Although, as Guicciardini observed, the terms of peace more nearly resembled conditions usually imposed on those who lose wars, Lorenzo nonetheless returned in triumph in March 1480 to a city hungry for peace and a regime desperately glad to have him back. There had been no revolution, perhaps not even the beginnings of organized opposition during his absence. But Lorenzo was aware of the murmurings, and without delay he and his inner circle decided on yet another series of reforms to narrow the regime to the ever smaller group of those he trusted. In early April the priorate asked the councils for a balia which passed by only one vote in the Cento and narrow margins in the other councils. Instead of carrying out its assigned tasks in the areas of fiscal reform and elections (it never even held the promised general scrutiny), the balia strengthened the regime by creating a new council, the Seventy, to which it entrusted an unprecedented combination of executive, legislative, and electoral powers. The Seventy were given final say on proposals to be submitted to the councils, thus replacing the Signoria in this crucial executive function. From its own membership it elected two new executive committees, the Otto di Pratica, which replaced the Dieci in foreign policy, and the Dodici Procuratori, who oversaw finances and the Monte. Their deliberations required approval from the Seventy, which thus superseded the Cento as the most important legislative body. Also entrusted to the Seventy were a mano elections of the Signoria and the appointment of the security and police magistracy of the Otto di Guardia. The Seventy thus became the “supreme agency of control” and “the principal organ for all important decisions.” Never before had the different functions of government been so exclusively concentrated in one body. Moreover, the Seventy were to remain in office for five years: Guicciardini called it a “consiglio a vita,” a senate with life tenure. In 1484 the three older councils of the Popolo, Commune, and Cento renewed the Seventy and its powers for another five years by comfortable but not overwhelming margins. Subsequent renewals occurred in 1489 and 1493, but this last, after Lorenzo’s death, encountered serious opposition and gained two-thirds majorities with only three votes to spare in the Popolo, eleven in the Commune, and one in the Cento: clear evidence of the anti-Medici sentiment that was to erupt in the next year. But while Lorenzo was alive the Seventy governed with little opposition.45
The Seventy consisted of the balia’s first thirty members, selected by the Signoria, and forty others, all veduti Standardbearers of Justice, selected by the thirty. Sixty-five of the first Seventy had at one time or another served on a Medici balia. Lorenzo was of course among the first thirty, who also included Tommaso Soderini, members of elite families (Capponi, Guicciardini, Ridolfi, Davanzati, Gianfigliazzi, Tornabuoni) and several non-elite characterized by Guicciardini as those who “would have had no influence without [Lorenzo’s] support”: Bernardo Buongirolami, Antonio Pucci, Girolamo Morelli, and two powerful insiders from lower-class backgrounds, Bernardo del Nero and Antonio di Bernardo di Miniato Dini, the minor guildsman who administered the Monte. Among the forty they appointed were members of elite families (Capponi, Corsini, Vettori, Pitti, Salviati, Rucellai, Albizzi, Valori) and more non-elite Medici clients: Giovanni Bonsi, Pierfilippo Pandolfini, and relatives of influential Medici insiders Giovanni Lanfredini, Agnolo Niccolini, and Cosimo Bartoli. In 1489 the roster of Seventy shows a similar mix. Official sources do not of course reveal the extent of Lorenzo’s influence in these Rubinstein, Government, pp. 228-30, 238-41.
Selections. But because it was said (by the Milanese ambassador) that Lorenzo himself named the first forty members of the balia of 1471, and because, according to Piero Guicciardini, Lorenzo also handpicked the members of the regime’s last scrutiny council in 1484, it seems probable that he, perhaps with his inner circle of advisers, also chose the Seventy.507
Lorenzo’s power in the 1480s was unprecedented in Florence and perhaps unmatched even by some of Italy’s princes. No one held or even became eligible for important offices without his approval. No action or communication was undertaken by the foreign policy magistracy without his instructions. Lorenzo controlled fiscal policy through his “minister” of the Monte and placed himself on the powerful committee of the Seventeen Reformers both times it was appointed, in 1481-2 and 1490-1, with wide-ranging powers over finances and economic policy. With his influence on this committee, he took substantial public funds (by one calculation, over 50,000 florins) for his personal needs and got his hands on still more from various communal accounts, while his Monte officials withheld interest payments from citizens.508 Elite families did not contract marriage alliances of which he did not approve. Intervening in the administration of justice, he compelled magistracies to carry out punishments on his orders. In 1488, for example, when a large crowd pleaded for mercy on behalf of a man sentenced to death by the Otto di Guardia for killing one of their staff, Lorenzo intervened on the spot and ordered that the execution take place immediately. He also ordered the seizure, torture, and exile of four people from the crowd who had encouraged the condemned man to escape.509 These were the powers of a prince above the law.
