Lorenzo died on April 8, 1492. Within a week the councils confirmed twenty-year-old Piero in his father’s offices, including the Seventy, in the absence of any movement to restore constitutional government (as in 1465-6) or organized demonstrations of support (as in 1469). But the apparent smoothness of the succession was deceptive, and discontents muffled in the 1480s soon emerged. When Piero began to “give audiences in his home, as his father had done, surrounded by armed” retainers, Piero Parenti wrote, “the city secretly lamented” his expanding power, “fearing once again that it might slide into servitude, and of yet a worse kind.” Taking prophetic note of the growth of apocalyptic preaching, Parenti added that people “placed their hopes in the promises of preachers” who predicted that “from God would come a scourge such that men would be forced back to the right way of living. Entrusting themselves to God, they waited for events to unfold, unable to believe that the violence and intimidation employed by the Medici over fifty-eight years and through three successions should become permanent.” It was not, or not yet, Savonarola to whom Parenti alluded, but rather a fiery Franciscan, Fra Domenico da Ponzo. Waiting for the “principali” to take the lead, the “popolo and the majority of citizens remained in suspense, not knowing what road events would take or to what conclusion they would lead. They desired true liberty, and waited for the opportunity; they were in truth unhappy with the present regime, and everyone lived in great anticipation.” Some said that the purpose of Giovanni’s triumphal entry in May 1492 was to win popular support for the crumbling regime. Parenti thought that Piero, desiring “complete governance of our city,” searched ever more desperately for support, cultivating the loyalty of “young men and youthful gentlemen” by making them dependent on his good graces against the wishes of men of “mature age” from leading families, and trying to weaken the “authority of the grandi” to create more stable foundations for his own power.1
Parenti, Guicciardini, and the historian Bartolomeo Cerretani all located the cause of Piero’s troubles in the resentment of ottimati excluded from the inner circle. Guicciardini says that Bernardo Rucellai (married to Lorenzo’s sister Nannina) and Paolantonio Soderini (eldest son of the recently deceased Tommaso) tried to persuade Piero to “use his authority moderately” and to “come closer to a vita civile” (a phrase suggesting both the customs of citizens and constitutional, or republican, government) “rather than continue in those ways that gave a whiff of tyranny and for which many citizens had felt ugly toward Lorenzo.” But when Rucellai and Soderini arranged the marriages of, respectively, a daughter and a son to children of Filippo Strozzi, the insecure Piero, fearing that the great families were uniting against him, spurned them even more openly. In this fatal behavior he was urged on by those secretaries and chancellors who “decided all things and arrogated to themselves immense power, as they had maliciously designed and sought to do from the beginning, to Piero’s great harm; for anyone who thinks about it will realize that persuading Piero not to trust the wise citizens and friends of the regime was the beginning of his downfall.”537 538 According to Parenti, “the whole weight of the regime” was now reduced to ten persons: Piero, his secretaries, Bernardo del Nero, and only two men from elite families, Francesco Valori and Niccolo Ridolfi. “Piero let himself be led by them, and they used him as capo for their own preservation.”539
Dangers from abroad soon overwhelmed and exacerbated these internal tensions. By 1493 Italy was abuzz with rumors and fears of an invasion by France’s Charles VIII in pursuit of his claim, as heir to the Angevins, to the Neapolitan kingdom. The road to Naples went through Lombardy and Tuscany, and the French tried to persuade the Florentines to facilitate their descent through Tuscany. But Piero, his mother a Roman Orsini and his wife a Neapolitan Orsini, held to the Neapolitan alliance until the arrival of the French army in Tuscany. Parenti says that those who wanted to rid Florence of the Medici actually “awaited the French, wanted them to come, and called for them, albeit secretly, if their coming could bring the liberation of their city and the restoration of liberty.” Even the Medici were split over whether to support Naples or France. In April 1494, a French ambassador departing the city was accompanied by Piero’s brother Giuliano and their second cousins Lorenzo and Giovanni, sons of Pierfrancesco and grandsons of Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo, who offered the ambassador hospitality at their villa at Cafaggiuolo in the Mugello, ignoring official plans for him to stay at an inn. Piero was furious that members of his own family displayed such warmth to France and feared that something more lay behind their gesture. Piero investigated, and the cousins admitted they had secretly become “men of the [French] king,” retainers in effect, with a hefty annual fee, and that they were thus obliged to honor anyone representing Charles. A scandal erupted, with suggestions of a wider conspiracy involving Lodovico Sforza, Bernardo Rucellai’s son Cosimo, and Paolantonio Soderini’s brother Francesco, bishop of Volterra, and the episode revealed the presence of a pro-French party in the city. Although the Seventy wanted life imprisonment for the cousins, Piero agreed to a symbolic punishment of exile beyond the city limits (allowing them to live in their country villa) in order not to risk reprisals against Florentine merchants in France, including the Medici operation in Lyons, and also because his cousins had a following that might be provoked if they were treated harshly. Despite a show of reconciliation, the split in the family came fully into the open when the French arrived eighteen months later; Piero was exiled, and his cousins returned in triumph and changed their name from Medici to Popolani.540
