Cosimo and his advisers inherited a precarious and detested regime, stabilized it, consolidated ducal power, and founded a dynasty that lasted two hundred years. Draconian punishments, intimidation, spies, censorship, and imperial protection all played their roles, but, except for some exiles, in the end most Florentines, chastened and disciplined, accepted the new order. Some were never reconciled: Michelangelo refused to set foot in Cosimo’s Florence. But dissent was marginalized and most intellectuals behaved. Despite unhappiness in some quarters and a few conspiracies, there were no revolts or widespread movements of opposition within Florence or the dominion. These were not insignificant achievements in a city that had three times expelled the Medici. While never fully escaping the need for foreign protection, Cosimo gradually asserted his state’s independence in Italian politics. He did not create a modern professional bureaucracy or a unified regional state, but he managed to hold together the agglomeration of territories assembled by the republic, collect taxes, administer justice, and build roads and bridges.
Cosimo’s greatest crisis came from without: the war for Siena that was also a war against the exiles and their French allies.744 Occupied by imperial troops
Since 1541, Siena rebelled and expelled the Spanish garrison in July 1552. Cosimo faced the twin dangers of renewed French intervention in Italy at his doorstep, and at a moment when Charles V was at war with the Lutheran princes of Germany, and the prospect that exiles would use Siena as a base either for attacking the duchy or fomenting rebellion within Florence. Anti-Medici exiles in Rome, Venice, Lyons, and elsewhere had a military leader and source of funding in Piero Strozzi, who inherited his father’s vast banking fortune and was now King Henry Il’s viceroy in Italy. Exiled bankers, and still others outside Florence who were not exiles but whose businesses depended more on good relations with France than with Spain, allowed themselves to be tempted by the prospect of removing Cosimo. Thus the conflict between France and the empire over Siena also became the last war for control of Florence.
By August 1552 Strozzi was in Siena to lead French and exile forces, and throughout 1553 hundreds of thousands of scudi came pouring in from anti-Medici Florentine bankers all over Europe, including the Strozzi, Guadagni, Salviati, and especially from Bindo Altoviti, the leading Florentine banker in Rome who, although no enemy of the Medici until now, provided huge sums and even organized a contingent of troops led by his son. In March 1554 Cosimo, having learned from his informers in Rome that this erstwhile Medici ally was plotting with the French and the exiles, wrote to the brother of Pope Julius III to urge the pope to expel Altoviti and other anti-Mediceans in the Florentine nation in Rome and to “take away their properties which, once confiscated, would reasonably come to me. And in this manner you will reveal their folly and insolence; for our part we will proceed according to the laws of justice, which cover the loss of their property and their life, including that of their criminal sons, who I hope will repent of their recklessness. I think no one will be the people’s fool more than Bindo, who will throw away his fortune in order to be thought mad.” In May Altoviti, summoned by the pope, confirmed that he and other Florentines in Rome “had secretly decided to pay for 3,000 infantrymen in the service of their city, and had secretly made twelve white flags with the inscription ‘Libertas’.” Altoviti acknowledged “that he was the leader” and was “determined to risk his life and that of his sons to liberate his homeland, and that he wanted to play the rest of the game; and that the other wealthy Florentines of Lyons, Venice, Ancona, and other places agreed with this honorable enterprise.” A week later anti-Medici Florentines in Rome held a procession representing the return of the Israelites to the promised land.745 Reaching back to the greatest of all Florentine exiles, Altoviti’s troops placed on their standard the words with which, in Purgatorio 1.71-2, Dante’s Virgil explains to Cato of Utica the pilgrim’s goal (changing “he” to “I” and substituting political liberty for spiritual freedom): “I go seeking liberty, which is so precious, as they know who give up their life for it.”746 It was not perhaps the most hopeful of associations, for, while Dante’s pilgrim found the spiritual freedom he sought, his author never returned home.
Nor did the exiles. With the emperor’s military help and financial assistance from bankers in Antwerp and Genoa, Cosimo assembled an army of Spanish, German, and Italian (but no Florentine) troops, and hired an imperial captain (from, coincidentally, the Medici family of Milan). Despite Strozzi’s daring forays into Florentine territory (reminiscent of Ferrucci’s heroics in 1530), the promised French reinforcements never arrived (again as in 1530), and in August 1554 the exiles were crushed at Marciano near Siena with thousands of casualties. Cosimo exulted and organized processions in Florence, with the captured banners hanging upside down from Palazzo Vecchio. Prisoners from leading exile families were publicly executed (as in 1537). Segni says that most of the population celebrated the victory because they were tired of the war and blamed Strozzi for causing it. Another chronicler reports that, at the news of the victory, the “nobles” remained quiet, “since most of them were hostile to the duke, and, on the contrary, favorable to that freedom promised by Strozzi, which confirms the proverb that no amount of gold can buy free-dom.”747 Siena continued to fight for its independence, and Cosimo’s army laid siege to the city, which, at the edge of starvation, surrendered in April 1555. Even so, republican holdouts moved to Montalcino, and it took two more years, amid the ever-shifting interests of Spain, France, and the papacy, before Cosimo fully gained control of Siena. Yet Charles insisted on retaining sovereignty and granted the city to Cosimo as an imperial fief, with the usual obligations of vassalage.748 Even in his greatest victory Cosimo was legally subordinate to his protector: as Segni put it, “like a good subject,” Cosimo was “in the shadow of the emperor.” This was certainly among the motivations behind his subsequent quest for a grander title.
Accomplished with foreign troops and loans, the conquest of Siena was largely a personal triumph for Cosimo that brought little or no benefit to the Florentines. Years later he almost acknowledged as much when he had Vasari commemorate the victory on the ceiling of the hall of the former Great Council by depicting the expansion of “all our territories together” as the result of a war planned by Cosimo himself without advisers.749 Cosimo’s mistrust of the elite was sealed by the participation of the ottimati exiles in the 1554 war (and again by the Pucci conspiracy of 1559).750 The Marucelli chronicler denounced the war, declared his sympathies for the besieged and betrayed Sienese, reviled the tyrannical Spaniards, and reported widespread dissatisfaction in Florence with Cosimo and his policies: “Such was the hostility generated within the popolo that almost every morning sonnets and placards were found posted in various places, and if I had possessed any copies Cosimo would have punished me.” Evidently he got his hands on at least one of them, a “sonnet” (copied into the chronicle) that excoriates Cosimo for three pages as a tyrant who destroys his city and ruins his subjects.751 But the acquisition of Siena consolidated the principate by ending the threat of the exiles, who lost an immense fortune in the ill-fated attempt at a fourth Medici expulsion, and, whatever the underlying mood, Cosimo came through the crisis without a revolt at home. However much some may have sympathized with Strozzi, the exiles, and the Sienese, there was no uprising of either ottimati or popolo. If, for Cosimo, that was the most significant outcome of the war, others saw matters differently. Segni worried that, because Cosimo “rules over people who suffer servitude only with extreme reluctance, [but] without knowing how to live free, he seems almost forced to maintain himself in power by giving himself up as prey to foreigners and the arms of barbarians.”752
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