Cosimo’s connection to the papacy and his influence in foreign and military affairs compensated for the regime’s limited success in bringing domestic politics under secure control. Their role as papal bankers was the beginning of the Medici link to the church that lasted, despite some rocky moments, for over a century and allowed the family to survive political opposition in Florence and even exile. Giovanni de’ Medici’s good relations with John XXIII and Martin V carried over to Cosimo’s dealings with Eugenius IV, at least until the early 1440s. Although Eugenius had been invited to Florence by Cosimo’s enemies, he already had Medici connections, having for example acceded to a Medici request, in negotiations conducted by Medici partisan Nerone Dietisalvi-Neroni, to raise the status of the canons of the Medici parish church of San Lorenzo to equality with the cathedral canons, a decision the Signoria strongly protested and succeeded in having revoked.355 Rinaldo might have been trying to lure the pope away from Medici sympathies by offering him safe haven in Florence in June 1434. But Eugenius was widely seen as having been influential in securing Cosimo’s recall and political ascendancy, after which the pope remained for nine more years and ruled the church from Medici-dominated Florence. For the first seven or eight of these years, Eugenius supported the Florentine-Venetian alliance against Milan and was dependent on the military strength of the two republics, on the Medici bank for the smooth operations of papal finance, and on Medici loans. And his dependence on the interest from 100,000 florins of shares in Florence’s public debt gave Cosimo added leverage over the pope.356
His alliance with Eugenius offered Cosimo the opportunity to stage, and finance, the event that, perhaps more than any other in the regime’s early years, consolidated Cosimo’s image as a head of state and almost an uncrowned prince. The Council of Constance had mandated the convocation of further councils at regular intervals. A council assembled at Basel in 1431 was quickly dominated by conciliarists and assumed an anti-papal stance with political support from Milan and Aragon. To undermine its legitimacy, Eugenius sponsored a council of union with the various Christian communities of the East, especially the Orthodox Greeks whose Byzantine (and still nominally Roman) Empire had gradually been reduced to a few pockets of territory surrounded by the Ottoman Turks, who were then preparing the final assault, which came in 1453, on the imperial capital of Constantinople. For decades the Greeks had been appealing to the West for help, and when the council at Basel welcomed and signed agreements with a Greek delegation, Eugenius responded by convening his own council at Ferrara in 1438 to which he invited the Byzantine emperor and a large contingent of 200 churchmen and theologians, altogether no fewer than 700 dignitaries. An historic council for the reunification of the two main branches of Christendom, so Eugenius hoped, would split the gathering at Basel and bring many of its participants to Ferrara. Loans from the Medici bank paid the expenses of the Ferrara council, including those of the impecunious Greeks: one loan for 10,000 florins was secured with half of Eugenius’s 100,000 florins of Florentine Monte shares, and the collateral for a second and larger loan was nothing less than the papal town of Sansepolcro, east of Arezzo, which did indeed become part of the Florentine dominion.357 But Eugenius could not make ends meet and was constantly short of money. Moreover, hostile Visconti armies were coming uncomfortably close to Ferrara, and, with the danger of plague in the area, the pope decided at the end of 1438 to accept an invitation to move the council to Florence. Negotiations for the transfer were conducted by Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo.
