Between 1472 and 1478 Lorenzo and his regime were on a collision course with the papacy of Sixtus IV and with enemies both in and beyond Florence, a conflict that produced the most traumatic event in the fifteenth-century history of the Medici. Tensions grew between Lorenzo and a variety of antagonists, but with no single source.484 Traditional frictions between Florence and the papacy over spheres of influence on their common border and ecclesiastical benefices were complicated by fissures within the regime, resentments over Lorenzo’s tightening control of politics, patronage, and the local church, and increasing volatility in his relationship with the ottimati. At the same time the family banking empire entered into decline. Already in the mid-1460s Piero’s foreclosure on a number of loans gave evidence of shrinking assets and inaugurated a policy of retrenchment that even reduced loans to the Sforza. General manager Sassetti decentralized the bank and allowed branches to pursue ventures more independently. But falling profits caused branches to close in Venice (for two years from 1469 to 1471 and again in 1481), Milan (1478), Avignon (1479), Bruges (1480), and London (1480). Only the Florence, Rome, Naples, and Geneva-Lyons branches remained after 1480. Whether because of poor management by Sassetti or neglect by Lorenzo, who was said to have little interest in its operations, the bank no longer provided the family with the financial resources it produced in Cosimo’s time. Its supremacy even among Florentine banks was challenged by, among others, Filippo Strozzi and the Pazzi. The latter, whose resentment toward Lorenzo went back to 1471 when he had them punished in the scrutiny after Bardo Corsi criticized the Milanese alliance,485 vied with the Medici for influence at the papal court and sought to replace them as the pope’s bankers. Lorenzo’s need for cash, even to keep the bank going, forced him to sell land in the Mugello, to borrow money from, of all people, the former exile Strozzi, and, in the 1480s, to divert public monies for his private use.486
Meanwhile, relations worsened with Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere), his nephew Giuliano della Rovere (later Pope Julius II), and Sixtus’s nephews in the Riario family, to which the pope was related through his sister. Sixtus sought more effective papal control over the semi-autonomous towns and principalities of the papal states, many of which had agreements with Florence that kept them within a Florentine sphere of influence. When Florence assisted the ruler of Citta di Castello in Umbria in resisting papal forces, Sixtus pointedly blamed Lorenzo. The pope was also determined to wrest control of Imola, northeast of Florence in the Romagna, from Milan, but when Galeazzo Maria offered to sell Imola to Florence, and Lorenzo agreed, Sixtus loudly protested that the city was within the papal states and threatened a series of spiritual and temporal penalties that persuaded Galeazzo Maria to yield Imola to the papacy for 40,000 ducats. Sixtus put Lorenzo, still the pope’s banker, in an impossible position by asking him to lend funds for the purchase. Knowing he would be severely criticized if he financed a papal acquisition against Florentine territorial interests, Lorenzo replied that he lacked such funds (which, given the weakness of the bank, could have been true) and also asked the Pazzi not to give Sixtus the money. Not only did the Pazzi do so, they also revealed to Sixtus what Lorenzo had requested of them, and the pope retaliated by depriving the Medici of the office of Depositary of the Apostolic Camera, thus removing the papal account from their bank. As the Medici and their domestic rivals increasingly looked to foreign powers in their search for allies and friends in the larger world of Italian politics, local antagonisms became potentially explosive.
