As soon as the war against Milan ended in 1428, internal tensions erupted. In January 1429 a large pratica discussed the dangers of factions and the need for unity; that same month 700 citizens signed an oath “to divest ourselves completely of partisanship and loyalty to factions, to consider only the welfare and honor and greatness of the Republic, and to forget every injury received up to this day on account of partisan or factional passions.” In February a new magistracy, the Conservators of the Laws, was instituted (despite many dissenting votes in both councils) to review the suitability of officeholders and to determine if any belonged to illegal associations or societies seeking to influence elections. Citizens were invited to convey their suspicions to the ten Conservators, and over the next few years hundreds of accusations, implicating both Mediceans and their opponents, exacerbated partisan divisions. In December 1429, just as the government was deciding once again to go to war, this time against Lucca, the councils passed another law against factions (again over strong opposition) that aimed to “restrain the pride of the great which must be subdued and checked, so that no one, trusting in wealth or kinship or marriage alliances or patronage [clientelis] or factions, will dare do anything to disturb the peace and tranquility of the city.” Concisely identifying the nature of the bonds within factions, this “law against sowers of scandal” required the Signoria, together with eighty citizens drawn by lot, to meet twice a year to identify persons suspected of belonging to illegal associations, put to a vote anyone named at least six times, and punish anyone convicted by a two-thirds vote with banishment or loss of office-holding rights.333 Secret accusations and public humiliations became favorite weapons of partisan antagonists. In 1432 Rinaldo degli Albizzi used such methods to banish the respected Neri di Gino Capponi, a war commissioner and frequent envoy whose initiatives in foreign policy Rinaldo resented. Two months later Neri’s many friends had him recalled, and it was Rinaldo’s turn to feel the sting of humiliation: a dress rehearsal of sorts for the drama that was to be played out in 1433 and 1434.
Such were the tensions and levels of mistrust within the ruling group as the disastrous war with Lucca drew Milan into the hostilities and intensified the commune’s fiscal crisis to the point of dependence on Medici money to pay for a war to which Rinaldo was strongly committed. Before 1430 the configuration of the parties and the shape of looming confrontation between a Medici-led faction and the coalition around Rinaldo were still murky. Voices for and against the war were heard among Mediceans and anti-Mediceans alike. Palla Strozzi, who later joined the anti-Mediceans, opposed the war, whereas Neri Capponi, subsequently a Medici ally, favored it. Rinaldo initially supported the war with much conviction and served as civilian commissioner in the field. Cosimo’s letters reveal no great enthusiasm for the war, although he remarked to his cousin Averardo that those responsible for the disaster it turned into (“and may God forgive them,” he added) were the ones who opposed it when it was still possible to win quickly.334 Early in 1430 he wrote to Averardo that “whether or not we approve of this undertaking, things have come to the point where the honor of the commune is involved, so that everyone must give it all the support they can.” By October, when he realized it was to be a long and divisive affair, he suggested, again to Averardo, that they ought to steer clear of direct involvement. But two months later, in early December, the Florentine army suffered a disastrous defeat that prompted the appointment of a new balia that included Cosimo and three of his closest allies. From that point on, the Medici and their friends held an increasing number of important positions in the prosecution of the war. Thus, although Cosimo was cautious at the outset, one year into the conflict he and his friends assumed a large share of the responsibility for bringing it to a successful conclusion, without any apparent protest from those who, at war’s end, tried to destroy them.
