Revolution

Clement’s foreign policy wavered dangerously and irresponsibly between France and the empire. After allying with Francis in 1524, he reversed course after the massive French defeat at Pavia in February 1525 and accepted an agreement with Charles. But when Charles imposed Spanish rule on Milan, the pope did another about-face and in May 1526 formed the League of Cognac with France and Venice to limit imperial power in Italy to Naples. To protect its merchants from reprisals Florence did not officially join the league, but Clement insisted that it contribute financially and militarily. When Charles’s Colonna allies attacked Rome in September 1526, Clement had to sign another agreement with the emperor, which he promptly repudiated. To frighten or punish the faithless pope, Charles sent into Italy an army of 12,000 German mercenaries, the famous, feared, mostly Lutheran landsknechts who joined forces with imperial Spanish troops under the Duke of Bourbon and began a disorderly march toward Rome that took them through Tuscany and perilously close to Florence. League forces were unable to stop this irregularly paid and unpredictable menace, and Charles himself was unable, or unwilling, to control it. As the imperialists descended into the Romagna and prepared to cross the Apennines in the late winter and spring of 1527, fear mounted in Florence, and many, including prominent ottimati like Niccolo Capponi, son of Piero who had defied the French in 1494, and Luigi Guicciardini, brother of Francesco who was now Lieutenant-General of the papal armies, demanded that the city be allowed arms for self-defense. In February Machiavelli was sent to papal military headquarters in the north to impress upon Guicciardini Florence’s urgent need for defense, and he remained with Guicciardini through April as papal forces moved south from Parma to Bologna to Forli. From this mission Machiavelli wrote his last letters, addressed to Francesco Vettori, assessing the immense danger that Florence faced. On April 16, reporting Guicciardini’s decision to bring an army to Florence’s defense if the imperialists threatened the city, he told Vettori: “we must not hobble about anymore, but rather fight with abandon; desperation often finds solutions that choice does not. . . . And I tell you from sixty years of experience that we have never faced such travails as these, where peace is necessary and war cannot be avoided, and yet we have on our hands a prince [Clement] who can provide neither for peace nor for war.” Two days later, he ominously predicted that “whoever enjoys war, as these soldiers do, would be crazy to praise peace. But God will see to it that they have more war than we would like.”1

On April 1 Bourbon’s army moved from Ferrara toward Forli and began crossing the Apennines from Meldola to Santa Sofia, in Florentine territory, where it arrived on the 16th. A panicked Clement reopened negotiations with the imperial viceroy, who agreed to go to Florence and attempt a deal with Bourbon’s envoys to spare Florence an attack in return for cash. After 80,000 florins were hastily collected, Bourbon raised the demand to an astronomical 300,000, making it evident that he and his hungry troops intended to sack the city. As a foretaste, they attacked towns in the Casentino and by the 26th were in San Giovanni Valdarno, only twenty miles southeast of Florence. But Guicciardini had already arrived with a Swiss-French force and Venetian troops and, although the contado suffered from the depredations of all three armies, the danger of a sack was averted.691 Preferring easy slaughter to a battle in which they would have been outnumbered, Bourbon’s troops moved on to Rome, where ten days later they inflicted the sack denied them in Florence.

On April 26, when the danger was most acute, seething anger against the pope and the regime erupted in what became known as the “Friday uprising.” When Cardinal Passerini and Ippolito de’ Medici left the city to meet the commanders of the league’s armies, a group of young ottimati led by Piero Salviati and supported by Niccolo Capponi seized the palace demanding arms, the banishment of the Medici, and the restoration of the pre-1512 constitution. Luigi Guicciardini, Standardbearer of Justice, was willing to distribute arms but hesitant to concede the political demands. But with Capponi and the crowd crying “popolo e liberta” and insisting that the Medici be expelled, no less than Francesco Vettori, seeing the disintegration of the regime he had loyally supported since 1513, persuaded the Signoria to yield. Passerini and his troops returned and forcefully quelled the revolt, as an amnesty was negotiated, oddly enough, between Vettori on behalf of the “rebels” and Francesco Guicciardini for the regime. It was only a temporary reprieve for the regime, because the Medici were once again losing the ottimati. The revolution of 1527 began, like that of 1494, with men from leading families taking the initiative. But, also as in 1494, the ottimati were divided amongst themselves and unable to contain the revolt. Vettori was willing to accept a non-Medici government without severing ties to Clement and the church. Capponi wanted a complete break with the pope and even discussed with the imperial viceroy the possibility of support for the insurrection from the very imperial army threatening the city. But Guicciardini, still Lieutenant-General of the papal armies, remained committed to Clement. Rarely had the interests, aims, and convictions of leading ottimati pulled in so many incompatible directions.