Disputes over church offices, another important arena of patronage, were also a source of tension. Florentine governments had always wanted men of proven loyalty in the dominion’s seven bishoprics, Fiesole, Pistoia, Volterra, Arezzo, Cortona, Pisa, and above all Florence. Popular governments had earlier tried to prevent the elite from exploiting the powerful office by prohibiting the election of Florentines to the Florentine diocese, but by the fifteenth century the ban had been relaxed and popes appointed a mix of Florentines and foreigners. Giovanni Dietisalvi-Neroni, whose candidacy Eugenius rejected in 1445, finally became archbishop of Florence in 1462,487 just in time to become an embarrassment to the regime when his brother emerged as a leader of the anti-Medici movement. Giovanni was hustled off to Rome and, although Pope Paul II refused to replace him, he never again set foot in his diocese. This awkward situation no doubt underscored for Lorenzo the importance of selecting bishops carefully. Moreover, to protect his influence at the papal court and access to the favors crucial to Medici patronage, Lorenzo wanted a Florentine cardinal of his own choosing to safeguard his interests. He expressed this wish shortly after Sixtus IV’s accession in 1471, but the pope politely brushed aside the suggested candidacy of Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano. When Archbishop Neroni died in 1473, Sixtus appointed his nephew Pietro Riario to the Florentine see, but Riario died a year later. By then the rift between Lorenzo and Sixtus had become irreparable over Imola, where the pope installed as ruler his other Riario nephew Girolamo, who loathed Lorenzo for his attempt to thwart papal acquisition of the city. Sixtus then selected for the vacant Florentine archbishopric Francesco Salviati, a Florentine but a close curial ally of the Riario and first cousin to Jacopo Pazzi. Lorenzo had the Signoria refuse Salviati’s appointment and champion instead the candidacy of Rinaldo Orsini, brother of his wife Clarice. Sixtus yielded and appointed Orsini, but refused to make him a cardinal. If Lorenzo failed to get his cardinal, he at least got a brother-in-law archbishop. Orsini remained in the post for the next thirty years but hardly ever appeared in the city and left the administration of the see in the hands of Lorenzo and his inner circle.488
Although Lorenzo succeeded in the appointment of Orsini, the defeat of Salviati’s candidacy was yet another of the seeds of the conspiracy. Soon thereafter, the Medici bishop of Pisa died, and Sixtus, now openly at odds with Lorenzo, poked him in the eye by naming Salviati to the second most important episcopal see in the Florentine dominion. There was even some speculation that he would make Salviati a cardinal and destroy Lorenzo’s hopes for a cardinal protector in Rome. But Lorenzo, again with the docile cooperation of the Signoria, refused for three years to allow Salviati to take possession of the Pisan see. When Lorenzo explained to the duke of Milan that the reason for this refusal was that Salviati had influential supporters in Florence, he acknowledged that at the heart of the dispute were divisions within the city and regime. Writing to Galeazzo Maria in December 1474 to ask for his support in the controversy, Lorenzo protested the “injustice and wrong” done to him by the pope, “who is offended, as far as I understand, for no other reason than that Francesco Salviati has been denied possession of the archbishopric of Pisa; and for this offence, if it is an offence, and which has been done by the entire city, [the pope] wants to take revenge against me alone.” Lorenzo admitted that, if he had so wished, he could have pulled strings and put Salviati in office, “but I’m not inclined to permit such public humiliation for my own personal interest, for this city does not deserve such a thing from me.” Lorenzo thus neatly reversed the relationship of public and private interests in the affair, for the government had in fact been acting on his determination to keep Salviati out of Pisa. “What makes this even more difficult,” he continued, “is that the pope loves a citizen of ours, as messer Francesco Salviati certainly is, who has deceived the city and acted against the wishes of our Signoria, more than he loves the honor of the whole city.” He then came to the core of the matter: “what is especially important to me and to our entire regime [stato] is that there are some citizens here” (presumably Salviati’s Pazzi in-laws) “who claim that this [campaign in Rome to secure Salviati in the Pisan see] is their own undertaking, and they’ve let the pope know that they’ll keep on working, whether I like it or not,” to bring about a resolution in Salviati’s favor.
What troubled Lorenzo was less the prospect of Salviati as archbishop of Pisa than the fear that influential rivals within Florence might bring this about over and above his wishes. As he put it, again to the duke of Milan a few days later, the fact that the pope “received letters from many [Florentines] on Salviati’s behalf seems to me the reason why, more than any other, he should be denied the possession [of the see]. For, since the Signoria and the men of the regime have determined that they do not want this, those who do want it and have written [to the pope] about it must be men who do not see eye-to-eye with those who govern, and it would seem strange indeed in a city as untrustworthy as Pisa to have [a bishop] agreeable to the latter and not to [the men of] the government.” How, he asked rhetorically, could he possibly “support Salviati, so powerfully protected by his friends and relatives, once the pope had been told, in order to get him to confer the benefice on Salviati, that he would get possession of the diocese whether other citizens [i. e., Lorenzo and the regime] liked it or not?” A year later he explained (still to Galeazzo Maria) his continuing resistance to pressures from Rome by observing that Salviati was “bound to the Pazzi by marriage ties and obligations of friendship” and was “very much their thing,” and that, if he (Lorenzo) relented, “what seems most important to me is that this would enhance the prestige of the Pazzi and do the opposite for me.”489 It was thus another test of Lorenzo’s strength: at stake in essence was his ability to impose his will on his domestic rivals. Lorenzo could not tolerate a prelate in Pisa whose Florentine supporters were challenging his own power and whose protectors in Rome were his ever more declared enemies.