Thus, early in 1439 the entire council packed up and moved to Florence, officially as guests of the commune, but, given the source of the funding that kept the council alive, in effect as guests of the Medici. Only five years earlier, Cosimo had faced the potential ruin of his family in exile; now he welcomed not only his friend the pope but also the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus, the Patriarch of Constantinople Joseph II, and a huge gathering of eminent cardinals, bishops, patriarchs, and theologians from east and west. Cosimo saw to it (he could so arrange these things through his accoppiatori) that he was Standardbearer of Justice when the council arrived and thus at the head of two delegations that welcomed Eugenius on January 27, 1439, and the Greek emperor and his retinue on February 15 - later memorialized in the sumptuous frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli in the chapel of the new Palazzo Medici. Cosimo provided living quarters for the emperor in the empty palaces of the banished Ridolfo Peruzzi in Santa Croce.358 Putting his imperial guest in the homes of exiles made it clear that Cosimo could use for his own purposes the property of enemies whose cause was now hopeless; it was almost the action of a sovereign with the implication that the city was now his. Despite doctrinal divergences and cultural differences accumulated through centuries of estrangement, on July 6, 1439, the assembled prelates announced the declaration of union solemnly proclaimed in the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, whose magnificent dome, designed by Brunelleschi, had been completed just a few years before. Although the union was widely rejected by both Catholic and Orthodox Christians, and certainly did not save Constantinople, many Florentines saw the remarkable event as a consecration of the leadership and international prestige of Cosimo and his family.359
Eugenius was Cosimo’s link to another opportunity of ultimately even greater significance: the alliance with the condottiere Francesco Sforza, future duke of Milan. Before he was driven from Rome in 1434, Eugenius snatched Sforza away from the service of Filippo Maria Visconti and signed him to a contract to fight for the church. In fact, however, Sforza used his new employment mainly to continue dismembering the papal states and bringing the region of the Marche, on the Adriatic, under his control. Eugenius’s alliance with Florence and Venice meant that Sforza also became the chief captain of the allied republics. In the fall of 1434 the balia that recalled Cosimo committed the Florentine government to pay Sforza 50,000 florins on Eugenius’s behalf.360 Sforza soon signed a treaty with Florence that was the beginning of a long association sustained by a personal alliance with Cosimo, which eventually shaped Florentine foreign policy and relations among the states of Italy. Sforza came from a Romagnol family of mercenary captains, but when he allied with Cosimo he was already acting (and being treated) as if he were one of Italy’s princes. He inherited from his father huge tracts of land in the South and used the territories he seized from the church in the Marche as his temporary base. But his ultimate objective was Milan, where his former employer, Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, had no heirs. At the center of speculation and intrigue in Italian politics in these years was the fate of Milan after Visconti’s death. By the 1440s, the fear was growing in many quarters, including the Medici, that the looming disintegration of the Visconti state might result in the conquest of the whole of Italy north of the Apennines by the ever more powerful Venetian republic. To what extent Cosimo may have foreseen such an eventuality in the 1430s, when he established his alliance with Sforza, is difficult to say, but by the next decade he considered the territorial integrity and strength of Milan as the key to both preventing Venetian hegemony in northern Italy and protecting his regime in Florence. And the key to preserving Milan was Francesco Sforza.
Already by 1438 fears of Venetian expansion led to a truce between Milan and Florence. But when Filippo Maria’s chief captain, Niccolo Piccinino, took advantage of the agreement to renew the assault on papal dominions by taking Bologna, which as always for the Florentines meant that the Milanese were too close for comfort, another war pitted Florence, Venice, Eugenius, the Angevin contenders in Naples, and Francesco Sforza against the alliance of Milan and Alfonso of Aragon, who was struggling to bring the southern kingdom into the Aragonese empire. In 1440 Piccinino, with Rinaldo degli Albizzi and other exiles in his entourage, took his troops into the papal state very close to Florentine territory in the Casentino, where he suffered a decisive defeat at Anghiari at the hands of forces directed by the Florentine commissioners Neri Capponi and Bernardo de’ Medici, Cosimo’s distant cousin.21 It was the last gasp of the exiles. Rinaldo gave up the fight and died two years later, and a peace signed the next year recognized Florentine possession of the Casentino. In the aftermath of the council of 1439, the victory at Anghiari in 1440, and the peace of 1441 that further enlarged the Florentine dominions, the Medici regime seemed stronger than ever.
