Guicciardini says that the organizers of the anti-Savonarolan attacks, including Bernardo Rucellai, assumed that “with the friar gone, the Great Council would be finished; this is why they so vigorously opposed him, but in this they were deceived.”589 Former ottimati supporters and opponents of Savonarola now sought to present a united front against the council. In July 1498 a group met to discuss instituting a council of 150-200 elite citizens and putting the government “in the hands of men of worth and nobles.”590 Thus began four years of proposals and schemes by ottimati determined to modify the constitution of 1494. At the root of their error in believing they could now overturn the council was a failure to recognize the popolo’s growing strength in the body. Initially, Savonarola mediated between his party’s elite leaders and popular base, but in 1497 he came to depend more on Valori and the ottimati and in 1498 the alienation of much of the base turned violent. The chronicler Piero Vaglienti, a shopkeeper, blamed the proliferation of factions on “that devil of a friar Girolamo.”591 A strong popular party not only survived the weakening of its ties to Savonarola, and his and Valori’s spectacular elimination from the scene, but actually grew stronger over the next few years. By 1499, the popolo had more political clout in the council than ever before, which made the ottimati still more determined to abolish or at least weaken it.
In the council the ottimati favored the election of candidates receiving the most votes among those with at least a majority.592 This may seem counterintuitive, given that ottimati were a minority in the council. But the alternative was sortition, which left matters to chance, whereas voting allowed for the exercise of influence, favors, intimidation, and all the more or less subtle ways in which wealthy and powerful patrons and families could encourage votes for ottimati candidates. Under this system, in 1495-6 ottimati elected to offices were proportionally more numerous than their share of the council. Guicciardini estimated that 200 men monopolized the key offices.593 Apparently lacking confidence in their ability to translate numerical superiority into consistent victories in elections, the popolo preferred sortition and succeeded in restoring it, beginning in May 1497, for minor offices. Savonarola and his ottimati allies argued against it. Valori made his opposition clear in a pratica: “In important offices, like the Dieci, we need prudent and wise men, with greater dignity than others have. With regard to other offices, everything has been done to broaden participation, more to unite the citizens than for any other reason. . . . For my part, I will say that anyone who wants sortition seeks his own ruin.”594 For the moment they compromised: for minor offices only, after the council voted on the nominees, the names of all those approved by a majority of the council’s voting members were placed in pouches from which officeholders were selected by lot. But in May 1499, under a priorate that included only two men from elite families, sortition was extended to all major political offices, including the Signoria and the Dieci. Until the return of the Medici in 1512, elections for the priorate, colleges, the Council of Eighty, and other offices, including the Otto di Guardia, were conducted in this way. For most offices, excluding the Signoria, even the selection of candidates was entrusted to sortition rather than nomination. Guicciardini said about the 1499 law that “the desires of the popolo were harmful to the city.”595 Ottimati hostility to institutions they had hoped just a few years earlier to control now became intense. Although they continued to dominate the foreign policy magistracy of the Dieci and the ambassadorships,596 the popolo often controlled the Signoria and especially the advisory colleges (as Guicciardini complained) where it frustrated ottimati objectives. Unable to control the Great Council, the ottimati turned to the idea of a smaller and powerful senate to replace it.
Another source of conflict between the council and the ottimati was public finance,597 which still depended on a combination of indirect taxes and loans, the latter still divided between forced loans paying modest interest and voluntary loans from the wealthy secured with higher and guaranteed interest. Early in 1495 the new government also authorized a direct tax of one-tenth (thus called the decima) on income from land, but it took nearly four years to complete the assessment of real estate values, and even then it yielded modest sums. An increasingly costly war to recover Pisa and generally lower receipts from indirect taxes (compared to twenty years earlier) created a familiar fiscal crisis. Protecting the interests of its own middle-class creditors whose investments in the regular Monte and the Dowry Fund had frequently been neglected in favor of higher interest for wealthier creditors, the council was reluctant to approve new taxes whose receipts would have gone to such wealthy creditors. By 1499, after a failed campaign against Pisa with large financial losses, the council refused outright to approve new tax bills and instituted an audit of the Dieci’s finances going back to 1494. Monte officials, charged with raising the needed loans, paying interest, and providing the Dieci with the sums they needed, found it increasingly difficult to persuade the wealthy to lend money. In early 1500 the council authorized a graduated version of the decima in which a progressive “ladder” (or scala, hence the decima scalata) imposed higher rates on higher incomes: 10% at lower income levels, 17% for incomes of 250-400 florins, and 27.5% for those over 400 florins. Guicciardini denounced the progressive tax rate, pointing out that, with three or four collections per year, those at the higher end would pay 100% or more of annual income from land. He also reported with disgust the speech made in favor of the decima scalata by one of the Twelve, Luigi Scarlatti, who openly taunted the wealthy, telling them that “if they complain that this tax will impoverish them, let them reduce their expenses; and if they can’t keep their horses and servants, let them do as he does and walk to their country houses and serve themselves.”598 Although it is unclear how often the new tax was actually collected, fiscal policy, no less than electoral issues, was obviously exacerbating class tensions.