In the end, Lorenzo relented and agreed to Salviati’s appointment in return for promises, later disputed, that no bishops would be appointed within the Florentine dominions without the consent of the Signoria and that a Florentine cardinal would be forthcoming. Although Sixtus and Girolamo Riario got Imola, and Salviati got his bishopric, the coalescing resentments generated by
Lorenzo’s resistance to both produced the plot, apparently hatched in Rome as early as 1475, to kill Lorenzo and Giuliano and terminate the Medici regime. Galeazzo Maria sent Lorenzo a number of warnings that something was afoot (and then, ironically, himself fell victim to an entirely separate assassination plot in 1476). Initially, the Pazzi, or at least Jacopo, the family’s leader, were reluctant to take part, but they may have been goaded into doing so by an inexplicable provocation from Lorenzo. One of the Pazzi was married to a Borromei woman whose father died without sons or a will; the Pazzi assumed that his estate would be inherited by his daughter and thus come under the control of her Pazzi husband. But in 1476 Lorenzo had a law passed, retroactively valid, affirming that, in the absence of male children and in cases of intestacy, other male relatives (in this case the father’s nephews) would have priority over daughters as heirs. The enraged Pazzi joined the conspiracy, together with Francesco Salviati, Girolamo Riario, Riario’s military captain Giovanbattista da Montesecco, Jacopo Bracciolini (son of former chancellor Poggio), Pope Sixtus (who insisted, however, that he wanted no bloodshed), and Duke Federico of Urbino,490 who just a few years earlier had done Lorenzo’s dirty work for him in Volterra. Lurking in the shadows of the plot was also King Ferrante of Naples. After rejecting several plans, they decided to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano at the family palace on Sunday April 26, 1478, but at the last moment, realizing that Giuliano would not be present, the assault was relocated to the cathedral. And when Giovanbattista da Montesecco, designated as Lorenzo’s assassin, changed his mind and refused to kill in church, he was replaced by two priests, one from Volterra, who, according to Poliziano, was motivated by the hatred that all Volterrans felt for Lorenzo.491 Giuliano was killed; Lorenzo, slightly wounded, took refuge in the north sacristy and then fled back up via Larga to the family palace to rally his supporters.
In an uproar of confusion, the city was “bewildered with terror,” according to the diarist Luca Landucci, a non-elite apothecary with no connection to the regime.492 Salviati tried to seize the palace of the priors, but the Signoria, informed just in time, fended him off and retained control. Jacopo Pazzi, realizing that a popular uprising was the only hope of saving the day, rode into the piazza to rally the crowd with cries of “popolo e liberta,” but the ground had not been prepared for such an appeal, and when the city learned that Lorenzo was alive and that the conspirators had attempted to assault the government palace as well as the Medici brothers, no one dared side with failed conspirators who were already being mercilessly hunted down. Medici armed guards and pro-Medici mobs seized the plotters and began executing them on the spot. Guicciardini estimated that fifty people were killed that day, many hanged from the windows of the palace. “I do not believe,” he commented, “that Florence had ever seen a day of such torment.” The search for, and punishment of, the conspirators and anyone with any connection to them went on for weeks. Lorenzo even had one of those who escaped tracked down and returned from Constantinople to be hanged. Altogether more than eighty people were executed, many innocent of any involvement, some only because they were members of a family now damned in perpetuity. The Pazzi were destroyed, their property confiscated, the survivors forced to change their name, and daughters and sisters of the executed and exiled forbidden to marry for many years.
Writing thirty years later and after the fall of the regime, Guicciardini cheekily pointed to the irony in the conspiracy’s outcome: although it nearly cost Lorenzo both his life and “lo stato,” it nonetheless “gave him such a reputation and such advantages that one could say it was a most happy day for him. His brother Giuliano, with whom he would have had to share his wealth and compete for power in the regime, was dead. His enemies were gloriously removed through the power of the state, as were the shadows of doubt and suspicion that had previously followed him. The people took up arms on his behalf, and on that day they finally recognized him as padrone of the city and gave him, at public expense, the privilege of going about with as many armed guards as he wished for his personal security. And in effect he so thoroughly took control of the regime [stato] that he thereafter emerged, freely and completely, as arbiter and almost as lord [signore] of the city. The great but insecure power that he had had until that day now became very great and secure.” Guicciardini finished his account with some thoughts about “civil discords”: they end with the elimination of one faction, the victor becomes lord of the city, “his supporters and companions become his subjects, and the people and the multitude become enslaved. The stato is handed on as an inheritance and often passes from a wise man to a madman who pushes the city over the edge.”493
Sixtus and Ferrante immediately declared war. On June 1 Sixtus excommunicated Lorenzo for the execution of Archbishop Salviati, a crime against Holy Church, said the pope, and ordered the Signoria to deliver him to Rome.
