Cosimo’s death on August 1, 1464, brought the Medici, their inner circle, and the ottimati to a moment of truth over a question that had been looming for years: was Cosimo’s leadership a family legacy to be inherited by his son Piero, or a personal achievement to be followed by a restoration of collective rule by either the Medici lieutenants or a wider group of ottimati? Assuming that they were Cosimo’s political heirs, the chief lieutenants began exercising the collective leadership that they believed was legitimately theirs. Piero’s reaction provoked a confrontation in which Medici “succession” was nearly thwarted but in the end imposed, again largely by armed force and the threat of military intervention from Milan. Although many historians persist in referring to the refusal of Cosimo’s former allies to accept a Medici succession as a “plot” or “conspiracy,” it was in fact no such thing. Their challenge to Piero was an open and legal attempt to restore constitutional government. Perception of conspiracy in these events reflects Medici propaganda: that they were Florence’s destined and therefore legitimate rulers and that any attempt to limit their power could only have been an extra-legal act.374 In fact, it was the Medici who invented and promoted the story that “conspirators” had sought to kill Piero at the height of the confrontation in the summer of 1466.
Cosimo’s relations with his chief lieutenants soured in his last years. Agnolo Acciaiuoli, who openly criticized Cosimo and Piero in a letter to Francesco Sforza, was rumored to be trying to replace the Medici as Florence’s chief link to Milan.375 After Cosimo died, Dietisalvi Neroni wrote to the duke that “while Cosimo was alive, decisions were left to him; now those who remain at the head of the regime [are] Piero and a number of citizens supporting him, who were brothers to Cosimo and who will now be fathers to Piero.”376 Over the next year, Acciaiuoli went his own way, and even in the Cento voices were heard in favor of a return to traditional elections and government. Beyond the ruling elite was a sense that the air was freer with Cosimo gone and expectations that political controls would loosen. Although Parenti acknowledged that Florence was prosperous and at peace, for which he gave Cosimo some credit, he asserted that “nevertheless on his death everyone rejoiced, such is the love of and desire for liberty. It appeared to the Florentines that from his way of governing they had experienced a certain subjection and servitude, from which they believed his death would liberate them. This they desired and in this they delighted, putting off thought of any other good which they enjoyed.”377 Taking note of this mood, in September 1465 Dietisalvi Neroni told Sforza that “the citizenry would like a more broadly based and freer government, as is appropriate in citta popolari like ours.” Manno Temperani told a pratica that the people disliked the very word “balia” and were unhappy with the fact that “all power had been entrusted to the will of a few and that all things were being governed according to their wishes.” That same month the statutory councils terminated a mano elections and ordered a resumption of sortition and the restoration of eligibility to the many disqualified in 1458. “The whole city liked it,” wrote Acciaiuoli, except Piero.378 Some weeks later, Alessandra Strozzi told her exiled sons in Naples not to be surprised if their brother-in-law Marco was for the moment less than usually attentive to family business: “everyone’s mind is on what is happening in the palace, to put the government back on track [dirizzare lo Stato] and decide how we are going to live. They’re discussing it all day and those whose names were taken out of the pouches in 1458 are expecting to have them put back in. Marco is working hard on this, as are the others, to get it put to a vote.” Once that is done, she added, they’ll take up the question of allowing “innocent exiles” to return: a hope that, for the Strozzi, soon materialized, but not in the way Alessandra expected.379
The luck of the electoral draw made Niccolo Soderini Standardbearer of Justice for November-December 1465. A former Medici friend who fell out of favor in the early 1450s as he watched his brother Tommaso grow ever closer to the regime, Niccolo came into office with a reform agenda that gave Medici opponents great encouragement. On just the second day of this Signoria, Parenti wrote to his brothers-in-law in Naples that Niccolo’s election put the city “in an uproar,” to the dismay of the Mediceans and delight of their opponents: “it could not please me more to see where Florence is going.... I cannot tell you what a great spirit he shows, and he has the favor of all Florence. Everyone visits him at his house.” “Never,” he later wrote, “had there been a Standardbearer who took office with such a spirited welcome from the people and with such expectation of good.”380 The next day Soderini delivered a long dramatic speech in a pratica, lamenting the decline of political virtue and good government in Florence, corruption in the courts and distribution of offices, and excessive taxation that was impoverishing city and countryside.381 He urged a new scrutiny: the first since 1458 and the first in more than three decades not controlled by a balia.
