434, a new Signoria election resulted in a Medici majority. Rinaldo called for an armed coup, but his allies wavered. The new Signoria summoned Cosimo back and sent a message to Rinaldo, inviting him to the palace for an "urgent meeting"—the same trap laid for Cosimo a year earlier. Rinaldo did not fall for it. He returned to his house and called in mercenaries. But over the next few days, his support melted away. The pro-Medici Signoria had made its own military preparations. The standoff was resolved by an unlikely mediator: **Pope Eugenius IV**, who was residing in Florence after being kicked out of Rome by a mob. Needing money to return, he had an obvious benefactor in mind. He brokered a deal, advising Rinaldo that he could not win and should surrender in exchange for leniency. By the end of September, the struggle was over. Cosimo made a great progress back to Florence, entering the city in triumph on October 6th, greeted by crowds chanting his name. This reception was not entirely spontaneous; the city had been secured by hundreds of Medici soldiers, and anyone not a supporter knew to keep quiet. It was both a genuine upsurge of popular affection and the result of an intimidated population after a military coup. Cosimo, a serious man, now did what had to be done. He was ruthless without being overly bloody. The entire Albizzi clan was banished from Florence forever. Cosimo was elected *gonfaloniere* for two months—a symbolic gesture to show he was now the top man. He had moved from playing Cicero to playing Augustus. For the next thirty years, Cosimo would control Florence. Like Augustus, he kept the republican system intact in form. The difference was that now, every name pulled from a leather bag was certain to have been pre-approved by Cosimo and his allies. Those who stepped out of line were not killed, but they might find themselves with an unexpectedly large tax bill, be denied planning permission for a new palazzo, or, at worst, be banished. Foreigners described Cosimo as the lord of the city, yet he rarely held public office himself. He operated from the shadows, through his clients and surrogates. As Donald Weinstein wrote, Cosimo "liked to be seen as a benevolent father figure who embodied the traditional Florentine virtues." He was the first citizen, *primus inter pares*, not a prince. When protests against election rigging arose in 1458, he crushed them by calling a *parlamento*, policing the streets with troops from his Milanese allies, and securing full legal control over the electoral process. He would never be challenged again. His foreign policy was his other great success. Just as his father had bet on a future pope, Cosimo placed a bet in a Milanese succession crisis. For two centuries, Milan had been ruled by the Visconti family. The current duke, Filippo Maria Visconti, was a grotesque and neurotic character with no legitimate heir. His illegitimate daughter was married to Count **Francesco Sforza**, the son of an illiterate peasant who had founded Italy's best mercenary company. Sforza was a man of immense physical strength and ambition. Cosimo decided he was the man to back, lending him vast sums of money. With this backing, Sforza seized control of Milan. This created a formal alliance between Cosimo's Florence and Sforza's Milan, making the Medici effectively invulnerable. A lesser man might have used this power to expand Florence’s territory, but Cosimo was smarter. His priority was peace, because peace was good for business. ### Money, Art and Culture: Pater Patriae Cosimo is less famous than his grandson Lorenzo, yet he was arguably the greater man because he never lost sight of what mattered: the balance sheet. He expanded the Medici bank across Europe, with offices in London, Cologne, Bruges, and beyond. In one ten-year period after 1442, the bank made nearly 190,000 florins in profit—an amount likely underestimated due to creative bookkeeping. However, there was a hidden cost to all this wealth: the fate of his eternal soul. The Bible explicitly condemns usury—the charging of interest. Bankers in Dante's *Inferno* are weighed down by bags of gold in burning sand. To circumvent this, Florentine bankers used various fudges, pretending interest was a "gift" or disguising it as a commission fee on currency exchange. Cosimo, a serious man, worried this would not be enough. His solution was patronage. In 1439, he played a key part in hosting the **Council of Florence**, an ecumenical council of the Western and Eastern churches. Pope Eugenius IV, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Byzantine Emperor John Palaiologos all came to the city. The council resulted in a short-lived union between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, driven by the Emperor’s desperate need for help against the Ottoman Turks. For Cosimo, this was a triumph. Florence could not afford to host such an event, so he lent the city the money, taking home 14,000 florins in interest. This was a perfect fusion of politics, finance, faith, and culture. The council brought a flood of Greek scholars and manuscripts to Florence. This is when Plato, brought in Greek by scholars like Gemistus Plethon, truly entered the bloodstream of the Renaissance. Cosimo used his profits to launder his immortal soul. The Church taught that investing in monasteries and church buildings could earn God's forgiveness. Cosimo spent fortunes on San Lorenzo, the Medici family church, and on the baptistry of the cathedral. He donated to Santa Croce and other major churches. His most significant project was the Dominican monastery at **San Marco**. Worried about the "burning sand," he was advised by the Pope to invest heavily in it. Cosimo spent 30,000 florins—millions in modern terms—completely renovating it, creating a new church, refectory, and library filled with rare manuscripts. In return, Pope Eugenius IV gave Cosimo a bull of exculpation, a pardon for his sins, which Cosimo had mounted above the sacristy door. He famously commissioned the friar **Fra Angelico** to paint a mystical fresco in every monk's cell. Art was also about status. In the 1440s, Cosimo commissioned the architect Michelozzo to build the **Palazzo Medici**, a cross between a Gothic fortress and a classical palace. Within its arcades were classical busts and two of the most famous artworks of the Renaissance, both by Cosimo's favorite sculptor, Donatello. His bronze *David* was the first freestanding nude male sculpture since antiquity. His *Judith and Holofernes* was equally revolutionary. Both were biblical themes rendered in a classical style, and cast in bronze—a material so expensive it was a definitive statement of wealth. By the 1450s, Cosimo's health was in decline. He suffered from terrible gout, a theme of this period. He and his sons, Piero and Giovanni, who also had the affliction, were once found by a visitor all lying in bed together, groaning with pain. Giovanni, Cosimo's favorite, died young at 42, likely from gout-related kidney failure or a heart attack. Cosimo never recovered from the loss and died just under a year later, in August 1464. At his funeral, the Signoria gave him the title **Pater Patriae**—Father of his Country. This was the same title held by Cicero and Augustus, a comparison he would have loved. Yet, one of his opponents, Marco Parenti, wrote after his death: > "Not for many years had Florence been so prosperous. But on his death, everyone rejoiced. Such was their love and desire for liberty. It appeared to the Florentines that Cosimo's style of government had brought them to subjection and servitude. And from this they believed that his death would liberate them." Whether it would or not remains to be seen. --- ## # Lorenzo de' Medici - The Magnificent We open with a fiery sermon delivered by a priest named Antonio Maffei to the people of San Gimignano in Tuscany: > Citizens of San Gimignano, heeded well my words. You must repent. Repent and seek forgiveness. For your wicked ways have incurred the wrath of a demon. Summoned by your sins, he now walks our world cloaked in shadow and darkness. And everywhere he treads, death follows. Why, you ask? Because you have strayed and sacrificed your liberty to that wretch Lorenzo de' Medici... You are puppets enslaved by purse strings, won over by