On May 11 the news of the Sack of Rome arrived in Florence and sparked a second and successful revolt. Besides their horror over the destruction, pillaging, and loss of life, Florentines with businesses and banks in Rome saw “hundreds of thousands of florins,” Vettori estimated, go up in smoke, and “everyone blamed the pope for these losses.”692 With Clement a prisoner in Castel Sant’Angelo and unable to protect either Rome or Florence, all but the smallest pockets of support for the regime now disappeared. Even Clement’s banker Filippo Strozzi joined the revolt. Passerini and Ippolito were persuaded to leave the city, and on May 16 a balia decreed that the Great Council would be reactivated in late June and that in the meantime smaller councils would govern. However, as in 1494, popular pressure quickly transformed the face of the revolution, demanding that the council reopen as soon as possible, with a minimum age limit of twenty-four (instead of twenty-nine), and that the council’s hall, reduced to barracks for fifteen years, be quickly refurbished and re-consecrated. On May 21, 2,272 citizens attended the first session, and another 400 were turned away for lack of space. Eight days later the council decided by 1,298 to 134 that the Standardbearer of Justice should hold office for one year and be eligible for re-election, and on May 31 no fewer than 2,500 members carried out the election. Sixty members drawn by lot each nominated a candidate, and each nominee was put to a vote by the full council: the six with the most votes were the jurist Baldassare Carducci, Nero del Nero, Giovanbattista Bartolini (captain and military commissioner at Pisa), Alfonso Strozzi (Filippo’s brother), Tommaso di Paolantonio Soderini (nephew of Piero), and Niccolo Capponi, who was elected in the second ballot.

Benedetto Varchi, a young revolutionary in 1527 who later made his peace with the principate and wrote a history of these years commissioned by Duke Cosimo, analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of these candidates in terms that reveal much about the party and class divisions that accompanied the birth of the last republic. Uncompromising anti-Mediceans favored either Carducci or Strozzi. But Carducci was absent from the city (in jail, in fact, in Venice for calling the pope a tyrant and a bastard693), and Strozzi, despite his loyalty to Soderini’s republic, had been among the anti-Savonarolan compagnacci. Nero del Nero and Bartolini were supported by the “universale” for having enjoyed Soderini’s favor and being ignored thereafter by the Medici, but they suffered from insufficient “grandezza.” Tommaso Soderini had the advantage of being the son of Paolantonio, “who had, if not invented, greatly promoted the council in the time of the friar,” and the nephew of Piero, “through whose incomparable prudence and integrity Florence had lived most happily and peacefully.” But it also worked against him, because many disliked the idea of Medici-Soderini alternation in power. “Only on Niccolo [Capponi] did all the factions concur,” says Varchi: apart from the benefit of his father’s reputation, “palleschi” liked him because he had been esteemed by the Medici; yet anti-Mediceans knew he never sought honors from the Medici; and “frateschi” considered him a man of integrity who had fought for liberty. What set him apart from Soderini was that he openly opposed the Medici even before the “Friday uprising” of April 26.694 The political fault lines in 1527 still reflected deep divisions over the Medici, Savonarola, and the Soderini republic, as well as the class division that attributed “grandezza” to some and not to others. Interestingly, Guicciardini, Vettori, and Filippo Strozzi were not considered despite their support for the revolution in its initial phase. Strozzi, who had long collaborated with Clement, ruined his relationship with the new republic in a matter of days by bungling the assignment of recovering the citadels of Pisa and Livorno and letting Ippolito de’ Medici escape from his control. Soon enough all three, faced with the stark choice between Clement and the republic, stayed with their Medici pope.

The republic of 1527-30 witnessed an explosion of popular political, religious, and military energies that only intensified once Clement’s determination to retake Florence for his family produced the war and siege that became the gravest threats to the city’s survival in its long history. At each stage of the conflict, ottimati voices grew weaker and more suspect to a radicalized popolo that refused compromise with Clement, revived the memory of Savonarola and his vision of the holy republic, and put a huge portion of the city’s population under arms in a resurrected militia. Hatred of the Medici boiled over. Pierfilippo Pandolfini denounced their “tyranny” and accused them of inflicting “slavery” and “calamities” and shedding the “blood of so many innocent citizens.” Cosimo’s tomb at San Lorenzo, said one citizen, had named him pater patriae “unworthily and in dishonour of liberty.” The Medici “have always been tyrants and have always slandered this city, decapitated citizens, and stolen the money of the commune. . . . Those who have always kept the city in slavery (I recall to Your Lordships the events at Prato [in 1512]) deserve to be burned in their palace and given to the dogs.”695 No Medici were executed, but a committee of five syndics investigated fraudulent financial accounts and the looting of Florentine wealth since 1512. Family members and associates were fined and had property confiscated for tax evasion, malfeasance, and fraud. Francesco del Nero, the Medici client who ran the