A third source of conflict was dominion and foreign policy. Between 1499 and 1502 the republic suffered military and regional crises with severe repercussions on domestic politics. In 1499 the government accused its chief captain, Paolo Vitelli, a controversial figure supported by many ottimati but suspect to much of the popolo, of having collaborated with foreign powers and sabotaged that summer’s campaign. Vitelli was interrogated, tortured, and, although he never confessed, executed. Suspicions were rampant within the popolo that ottimati among the Dieci had conspired with Vitelli to prolong the war and prevent a Florentine victory in order to impoverish the popolo with taxes and provoke a political crisis that would bring down the council and reinstate the Medici.599 Popular hostility against the Dieci mounted, and for over a year the popolo prevented their election by refusing to give the necessary majorities to candidates.600 To the ottimati this obstructionism was
Intolerable, and some called for solutions by force or radical constitutional changes. In September 1500 a compromise permitted the election of new Dieci, but with limited powers: they were forbidden to begin wars, make peace, enter into alliances, hire soldiers, or appoint civilian military commissioners without the approval of the Signoria and colleges. That same summer, an explosion of factional warfare in the subject city of Pistoia between the factions of the Panciatichi and Cancellieri families deepened the crisis of the Florentine territorial state beyond the already intractable problem of Pisa. Civil war in Pistoia had repercussions in Florence,601 as ottimati supported their clients and friends and exacerbated the conflict. According to Guicciardini, the principal “friends” of the Panciatichi were his father Piero, Alamanno and Jacopo Salviati, and Piero Soderini, whereas the Cancellieri party included Bernardo Rucellai, Giovanbattista Ridolfi, and Guidantonio Vespucci. Pistoiese factions also looked beyond Tuscany for help, the Cancellieri appealing to the Bentivoglio of Bologna and the Panciatichi (old favorites of the Medici) seeking protection from the Vitelli and Orsini. Again the popolo suspected that ottimati were manipulating a crisis to provoke foreign intervention and impose constitutional reforms.
Renewed French intervention in Italy generated a new danger that intensified domestic antagonisms. In 1498 Charles VIII was succeeded by Louis XII, who invaded the peninsula the following year, drove Lodovico il Moro from Milan, and established alliances with Venice and the papacy in order to march on Naples. Florence signed an agreement with Louis obligating him to provide military help against Pisa in return for large amounts of cash. Delays in payments to the French troops caused their abrupt departure in the summer of 1500 and strained relations between Florence and Louis. Papal cooperation in French designs on Naples also obligated Louis to support the burgeoning ambitions of Pope Alexander’s son Cesare Borgia, who from the end of 1499 had been swallowing up the petty principalities of the Romagna to install himself as the strongest power in central Italy. Florence watched all this with increasing nervousness, and in May 1501 Borgia suddenly invaded Florentine territory. Rumors of conspiracy and collaboration abounded: his arrival, says Guicciardini, caused “much anger in the city, because the popolo concluded that he had come by agreement with certain leading citizens who aimed in this way to overturn the government. . . . With poisonous feelings running high and people speaking angrily, especially against Bernardo Rucellai, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco [de’ Medici], the Nerli, and Alfonso Strozzi, there was great danger that crowds might run to the houses of leading citizens and set them on fire.”602 Guicciardini did not believe such a conspiracy actually existed, but
Others did and insisted that Borgia could not have come unmolested to within a few miles of the city without the complicity of powerful people. Vaglienti says it was clear that he “had come to overturn the government, since one morning, before [Borgia] departed, they [the citizens in league with him] convened the advisory colleges and gave the order to call a parlamento to remove the council and reorganize the government according to their wishes. And because they found the colleges unwilling to go along with them, and because according to a law passed in 1494 it was forbidden even to discuss the summoning of a parlamento. . . , they decided to leave well enough alone. . . . With the help of [Borgia’s] troops, which these grandi had brought in for their own purposes, their aim was to abolish this council which they so hated because it prevented them from attaining their wishes.”72 To a group of ambassadors that included Piero Soderini (brother of Paolantonio and Francesco), Borgia claimed he wanted an alliance and contract (condotta) as the city’s military captain. It seemed more a threat than an offer of friendship, especially because it was accompanied by demands that Florence reinstate the Medici, diminish the council’s powers, and institute an oligarchic government.73 The demands were rejected and he was persuaded to depart, but he then seized Piombino (on the coast, south of Pisa) and threw yet another scare into the Florentines, who saw his expanding power in whatever direction they looked.