poisonous words... You have lost your virtue... And this draws the demons in to feed. This speech follows one of the most dramatic episodes in Renaissance history: the **Pazzi Conspiracy**, a plot to murder Lorenzo de' Medici—known as "the Magnificent"—during High Mass in the Duomo of Florence on April 26, 1478. However, those alert to the nuances of 15th-century Florentine rhetoric may find this speech suspect. It is, in fact, not genuine. It is a scene from the video game *Assassin's Creed 2*. The real Antonio Maffei, who played a significant part in this story, was in no condition to give such a speech, as he had just undergone a peculiarly excruciating surgical procedure. The fact that this moment features in a best-selling video game speaks to the enduring, glamorous, and romantic reputation of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the very embodiment of Renaissance Florence at its peak. In the last section, we examined the foundations of Medici power under Lorenzo's grandfather, Cosimo. Today, we will look at Lorenzo himself, peeling back the myths of his magnificence to focus on the story of the Pazzi Conspiracy, an event of near-Gothic horror that almost destroyed him. ### Legacy of Cosimo & Rise to Power Lorenzo de' Medici was born on January 1, 1449, in Florence. His father was **Piero de' Medici**, Cosimo's son, who was being groomed to succeed as head of the Medici political network. His mother, **Lucrezia Tornabuoni**, was a remarkable woman from a rich patrician family. Deeply religious and a keen patron of the arts, she was a poet in her own right, composing hymns and verse translations of the Bible. Lorenzo had three sisters and a younger brother, Giuliano, who will feature in this story in a thrillingly bloodstained manner. Lorenzo was said to be an ungainly boy, but he was athletic and exceptionally clever. He received a classic mid-15th-century humanist education from private tutors, steeped in Latin, Aristotle, and the newly fashionable Plato. By the age of 15, his family was already training him for a life in politics, sending him on diplomatic missions to Pisa, Milan, Bologna, and Naples. At 17, in 1466, he traveled to Rome to meet with Pope Paul II to discuss the Medici concession for the alum mines at Tolfa. Alum, a mineral salt crucial for dyeing textiles, was a vital component of the Medici financial empire. By this time, his life had already changed dramatically. His grandfather Cosimo, the *paterfamilias* of the family business, had died. Cosimo was not a duke or a prince, but the de facto ruler of Florence by virtue of his control over the bank and its associated political network. Unlike an Augustus, he possessed no formal raft of powers; his influence was shadowy and personal. It was therefore not guaranteed that Medici influence would continue. The man who succeeded him was [Lorenzo's father, Piero.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piero_di_Cosimo_de%27_Medici) At 48, Piero was in poor physical condition, suffering from massive eczema, arthritis, and the hereditary affliction of gout, which earned him the moniker *Il Gottoso*, "the Gouty." He appeared unappealing, with swollen glands and drooping eyelids that made him seem perpetually asleep. Yet beneath this exterior was a sharp and methodical mind. Though he is often underplayed in the historical record—he was head of the family for only four and a half years—he was a far more impressive figure than his reputation suggests. Upon taking over, he commissioned a report on the family finances and was shocked to find the bank had overextended itself, particularly with loans to profligate rulers like Edward IV of England and the Dukes of Burgundy, as well as to the Florentine elite. His decision to call in these loans triggered a financial crash in Florence and a split within the Medici party. In the summer of 1466, old-guard allies called for an end to Medici domination and a return to the "free" republican system. Piero, despite his gout, demonstrated his father's ruthlessness. He spent heavily to bring in troops from Milan, raised a private army of mercenaries, and stationed them in the city center on the eve of the Signoria elections. The opposition crumbled, its leaders were banished, and Piero cemented his power. A reality of the Medici story, often obscured by its association with art and culture, is a foundation upon armed intimidation, election rigging, and a form of political gangsterism. Like his father, Piero was a keen artistic patron, spending lavishly on coins, manuscripts, and church decorations. He was a great admirer of [the sculptor Donatello,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donatello) and upon the artist's death, Piero arranged for him to be buried next to Cosimo. It was Piero who promoted a young painter named **Sandro Botticelli**, the son of a tanner. Botticelli was invited to live in the Palazzo Medici and was treated as one of the family. In his famous painting, *The Adoration of the Magi*, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Botticelli included portraits of Cosimo, Piero, and, on the right, the young Lorenzo.  *[Sandro Botticelli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandro_Botticelli) - [Adoration of the Magi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoration_of_the_Magi_%28Botticelli%29) - c. 1475–1476 CE* Piero and Lucrezia sought a wife for their 18-year-old son, an early age for marriage by Florentine standards. This was a sign of their rising ambition; they were beginning to rank themselves alongside the princely and aristocratic families of Europe, for whom early marriage was the norm. While they could not become aristocrats themselves—in Florence, nobility barred one from office—they sought to live like them and be treated as such abroad. Lorenzo’s bride was a foreign noblewoman, the 16-year-old **Clarice Orsini**, an heiress from a Roman family with large estates near Naples. Lucrezia, after inspecting her at Mass in St. Peter's, reported back: "She's tall and not unattractive... Altogether, I think the girl is a good deal above the average." Lorenzo himself was unconventional in appearance, with long dark hair, a broken-looking nose, a jutting jaw, and a high-pitched, nasal voice. Yet, he was known to be charming, energetic, and clever. He loved sports, including a 27-a-side version of football called *calcio fiorentino*, as well as music, poetry, and elaborate pranks. He was also fiercely competitive and prone to tantrums when he lost. His betrothal to Clarice in 1469 was celebrated with a massive tournament that cost 10,000 ducats. Lorenzo, though not a skilled fighter, was declared the winner. The wedding was a gigantic feast featuring the strange culinary combinations typical of the era, such as calf's liver stuffed with marzipan and jelly made from a goose, all washed down with 300 barrels of wine. The day was marred by a bad omen: it rained so heavily that everyone's fine clothes were ruined. ### Lorenzo becomes head of the family Weeks later, Piero the Gouty's health declined, and on December 2, 1469, he died. He had done a solid job, weathering protests and strengthening the family's alliances. More importantly, he had successfully established the principle of hereditary succession within a republican framework. The proof came the night before his funeral. At a meeting of Medici loyalists, an elderly crony of Cosimo's, Tommaso Soderini, declared of Lorenzo, "Give the boy his chance." The assembled party agreed. Lorenzo, feigning reluctance, accepted "the care of the state." He later wrote, "I did it solely to protect my friends and possessions, for it fares ill in Florence for anyone who is rich and does not control the state." At not yet 21 years of age, having already secured the support of the Duke of Milan, Lorenzo de' Medici assumed control of the bank, the family, and the fortunes of Florence. His rule began with feasting, dancing, horse races, and mock battles. He turned the Piazza della Signoria into a circus, staging fights between lions and dogs and, most bizarrely, filling the square with stallions before setting a mare loose among them. A diarist noted, "It was the most marvelous entertainment for girls to behold." This extravagance signaled a key difference between Lorenzo