When it refused, he placed the city under an interdict on June 22. Ferrante sent troops into Florentine territory, commanded by his son Alfonso, duke of Calabria, and by Federico of Urbino, who quickly seized several towns. Lasting a year and a half, the war was fought both on the battlefield and on the turf of public opinion. In a letter of July 7 to the priors and people of Florence, Sixtus affirmed his love for the “Florentine community” and asserted that his only purpose was to punish Lorenzo and liberate Florence from his tyranny: since it was the “iniquity of Lorenzo and his accomplices” that disturbed the peace of Italy and made it impossible to unite against the common enemy (the Turks), Sixtus urged the Florentines to join him in restoring their liberty and ending the “tyranny of one man.”494 In other pronouncements Sixtus fulminated against the execution of Salviati as a crime that merited both the excommunication and the interdict. Among the Florentine government’s responses were public letters written by chancellor Scala495 and at least ten legal opinions (consilia) commissioned from Italy’s most famous professors of law, who argued that it was the Signoria, not Lorenzo, that put Salviati to death, that the punishment was fully justified as an act of self-defense because Salviati was not dressed in ecclesiastical robes when he assaulted the palace, and that the pope’s condemnations were invalid because he had acted arbitrarily and in violation of due process. In one of the earliest political uses of print technology, several of these texts, and at least one of Scala’s letters, were printed and disseminated in a propaganda war for public opinion all over Italy.496
Military operations came closer to Florence than any since the Milanese incursions into Tuscany in the 1390s. A war committee (the Dieci) was instituted, with Lorenzo as one of its members (his first executive office). Initial setbacks were followed by some successes, but by November 1479 enemy troops had occupied a good part of the southern portion of the dominion, including the important towns of Castellina in Chianti, Poggibonsi, Certaldo, and Colle Valdelsa. Florence sought help from Venice and Milan, but Venice was occupied with the Turks and Milan was in the throes of political crisis following Galeazzo Maria’s assassination and no longer a stable ally. Even after Lodovico il Moro, the murdered duke’s brother, seized power from Galeazzo Maria’s widow and her chief minister Cicco Simonetta in the summer of 1479 and declared his support for the Florentines, Milanese military help was still meager. Florence was largely alone in its war against Naples and the papacy, and, with territory being lost and treasure consumed, some in Florence began to accept Sixtus’s argument that the republic was fighting only to protect Lorenzo from papal wrath. Desire for peace was growing, and Lorenzo feared, as Guicciardini later put it, that “the citizens might deprive him of lo stato” in order to end the war. With Sixtus’s enmity undiminished and Florence’s allies unable or unwilling to help, the only solution was a separate deal with Naples. Lorenzo opened unofficial and secret negotiations with the dukes of Calabria and Urbino through personal emissaries, chiefly Giuliano Gondi and later Filippo Strozzi, whose ties in Naples forged over decades now helped to save the very regime that had kept him in exile there. By November, just when the military situation reached a low point for Florence, the outline of a settlement was reached.