Unhappiness with Soderini and fissures within the ranks of the anti-Mediceans quickly surfaced when the details of his recommendations for both the scrutiny and eligibility to major offices became known. He succeeded in attaching to the law authorizing the scrutiny, which was several times rejected by the Council of the Popolo until both councils narrowly approved it, the automatic admission to the scrutiny committee of all former Standardbearers of Justice since 1434, including the “veduti,” or, if they were deceased, their sons or other relatives. It was controversial enough to designate such a small inner circle (selected over the years by Medici accoppiatori no less) as a privileged elite with superior influence. But Soderini also wanted to guarantee permanent eligibility for all citizens, and their descendants, who had qualified in any scrutiny since 1444. Automatic re-qualification on the basis of an earlier scrutiny had been tried once (in the 1330s) and was rescinded within a decade because it would have permanently ensconced a hereditary ruling caste. Both ideas were rejected as too oligarchic, and Soderini quickly fell from favor, accused by former supporters of trying to create a rigidly demarcated Venetian-like ruling nobility. His proposals exposed the full implications of the hope he had expressed thirty years earlier that Florence would “eventually end up in the Venetian style.” Soderini left office at the end of the year defeated and humiliated, and the controversy destroyed the prospects of a united front of anti-Mediceans. A disappointed and disenchanted Marco Parenti wrote that “if he has done anything good, which he has, it is lost because of the very great evil of the division of Florence, which is now openly revealed and, one might say, stamped and sealed, so that now it can never be undone.”45
What Parenti called the “division of Florence” was the emergence of a triangular conflict among Mediceans, ottimati, and popolo. In the absence of Medici controls, the divergent agendas of popular and elite approaches to the restoration of what both groups considered “traditional” constitutional government became evident. To a certain extent, the contrast between the two republicanisms reprised old differences between popolo and elite. But the positions of both classes had been changed by thirty years of Medici dominance, and neither was identical to its fourteenth-century predecessor. Through decades of oligarchic and Medici hegemony the popolo lost contact with its guild origins and focused instead on the restoration of an electoral system of broad scrutinies and sortition, originally invented by the elite. Aristocratic republicanism now shared the rhetoric of republican liberty and the antipathy to what it too saw as tyranny, but it was moving toward Niccolo Soderini’s “Venetian-style” assumption that liberty could best be protected by a hereditary aristocracy of merit, a class of experienced leaders more likely to emerge from elite families than from either the middle class or a regime of favorites and clients. Dormant during the decades of Medici power, the latent conflict between these republicanisms surfaced in the vacuum that developed after Cosimo was gone. It was the first of many recurrences of this “division” over the next sixty-five years, with each side intensely aware that prolonged rifts would allow the Medici to impose their own solution.
Divisions among their enemies seemed on the verge of saving the Mediceans from being swept aside, when news arrived from Milan in March 1466 that Francesco Sforza was dead. At a critical moment Piero de’ Medici lost his most important ally, and the hopes of his enemies revived. Over the next few months, political tensions intensified and the Signoria issued repeated calls for unity. At the end of May the anti-Medici movement reached its apogee Phillips, Marco Parenti, pp. 176-88 (180).
When 400 citizens signed an oath in defense of liberty and the “government of many,” promising that “the city would be governed, as is customary, by a just and popular government, that in the future the extraction [of name-tickets] of our magnificent Signori will take place by lot as is now being done, and in no other way. . . , and that no violence shall be committed against any citizen illegally, so that citizens may understand that they are free to give counsel and to express their judgments about public matters.”382 First among the signatories were Cosimo’s former high command: Manno Temperani, Luca Pitti, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, Giovannozzo Pitti, and Dietisalvi Neroni. Niccolo Soderini is eighth on the list (and the only one of his family). Among the ottimati are at least eight Capponi, seven Pitti, four Corsini, Acciaiuoli, Dietisalvi-Neroni, and Alberti, and three Rucellai, Alessandri, and Albizzi. At least fifteen other elite families, and dozens of families from the second rank of the elite, are represented on the list, including five Machiavelli. There is even a Medici: Piero’s cousin Pierfrancesco, the son of Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo and founder of the rival branch of the family that was to go its own way politically.383 Another noteworthy name is that of Amerigo di Giovanni Benci, manager of the Geneva-Lyons branch of the Medici bank from 1459 to 1461, whose father had been the bank’s general manager for twenty years until 1455.384 Among scores of mostly unknown non-elite, including a few minor guildsmen and several notaries, a few stand out: two sons of Giovanni Morelli; the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti’s son Vittorio; and the humanist Giannozzo Manetti’s son Bernardo. Curiously absent is Marco Parenti; perhaps he preferred not to jeopardize efforts to effect the repatriation of his brothers-in-law. The long list eloquently testifies to the strength and social breadth of the movement to dismantle the Medici regime, as many who had been with them for years apparently assumed that the family’s season of power was over. On the strength of this wide support, the priors of May-June and July-August 1466 (including several who had signed the oath) initiated discussions about abolishing the Cento.