and his forebears. His nickname, ***Il Magnifico*** ("the Magnificent"), was a standard honorific for rich merchants, a constant reminder that he was not a *principe*. Yet a prince is what he desperately wanted to be. Unlike his father and grandfather who lent money, Lorenzo borrowed it, trading on the bank's reputation to fund his lifestyle. He borrowed 61,000 florins from his cousin and 10,000 from the Duke of Milan—a reversal of the traditional relationship where the Medici bankrolled Milan. The historian Mary Hollingsworth paints him as an arrogant, spoiled rich kid who blew his inheritance, a "depressing tale of greed and inexperience from which the Medici brand never really recovered." While one might argue that his princely posturing ultimately secured his descendants ducal status, the immediate consequence was that the rot had set in. He had no interest in banking, the foundation of his family's power. ### The Volterra Massacre To wield power in Renaissance Italy, one could not be a saint. Lorenzo's chief ally was the Duke of Milan, **Galeazzo Maria Sforza**, a patron of the arts but also a man of profound cruelty. He raped the wives and daughters of Milanese nobles and took sadistic pleasure in devising and supervising tortures. Lorenzo himself demonstrated a similar ruthlessness. In 1472, he became involved in a dispute over a newly discovered alum mine[^Alum] in Volterra, a town under Florentine control[^Volterra], cheaper than that from the Medici-controlled mine near Rome. [^Alum]: Alum was used in a variety of manufacturing processes, in particular for the dyeing of woolen cloth. [^Volterra]: Although formally an autonomous commune, Volterra had long been under Florentine influence. A 1361 agreement gave Florence taxation rights and military control, including the office of captain, thereafter generally held by Florentine ottimati, who, as happened elsewhere in the dominion, developed patronage ties with prominent Volterrans, protected the city against infringements of rights or excessive taxes, and extended loans for tax debts. As these ties expanded, Florentine factional divisions were soon replicated in Volterran politics. When Volterra resisted the imposition of the Catasto in 1429, the Medici became its chief patrons and defenders, and after Cosimo achieved power the Florentine government cancelled all back taxes owed by the Volterrans. Volterra subsequently became a fertile field of patronage for several members of the family but also a site of rivalries that later developed within the regime. A group of investors petitioned the Volterran priors for a lease to mine and sell alum; it was granted, but then contested by a subsequent committee of priors who claimed that the vote to approve it had been tainted by corruption and that a resource on public land ought to be exploited for the general benefit, not the profit of a private company. Some years earlier, when alum was discovered in papal territory, the Medici bank secured exclusive rights to purchase papal alum and sell it throughout Europe at prices kept high by their monopoly. Opponents of the Volterran lease contended that Lorenzo had organized the company in his clients’ hands in order to control the new source and prevent increased supply from driving down prices. Opposition to the lease drew increasing support, especially when it became known that among the company’s partners were two prominent Volterran allies of the Medici and a Florentine Medicean, Antonio Giugni. Since it was widely believed that the company represented Lorenzo’s, and the Medici bank’s, interest in controlling the alum market, the dispute became a test of strength between Mediceans and anti-Mediceans in both Florence and Volterra. In June 1471 the Volterran government, now controlled by opponents of the lease, seized the mine and expelled its partners and workers. Florence’s captain in Volterra, Ristoro Serristori, a Medici ally with two brothers in that year’s balia, wrote letters to Lorenzo and the Signoria (the latter sent first to Lorenzo for his approval) vociferously defending the company and denouncing the Volterrans, calling them “donkeys to be thrashed [asini da bastonate]” who needed a stern lesson for their insolence. He alerted Lorenzo to the political implications of the dispute, warning him that, just after the seizure and Volterra’s appointment of envoys charged with defending its actions before the Florentine Signoria, in Volterra it was being “publicly said that what [its government] did was done with the advice and encouragement of leading citizens [in Florence], from whom they will always enjoy every favor. I write this to you so that you will know how to proceed. They say that everyone is on their side except you and some crazy people.” Several weeks later he commended Lorenzo for having finally “opened his eyes” to the danger and urged him to “recognize friends as friends and enemies as enemies.” These warnings got Lorenzo’s attention and convinced him that prominent Florentines were using the issue to undermine him. In fact, the seizure of the mine occurred when the Florentine Standard bearer of Justice was Bardo Corsi, an ally and client of Jacopo Pazzi and an outspoken critic of the Milanese alliance. Lorenzo saw these simultaneous challenges in Florence and Volterra as no coincidence, and this no doubt confirmed in him the necessity for a balia, which came in July. After Lorenzo reinforced his control of key political institutions in Florence, Serristori punished four Volterrans for taking the alum mine. Succeeding Serristori in October as captain in Volterra was Bernardo Corbinelli, who adopted a much more conciliatory approach. In fact, he was rebuked by the Signoria for failing to carry out its instructions and suspected of looking the other way when, in February 1472, angry Volterrans attacked and killed the two leading Volterran Mediceans among the company’s partners. Their murder set in motion the recourse to a solution by force. The Volterrans introduced a militia into the city and appointed a committee for defense, which Corbinelli allowed and approved while also exiling several leaders of the local pro-Medici faction. Antonio Ridolfi, sent by the Florentine Signoria to restore order, sent back a reassuring picture of the situation denying that there was a crisis. Fearful of reprisals, the Volterran government dispatched emissaries to Florence to announce its willingness to restore the mine to the company. But Lorenzo had made up his mind, not only to recover the mine for his friends, but also to punish those who were using the dispute to weaken him politically. He rejected all appeals for compromise, both from the Volterrans, who even asked him to arbitrate the dispute, and from the Florentine bishop of Volterra, who wrote him several letters urging a peaceful settlement. What Lorenzo found intolerable was that leading Florentines were pursuing their own independent courses and policies in relations with the Volterrans, and he thus opted for a military strategy, both to punish the Volterrans and to convey a warning to uncooperative Florentine ottimati. On April 30, 1472, Lorenzo’s revamped Cento authorized the appointment of a war balia. In order to mute criticism, Lorenzo carefully included among its twenty members, in addition of course to himself, Antonio Ridolfi, Bernardo Corbinelli, his occasional rivals Tommaso Soderini and Jacopo Pazzi (who had also advocated a peaceful solution), and other loyal allies and members of leading families (Pitti, Guicciardini, Serristori, Canigiani, and Gianfigliazzi). Both Lorenzo and the Volterrans looked for allies beyond Tuscany, and he of course succeeded where they failed. Lorenzo engaged the services of the duke of Urbino and captain for hire, Federico da Montefeltro, who led a combination of his own forces and Florentine and Milanese troops against Volterra in May. To avoid a siege and possible sack, Volterra agreed on June 16 to a negotiated surrender that explicitly assured the town’s safety with guarantees from Lorenzo and the Florentine government. But two days later, Federico’s soldiers entered the city, massacred, and raped an unrecorded number of citizens, and sacked and plundered the town.  *[Daniele da Volterra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniele_da_Volterra) - [Massacre of the Innocents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_the_Innocents_(Daniele_da_Volterra)) - 1557 CE* Some blamed Federico, others the Milanese soldiers, still others the Volterran militia for provoking the attack, but the Volterrans themselves blamed Lorenzo. Earlier in June he and the war balia had urged Federico and the Florentine commissioners to win the war at all costs, “with less regard for the safety of [Volterra] than for winning in whatever way it takes. ... Be determined to conquer this town in any way, demonstrating with actions that, since they have been unwilling to have compassion for their patria, they do not deserve greater compassion from anyone else. . . . Make them understand their error in not having had greater fear of a sack.” Lorenzo wanted an unconditional surrender, with the safety of the town entirely at the discretion of Federico and the commissioners, and after the event many Volterrans were convinced they had been deliberately misled and betrayed, that the agreements had been merely a ruse to get Federico’s forces into the city for the town’s castigation. Federico claimed he was unable to control the soldiers, not all of whom were his, but the Volterrans found that difficult to believe given that he limited the sack to twelve hours and removed the army by the end of the awful day. When he heard the news, Lorenzo claimed to be saddened and disturbed, and, with the horror accomplished, he urged restraint. He decided that “we won’t say anything more about the sack, in order to forget it as quickly as possible. Perhaps [the Volterrans] merited this because of some sin of theirs. We must be content with our own conscience and the actions that we and this illustrious lord [Federico] took to prevent this evil from happening.” Chancellor Scala delivered an oration of praise and congratulation for Federico in front of the palace, but for decades thereafter chroniclers and poets wrote of the massacre in anything but a celebratory mode. Francesco Guicciardini later defended the commissioners, because his grandfather Jacopo was among them, claiming that they tried to stop the violence and that the Florentines were as distressed by the sack as they could possibly be. Still later, Machiavelli (Florentine Histories 7.30) wrote that the “news of this victory was received with great happiness by the Florentines; and because it had been entirely Lorenzo’s undertaking [tutta impresa di Lorenzo], it greatly increased his reputation.” ### The Pope Turns on the Medici Such actions inevitably provoke powerful enemies. In Florence, the Medici were not the only great banking family. There were the **Pazzi**, an older and more prestigious family whose ancestor had brought back stone flints from the altar of the Holy Sepulchre during the First Crusade. The head of the Pazzi family was **Jacopo de' Pazzi**, a man in his mid-fifties who was both a miser and a gambler. He watched Lorenzo with the cold eyes of a predator. Another ruthless character watching Lorenzo was **Pope Sixtus IV**. A self-made man from a fishing town, Sixtus was a clever bruiser—a big, gruff, toothless man with a massive head and an intimidating expression. He was also incredibly corrupt, even by papal standards, making six of his nephews cardinals. Initially, Sixtus confirmed the Medici as papal bankers. But they had a massive falling out in 1473. The Pope wanted to buy the town of Imola for his favorite nephew (and likely son), **Girolamo Riario**. He asked the Medici bank for a loan. Lorenzo, who wanted Imola for Florence, refused. The Pope, furious, turned to the Pazzi bank, and Jacopo gave him the money. A year later, Sixtus stripped the Medici of the papal account and gave it to the Pazzi. He then appointed Jacopo de' Pazzi's cousin, **Francesco Salviati**, as the new Archbishop of Pisa, a city under Florentine control. This was a massive snub. By the end of 1476, the tide was turning against Lorenzo. The Pope was now his enemy. Then, on Boxing Day, his ally, the psychopathic Galeazzo Maria Sforza, was assassinated in Milan, plunging Florence's key ally into a succession crisis. A few weeks later, three men met in secret in Rome: Girolamo Riario, the Pope's nephew; Francesco Salviati, the new Archbishop of Pisa; and **Francesco de' Pazzi**, the arrogant manager of the Pazzi bank in Rome. They met to discuss one thing: how to get rid of Lorenzo de' Medici. Francesco de' Pazzi, the brains of the operation, sought to hire a hardbitten mercenary commander named **Montesecco**. Montesecco refused to act without the Pope’s approval. A meeting was arranged with Sixtus IV himself. The Pope was elliptical. He stated that he hated bloodshed and would be sad if Lorenzo were killed, but he also expressed a strong desire to see a "change" in Florence and for Lorenzo to "disappear from the picture." The message was clear. The final link was Jacopo de' Pazzi. Initially, he was cautious, telling Montesecco, "They're going to break their necks." But when he was assured of papal backing, he relented, with one crucial condition: they must kill not only Lorenzo, but also his brother Giuliano, at the same time. After months of planning, an opportunity arose in early 1478. A young cardinal, another of the Pope's relatives, was visiting Florence, and Lorenzo was hosting a banquet for him. This was to be the moment. Montesecco stationed his mercenaries in the hills outside the city. But then, Giuliano came down with an eye infection and was unlikely to attend. The plan was off. The conspirators met hurriedly. With word leaking out, it was now or never. A new plan was forged. On Sunday, April 26, the Medici brothers were certain to attend High Mass in the Duomo with the visiting cardinal. This was the place. They would be cut down in front of the altar. Montesecco, however, recoiled at the sacrilege of committing murder in a cathedral, fearing God’s witness. He was replaced by two "lean, embittered priests," Bagnone and Maffei. Francesco de' Pazzi would kill Giuliano. Archbishop Salviati would seize the Palazzo della Signoria with the mercenaries. The signal would be the ringing of the sacristy bell at the elevation of the Host. On the morning of the 26th, Lorenzo walked the three minutes from his palace to the Duomo with his guest. They were joined by Archbishop Salviati, who then made his excuses, claiming his mother was ill. Inside the cathedral, people stood and mingled. Giuliano, however, had not yet arrived. Feeling ill, he had considered skipping Mass. Francesco de' Pazzi and another conspirator went to fetch him. In a chilling detail, on the way to the Duomo, Francesco put his arm around Giuliano, ostensibly in friendship but actually to check if he was wearing armor. He was not. It was midday. The service began. The conspirators took their places. At the crucial moment, the priest lifted the Host, the congregation bowed their heads, and the bell rang. Maffei put a hand on Lorenzo’s shoulder and struck with his dagger. Lorenzo twisted away, the blade slicing his neck but not delivering a fatal blow. Blood spurted. Lorenzo wrapped his cloak around his arm as a shield, drew his sword, and slashed at the priests. He then leaped over the altar rail and sprinted for the bronze doors of the sacristy. Giuliano’s assassins were more efficient. As he bowed his head, a conspirator shouted, "Take that, you traitor!" and slashed at his head, nearly splitting it in two. Francesco de' Pazzi then fell upon him, stabbing him again and again. Giuliano collapsed in a pool of blood, suffering nineteen wounds in total. The killers saw Lorenzo escaping and ran to cut him off. But a partner in the Medici bank, Francesco Nori, threw himself in their path. He was stabbed and killed, but his sacrifice bought Lorenzo vital seconds. Lorenzo and his friends made it through the sacristy doors, slamming and jamming them shut. The cathedral erupted in chaos. The crowd, hearing of the coup attempt, rallied to the Medici. People poured into the piazza, chanting "Palle, Palle!" ("Balls, Balls!"), a reference to the Medici coat of arms. Archbishop Salviati’s attempt to seize the Palazzo failed; the *gonfaloniere* fought him off with a cooking spit. The plotters were overwhelmed. The Archbishop's mercenaries were