Between 1494 and 1512 the triangular conflict among ottimati, popolo, and Medici seemed to have narrowed to a contest between the rival aristocratic and popular republicanisms of ottimati and popolo. Resenting their humiliating subjection to the Medici, most ottimati welcomed the regime’s collapse in 1494 and anticipated the foundation of an aristocratic republic modeled on Venice. Their expectations were trampled by the political energies unleashed in 1494, as the revived popolo made the Great Council the centerpiece of its broadly based republic. Once Piero Soderini made it clear that he would not countenance a dilution of the council’s powers, his ottimati enemies began searching for whatever combination of allies could bring him and his government down. With Pope Julius and a Spanish army, a group of radical ottimati pulled the Medici back into power in 1512, in what initially looked like a restoration of the old regime but then increasingly came to be seen as something different, more autocratic, less bound to Florentine political tradition. With more trappings and overt power, but less support than its predecessor of 1434-94, the new Medici regime soon alienated almost everyone. As Medici interests and the family’s power base shifted to Rome under two popes, Leo X and Clement VII, they never found a family member suited to governing Florence and eventually entrusted the task to a series of functionaries detested by nearly all Florentines. This was probably the most despised of all Florentine governments, and it lasted only fifteen years, until 1527, when Clement’s catastrophic mishandling of foreign policy resulted in the horrific sack of Rome, the regime’s disintegration, and the third expulsion and exile of the Medici. Another republic, the city’s last, began, like that of 1494, under the ottimati, but it too quickly slipped from their grasp and became the most radically anti-aristocratic of all Florentine popular governments. It took a year-long siege by Emperor Charles V’s armies to bring down this republic and restore the Medici, this time to a principate.
Although they were loath to acknowledge it, even before 1527 it was clear that the ottimati lacked the strength and unity to establish their Venice on the Arno and that Florence’s future was now in fact a contest between Medici rule and popular republicanism. After 1434, all Florentine governments were species of one or the other. But, although unable to implement the constitution they preferred, the ottimati did have the power to determine which of these alternatives would prevail. When the Medici became intolerable, before 1494 and again before 1527, the ottimati threw them off and instituted an aristocratic republic, only to see it slide on each occasion into the very different republicanism of the popolo. And when the popular republic became in its turn intolerable to the ottimati, before 1512 and again during the last republic, they went back to the Medici. By 1530, the ottimati were finally determined not to re-open republican doors no matter how unappetizing a Medici principate seemed. Neither alternative was much to their liking, but in the end they detested the popular republic more than the oppressive Medici.
World History