Depository for Filippo Strozzi, was accused of laundering payments of millions of florins from the Monte to the Medici, Strozzi banks, papal treasury, and papal armies. Official findings did not come close to such figures, but the syndics found him guilty of falsifying accounts to cover a variety of illegal transfers. Clement himself was declared the commune’s debtor for over 200,000 florins, actually a fraction of what he had stolen from the city through various channels, including Strozzi’s connivance. Accusations against Mediceans came fast and thick in the republic’s first year. The criminal court of the Quarantia, created in 1502 and abolished in 1512, was revived to adjudicate crimes against the government; it convicted and imprisoned some, but the acquittal of many others suggests that public anger (measured by the number and virulence of anonymous denunciations received by the Otto di Guardia) was contained, if not muted, by the court’s relative moderation. Death sentences recorded by the confraternity that offered consolation to the condemned were not markedly more numerous under the republic than during the preceding and subsequent years of Medici rule: 16 in 1527, 24 in 1528, 30 in 1529, and 23 in 1530 (and several in this last year were victims of Medici vengeance after the capitulation) compared to 18 persons executed in 1520, 22 in 15223, 14 in 1525, and 16 in 1526, 19 in 1531, 30 in 1533, 24 in 1534, 14 in 1535, 13 in 1536, 28 in 1537, and 23 in 1540.7 Moreover, most death sentences under the republic were not imposed on the Medici and their elite friends. Two non-elite citizens, Carlo Cocchi and Ficino Ficini (nephew of Marsilio), were executed for praising the Medici and advocating their return: the only two mentioned by Giannotti in denouncing the severity of such punishments.8 Jacopo Alamanni, an implacable anti-Medicean and intemperate critic of Capponi’s moderation, was executed for inciting a riot, but also, as some suspected, because he knew of Capponi’s secret negotiations with Clement.9

Intense feeling against the Medici and their allies was fueled partly by anger at Clement’s criminally reckless foreign policy, which exposed the city to such danger, and partly by the systematic draining of Florentine wealth through his ottimati friends into the sinkhole of papal follies. And it was sustained by a millenarian religious ideology, which, as the astonished Guicciardini observed during the siege of 1529-30, but without really comprehending it, generated faith that “moves mountains” and the obstinacy and certainty needed to face impossible hardships.10 Resurgent Savonarolan piety fueled the last republic.

7  S. Y. Edgerton, Jr., Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution During the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, N. Y., 1985), p. 237.

8  Donato Giannotti, Della repubblica fiorentina, in Opere politiche, 2 vols., ed. F. Diaz (Milan, 1974), 1: 307.

9  Varchi, Storia, vol. 1, pp. 494-7.

10  Guicciardini, Ricordi, ed. R. Spongano (Florence, 1951), p. 3; Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman, trans. M. Domandi (New York, 1965), p. 39.

San Marco recovered the prestige and political importance it enjoyed under Savonarola, prominent citizens again cultivated the support of the friars, public preaching received renewed government support, and the council passed new laws for the moral purification of the city. Prophecies were declared fulfilled, as piagnoni once again identified their cause with the republic’s liberty and in opposition to the repulsed Medici tyranny. While no doubt a source of strength, especially during the traumatic siege, the republic’s millenarian and puritanical strains also revived Savonarolan intolerance. Barely three weeks after the revolution, “in order to return the city and the republic to all the conditions and institutions” of “the popular government before 1512, and especially those that concern the health of the soul and the establishment of the good life,” the restored Great Council ordered Jews to close their lending operations and leave the city, although once again the order was not rigorously enforced and some Jews remained as proposals for expulsion within six months were repeatedly rejected. New laws restricted dress, dowries, prostitutes, sodomy, and blasphemy; taverns were regulated and gambling forbidden. To publish books now required the Signoria’s permission, and clerics were authorized to supervise discussions of religion.

In February 1528 Niccolo Capponi theatrically implored the council to declare Christ King of Florence. Only 18 of 1,100 had the courage to vote against it. In June 1529 the republic’s submission to Christ was renewed in recognition of “the most precious gift of the most holy liberty granted to this most devoted people by work of God” and in dutiful acknowledgment of the promise “of the Holy Spirit, speaking through the mouth of Moses” when he said “If you will hear my voice and will observe my covenant and obey my commandments, you will be my chosen people above all others.”11 Not everyone, even among loyal republicans, was pleased with the religious fervor that suffused these years. After the fall of the republic in which he held Machiavelli’s old post of secretary to the Ten, Donato Giannotti, in his treatise On the Florentine Republic, criticized those who “were so presumptuous under that cloak of religion that no one dared to say anything that contradicted their opinions.” He accused the piagnoni of “giving the most false interpretations” of Savonarola’s utterances and persuading citizens, even during the worst of the siege, that they should leave all to God’s will. The friars could have put an end to such “hypocrisy” by staying out of politics and “remembering that discussion of government occurs in the palace [of the priors] and not at San Marco.” Their lay followers who made “such a show of holiness” in the council but outside of it were no better than others “were the worst citizens of all.”696 697

This may have seemed clear to intellectuals like Giannotti after the surrender, but that the city was able to endure the suffering of the siege was due in no small part to the conviction that the republic was under the special protection of a divine providence that had indeed chosen the Florentines.