slaughtered, their heads paraded through the city on lances. The retribution was swift and savage. The Archbishop was cornered, a rope tied around his neck, and he was thrown from an upper window of the Palazzo della Signoria. Francesco de' Pazzi, stripped naked, was hanged beside him. In his death throes, the Archbishop sank his teeth into Francesco's chest. Around 80 people were lynched in the ensuing riots. The two priests were caught, castrated, and then one was hanged and the other beheaded. Montesecco was interrogated under torture, revealing the plot's details before he too was beheaded. Jacopo de' Pazzi fled but was recognized and dragged back to Florence. He was tortured, stripped naked, and hanged from a window. His body was thrown into the River Arno, fished out by children who flogged it, and eventually his head was cut off and used as a door-knocker on the Palazzo Pazzi. The entire Pazzi family was banished, their property confiscated, their symbol erased from the city. Botticelli was commissioned to paint a mural of the conspirators hanging from ropes. Across Europe, the conspiracy was a sensational story. But the Pope was not shocked. Upon hearing of the plot's failure, he promptly excommunicated Lorenzo and the entire Signoria of Florence for the crime of killing priests and an archbishop. In June 1478, he placed Florence under an interdict, forbidding the administration of sacraments. He then called for a coalition of Italian states to stage an intervention against the "excommunicated and heretical" Lorenzo de' Medici. The Medici bank was expelled from Rome and Naples, its assets seized. An army from Naples, led by the heir to the throne, began a slow, grinding march towards Florence. Lorenzo, having blown his money on princely extravagance, struggled to raise an army. The war dragged on, devastating the Florentine economy. Bread riots broke out. By the late summer of 1479, a friend wrote to Lorenzo that the city was exhausted. Lorenzo came to an extraordinary decision. On December 5, 1479, he sent a message to the Signoria, announcing that he was making the ultimate sacrifice. "I have decided to sail for Naples immediately," he wrote. "I am the chief target of our city's enemies. So, I have decided to surrender myself into their hands, and perhaps that way we will have peace. The war began with the blood of my brother and of myself. And perhaps it is the will of God that this is how we will end it." In an incredible gamble, Lorenzo, the playboy and patron of the arts, was risking his freedom, and perhaps his life, to save the people of Florence. *** ### Savonarola the Mad Monk > I announce this good news to the city that Florence will be more glorious, richer, more powerful than she has ever been. First, glorious in the sight of God and of men. And you, oh Florence, will be the reformation of all Italy... Second, O Florence, you will have riches beyond number, and God will multiply all things for you. And third, you will spread your empire, and thus you will have power, both temporal and spiritual... But if you do not heed what I have told you, then you will have none of it. > > Prophecy delivered from a Florentine pulpit on December 10, 1492, by the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola[^Savonarola] [^Savonarola]: Savonarola is one of the most controversial figures in Renaissance history. While he begins with the register of a late 15th-century preacher, his promises of unparalleled glory and riches resonate with a timeless political appeal. Yet anyone familiar with his story knows that these prophecies would culminate in scenes of fire and torture. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, in his book *Monsters*, declared Savonarola "one of the most evil men who ever lived," who presided over an "intolerant, sanctimonious, and murderous reign of terror." Others have seen him as a Catholic martyr, an early Protestant, or even a saint. When Lorenzo announced his departure, the councilors of Florence reportedly burst into tears but ultimately endorsed his mission as the best way to save the republic. He sailed the next day and, a few days before Christmas, arrived in Naples. There he was greeted by King Ferrante, a man who epitomized the contradictions of the Renaissance ruler. A member of the House of Aragon, Ferrante was a classic humanist—a patron of poetry, music, and the new technology of printing—but he was also shallow, ruthless, and vindictive. One account notes that he liked to keep his opponents close at hand, preferably dead and embalmed, "dressed in the costume which they wore in their lifetime." Despite this macabre habit, Lorenzo established a good rapport with the King. He had been in secret communication with the Neapolitan court and knew that Ferrante, worried about brewing tensions with France, was eager for the war to end. They bonded over their shared love for the classics. Lorenzo, for his part, cut a magnificent dash. Upon his arrival, he purchased the freedom of the galley slaves on his ship and distributed money to poor Neapolitan girls. This performance of magnificence was, however, built on smoke and mirrors; he was paying for the trip by mortgaging his country estate for 60,000 florins. The gamble paid off. He secured a peace deal—not an advantageous one, as Florence had to cede territory and pay a large indemnity—but a deal nonetheless. He returned to Florence the following March as a hero, greeted with fireworks and ringing bells. Now the hero of the hour, Lorenzo seized the opportunity to consolidate his power. Until this point, he had, like his grandfather Cosimo, hidden his authority behind a pretense of constitutionalism. Now, arguing that the city's financial precarity required a firmer hand, he called an emergency assembly and established a new **Council of 70**. This body gave him the power to veto any legislation, control of Florence's foreign policy, and final approval over every single appointment to office. Something fundamental had changed. While Lorenzo still maintained the fiction that he was a private citizen, official documents began to refer to him as "the first man" in the state. He was the only man in Florence permitted to carry weapons, and he now moved with a personal bodyguard of armed mercenaries, including figures known as Black Martin, Morgante the Giant, and a man called simply "Mutant." In the Palazzo della Signoria, busts of Roman Republican heroes were now joined by portraits of Roman emperors, a telling sign of a political culture shifting its identification from Republic to Empire, with the Medici as its Julio-Claudians. The great republican hero Cicero was rebranded as the man who, like Lorenzo, had foiled a conspiracy. For an impressionable Florentine teenager named Niccolò Machiavelli, these events would have a profound impact. ### The Dark Side of Lorenzo’s Florence There was a dark side to this new order. Plots to assassinate Lorenzo were uncovered every few years, though whether they were real or imagined is impossible to determine. The vengeance enacted was brutal. In one instance from 1480, a hermit accused of plotting against Lorenzo had the soles of his feet stripped, held over a fire until the fat ran, and was then forced to walk on coarse salt until he died. The chronicler noted, "It was never really established whether he had sinned or not." This was a repressive regime maintained by spectacle and fear. For most Florentines, however, as the historian Christopher Hibbert notes, this was acceptable. They had food, exciting public holidays, and a form of justice—the classic formula of bread and circuses. Lorenzo’s rule was aided by fortune. In 1480, the Ottoman landing at Otranto in southern Italy sent a wave of panic across the peninsula. The atrocities reported—including the murder of the archbishop at his own altar and the martyrdom of 800 citizens—fed a growing mood of apocalyptic anxiety. This threat forced Pope Sixtus IV to reconcile with Florence. Then, in 1481, Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror died, and the Ottoman threat receded. Shortly after, Pope Sixtus himself dropped dead. His successor, Innocent VIII, was a more worldly and easygoing figure who, despite his name, had seven children. Lorenzo won him over with gifts of wine and cloth and scored two