By 1433, the magnitude of Medici influence over communal finances and military and foreign policy was starkly apparent, and their opponents panicked. Rinaldo reached back to the example of his father Maso, who had overcome the threat of the Alberti in the early 1390s, by accusing the Medici of a series of political crimes as a pretext for driving them from the city. Emulating the paternal model may have come naturally to this man who once wrote, in a postscript to an official letter from a diplomatic mission, that “before dawn, my father appeared to me in a dream and instructed me concerning the peace that must be concluded.” Or, as one critical observer put it, “Messer Rinaldo wanted to do as his father had done in 1393, and carry out all his own vendettas.”335 But he would not have been able to persuade so much of the elite to take the drastic and risky step of exiling the Medici without serious allegations and evidence against them. In September 1433, just after Cosimo’s and Averardo’s arrest, the Signoria and the Otto di Guardia gathered testimony concerning alleged Medici misdeeds. Among other witnesses, ser Niccolo Tinucci, who had served as notary for the war balie, presented a long and detailed case against Cosimo.336 Although Tinucci had been friendly with Niccolo da Uzzano and his faction, he subsequently joined the Medici because of a personal dispute with a Da Uzzano ally, the chancellor ser Paolo Fortini, whom the Medici succeeded in having removed in 1427 (thus opening the way for the election of Leonardo Bruni). But in September 1433 Tinucci turned informant against the Medici and revealed details of conversations and things overheard or witnessed in their company. He may have been pressured to provide damning testimony against them, and, given his fluctuating loyalties, there are certainly grounds for doubting the veracity, or at least accuracy, of his claims. But “the activities which he attributes to the Medici and their friends,” as the leading study of these years concludes, are “supported, in numerous precise details, from the letters identifying partisans and revealing their political preoccupations in this period.”337
Tinucci’s most damaging allegations were that the Medici bribed and pressured communal officials to do their bidding, illegally interfered in scrutinies and elections, and, worst of all, used their influence, money, and access to and frequent service on the balie to prolong the war against Lucca because of the profits they made from loans to the commune. The first two accusations ring true, in part because they allege traditional forms of corruption in Florentine politics, and because after 1434 the Medici became regular and skillful manipulators of both elections and elected officials. Tinucci’s example of bribery went back to 1427, when, he claimed, Giovanni de’ Medici sought chancellor
Fortini’s removal and saw his opportunity in the election to the priorate of a Medici partisan, Luigi Vecchietti. In return for cooperation in sacking Fortini, Giovanni promised Vecchietti a loan of 800 florins for his daughter’s dowry; to another prior, Francesco Nardi, he offered cash and an Alberti wife with a dowry of 2,000 florins; and to the Standardbearer of Justice Sandro Biliotti (another Medici amico) he likewise offered cash. According to Tinucci, Giovanni even wanted this priorate to exile Niccolo da Uzzano, but Vecchietti balked. Tinucci’s allegations concerning electoral corruption were that in 1428 Giovanni conspired with another amico to penetrate official electoral secrets in order to influence a planned transfer of name tickets from the most recent scrutiny into the pouches of earlier ones. Such transfers allowed selected candidates to be drawn much sooner, and if a faction knew whose, and how many, name tickets remained in earlier pouches, it would know when to appoint cooperative accoppiatori who would select its preferred candidates for transfer, thus influencing the election of upcoming priorates. Officially, the identities of those approved in scrutinies and the composition of the pouches were secret, known only to the accoppiatori and the notaries who oversaw the voting. According to Tinucci, Giovanni persuaded his friend ser Martino di ser Luca, who had served as an elections notary in 1421 and 1426, to reveal the contents of the scrutinies of those years. When the Medici realized that Da Uzzano “and his friends” were more heavily represented in the pouches than they themselves were, they conspired to get Cosimo and Nerone di Nigi Dietisalvi-Neroni appointed among the accoppiatori. Consequently, Tinucci wrote, “Giovanni de’ Medici, Averardo, Cosimo, Nerone di Nigi, ser Martino, and Puccio [Pucci] were able to regulate the scrutiny” and the transfer of name-tickets and “to control the office of Standardbearer of Justice as they wished, so that whenever necessary they would have enough votes to accomplish whatever they wanted.” Tinucci possibly exaggerated the extent to which the Medici group controlled elections after 1428, but both episodes turned on the ways patronage ties could be used to subvert institutions for partisan benefit.