May 1501 was but the prelude of worse to come from Borgia. In June 1502 Vitellozzo Vitelli, brother of the executed Paolo and one of Borgia’s military commanders, seized Arezzo in the southeastern corner of the Florentine dominion and fomented rebellion throughout the Valdichiana to the south. When it became known that Piero de’ Medici had accompanied Vitelli into Arezzo, the Florentines realized the magnitude of the danger. Although Borgia denied all complicity, most Florentines assumed that he was behind Vitelli and that behind him was his father the pope and a thus a wide conspiracy to overturn the republic and restore the Medici. Vitelli took Cortona, Sansepolcro, Anghiari, and many other towns whose inhabitants, seeing no reaction from Florence, surrendered to the name of Medici. Guicciardini was convinced that if Vitelli had sent his soldiers at that moment to Florence, the unprotected city would have yielded and the government fallen. The Signoria persuaded Louis that the attack on their dominion was part of an effort to push him out of Italy. Louis sent angry letters to Vitelli and promised the Florentines help. The newly elected Dieci, who included Piero Soderini, Piero Guicciardini, and Antonio Giacomini, sent Soderini to Lombardy to organize an expedition of French troops into Tuscany. Meanwhile the new Signoria for July-August, including Alamanno Salviati, came into office. Guicciardini’s panegyric of the Vaglienti, Storia, p. 131; Connell, Citta dei crucci, pp. 207-14.
S. Bertelli, “Machiavelli and Soderini,” Renaissance Quarterly 28 (1975): 1-16 (6).
Deeds in this crisis of the man whose daughter Maria he had already married when he wrote the Storie fiorentine extravagantly lauds the decisiveness with which Salviati raised the funds needed to confront the rebellion. Salviati recalled the colleges into session, threatening to replace anyone who failed to appear, and insisted that they remain until they approved his financial measures. He also levied a special forced loan on the wealthy and threatened them with prosecution if they refused to pay. According to Guicciardini, it was the city’s good luck to have, “one might say, as its capo, a person like Alamanno,” a man “without fear who liked the vigorous and strong solutions” needed at that moment.603 Guicciardini’s praise of Salviati as the savior of the republic might be suspect in view of the marriage alliance, but Machiavelli too lavishly praises Salviati in the First Decennale, his narration in verse of Italian history from 1494 to 1504, as the one who “healed” three of Florence’s “four mortal wounds” (Arezzo, the Valdichiana, and Pistoia, but not Pisa).604 In fact, Florence owed its salvation at least as much to Louis, whose troops arrived in Tuscany at the beginning of July, causing Vitelli to flee and the conspiracy to collapse. Although Guicciardini briefly mentions that Piero Soderini was sent by the Dieci to Arezzo to retake possession for Florence, he obscures the major role played by Soderini, three times ambassador to the French court and much esteemed by Louis, in winning the king’s sympathy and support. Guicciardini’s slighting of Soderini reflects the hostility that he and other ottimati conceived for him after Soderini became lifetime Standardbearer in 1502.