major diplomatic successes. He married his daughter Maddalena to the Pope's son, Franceschetto. More significantly, he persuaded the Pope to name his second son, Giovanni, a cardinal at the age of just thirteen, in exchange for a loan of 100,000 ducats. This son would become Pope Leo X, Martin Luther’s great antagonist, whose sale of indulgences to rebuild St. Peter's would spark the Reformation. With a cardinal in the family, the Medici could now rank themselves alongside the princes of Italy. Lorenzo cultivated this image, surrounding himself with intellectuals like the scholar Angelo Poliziano and the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, whose *Oration on the Dignity of Man* is considered a manifesto of the Renaissance. Lorenzo himself was a poet, writing in the Tuscan dialect, which helped establish it as the foundation of modern Italian. His work ranged from the profound ("How futile every hope is that we have... We learn from our master grave") to the bawdy ("Two, we've all got cucumbers and big ones, too... Open wide your mouths, and suck them in"). He was a passionate collector of art, curios, and manuscripts, spending a fortune on the Medici library. Lorenzo is remembered as the great Renaissance patron, but this is a misconception. He commissioned far less art than his grandfather Cosimo or his cousin, also named Lorenzo, who was the patron for Botticelli's most famous works, *Primavera* and the *Birth of Venus*. Lorenzo the Magnificent's genius lay in using art as an instrument of soft power, sending artists like Botticelli to work on the Sistine Chapel after his reconciliation with the Pope. He was, above all, a supreme talent-spotter. He recognized the genius of a young apprentice from rural Tuscany named **Leonardo da Vinci** and, in 1488, recruited another promising pupil for his new art school: **Michelangelo**. To have discovered these two figures is perhaps patronage enough. His contemporaries saw him as their peer. Even the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II was said to have sent him a menagerie including a lion and a giraffe in 1487. Yet, as Machiavelli would later observe, his success was contingent. While Lorenzo was alive, his prudence and fortune were admired. But this glittering facade was built on a mountain of debt. Unlike his predecessors, Lorenzo completely mismanaged the Medici bank. The London office collapsed after making disastrous loans to Edward IV. The branches in Rome and Naples were losing money. Lorenzo’s main financial skill was not lending, but borrowing. He dipped into his cousins' trust funds, blackmailing them and eventually using public money from the Florentine treasury to pay them back. The historian Mary Hollingsworth argues he likely embezzled hundreds of thousands of florins, a story of corruption that rarely makes it into the annals of Medici history. By the end of the 1480s, the strain was showing, both financially and physically. His wife Clarice died of tuberculosis in 1488. Lorenzo, suffering from debilitating gout and eczema, was too ill to attend her funeral. He had to be carried by litter, unable to walk. His personal sickness mirrored a sickness in the body politic. The currency was devalued, the wool trade—once the bedrock of Florentine prosperity—was in decline as England began processing its own wool, and public resentment over Medici cronyism grew. It was at this moment of decline and discontent that a new voice began to cut through. ## Girolamo Savonarola - The Sword Over Italy This voice belonged to **Girolamo Savonarola**.[^savonarola] Born in Ferrara in 1452 to a professional family, he received a humanist education but experienced a personal crisis in his late teens, possibly a romantic rejection that left him with a sense of frustrated and repressed passion. In 1472, he wrote a poem, "On the Ruin of the World," decrying the sins of the papacy. Three years later, he joined the Dominican order in Bologna. The Dominicans were not a contemplative order; they were the "shock troops of the Lord," militant evangelists who thrived in the burgeoning, chaotic cities of late medieval Europe. Savonarola’s intense obsession with worldly corruption was a perfect fit. In 1482, he was sent to the convent of San Marco in Florence—a monastery deeply connected with the Medici, renovated by Cosimo and decorated by Fra Angelico. Initially, Savonarola was a poor preacher. His Ferrarese accent and harsh, croaky voice failed to engage the sophisticated Florentines. His breakthrough came when he found his theme: apocalypse. In San Gimignano in 1485, he began to preach of the Four Horsemen, the coming of the Antichrist, and the end of the world. This was not an unusual message. The fall of Constantinople thirty years earlier had fueled a massive mood of apocalyptic panic, and the new technology of the printing press had saturated Italy with prophetic and astrological texts. Preachers like Bernardino da Feltre had already held "bonfires of the vanities" in Florence, attacking lust, usury, and vanity. In the summer of 1490, in a surprising twist, Lorenzo de' Medici invited Savonarola back to Florence. Lorenzo likely saw him as a star attraction who could revitalize the sleepy monastery of San Marco, and potentially as a useful critic of the papacy should the need arise. Savonarola was now great box office. He was a short man in his late thirties with a hooked nose and glaring, intense eyes. His sermons were plain and fierce. A contemporary noted his power to persuade with visions of ruin, trumpets, dragons, and angelic battles. His followers, derisively called the *Piagnoni* ("weepers"), were often those who felt alienated and left behind by the Medicean regime. Savonarola’s message—that the rich would one day burn, and that poverty was a state of spiritual advantage—resonated deeply with them. He launched a culture war against the intellectual and artistic elite, attacking poetry, philosophy, and "artists who paint naked Venuses." Botticelli himself is said to have become a follower. In May 1491, Savonarola was elected prior of San Marco. As Lorenzo’s health failed, Savonarola’s rhetoric grew more extreme. By 1492, Lorenzo was dying at his country villa, his doctors treating him with an ineffective mixture of crushed pearls and precious stones. Omens abounded in Florence: the city's symbolic lions fought to the death, and lightning struck the lantern of the Duomo. When Lorenzo heard, he reportedly said, "I'm a dead man." On his deathbed, Lorenzo was visited by Savonarola. A later legend claims the friar demanded he renounce his wealth and restore Florence’s liberties, and that Lorenzo refused the final demand. The contemporary account by Poliziano, however, simply states that they prayed together and Savonarola gave him his blessing. On the evening of Sunday, April 8, 1492, Lorenzo the Magnificent died. His doctor, his remedies having failed, threw himself down a well. That night, people reported bolts of flame in the sky and wolves howling, portents that echo the epic tradition of Virgil. A week later, on Good Friday, Savonarola told his congregation he had seen a vision: a black cross stretching over the earth, inscribed with "the wrath of God," amidst a great storm that killed a host of people. Then, the sky cleared, and a golden cross rose from Jerusalem, inscribed with "the mercy of God," and all nations flocked to adore it. Addressing his congregation in the Duomo of Florence on the 13th of January, 1495. His sermon, which he later had printed and distributed across the city, stands the most ferocious of his pronouncements: > *All of a sudden, I saw the sword that quivered over Italy turn its point downward and like a great storm go among them and scourge them all. The quivering sword, I tell you, Florence, belongs to the king of France. That sword will be felt fluidly. Remember when I said three years ago now that a wind will come as in that figure of Elijah and that this wind would shake the mountain. This wind has come and it has shaken the princes of Italy. See now he has come just as I said. Tell me, Florence, where now are your fortresses? Where now are your strongholds? See now, he has come and still you do not believe.