Most serious among Tinucci’s charges against the Medici was that they conspired to prolong the war for their own profit. Given the length of the conflict and the fact that the Medici were among the few Florentines whose political (and financial) fortunes were raised by a war that was a disaster for the commune and the majority of its taxpayers, it is easy to see how, after the fact, their enemies concluded that Cosimo, Averardo, and their friends had indeed deliberately manipulated Florentine military and fiscal policy in order to keep the war going. The most blatant statement reported by Tinucci of Medici acknowledgment of complicity in prolonging the war could be interpreted as a projection of their enemies’ suspicions: “Many times I heard Cosimo and Averardo say that the way to keep oneself powerful is to keep [the commune] in a state of war and to serve the needs of the war economy with ready cash, and then make loans to the commune that are secure and highly profitable. The people will have the impression of being helped by the very persons who reap [from such actions] profit, honor, greatness and power.”338 This seems too much of an open admission actually to have been spoken by the chronically cautious Cosimo. But Tinucci surrounds the allegation with a whole series of recollections of specific moments in which he claims they influenced the course of the war, sometimes from their position on the balie, and sometimes by going around them, in order to prevent a quick conclusion. He alleges that Cosimo and Averardo worried that Rinaldo’s capture of Collodi, near Pescia, would redound to his political benefit and tried to have him replaced as commissioner; that they got the balia to send Alamanno Salviati and Neri di Gino Capponi as co-commissioners with Rinaldo but that when Capponi had some military success Averardo wanted to remove him as well. So he got ser Martino, now a member of the war commission, to write such angry letters to Capponi that the latter returned to Florence and left Salviati alone in the field with the troops. Salviati did nothing for two and a half months, “in order to prolong the war, as Averardo and Cosimo desired.” Meanwhile, Rinaldo was capturing another town and would have taken Lucca itself if Salviati had mounted an offensive from his direction. To frustrate Rinaldo’s efforts, they again used their influence with ser Martino to have the balia recall and replace him with another Medici amico, Fruosino da Verrazzano, “for the sole purpose,” says Tinucci, “of preventing Rinaldo from increasing his reputation and becoming too powerful.” Tinucci may have exaggerated both the negative consequences of Medici actions in the war and their narrowly partisan political motives. But the story he tells is too detailed to have been completely invented, and it is supported by the testimony of Piero Guicciardini, a Medici friend, who reacted with disgust at the open display of elation by Averardo’s son Giuliano upon learning of the defeat of Florentine forces in 1430: the event that ensured a longer war and opened the way for Cosimo and the Mediceans to assume control of it.339 And even if they were exaggerated for partisan purposes, Tinucci’s charges reflect the way the enemies of the Medici saw their growing influence and abuse of power.
Peace came in April 1433 with a treaty jointly negotiated, ironically, by Cosimo and Palla Strozzi. Apparently sensing that they might soon be the targets of a purge, the Medici began transferring cash to safe places and selling shares in the Monte,340 and Cosimo spent the summer at a family estate in the Mugello. The storm broke when the priorate drawn for September-October turned up a majority of anti-Mediceans, and on September 5, at Rinaldo’s instigation (so says Cavalcanti), the Signoria summoned Cosimo to Florence and had him arrested. Four days later it summoned a parlamento and asked it to approve a grant of balia powers to the Signoria and two hundred citizens, only about a quarter of whom were known enemies of the Medici. The balia immediately voted to exile Cosimo to Padua, Averardo to Naples, and Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo to Venice. But the Signoria kept Cosimo imprisoned in the palace for almost a month, for two reasons, as he would later write in his “Ricordi”: to use the implicit threat of killing him as a way of pressuring his “friends and relatives” on the balia to agree to measures against Medici interests; and to force him into bankruptcy by preventing him from using his financial resources or selling property or Monte shares. The first tactic seems to have worked, but Cosimo noted with evident pride that his financial empire did not collapse and that “many foreign merchants and lords offered us money and sent us large sums.” Cash bribes to two members of the Signoria finally resulted in Cosimo’s release and exile on October 3.341
Less than a year later he was back in Florence to begin thirty years of unofficial but unmistakable control of Florentine government and foreign policy. His remarkable reversal of fortune has several explanations. First is the curious reluctance of Rinaldo and other anti-Mediceans to do much damage to the Medici party. Evidently believing that to break Medici power it was sufficient to remove Cosimo and a few family members and allies, the anti-Mediceans left their patronage network largely intact. Most of Cosimo’s friends remained loyal, even if quietly so, helping to protect Medici assets and agitating for his recall. Although the balia conducted a new scrutiny, it did not nullify the older ones: the more than 2,000 citizens approved in the 1433 scrutiny were added to the existing pouches. Thus, while the Medici (excepting only the line of Vieri di Cambio) were barred from communal office, their friends and allies remained eligible. Although the Signoria and accoppiatori handpicked the next priorate of November-December 1433 - the first time since 1393 that name tickets were not drawn by lot - for some reason Rinaldo and his allies decided not to continue to handpick subsequent priorates, and the resumption of sortition soon proved fatal to the anti-Mediceans. The luck of the draw produced a pro-Medici Signoria for September-October 1434 that promptly set in motion the events that led to Cosimo’s triumphant return.