But he was also an insecure prince who trusted fewer and fewer people and needed ever more arbitrary and personal power to compensate for the increasing fragility of his support. In the early 1480s several members of elite families were accused of conspiring against the regime or trying to kill Lorenzo. In 1481 members of the Frescobaldi, Baldovinetti, and Balducci confessed to a plan to murder him and were hanged. In 1484 a young Tornabuoni (Lorenzo’s mother’s family) was exiled to Sicily “because,” as Landucci reported, “it was said that he had designs against Lorenzo. . . . Perhaps it wasn’t so; I’m saying what people said in the city.”510 Frequent rumors, accusations, and confessions of plots against him no doubt gave Lorenzo good reason to seek security in greater controls at every level: within his inner circle; within the regime as embodied by the Council of Seventy; in the scrutinies and elections of the Signoria; in the dominion; and in all the magistracies, courts, and councils of government. He sought such power because, among both old ottimati families and the popolo, acquiescence in Lorenzo’s veiled principate was becoming more reluctant. Lorenzo knew that Alamanno Rinuccini, whose dialogue On Liberty, written after the Pazzi conspiracy and its bloody suppression, openly denounced him as a tyrant and detailed his abuses of power and corruption of communal institutions, was not the only member of the elite who thought he had gone too far.511 He had fewer opportunities to hear or read the views of the popolo but was aware that the priorate of July 1482, whose proposal that the councils prohibit tax concessions to “private persons” was an obvious rebuke of Lorenzo’s manipulation of the Monte, included Piero Parenti,512 son of Marco. Piero was subsequently excluded from major offices for the remaining twelve years of the regime,513 presumably for his part in this slap at Lorenzo. Growing resentment among ottimati and popolo toward Lorenzo’s princely pretensions caused him to turn elsewhere and to ground his, his family’s, and the regime’s security in new foundations: in secretaries and bureaucrats from outside the elite, men beholden to him alone; in patronage networks in the cities and towns of the dominion; in a new politics of ritual and charisma directed at the lower classes; in marriage alliances with aristocratic families throughout Italy; and, not least, in the church. The most innovative dimensions of Lorenzo’s style of governance lay in his cultivation of these new sources of power.
Guicciardini says Lorenzo favored “those from whom he believed he had nothing to fear because they lacked family connections and prestige,” that he worried that men with great reputations and extensive family connections (his example is Tommaso Soderini) might become too powerful and prevent him from being “arbitro” of the city, and that he used to say that if his father had adopted a similar policy he would not have come so dangerously close to losing everything in 1466. Guicciardini, who belonged to the elite that Lorenzo increasingly mistrusted, thought that the most “oppressive and harmful” aspect of Lorenzo’s character was suspicion and mistrust, which he attributed to his awareness of the need to “keep down a free city in which it was necessary to conduct public business through the magistrates, according to the statutes, and with the appearance and form of liberty.” For Guicciardini, ottimati were the natural guardians of this liberty, and he equated “keeping down a free city” with Lorenzo’s attempts to “keep down as much as he could all those citizens who he knew were esteemed because of their nobility, wealth, power, or reputation.” Although Lorenzo gave these men, provided they were loyal to the regime, offices, ambassadorships, and similar honors, he “nonetheless did not trust them.” Thus it was to men who owed their reputation to him, and “who would have had no standing without his support, that he entrusted control of scrutinies and taxes and to whom he confided his innermost secrets.” Guicciardini lists ten such men: Bernardo Buongirolami (who made his family’s first appearance in the priorate in 1467); Antonio Pucci (whose family had hitched its wagon to Cosimo’s star before 1434, when they were minor guildsmen and neighbors); Agnolo Niccolini; Bernardo del Nero (a minor guildsman, but powerful member of the inner circle, member of the Seventy in 1489, and Guicciardini’s later choice as spokesman and defender of the Medici in his Dialogue on the Government of Florence); Pierfilippo Pandolfini (on the Seventy in both 1480 and 1489); Giovanni Lanfredini (director of the bank’s Venice branch in 1471-80, among Lorenzo’s most important emissaries, and on the Seventy in 1489); Girolamo Morelli, Piero Alamanni, Giovanni Bonsi (on the Seventy in 1480); and Cosimo Bartoli. Guicciardini saw them all as social parvenus, but he was even more irritated by the prominence of three others: Antonio di Miniato Dini, whose authority over the Monte was such that “one could say he governed two-thirds of the city,” and who sat on the Seventy in 1489; the notary Giovanni Guidi (“son of a