* The power of this rhetoric derives from its immediate context. Lorenzo the Magnificent is dead. French troops have crossed the Alps, making Italy bleed. The Medici dynasty, for decades the de facto rulers of the city, have been swept away. In their place stands Savonarola, a Dominican friar from Ferrara, preparing to purify Florence with a white-hot flame and lead its people into a new age of righteousness. History has often cast Savonarola as the villain, the archetypal mad monk—though, to be precise, he was a friar, not a monk. Yet, the question of whether history has been unfair to him warrants a deeper examination. At Lorenzo's deathbed was Savonarola, the intense, austere friar based in the monastery of San Marco, whose apocalyptic sermons had already taken Florence by storm. At that moment, the idea that he would succeed Lorenzo as the master of Florence seemed unthinkable, as everyone knew it would fall to Lorenzo's 22-year-old son, Piero. Piero de' Medici is an object lesson in dynastic decay. Handsome and spoiled by fortune, he was also entitled, arrogant, and lazy. He preferred the hunt to the ledger book, quickly alienating his Medici cousins and his father’s old guard. A murmur arose that the hereditary principle had failed—a particularly dangerous sentiment in a city that still called itself a republic. This internal fragility coincided with a watershed moment in world history. For Italy, the 1490s marked the beginning of its transformation into a frontline in the struggle between the great powers of Europe: France, the Holy Roman Empire under Maximilian I Hapsburg, and the newly unified kingdom of Spain. This was the dawn of the Italian Wars, a conflict that would last nearly seventy years, bringing with it unprecedented death and destruction fueled by new military technology and a more unrelenting, vengeful spirit. Florence, while wealthy, was no superpower. For any leader, the challenge would have been immense; for Piero, it was one he was uniquely unsuited to handle. ### The Fall of the Medici & The French Invasion The conflict began with Charles VIII of France, who asserted a claim to the throne of Naples through his Angevin grandmother. The Angevins had been expelled from Naples in 1442, replaced by the House of Aragon. However, Pope Innocent VIII, who detested the Aragonese dynasty in Naples, had been encouraging a French intervention. Charles, a short, remarkably ugly man who walked with both a crouch and a limp and twitched compulsively, was receptive. France was at peace, possessed the largest and most modern army in Europe, and fielded groundbreaking artillery firing iron cannonballs—a genuine game-changer in siege warfare. He also had the support of Milan, whose regent, Ludovico Sforza, loathed the Neapolitan royal family. Two developments accelerated the crisis. In August 1492, Pope Innocent VIII died and was succeeded by Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI, a figure who would give Renaissance popes their diabolical reputation. Then, in January 1494, King Ferrante of Naples died unexpectedly. This was the moment for Charles. In September 1494, a French army of 40,000 crossed the Alps. As they moved south, reports spread of their brutality: fortresses fell in hours, not months, followed by massacres, sackings, and the spread of syphilis, a notable French contribution to Renaissance culture. Florence’s dilemma was acute. Charles demanded safe passage, but Piero, closely allied with Naples through his wife, refused. In response, Charles expelled all Florentine merchants and bankers from France, delivering a massive economic shock. Despite panicked appeals from Florentine elites, Piero remained intransigent. By October 1494, Charles had seized the Tuscan frontier fortress at Fivizzano, slaughtering many inhabitants. He was now just three days from Florence. In this atmosphere of dark foreboding, one man appeared vindicated: Savonarola. He had been preaching for years that the end of days was at hand. His supporters saw his foresight not as shrewd geopolitical analysis but as genuine prophecy. Years prior, he had described a vision of "the sword of the Lord over the earth, quickly and soon." He foretold the coming of a new Cyrus the Great who would chasten the children of Israel—Florence. As his biographer Donald Weinstein notes, it was clear to any astute political observer from 1490 onward that a French invasion was imminent. His rhetoric reached its zenith on September 21, 1494. Preaching in the packed cathedral—which held 30,000 in a city of 50,000—he took as his text God’s decision to unleash the Great Flood: "Behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth." The philosopher Pico della Mirandola later wrote that he felt his hair stand on end. It is said that Michelangelo was present and fled to Bologna in terror. Savonarola’s message was one of repentance: the Florentines, like those who found safety in Noah’s Ark, must take refuge in the spiritual ark of Jesus Christ. This summons to repent in the face of apocalypse resonated deeply, much as modern calls for collective penance in the face of climate or political crises have. While Savonarola preached, Piero panicked. Emulating his father’s famous diplomatic mission to Naples, he rode out to the French camp without informing the Signoria, the city's council. Charles VIII greeted him with contempt, demanding control of Tuscan fortresses, the ports of Pisa and Livorno, and a subsidy of 200,000 ducats. Piero crumbled, agreeing to everything in exchange for remaining master of Florence. The French are said to have laughed in his face. When he returned on November 8, the Signoria, already appalled by the terms, had dispatched a rival delegation that included Savonarola himself—an extraordinary choice, given he was not a Florentine. The next day, when Piero tried to enter the Palazzo della Signoria, he found the doors barred. The great bell, the *Vacca*, began to toll, and the people poured into the streets chanting, *"Popolo e libertà!"* A revolution had broken out. Piero and his family fled to Venice. This was a hammer blow to the Medici. The Signoria banished the family forever, placed a bounty on Piero’s head, seized the Medici bank's assets, and looted their palace. In a potent symbol of the power shift, Donatello’s bronze statues of David and Judith were moved from the Palazzo Medici to the Palazzo della Signoria. The plaque on Cosimo de' Medici's tomb bearing the words *Pater Patriae* (Father of his Country) was prized off. Meanwhile, Savonarola's delegation met Charles in Pisa, a catastrophic meeting for Florence as it marked the loss of its main seaport, a blow from which its economy arguably never recovered. Savonarola addressed the French king, hailing him as an instrument of God’s plan: "At last, O king, you have come. You have come as the minister of God, the minister of justice." Charles, flattered, agreed to spare the city and recognize a new republican regime. On November 17, the French army marched into Florence not as conquerors, but as guests. After securing a subsidy of 120,000 florins, Charles departed for Naples. The hero of the hour was Savonarola. He had foreseen the crisis and negotiated a peaceful resolution. For many, this confirmed he was a true prophet, an intermediary between Florence and God. Critically, Savonarola himself came to believe this. He was not a charlatan, as Machiavelli would later suggest, but a man thoroughly convinced of his divine mission. With the Medici gone, Florence set about remaking its republic. Following Savonarola's sermons, which praised the Venetian model, they established a Grand Council, widening the political franchise to as many as one in four Florentine men. Though Savonarola, as a cleric and a non-citizen, could not hold office, his moral authority was immense. He became a figure much like Calvin in Geneva, a spiritual guide for a godly republic. Yet, there was also a local precedent: the Medici themselves had ruled from behind the scenes, using influence and charisma. Savonarola wielded a different kind of charisma, one founded on his preaching and his perceived hotline to God. ### The Moral Purification of Florence As 1495 began, the friar from Ferrara was the most powerful man in Florence. His agenda was one of moral purification, defined more by what he was against than what he was for. He railed against