At the height of the crisis over Arezzo, the Dieci sent as ambassador to Borgia Piero’s brother Francesco Soderini, accompanied by their secretary, Niccolo Machiavelli. As Machiavelli reported in a dispatch, the duke repeated his insistence that Florence change its government: “I don’t like this government, and I can’t trust it. You [Florentines] must change it and offer guarantees of the observance of what you promise me. . . . If you don’t want me as a friend, you’ll find out what it’s like to have me as an enemy.” Machiavelli fired back that “the city had the best government it was able to devise and that, since it was itself quite satisfied with its government, its friends could also be satisfied.”605 Actually, not everyone was satisfied with it. Demands for constitutional reform continued to come from the ottimati. In January 1501 twelve ottimati devised a plan to deprive the council of legislative authority in crucial areas and institute a new council composed of the Eighty and another 120 citizens with life tenure.606 The twelve included former supporters of
Savonarola (Giovanbattista Ridolfi, Antonio Canigiani, Piero Guicciardini, Bernardo Nasi, Alamanno Salviati, Lorenzo Lenzi, and Luca degli Albizzi) and enemies (Benedetto de’ Nerli, Guidantonio Vespucci, Bernardo Rucellai, and Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici); the twelfth was Piero Soderini, who had not taken sides in the Savonarola controversy. A pratica of forty leading citizens was unable to agree on the appointment of a balia to reform the government; Guicciardini lamented their failure: “What a disgusting thing it is that among the city’s leading citizens, who have the same interests and should reasonably have the same judgments about things, there is so little loyalty, so little unity, and so little courage in matters that one might say concern their very existence.”607 When in 1502 Borgia echoed ottimati calls for constitutional changes, many again believed they were conspiring with him to manipulate the popolo into political concessions.
During the Signoria of Alamanno Salviati, discussions on constitutional reform resumed.608 Pratiche were convened in early July, and the Signoria asked for proposals from committees of ten appointed in each quarter. Despite some differences, all four committees recommended the institution of a smaller council of between 180 and 300 members, with authority independent of the Great Council in fiscal affairs and with tenure of 3-5 years. The Signoria submitted a proposal for a council of 192 members to the Eighty, which twice rejected it before giving its approval. But it went no further, because it had little support in the Great Council. In early August proponents of a smaller council changed tactics and focused efforts on extending the tenure of the Standardbearer of Justice, an idea that had been advanced in July by the Sixteen and the Dieci, who, alluding to Venice’s system of lifetime tenure for its head-of-state, recommended “a magistrate for a long period, or a doge.” After the Eighty rejected proposals for five - and six-year tenure for the Standardbearer, lifetime tenure was at first rejected and then, on August 22, accepted. The Great Council rejected it once but approved it on August 26 by a vote of 818 to 372. No doubt against the wishes of the ottimati, the law entrusted the election to the council and allowed each member to nominate one candidate, at least fifty years of age, from its membership. The quorum was raised to 1,500 and all nominees were voted on; those approved by a majority were put to a second scrutiny; all gaining majorities in the second scrutiny were put to a third vote. On September 22, an astonishing total of 2,000 council members gathered to carry out the election. They nominated 236 candidates: either not everyone made a nomination or groups had settled on candidates before the meeting, as the Savonarolans did the night before, when, according to Parenti, three or four hundred gathered in San Marco and decided to support Giovacchino
Guasconi. Three candidates gained majorities in the first balloting: Guasconi; Antonio Malegonnelle, also a Savonarolan and, according to some, the favorite of the Mediceans; and Piero Soderini. Only Soderini gained a majority in the second scrutiny, and his election became official when he did so again in the third ballot.609
Soderini won because few wanted government in the hands of either frateschi or Mediceans. But whose candidate was he? According to Guicciardini, the ottimati assumed that a lifetime Standardbearer from their own ranks would be “the true means for realizing their design.” Alamanno and Jacopo Salviati thus “made every effort” to get Soderini elected. With the benefit of hindsight and the frustration of knowing that Soderini disappointed them in this as in so much else, Guicciardini criticized the ottimatI for failing to create the senate before electing an “ambitious” man who would not want to share power. But in 1502 it was not necessarily unreasonable to suppose that Soderini might have cooperated with his fellow ottimati, especially given his participation in the 1501 meeting on constitutional reform. Moreover, Soderini’s political career to this point had been chiefly in diplomacy; no Florentine in fact had been entrusted with more or more significant missions. In 1500 he reminded the Signoria that he had been away from Florence on diplomatic assignments for four of the preceding six years.610 Given the crucial importance of good relations with France, his frequent missions to and familiarity with the French court no doubt made him appealing to many. Finally, Parenti considered him the neutral candidate who had the support of citizens least affected by strong ideological convictions (by “passione”). Soderini probably owed his election to a lack of close ties with any faction.
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