notary from Pratovecchio who enjoyed so much of Lorenzo’s favor that, having held all the other offices. . . he might have become Standardbearer of Justice”), who headed the chancery office that drafted legislation and was said to have selected the scrutiny committee of 1484 together with Lorenzo; and Bartolomeo Scala, “the son of a miller from Colle [Valdelsa],” who was made Standardbearer of Justice because he was chancellor, to the outrage and indignation of all “men of worth [uomini da bene].” Thus, Guicciardini concluded, although “men of worth” had some role in politics, there were so many “middling men [uomini mezzani]” in the councils and key offices that oversaw electoral and fiscal matters (and with whom Lorenzo had established secret understandings) that one could say that they, and not the old elite, were “lords of the game [signori del giuoco].”514
Behind even these newcomers there emerged under Lorenzo a new species of secretary, mostly notaries, who served as personal chancellors or secretaries to Lorenzo, occasionally accompanied ambassadors and even wrote their letters, engaged in unofficial, secret negotiations on Lorenzo’s behalf (sometimes without the knowledge of the appointed ambassador), became secretaries to powerful committees like the Otto di Pratica, and were entirely and always
Lorenzo’s men. Niccolo Michelozzi, a humanist and son of Cosimo’s favorite architect, became Lorenzo’s personal chancellor and adviser to his son Piero and remained a loyal Medicean through the years of their exile, eventually replacing Machiavelli in the chancery when the Medici were restored in 1512. Most came from the subject territories, the best known being Piero Dovizi da Bibbiena and his brother Bernardo, the future cardinal and playwright. Piero Dovizi served as tutor to Lorenzo’s children, and later became Piero de’ Medici’s chief secretary. Bernardo also began as secretary to Lorenzo and tutor to his son Giovanni, in whose service he remained as secretary and adviser when Giovanni became a cardinal. Lacking much connection to Florentine political traditions, loyal only to the masters they served, and perceived by the ottimati as ambitious, arrogant, and irreverent, these secretaries were among the earliest voices of an emerging view of politics in which fulfillment of their masters’ personal ambitions was the highest goal. Lorenzo’s confidence in them angered the ottimati, and several were reviled and exiled in the anti-Medici fervor of 1494.515
Like other elite families, the Medici cultivated patronage ties with the provincial elites, ecclesiastical and philanthropic institutions, and governments of the dominion cities. Such ties developed when elite Florentines served as podesta or captains in the subject towns, presiding over courts, police, and defense. If several family members formed good relations over time with particular cities, its citizens came to regard them as protectors and patrons, typically appealing to them for tax relief, settlement of disputes, or appointment of officials to administrative posts. The Capponi, for example, were linked to Pistoia through Neri di Gino, who, between 1421 and 1456, served once as podesta, twice as captain, and four times on committees overseeing everything from taxes to revision of statutes, providing support and favors that earned him a loyal following and, at his death, the honorary title of “protector and father of the city.”516 Likewise prominent in Pistoia were the Medici, of whom seven held offices by mid-century. Giovanni di Bicci was podesta in 1407, and when he died Pistoia honored him (and sought favor with Cosimo) by bestowing its insignia and arms on the family. Donato de’ Medici was bishop of Pistoia for almost forty years. And Pistoia honored Piero as “father of the city” in 1464 and the Medici family as its “protector” in 1476.517
Until mid-century the Medici and Pitti exceeded other families in the range of their patronage connections, but after Luca Pitti’s humiliation in 1466 the Medici and, after 1470, Lorenzo became the undisputed masters of dominion patronage, as shown by the voluminous correspondence from governments, institutions, and individuals seeking favors and help. Letters came to many family members, including Lorenzo’s mother Lucrezia who typically passed on to her son the requests she received.518 From just Pistoia and its district, more than a thousand letters sent to the Medici between 1400 and 1494 have survived, over 900 of them after 1460, and over 660 to Lorenzo alone (even with the loss of most of the letters of the 1480s). Extant letters to Lorenzo from Pistoia are at least three times as numerous as the combined total of letters to Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo’s uncle Giovanni, who until his death in 1463 was the chief Medici contact for Pistoia.519 A similar story emerges from Arezzo, where Piero de’ Medici displaced Luca Pitti as the most influential Florentine in local affairs, built a group of friends and clients (who offered military help in 1466), and introduced the young Lorenzo into Aretine patronage by letting him nominate Medici clients to offices. Lorenzo