As the French came closer, Piero kept putting them off while trying not to offend them. Parenti reports that he wanted to resist the French and stay with Naples because more and more citizens thought the arrival of the French would mean liberation from the regime. Parenti’s dislike of Piero may have led him to exaggerate the number and fervor of those who saw the French as potential liberators, but he claims that, on the eve of their arrival, “so heavy was the yoke of the house of Medici” that this was the view of “the majority of citizens.” Their “normal hatred” for the Medici was intensified, he adds, by Cardinal Giovanni’s grasping for every vacant benefice: “thus, this family, having usurped both the ecclesiastical and the civic [spheres], was now intolerable.” Growing numbers of people were speaking openly against the regime, he says, and the city was strewn with leaflets calling on the king of France to free them from the “tyrant.” Facing the regime’s intransigence, Charles increased the pressure by expelling Florentine merchants from France and threatening to “liberate” the city. At the end of October, with French forces marching from Milan into Tuscany, criticism of official policy was voiced in the councils, and Piero lost his nerve. On the 26th, imitating his father’s already legendary trip to Naples, he left the city with a few companions, went to Charles, placed himself at the king’s mercy, and ordered Florentine commanders to surrender the fortresses of Pisa, Livorno, Pietrasanta, and Sarzana, and control of the entire western half of the Florentine dominion: “so great was the authority that Piero de’ Medici arrogated to himself.”5
When the news reached Florence, Parenti reports, people asked by “what authority he had” surrendered the fortresses. Piero tried, after the fact, to get a mandate for this action, but failed. Protests multiplied: some blamed him and his youth; others focused on the hated secretaries and advisers. Florence now faced two crises: the collapse of Piero’s authority and with it the regime; and Charles’s intention to enter Florence with an army that had already brutally sacked the town of Fivizzano in the northwest. On November 4 the Signoria called an emergency pratica of the regime’s leadership. “Although they were his partisans,” Parenti says, “they had already become extremely unhappy with Piero’s actions, and, seeing themselves being led to disaster, began to turn their cloaks.” The core of the regime was about to abandon Piero. To deal with the French threat, they decided first to ask the Dominican preacher Savonarola, “who had predicted this calamity,” to lead a delegation to Charles to persuade him not to enter the city or, if he insisted, to limit the size of the arriving force and restrict its movements.
On November 8 Piero returned to the city, went to the family palace, and asked the military captain Paolo Orsini to approach the city with his forces, while the Medici began rounding up troops from the Mugello and the territory of Pistoia, apparently preparing for another resolution by force along the lines of 1458 and 1466. Rumors of a coup abounded, even of a plan to set various neighborhoods ablaze and “retake lo stato per forza.” Piero went to the government palace the next day with his retinue, but the Signoria, aware of his military preparations, refused him entry. An armed confrontation nearly ensued between the palace guards and Piero’s men, but when cries of “popolo! popolo!” summoned the population to the defense of the palace, Piero backed off and went home. Not only the Signoria turned its back on Piero: Francesco Valori, until then a regime stalwart, and Piero Vettori, another loyal Medicean, rode into the piazza and led the crowd to police headquarters at the Bargello to seize arms in anticipation of a pitched battle. Piero’s friends and relatives were also in danger: at least two were attacked, and Girolamo Tornabuoni, of the Otto, was killed. Cerretani says that Cardinal Giovanni narrowly escaped an angry crowd and had to disguise himself as a Franciscan friar to make it
5
Parenti, Storia, pp. 103, 110-14.
Safely out of the city.541 When the Signoria put a bounty on the heads of both Piero and Giovanni, all three brothers quickly left through the San Gallo gate, went to the family villa at Careggi and from there to Bologna. One of the Bibbiena brothers took Piero’s infant son Lorenzo and his wet nurse to Urbino and then to Venice, while Piero’s wife Alfonsina was sent for her safety to a nearby monastery. Thus did sixty years of Medici rule come to an inglorious end. Piero never set foot in Florence again, whereas Giovanni and Giuliano returned on the backs of Spanish troops eighteen years later.