At the end of August the confrontation came to a head and was dramatically resolved in favor of the Medici when several things happened all within the space of a few days: threats of armed intervention on behalf of both sides; the election of a pro-Medici Signoria; and a stunning reconciliation between Piero and Luca Pitti that broke the ranks of the anti-Mediceans. Rumors flew that Piero, so advised, according to Parenti, by Tommaso Soderini and the ever-present Milanese ambassador, was ready to summon Sforza troops. Milanese cavalry were waiting near Bologna, and on the 27th Piero gave the order for them to begin entering Florentine territory.385 Offers of military support for the anti-Mediceans came from Borso d’Este of Ferrara. According to a pro-Medici account, Ferrarese troops moved into the area north of Pistoia on the 26th,386 but Parenti says that the request from the anti-Mediceans for their intervention came only after Piero had summoned the Milanese troops. In any case, two armies were on the borders of the Florentine dominion and ready to approach the city. Although neither did, rumors of troop movements and fears of invasion prompted both sides to prepare for battle in the streets.
Piero also assembled his own forces from the contado, as Cosimo had done in 1434, barricaded the family palace, closed off the neighborhood, and stockpiled arms, wine, and bread. Pitti and his allies also armed, but too slowly and timidly, according to Parenti, who accused them of being unwilling to take the risks, or perhaps spend the money, needed to win the looming battle: “each kept his hand in his own pockets,” he caustically says. Parenti provides an intriguing explanation of how and why the anti-Mediceans fatally hesitated. As people throughout the city waited to see which way the wind was blowing, Niccolo Soderini arrived on horseback at Luca Pitti’s palace in the Oltrarno, which served as anti-Medici headquarters, and urged Pitti, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, Dietisalvi Neroni, and all the others present to stop talking and take action, pleading with them to ride through the city and gather supporters with cries of “Liberty” and to attack Piero in his palace. According to Parenti, they all thought it a plan “likely to succeed, but one doubt held them back. This was fear of the lower classes roused up in arms. After Piero was defeated and his house and goods put to sack, having once tasted the delights of this vandalism, they might be excited to such a fury that the desire would come over them to turn upon the rest of the well-to-do, thinking in this way to be able to throw off their misery. . . . And perhaps, with growing boldness, they might rise against the government and take it for themselves, as they did in 1378.” In this eerie replay of 1434, when Palla Strozzi declined to heed Rinaldo degli Albizzi’s call to arms against the Medici, it was the memory of 1378 that held the anti-Mediceans back. Almost ninety years after the fact, the trauma inflicted on the Florentine elite by the Ciompi and the ensuing radical popular government still conditioned its response, or lack of it, to the Medici. Here was the social triangulation of Florentine politics in its most naked form: faced with the choice between the tyranny they despised and an alliance with the middle and lower classes to defeat that tyranny, the ottimati, however reluctantly, chose to stay with the Medici. Parenti commented that, although it was a “highly prudent consideration. . ., in their need it was very cowardly since matters had come to such a state that they had no other possible way of providing for their safety.”387
On the 28th, the free sortition so ardently desired by the anti-Mediceans boomeranged by producing a Signoria for September-October more favorable to the Mediceans than the preceding priorates had been. Its Standardbearer of Justice was Roberto Lioni, a Medici ally and several times an accoppiatore. Parenti says he was “a judicious man and a good popolano, who by his nature should have followed the common good and liberty. Nonetheless, ambition led him to uphold Piero,” and to believe “that he would be advanced by Piero to a place amongst the first citizens and be rewarded with considerable honors and profit.” What Parenti saw, in other words, is that the potential rewards of Medici patronage were undercutting “natural” class solidarities. The same day, the outgoing Signoria tried to defuse the tense standoff in the city by summoning both Piero and Luca Pitti to the palace and asking them to disband their growing private armies, which were then streaming toward the city, Pitti’s from the south and Piero’s mostly from the north and the family’s home base in the Mugello. Piero declined to appear, offering the excuse of his infirmity, the severe case of gout for which he is known as Piero the Gouty.388 Parenti reports that Pitti obeyed the order to disarm, whereas Piero’s party “did not entirely.”
Luca Pitti, seeing the impunity with which Piero refused to obey either the summons or the order to disarm, knowing that the new Signoria was heavily Medicean, and cognizant of the extent of Piero’s private army, lost his nerve. On the 29th, he accepted Piero’s offer of a secret deal. Piero sent Francesco Sassetti, general manager of the bank since 1463, to lure Pitti into an agreement to switch sides in return for three things: an appointment as accoppiatore, some office for his brother, and the marriage of his daughter into the Medici family. Parenti adds a touch of pathos to his account of Pitti’s capitulation: when Piero agreed to the marriage of Pitti’s daughter “to someone he [Piero] held most dear,” Pitti assumed, without asking, that Piero meant his son Lorenzo, only to discover, when the rewards of betrayal were paid, that Piero meant, not Lorenzo, but his wife Lucrezia’s brother Giovanni Tornabuoni. Parenti, who could see where the Medici were now heading, as Pitti evidently could not, remarked that “Piero wished to reserve Lorenzo for a marriage with nobility since he already felt himself to be more than a mere citizen.” Marrying titled nobility meant reaching outside the ottimati and beyond Florence altogether.