Also crucial to Cosimo’s survival in 1433-4 was the support he enjoyed from many Italian governments and ruling houses, no doubt because of the bank’s central role in their finances. He received condolences and offers of
Assistance from rulers of several cities in the Romagna, from the Baglioni of Perugia, the Bentivoglio of Bologna, and from the condottiere Micheletto Attendoli whose 1431 contract to fight for the Florentines had been negotiated by Averardo.342 Attendoli was the cousin of Francesco Sforza, who later, as duke of Milan, played a decisive role in the preservation of Medici power. But most important among Medici allies during the exile were the Venetians. Cosimo requested and received permission to move from Padua to Venice where he was treated like a visiting head of state, in part because of loans he extended to the Venetian government and also because of old ties of friendship through the bank’s Venetian branch. In the “Ricordi” he recalled how “I was received, not as an exile, but as an ambassador. . . and with such honor and good will that it would be impossible to describe. [The Venetians] expressed sorrow over my misfortune and offered the power of their government and city and resources to provide for my every comfort.” Venice even sent envoys to Florence to urge the revocation of Cosimo’s banishment. No government in Italy could have been unaware of the fact that Medici financial and political clout was largely unaffected by their expulsion from Florence, and many were betting that the exile would be brief.
Not least among the sources of support for the Medici during their crisis were the small communities and hill towns north of Florence. Cosimo noted that on his way out of Florentine territory in October 1433 the “men of the mountains” received him as an honored ambassador and provided him with an escort of twenty men as he moved into Ferrarese territory. And from farther east, north of their home territories in the Mugello and extending into the Romagna on the other side of the mountains, came offers of willing help. The Medici had long cultivated ties to these communities, both in formal political contexts as representatives of the commune to the district territories, and in their “private” but no less imposing capacity as landowners and local notables to whom (again, no doubt, because of favors, loans, and various forms of intercession) deference and assistance were due. This quasi-feudal dimension of Medici strength was to play a crucial role (for the first of several times) in the crisis that brought them home in September of 1434.