Cosimo was now ready to lead the Florentines into new, and by no means universally accepted, diplomatic and strategic positions. In 1442 Alfonso defeated his Angevin rivals and took control of the kingdom. For Eugenius, who had supported the Angevins, this was yet another setback after the loss of the territories he had been forced to cede to both Sforza and Florence. Nor had the peace of 1441 restored Bologna to papal control. The pope broke his pacts with Sforza and ended his old alliance with Cosimo, who had provided much of the money for Sforza’s campaigns. With barely concealed hostility between Eugenius and Cosimo, the pope’s presence in Florence was now awkward for all concerned. Thus, early in 1443, after living for nine years at Santa Maria Novella just a few hundred meters from the Medici palace, Eugenius finally returned to Rome, where he promptly removed the manager of the Medici bank’s Rome branch, Roberto Martelli, from the office of papal depositary. Relations between the former allies remained frosty for the remainder of Eugenius’s pontificate. In 1445 Florence’s archbishop died and the regime recommended a number of possible successors, including Cosimo’s cousin, the Bishop of Pistoia Donato de’ Medici (son of the humanist Nicola di Vieri) and Giovanni di Nerone Dietisalvi-Neroni, a canon of Florence cathedral and brother of Dietisalvi in Cosimo’s inner circle. Cosimo wanted a Florentine in the post and blatantly requested the appointment of someone “most faithful to this regime [fidissimus huic statui],” if not his cousin the bishop, then Dietisalvi’s brother. But Eugenius was no longer willing to cooperate with the Medici, and early in 1446 he announced the appointment of Antonino Pierozzi as archbishop, a Florentine, but not from the Medicean circle or even the elite. This son of a notary was an Observant Dominican, one of the leading theologians of the century, and a determined church reformer at the local level. His tough-minded independence kept him from becoming a pawn of the regime and gave Cosimo, as we shall see, a major headache in the political crisis of 1458.361
By 1446 Cosimo openly supported both Sforza’s ambitions, including an unsuccessful attempt to occupy Rome itself, and the efforts of the Bentivoglio in Bologna to keep that city free of papal rule and friendly to Florence. Eugenius died early in 1447 and was succeeded by the humanist Tommaso Parentucelli, a Tuscan and old friend of the Florentines, who, as Nicholas V, made peace with Sforza, brought the schismatic council of Basel to an end, and improved relations with Florence and Cosimo in a variety of ways, including the reinstatement of the Medici branch manager as papal depositary. In August 1447 Filippo Maria Visconti died. The struggle for Milan opened when the Milanese popolo proclaimed the Ambrosian republic the very next day. As the Venetians took advantage of the turmoil to gobble up cities and territories ever closer to Milan, Sforza at first fought with the Milanese republic to keep the Venetians at bay, but in October 1448 suddenly reversed himself, signed an agreement with Venice, and marched on Milan to make himself the new duke. Cosimo used all his considerable influence in Florence to support Sforza, especially when the Venetians, worried by Sforza’s burgeoning power, terminated their alliance in 1449 and supported the Ambrosian republic against him.
Cosimo’s alliance with Sforza and the latter’s demands for more and more money caused controversy and acrimonious debate in Florence. Even within the balia voices were raised against further subsidies to Sforza, and in the pratiche speakers troubled by Cosimo’s abandonment of Venice and embrace of Sforza openly lamented that “an alliance between a signore and a republic is akin to an alliance of partridges and falcons.” Cosimo’s foreign policy was threatening to split the ruling group, and some of his most important domestic allies, including Neri Capponi, Alamanno Salviati, and Luca degli Albizzi, were so distressed by this reversal of the republic’s traditional alliances that they became reluctant to support the new policy on diplomatic missions. Tightening control over foreign policy, Cosimo removed his critics from the inner circle, including Capponi, and limited the conduct of diplomacy to a small group of his most trusted lieutenants, in particular Agnolo Acciaiuoli and Dietisalvi Neroni.362 Thus began the practice of semi-private diplomacy and foreign policy, increasingly under the thumb of the Medici group and removed from regular constitutional channels, a practice that was to culminate in the princely pretensions of Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo in the 1470s and 1480s.
Sforza took Milan, became its duke, and went to war against Venice with Florentine support. In 1451 Florence and Sforza agreed to a military alliance, and the DiecI di balia who oversaw the war included Cosimo. When, in April 1454, Sforza and Venice ended hostilities and signed the Peace of Lodi, some Florentines believed that Cosimo was opposed to the peace, either because, as Marco Parenti speculated, he preferred the war to continue until Sforza had taken more territory from Venice,363 or because he knew that his hold on domestic politics would again weaken without war. But most Florentines were relieved to see the long years of war come to an end. In March 1455 the five principal states of Italy (Sforza’s Milan, Venice, Cosimo’s Florence, the church under Nicholas V, and Naples under Alfonso of Aragon) signed a 25-year peace treaty with promises of mutual defense and preservation of the status quo throughout the peninsula. Cosimo’s daring gamble proved in the end successful: at the core of the pacification of Italy was the new Florentine-Milanese alliance. Venice was contained, and Sforza’s Milan was now ready and willing to protect the Medici regime against its internal enemies.
World History