later strengthened the Medici presence in Arezzo by having his former tutor Gentile Becchi appointed bishop in 1473 and dominating more and more of the patronage channels to the point of excluding all rivals and becoming sole intermediary between Arezzo and Florence for fiscal matters, tax-exemptions for local markets and fairs, and appointments. Even if unable to fulfill all requests for tax reductions, he never failed when it came to recommendations for Medici clients, even when statutory regulations had to be ignored.520 Lorenzo’s involvement in Pisa was similarly extensive. In 1472 he pushed through the legislative councils a proposal defeated earlier in the year for the transfer of most of Florence’s university (the Studio) to Pisa. By late 1473 the faculties of law and medicine were operating there (while the studia humanitatis remained in Florence). Lorenzo was among the Studio’s governors who administered funding, much of it, ironically, from the income of Volterra’s alum mines.521
Lorenzo’s influence and power were everywhere in the dominion, especially within local governments. Even with a major lacuna in the documents for the 1480s, over 1,300 pre-1494 letters addressed to the Medici by local governments have survived, 915 of them sent to Lorenzo from Pistoia (which leads the list), Arezzo, Prato, Volterra, Pisa, San Gimignano, Cortona, and altogether no fewer than 125 communities large and small. Some were generic declarations of loyalty occasionally accompanied by gifts, but the letters Lorenzo sent in return reveal that the majority of requests asked him to appoint persons of his choosing, often for as long as he wished, to administrative offices (chancellors, schoolteachers, notaries, administrators of hospitals) and ecclesiastical positions. Lorenzo’s patronage was larger in volume, more extensive in reaching all corners of the dominion, and more exclusive and personal than that of any other Florentine: he permitted no one to exercise anything like the same degree of influence and was unwilling to delegate contacts even to members of his family, as his father and grandfather had done.522 His patronage nonetheless occurred in the context of already complex relations between the Florentine government and the dominion communities, which often appealed to him for protection against Florentine fiscal demands. Lorenzo’s intervention on behalf of clients was sometimes perceived by these same communities as interference and was occasionally resented and even resisted. Letting him pick their chancellors or hospital administrators gained them his good will and such appointments added to his network of clients. But promoting his friends and favorites, his “creatures” as they were regarded, meant disappointing other candidates and embarrassing their local patrons or the governments in which they had served. In order to get or keep a client in office, Lorenzo did not hesitate to pressure the communities to overlook or annul their statutory prohibitions against re-election or extension of terms of office. A slow but steady erosion of local autonomies caused some grumbling and occasional anger but was generally accepted as the necessary cost of the benefits of being numbered among Lorenzo’s friends and clients.523
Lorenzo’s intervention in the dominion also extended to the Florentine podesta, captains and vicars, the frequency of whose correspondence with him, despite their official status as officers of Florentine government, is extraordinary. Nearly 1,700 such letters have survived, and, since here too there is a lacuna for the 1480s, the original total was much greater. Officials sometimes wrote to defend the sentences of their district courts, in response to Lorenzo’s requests (which local governments had asked him to make) for leniency or pardons. Although Lorenzo could not arbitrarily overturn convictions or reduce penalties, these officials would have thought twice about simply rejecting his wishes. Lorenzo mediated between local governments and Florentine administrators and judges, just as he did between the communities and Florentine tax officials. Thus the administration of justice in the subject territories became ever more dependent on his discretion and influence, as he applied more or less pressure or leaned in one direction or another, for reasons that could be political or personal but which did not necessarily reflect the merits of the case. Most dominion officials belonged to elite Florentine families and wanted of course to avoid giving the impression of being bullied or intimidated by Lorenzo and thus losing face vis-a-vis the towns they governed. But they sometimes agreed to reduce jail sentences, cancel a death sentence, or forego the use of torture. Dominion governance and the prospects for impartial justice or standardized administration were seriously compromised by these interventions anD the always tense relations between Lorenzo and the ottimati. Dominion localities quickly became accustomed to the notion that parallel to, and often more powerful than, official justice was Lorenzo’s “private” and politically motivated justice.524
World History