With these resources Cosimo bided his time, refusing to take risks that would have made a return impossible, remaining in regular touch with the amici, and waiting for the right moment. It came at the end of August 1434, when the extraction of the new Signoria included four prominent Mediceans: Luca di Buonaccorso Pitti (who would go on to be one of the regime’s chief lieutenants), Giovanni Capponi (a Bank Official in 1432), Neri Bartolini-Scodellari (also a Bank Official), and, as Standardbearer of Justice, Niccolo
Cocco-Donati, from a new family heavily dependent on Medici patronage. And not one of the other five was a known anti-Medicean. For several weeks everyone waited to see who would make the first move. At the end of September, the Signoria issued a summons to Rinaldo and his allies and announced a parlamento for the 29th at which, as everyone knew, the crowd would be asked to agree to the return of the Medici. Realizing that the moment of truth had arrived, Rinaldo refused the summons and, together with other leading anti-Mediceans, opted for a showdown in the streets and a risky all-or-nothing revolt against the pro-Medici Signoria. Between 500 and 1,000 armed retainers and supporters, including members of prominent anti-Medici families, gathered under Rinaldo’s leadership behind the palace, as the Signoria assembled its own force of 500 men inside. Years of factional rivalry were about to be resolved with arms. But two men prevented an actual battle and guaranteed the defeat of the anti-Mediceans. The first was Palla Strozzi. Rinaldo hesitated to take the drastic step of attacking the palace without Strozzi’s full support and the participation of his large private army, which might have tipped the balance in favor of the anti-Mediceans. Rinaldo begged Palla to join the fight, but Strozzi, who commanded more moral authority than any other Florentine and who had never opposed the Medici until the year of their exile, refused. According to Cavalcanti, he appeared without his troops, listened to Rinaldo’s anguished dismay, mumbled something that Cavalcanti claims not to have heard, and went home.343 Decades later, in his admiring biography of Strozzi, Vespasiano da Bisticci invented, or perhaps reported from sources unknown to Cavalcanti, the dignified and stoically fatalistic response that Strozzi allegedly made to Rinaldo’s emissaries: that he did not wish to destroy what he had not made, namely the city, and that what Rinaldo and the others were doing would surely have led to its ruin.344
The other man who intervened that day to stop the insurrection was Pope Eugenius, who had come to Florence that summer at Rinaldo’s invitation to escape the violence and instability that Rome’s nobility inflicted on the papal city. Rinaldo’s army was losing strength in the aftermath of Strozzi’s great refusal, as many now saw the folly of an attack on the Signoria and the palace that was sure to fail. Eugenius offered to arbitrate and promised that no harm would come to Rinaldo if he agreed to lay down his arms. Medici financial power surely influenced Eugenius’s advice. Despite his close ties to Rinaldo, whom he had made a Roman senator two years earlier and whose hospitality in Florence he had just accepted, the pope knew that the church’s interests were better served by good relations with the Medici, who were still his bankers and the key to the papal-Florentine-Venetian alliance that was trying to keep Milan out of Tuscany and the papal states. Did Eugenius lure Rinaldo into a trap? Or did he simply see the hopelessness of a revolt against both the government and the well organized Medici faction? Whatever Eugenius’s motives may have been, Rinaldo could not compete with Medici power.
When Rinaldo agreed to papal arbitration, the game was up. The Signoria summoned a parlamento and, to ensure its docile cooperation, summoned, or perhaps agreed to the arrival of, huge numbers of armed peasants from the contado. Cosimo himself noted that more than 3,000 of them came from the Mugello, from the mountains farther north, and even from the Romagna, and that, as he added rather matter-of-factly, they came “to our house.” These irregulars were in effect the Medici private army, the inhabitants of the areas into which the family had slowly extended its network of rural patronage and from which it now called in debts that were years in the making. Cavalcanti called them “a huge multitude of wild and fierce peasants” and said that they were under the command of Papi de’ Medici, Cosimo’s distant cousin who also lived and owned property in the Mugello. Under the menacing gaze of some 6,000 armed peasants at the direct orders of a family that dominated a whole area of the Apennines, the parlamento approved the balia that recalled the Medici and banished Rinaldo degli Albizzi, Ridolfo Peruzzi, Niccolo Barbadori, Felice Brancacci, and all the anti-Medici leaders, including, to the surprise and dismay of many, Palla Strozzi: altogether seventy-three exiles and, counting their households, 500 persons. It was the largest group of exiles from Florence in over a century. Among the Albizzi, only Rinaldo and his son Ormanno were banished, probably because Rinaldo’s brother Luca had become a Medici ally. Of the fifty-eight families with at least one exile, those hit particularly hard were the Bardi, Brancacci, Castellani, Gianfigliazzi, Guadagni, Guasconi, Peruzzi, and Strozzi, whose four exiles included, in addition to Palla, Matteo di Simone, the husband of Alessandra Macinghi. Cavalcanti wrote that the balia gave Florence a “nuovo reggimento,” but then thought better of it and added that, “although I say new reggimento, one didn’t hear new voices, and neither the kind nor number of men changed; rather there was an addition of some men who had had no place in the previous reggimento.”49 While there was no wholesale replacement of the wider political class and changes were largely confined to the leadership, in this case Cavalcanti underestimated the full significance of what was about to change, not immediately, but over the course of many years, as a consequence of the events of ’34.
