That the Medici were even a contender for Florence’s future was obscured during the early years of the exile. Piero’s attempts to return by force discredited the Mediceans and diminished his brothers’ chances for reconciliation with the republic. His death in 1503 (he drowned in the Garigliano river while fleeing with the French army from the defeat that sealed Spanish control of the South) relieved them of the burden of his unpopularity, and Cardinal Giovanni, still only twenty-eight, assumed political leadership of the family from his fashionable Roman court. Despite a 1497 prohibition that outlawed anyone even associating with the Medici, certain young ottimati visited him frequently, no doubt because of his influence with the new pope, Giuliano della Rovere, Julius II, thus keeping their options open in the event of a Medici restoration, and perhaps also to display their antipathy for Soderini. Giovanni’s political coming-out-party was a banquet in September 1504 attended by some forty Florentines resident in Rome, an event whose scandalous implications necessitated a full report to the government by the Florentine ambassador.
Over the next few years Giovanni made his and his family’s presence felt in a variety of ways, trivial and serious, to which Soderini’s government responded with varying degrees of effectiveness. When Giovanni’s sisters had a wax-model of Giuliano placed in Santissima Annunziata, where there had been wax ex-voto likenesses of their father Lorenzo before 1494,1 Soderini promptly had it removed. More ominously, Giampaolo Baglioni’s resignation in 1505 as Florentine captain turned out to be part of a (failed) plot involving the Orsini, Sforza, and Medici to restore the latter to power. And in the winter of 1507-8 Giovanni intervened in the selection of an archbishop to replace his uncle Rinaldo Orsini. After first promoting Guglielmo Capponi, whose appointment Soderini blocked by getting the Signoria to protest to the pope, Giovanni pushed another candidate, Cosimo de’ Pazzi, who proved acceptable to both the Signoria and Julius. Guicciardini says that Giovanni’s real aim, and success in the matter, was preventing Soderini’s brother Francesco, bishop of Volterra, from gaining the Florentine see. With his greater resources and more extensive network of contacts (inherited from a century of Medici patronage) Giovanni thus showed he could prevail in a contest between the two Florentine cardinals.629 630
Giovanni’s most serious challenge to Soderini and the republic was the controversial marriage in 1509 of his niece Clarice, Piero’s daughter, to Filippo Strozzi the younger. A prestigious Florentine marriage would demonstrate that the Medici still had friends and influence “at home” and that their name had enough of the old magic to induce prominent ottimati to risk marriage with the exiled “tyrants.” In particular, it would open the door to Florentine contacts and influence for Clarice’s brother Lorenzo. For Filippo Strozzi, only nineteen years old at the time of the marriage negotiations in 1508, it was a huge gamble that nearly proved disastrous but eventually brought him immense wealth and political influence. He was the son of Filippo di Matteo, who returned to Florence after half a lifetime in Medici-imposed exile and augmented an already great banking fortune with which he began building the Strozzi palace. Filippo the younger was only two when his father died in 1491, and he and his brother Lorenzo were raised by their mother Selvaggia Gianfigliazzi, who depended for advice and support in matters both financial and political on Bernardo Rucellai, Piero Soderini’s archenemy. Strozzi-Rucellai ties went back at least to the 1428 marriage of messer Palla’s daughter Jacopa to Giovanni Rucellai, and in 1503 Filippo’s brother Lorenzo married Bernardo’s daughter Lucrezia.631 As much for his own political purposes as for the possible advantages to Filippo, Bernardo encouraged Selvaggia to consider marrying her son into the Medici family.632 Because of the potentially explosive reactions, negotiations were conducted in secret and the marriage contract quietly signed in July 1508. Filippo was to marry Clarice within eight months, and the Medici promised an astronomical dowry of 6,000 florins. To camouflage the alliance’s political implications, Filippo went to Rome to stage a romantic encounter with his bride-to-be.