drinking, gambling, swearing, prostitution, fireworks, and "provocative dancing." He particularly detested what he saw as gender fluidity: men with long hair, tight hose, and fancy capes, which he believed erased the divinely ordained distinction between the sexes and encouraged the sin of sodomy. Florence was so notorious for homosexuality that the German word for sodomite was *Florenzer*. Savonarola declared in a sermon, "Make a law, I say, without pity, so that such persons are stoned and burned." The Signoria passed the most stringent anti-sodomy laws in the city's history, replacing fines with the pillory, branding, and, for repeat offenders, death. This was not novel; moral panics over sodomy were a feature of 15th-century Italy. Bernardino of Siena had earlier preached in the Duomo, urging his congregation to spit on the floor at the mention of the sin. The intensity of a moral panic, $M_p$, can be understood as a product of perceived social deviance, $D_{soc}$, and the perceived threat to a collective identity, $T_{id}$. Thus, $M_p \approx D_{soc} \times T_{id}$. In Florence, the perceived license under Lorenzo de' Medici created a high baseline for $D_{soc}$. Ironically, Savonarola’s crackdown was counterproductive. Officials were reluctant to impose such harsh penalties, and citizens hesitated to report neighbors who faced execution. Prosecutions for sodomy actually fell. Savonarola's regime is most remembered for two phenomena. The first is the **Bonfire of the Vanities**. Popular imagination pictures this as a grim, Nazi-style book burning, but the reality was different. Such bonfires were not new to Florence. What distinguished Savonarola's, held during Carnival in 1497, was its scale and official sanction. A great wooden pyramid was erected in the Piazza della Signoria and filled with "vanities": shameful pictures, gambling devices, musical instruments, masks, cosmetics, wigs, and perfumes. Contemporary sources describe the event not as one of oppression, but as a great public spectacle. Thousands processed, singing hymns, and the crowd cheered as the pyre was lit. It was a festival of righteous destruction. The second phenomenon was his use of youth groups as moral enforcers, often seen as a chilling precedent for Mao's Red Guards. The origin, however, was in addressing Florence’s notorious gangs of boys, the *fanciulli*. Savonarola organized them into companies, encouraging them to elect officers and set the city’s moral tone—a Renaissance Boy Scouts movement. These boys would harass dandies and drunkards and snatch tiaras from women’s heads, but reports from Rome of a "reign of terror" were exaggerated. When the boys asked the Signoria for the power to punish homosexuals and prostitutes, their request was flatly denied, demonstrating the clear limits of Savonarola’s power. He did not rule with an iron fist. Savonarola’s rule was always fragile, threatened by two forces. First, Florence was in economic crisis. Trade had collapsed, harvests failed, prices soared, and bread riots erupted. Savonarola's only answer—that the people must repent of their sins—began to wear thin. Second, the international situation turned against him. In 1495, Pope Alexander VI formed a Holy League—uniting the Papal States, Venice, Milan, Aragon, and the Holy Roman Empire—to expel the French. Florence, allied with France, was now isolated. Savonarola’s prophecy that Charles VIII would lead a great reformation looked increasingly hollow, especially when Charles signed a truce with the League and returned to France without restoring Pisa to Florence. Pope Alexander VI began to view Savonarola as a direct threat. A man in Florence claiming a direct line to God was an intolerable challenge to papal authority. In July 1495, the Pope summoned Savonarola to Rome. The friar refused, citing illness and fear of assassination. This was a fateful decision. By defying a direct papal summons, he set himself on a collision course with Rome. The Pope accused him of "perverse dogma and insanity of mind" and banned him from preaching. Savonarola ignored the ban; preaching was the source of his power. His rhetoric grew more defiant, openly comparing himself to Moses and casting the Pope as Pharaoh. By 1497, his enemies in Florence, the *Arrabbiati* ("the angry ones"), were growing bolder, supported by rival religious orders like the Franciscans. His supporters were known as the *Piagnoni* ("the weepers"). Obscene graffiti mocking Savonarola appeared, and pranksters drove nails into his pulpit. That summer, the Pope excommunicated him. Savonarola dismissed it, arguing that an excommunication based on false information was invalid—a legalistic, not theological, argument, distinguishing him from Luther. The crisis came to a head in March 1498. The Pope delivered an ultimatum to the Signoria: silence Savonarola or face a papal interdict and the seizure of all Florentine assets in Rome. The threat to their wealth was the final straw. The Signoria ordered Savonarola to stop preaching. It was then that a Franciscan friar, Francesco de Puglia, issued a dramatic challenge: an ordeal by fire. He and Savonarola would walk through flames, and God would protect the righteous. The public was ecstatic. Savonarola was reluctant, but one of his disciples, Fra Domenico, volunteered to take his place. The Franciscans then produced their own champion. The stage was set for Saturday, April 7, 1498, in the Piazza della Signoria. Grandstands were erected, the city gates closed, and guards posted. But the event descended into farce. Arguments broke out over whether Fra Domenico could carry a crucifix into the flames. Savonarola then insisted he carry the consecrated Host, leading to accusations of theological doping. As the crowd grew restive, thunder rolled in and it began to rain. The ordeal was called off. The crowd, furious, blamed Savonarola, accusing him of using delaying tactics because he knew he would lose. ### The Fall, Torture, and Legacy of a Prophet The next day, Palm Sunday, the city's mood was explosive. A brawl between factions escalated into a mob chanting, "To San Marco!" They surged towards Savonarola's monastery and laid siege to it. Some of the monks, having stockpiled weapons, fought back from the roof, hurling tiles and firing crossbows. The battle raged for eight hours before soldiers sent by the Signoria stormed the building. They found Savonarola praying in the Medici library. He was dragged to the Palazzo della Signoria and placed in the same cell that had once held Cosimo de' Medici. Days of interrogation and torture followed, primarily using the *strappado*—a method where the victim's hands are tied behind their back and they are hoisted by a rope, dislocating their shoulders and breaking their arms. Under this agony, Savonarola produced a series of rambling confessions and retractions. Weinstein suggests that in his torment, Savonarola came to believe his own guilt, concluding that God would not have deserted him unless he had been a false prophet. His confession was as sincere as his prophecies had been. On May 23, 1498, Savonarola and two of his chief lieutenants were publicly defrocked and hanged in the Piazza. To the crowd's disappointment, he made no final, resounding speech. After their deaths, their bodies were burned on a platform rigged with explosives, and their ashes were thrown into the Arno to prevent the collection of relics. The authorities attempted to erase his memory, banning his books. Yet his legacy endured. The first Protestant reformers saw him as one of their own. Martin Luther called him a "holy man," and John Calvin was a great admirer. Savonarola stands as a transitional figure, perhaps the last of the great medieval reformers who summoned Christians to repentance, but also a prefiguration of the Reformation that would soon tear Europe apart. The Medici would eventually return in 1512, becoming hereditary Dukes of Florence and Grand Dukes of Tuscany. But the city's golden age was over. The turmoil of the 1490s and the Italian Wars had shattered its economic dynamism. It became a cultural backwater, its glorious 15th-century architecture preserved as if in amber—a perfect future for tourism, but a shadow of the republic that had once burned with such righteous, and ultimately self-destructive, fire.