With Pitti neutralized and a sympathetic Signoria in place, Piero made his move. On September 1 he ordered his soldiers into the city: not the Milanese troops, but rather his own private army, which Parenti estimated at 6,000 and the Milanese ambassador at an astounding 8,000. Although most of these troops came from the ancestral lands of the Medici in the Mugello and farther north, Piero also used his patronage ties elsewhere in the dominion to augment this force. Having cultivated over the years a nucleus of clients and friends in Arezzo, he appealed to them for help, and the chiefs of his Aretine patronage group put together a small force of sixty men, while the commune of Arezzo sent two hundred.389 Whether and to what extent Piero made similar appeals to other subject cities where he had built patronage networks is not known, but his search for support in the subject territories beyond the old contado is an early instance of what became a crucial new source of power for the Medici under his son Lorenzo. A Sienese observer of Medici military preparations in 1466 claimed that one of their captains told him that, if a settlement had not been reached quickly, he could have put 10,000 troops in the city in defense of the Medici, not counting the Milanese, many from the territories of the Bardi di Vernio, the family of Piero’s mother.390 Such overwhelming force left no doubt concerning the outcome. In a pratica held the next day (in Piero’s own house!) Luca Pitti himself advised summoning a parlamento, and as he spoke some 3,000 of Piero’s troops surrounded the piazza della Signoria. Another coup was in the making, and the well-rehearsed and dreary drill duly unfolded that same day. The crowd approved a balia, which began meeting two days later on the 4th and wasted no time in restoring a mano elections of the Signoria for ten years, later extended another ten years, by accoppiatori to be appointed by the Cento. In fact, during the remaining twenty-eight years of the regime, the election of the Signoria never again occurred by lot. The balia gave the Otto di Guardia the authority to round up and arrest enemies of the regime. Agnolo Acciaiuoli and Dietisalvi Neroni learned of this on the 6th and hastily left the city, as Niccolo Soderini had done several days earlier. A procession of thanksgiving for the city’s “deliverance from bloodshed” was held on Sunday the 7th, according to Parenti “as much a net in which to trap men as for devotion.” Searches, seizures, and arrests were carried out by the all-powerful Otto even as the procession was giving its thanks. All the anti-Medicean leaders, except Luca Pitti of course, and many less important people who had signed the oath of the previous May were exiled. Although the regime had survived and was now stronger than ever militarily, because of the loss of so many former supporters it was weaker in its ties to the frightened ottimati. Thus Piero decided to repatriate a long list of exiles from the class of ’34, including Alessandra Strozzi’s sons, Filippo and Lorenzo.391
In September, after his victory, Piero repeated the accusation he had made in late August of an assassination plot and added to it the charge that his opponents had conspired with Borso d’Este to invade the city and “overturn the government” by violent means. This was the origin of the legend that the anti-Medici movement was a conspiracy, and the chief piece of evidence adduced in support of the accusations was a confession allegedly made by Dietisalvi Neroni’s brother Francesco. In fact, the longer statement in Francesco’s own hand says nothing about a plot to assassinate Piero or invite a foreign invasion. Medici interrogators introduced these items into their own doctored version of Francesco’s confession.392
After 1466, no ambiguities remained about the regime. The myth of the Medici as “first among equals” was now recognized as the fiction it had always been. A scrutiny scheduled for the end of 1468 was indefinitely postponed, and in the same year the exiles, supported by Venice, were defeated on the battlefield. Piero had re-established his family’s power and asserted a de facto right of succession that was not challenged when he died in December 1469 and his twenty-year old son Lorenzo assumed the leadership. Lorenzo’s marriage earlier that year to a woman from a Roman branch of noble Orsini confirmed that the Medici no longer wished to be seen as mere Florentine citizens and bankers. Henceforth, Medici men and many of their women married into the noble families of Italy and, ultimately, beyond Italy. Piero’s brief period at the helm was decisive for Medici fortunes. To him both family and regime owed their survival in the greatest crisis they faced between 1434 and 1494. And the manner and means of his victory in 1466 go far in explaining the immense difference, over a bridge of merely five years, between the regime of “first citizen” Cosimo and that of the boy “prince” Lorenzo.
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