Rumors leaked and the storm broke at the end of the year. Florentines talked of little else that December and January. The first reaction was angry denunciation from Soderini’s allies, including Filippo’s own half-brother Alfonso. Embarrassed and frightened by the general uproar, the Strozzi met to discuss their predicament and sent a delegation to the Signoria to plead that Filippo had acted rashly, on his own and without their knowledge, that the marriage had no political significance, and that they would do their utmost to quash it if this were still possible. With their long experience of exile, the Strozzi were aghast at the possibility that an ill-conceived marriage alliance by one of their young men might jeopardize the family’s rehabilitation. For those who knew the city’s early chronicles, it must have seemed an ominous echo of the legendary Buondelmonti marriage fiasco. Strozzi distress was exacerbated by the irony that Filippo proposed to marry into the very family that had imposed their exile. From family members in Florence and descendants of Strozzi exiles all over Italy came expressions of anguish and protestations of the family’s innocence. Both his brothers wrote to Filippo, and his reply to Lorenzo reveals a shaken young man: “Now what can I or should I do? If I sever my ties with the Medici, which seems impossible, aside from the penalty to pay [as stipulated by the contract], we would bring down their wholehearted hostility and I would be dishonored. However, if I go through with it, you say that I and all of us will be ruined, and you depict an inferno so black that it scares me. ... I do not want you to lose on account of me anything that I cannot restore to you.”633 His response to Alfonso, who was much angrier than Lorenzo and who must have told him of the furious reaction from the popolo, is summarized by Guicciardini: Filippo “acknowledged the marriage alliance, saying he had entered into it because of the scarcity of [socially acceptable] alliances, and that he cared not at all about the opinions of the foggiettini” - an insulting metonym for the laboring classes that identified them with their small caps.634 These remarks brought down still more anger on
Filippo’s head, both for implying that Florence lacked sufficiently noble families into which he could consider marrying, and for mocking the popular government with the characterization of the council’s members as poor and poorly dressed workers.635 This comment evidently made the rounds, since Cerretani also reports Strozzi saying that he wasn’t surprised at the outrage, “especially since the city was being governed by foggettini.”636
At Soderini’s urging, the Signoria unanimously summoned Filippo and ordered him to appear by December 25. Formal accusations were filed with the Otto di Guardia against a dozen people, including Filippo, Bernardo Rucellai and his sons, Lucrezia (Medici) Salviati and her husband Jacopo, Antonfrancesco degli Albizzi, the new archbishop Cosimo de’ Pazzi, and Giovanbattista Ridolfi, all charged with crimes against the “stato” and conspiracy with intent to bring down the government. Filippo’s brother Lorenzo reports that the harshest of the denunciations was written by Machiavelli on behalf of Soderini, who also made an impassioned speech before the Great Council. Feelings intensified on all sides. Alfonso Strozzi remarked that it might be necessary, in order to restore calm, for Bernardo Rucellai, Cosimo de’ Pazzi and a few others to lose their heads. Rucellai, who was in Venice, prudently stayed there and wrote a long letter justifying himself to the Signoria. In January 1509 the Otto subjected Filippo to rather light punishment (a 500-ducat fine and three-year banishment to Naples, of which he served less than a year) on the grounds that he was not actually marrying a rebel, since daughters of rebels were exempted from that status. Soderini recommended that Strozzi be confined to Florentine territory, which would have prevented him from traveling to Rome to marry Clarice, but the Signoria refused to comply and the wedding took place in February 1509.
Political winds had shifted. Soderini failed to persuade the Signoria and the Otto of the marriage’s dangerous political implications, and critics accused him of abusing his power and bullying government officials. Seeing the inevitable, he dropped his objections to the marriage and even supported a measure allowing Strozzi to return to Florence by the end of 1509. The episode revealed that the Medici had a growing number of friends in the city who could and would stand up to Soderini. But Soderini had also made his point. Filippo stayed quietly away from politics for the next four years and declined to take part in either a 1510 assassination plot against Soderini or the events that brought down the republic in 1512, from which, however, no one (apart from the Medici themselves) benefited more than he.
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