Lorenzo then made the dramatic decision to go to Naples, with assurances of course that he would be welcomed and his personal safety guaranteed. On December 5 he had the Signoria and Dieci convene a pratica of forty leading citizens to inform them (without asking their opinion) that he was leaving the next morning for Naples. In Guicciardini’s version of the speech, Lorenzo says that this was the only way to find out if the king and the pope were sincere in claiming that they were fighting him and not Florence: if it were so, they would have him, and the war would end; if not, he would find out what they really wanted and negotiate a settlement. He knew it would be dangerous, he said, but he was willing to take the risk because he placed the public welfare before any private good and because he recognized that the obligation that all citizens have to their patria was even greater in his case because of the greater benefits and status he enjoyed. He hoped that those assembled would not fail to “protect the stato and his position” in his absence and he “commended himself, his house, and his family” to them.497 Lorenzo was confessing his vulnerability and acknowledging his dependence on the ottimati’s willingness to remain loyal to him even as opposition to the war was beginning to erode his power. The real risk he faced was less whatever danger might lurk in Naples than the possibility that in his absence sentiment, even within the regime, might turn against him.498 Once outside Florence he wrote to the dukes of Calabria and Urbino to inform them of his movements, to Florence’s allies, the duke of Ferrara and Marquis of Mantua, to the Venetian, Ferrarese, and Milanese ambassadors in Florence to explain what he knew would be cause for anger in Venice and Milan, and to the Florentine Signoria repeating what he had said to the pratica before his departure.499 The Dieci wanted to confer upon him a formal mandate to go to Naples and negotiate peace as their legal representative and that of the “whole people and commune of Florence.” Another version of the mandate, drafted by chancellor Scala, said that he “should give much greater preference to the public interest [than to his own private interest]” and indeed “forget his own in order to consult the public interest.”500 Although Scala urged him to accept the mandate as the “honorable” thing to do, Lorenzo declined and preferred to act in a private capacity, perhaps in order to maintain a freer hand in the negotiations, perhaps also because he feared that the Cento, which ratified such mandates, might not approve this one in the face of growing opposition to him and “his” war.501
While he was in Naples, members of the inner circle warned Lorenzo that there was talk of political change. “Many different thoughts and words,” wrote Scala in January 1480, “are being expressed both by your friends and by all manner of people.” In February Scala told him there was discussion of a change of regime and offered the advice that “it is essential for you to be here, so that in procuring peace down there you don’t find yourself with a worse war on your hands here.” Antonio Pucci similarly judged that “your departure has upset everything and made our situation here worse.”502 According to Guicciardini, what many saw as Lorenzo’s rash act of “throwing himself into Ferrante’s arms” and the possibility that he might not even return encouraged some to speak ill of the governing inner circle and to complain that political offices and taxes should not be controlled by such a small number. Even more ominously, “many members of families of the regime” were contemplating “new arrangements,” even promoting Girolamo Morelli as an alternative to Lorenzo. Morelli, the grandson of a brother of Giovanni Morelli, is mentioned by Guicciardini among the men from outside the elite raised to prominence by Lorenzo. He was Florentine ambassador to Milan for much of 1479, lauded by the Milanese to Lorenzo as a “sincere, beloved, and cordial friend” whom they were very sorry to see leave his post,503 and indeed, so says Guicciardini, “so powerful that Lorenzo feared him.”504 These tantalizing suggestions of gathering opposition to Lorenzo point to disaffection among both elite families and regime members of lower social status often resented by the elite. In early 1480 “friends of the regime” judged it difficult merely to keep it going without a revolution and did all they could to have loyal priorates placed in office until Lorenzo’s return.
In Naples Lorenzo discovered that the settlement tentatively agreed to by his emissaries was not definitive for Ferrante, who dragged out the negotiations and kept his guest in Naples for longer than Lorenzo expected.505 Ferrante had the problem of placating Sixtus, who wanted no peace that kept Lorenzo in power, and, according to Guicciardini, the king delayed a settlement in order to allow time for a change of regime in Florence. For this reason Lorenzo’s friends urged him to conclude matters if possible but in any case to return without delay. Lorenzo pressed for three things: complete restoration of Florentine territories; protection from papal aggression for Florentine allies in the Romagna (even though their cities were formally papal territory); and cancellation of Sixtus’s demand that Lorenzo go to Rome and humble himseLf before the pope. Worried that matters in Florence were slipping from his control, Lorenzo came away with no guarantees on any of these points. But by February, Ferrante, now worried about a possible Angevin expedition from France to reclaim Naples, was suddenly eager to wrap up negotiations by giving unofficial assurances that Florence would regain its territories and that the Romagna lords would be shielded. The peace treaty still required that Lorenzo beg the pope’s forgiveness in person,506 but when the Ottomans attacked and occupied the port of Otranto in Puglia in the summer of 1480, Ferrante withdrew his forces from Tuscany, allowing the Florentines to reoccupy most of their territory, and Sixtus, anxious for the support of all the Italian states against the Ottomans, agreed to receive a delegation of Florentines without Lorenzo and allowed them to ask forgiveness on behalf of the Florentine people.
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