Medici secretaries and advisers went into hiding. Some were arrested, and the Monte officer Antonio di Miniato Dini was executed for embezzlement of public funds (perhaps standing in for his bosses). Medici possessions were confiscated from the family palace, including works of art. Advised by a large pratica, the Signoria abolished the Seventy and the Cento and recalled a long list of exiles, including the Pazzi. There were disagreements over what to do with the former regime’s inner circle: some advocated leniency and were supported by Savonarola, while others wanted justice. Differences over political reforms also surfaced: the priors were evenly divided between those who “leaned toward the popolo” and, as Parenti put it, those who “were in favor of tyranny and against popular liberty.” But with the French demanding entry, politics had to wait. On the 12th Charles agreed to postpone his arrival for five days. Meanwhile the Signoria sent for troops from the contado and quietly placed them in strategic locations near and in the city. Charles arrived on the 17th, officially an ally and protector but also a potential enemy who had angered the Florentines by recognizing Pisa’s independence and supporting Piero. Everyone feared that the French army might be unleashed against the city; young women were sent to convents for protection. Cerretani’s estimate that 18,000 (of 40,000 French soldiers) entered the city is almost certainly too high, but Charles himself said he brought 10,000.542 His mixed army of large and (to the Florentines) strange-looking soldiers from different parts of Europe, from Switzerland to Scotland, impressed and frightened the citizens. His representatives had already gone through the city marking with chalk homes suitable for French courtiers, noblemen, and soldiers (a detail Machiavelli later made famous when he remarked in chapter 12 of The Prince that Charles took Italy “with chalk”). Charles himself stayed in the Medici palace, where he began acting more like Florence’s conqueror than its honored guest. When he demanded that the Signoria allow Piero to return, the Florentines responded angrily with near unanimity that, as Parenti put it, “they would rather die valiantly with arms in their hands in defense of their liberty than agree to the return of the tyrant.” Both Parent! and Cerretani report that the most eloquent spokesman for this view was Francesco Soderini, who made a long speech in a pratica in which he recalled Florence’s centuries of armed resistance to would-be foreign conquerors. Another delegation went to Charles, again including Savonarola, to persuade him to relinquish the demand for Piero’s return.
Charles and the Florentines were also at loggerheads over a formal agreement defining their alliance. He demanded recognition as the republic’s overlord, by right of conquest according to the laws of France, with the authority to install a presiding representative once he departed. When the Florentines rejected the idea out of hand, tensions escalated with rumors and fears of a sack. Florentine negotiators, including Francesco Valori and Piero Capponi, presented a draft of an agreement, which Charles and his councilors dismissed with menacing words. In a moment that remains legendary, Piero Capponi allegedly tore up the document and said, in Cerretani’s version: “Most Christian prince, we shall sound the bells if you sound your trumpets, and we shall show you this people in arms.” Guicciardini tells a similar story. It is missing in Parenti, who does however say that Florentine attitudes toward the king were quickly transformed from good will to hatred, and that the government ordered contado infantry (he speaks of 30,000 men, a figure confirmed by Guicciardini, while Cerretani says 25,000) billeted in elite homes in the center so that they could quickly “run armed to the piazza [of the Signoria] at the sound of the bell.”
Neither side wanted a catastrophic confrontation, and within a few days an agreement was reached that bound them “in friendship” and required Florence not to make other alliances without French approval, to pay Charles 120,000 ducats over seven months, at least to consider the repatriation of Piero, and to allow French control of the fortresses until Charles concluded the Neapolitan campaign. Charles recognized Florence’s sovereignty over Pisa, but left the Florentines to figure out how to re-establish their rule. Both sides swore to observe the treaty in a ceremony in the cathedral on the 26th, and, after one more mediation by Savonarola, who told Charles that God had more important tasks for him than to remain idle in Florence, the French finally left on the 28th for Rome and Naples. Florence narrowly escaped what would have been the greatest disaster in its history. Parenti thanked God and Savonarola and lauded his fellow citizens, underscoring the contribution of women and children who impeded the movement of French troops and artillery by pelting them with stones from their windows. “I cannot sufficiently commend the greatness of spirit of our people, who, with the king of France in their city and surrounded by many thousands of his men, and still suspicious of the many and powerful citizens who were supporters of Piero, dared to oppose the king’s will in order to preserve their liberty.”
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