49
Cavalcanti, Istorie, vol. 1, pp. 587-8; Kent, Rise, pp. 289-351.
The Medici and the Ottimati: A Partnership of Conflict Part 1: Cosimo and Piero
The significance of 1434 changed over time. Decades later, Cosimo’s return from exile acquired the status of an historic turning point. But for the first ten, even twenty, years of the regime, many Florentines (although probably not Cosimo himself) thought, as Cavalcanti did, that little had changed: that a typical conflict between upper-class factions had been resolved (as in 1393) with the victory of one group and the exile of the other. Illusions of continuity were sustained by the absence of major institutional reforms. Through the mid-1430s, Bruni and Palmieri continued to laud the republic’s liberty and ideals of participatory citizenship, with no suggestion that anything fundamental was different. Bruni could not have been happy about the exile of his friends Rinaldo degli Albizzi (to whom he had dedicated his De militia in 1421) and Palla Strozzi, but he remained as chancellor and gave no public signs of displeasure with the new regime. Although not as thick as those he had with the exiled anti-Mediceans, Bruni had ties to the Medici as well that went back many years.345 In 1420 he had dedicated a translation of the Economics (then attributed to Aristotle) to Cosimo himself. In the regime’s early years, Poggio Bracciolini, Ambrogio Traversari, and other humanists praised Cosimo as a model citizen in the mold of virtuous ancient Roman statesmen and as the embodiment of civic and republican virtues.346 By 1439, in an analysis of the Florentine constitution written in Greek for the visitors to the ecumenical church council then meeting in Florence, Bruni did acknowledge that the character of Florence’s polity had been transformed by reliance on great private wealth in wartime.347 But no humanist or chronicler of the regime’s first years either praised or damned the return of the Medici as a watershed event.
In fact, much did change, and from the very beginning. Cosimo and his lieutenants modified Florentine politics and the relationship between governors and governed in ways that aimed to ensure that he would succeed where the Albizzi had failed.348 Whereas Rinaldo had evidently not understood that the methods of 1393 would not work in 1433, Cosimo drew useful lessons both from the near disaster he and his family had suffered and from his enemies’ failure to consolidate their temporary victory. A major reason for Cosimo’s success over the next three decades was that he never forgot how close he came to losing everything. For him and his family the memory of 1433 nourished the constant obsession with never losing control of politics and government, or with regaining it by any and all means whenever it was weakened. The most urgent imperative of Cosimo’s political practice was not to repeat his own mistakes of 1433 or those of his foes in 1434.
First among the differences between the oligarchic and Medici regimes were the banishments, not only the far greater number sent into exile in 1434 in a clear attempt to break rival factions rather than simply removing their leaders, but also the controversial exile of Palla Strozzi, whose refusal to join the insurrection of September 1434 facilitated the peaceful return of the Medici, and for which messer Palla might have expected a measure of gratitude from Cosimo. Even Medici friends protested this decision, albeit to no avail. Unlike Rinaldo, who joined Milanese military campaigns against Medicean Florence, Strozzi suffered his exile decorously and, so says Vespasiano, without wishing even to hear harsh words spoken against his city. Despite this unimpeachable conduct, Cosimo repeatedly renewed Palla’s banishment and let him die in exile in 1462. Yet the harsh (according to many, indefensible) treatment of Strozzi had a purpose: it loudly announced, at the regime’s inception and periodically thereafter, that it was not only enemies who would not be tolerated, but also anyone who could compete with Cosimo in wealth or prestige,5 and that the collegial and collective rule by an oligarchy of families of more or less equal authority and stature was finished. Now one family claimed a primacy not to be rivaled by others.
World History
