The Medici sought to build their regime with the collaboration of the city’s leading families. Despite the frequent presence in offices of non-elite partisans, it was still primarily with the support of the ottimati, as the elite now liked to call themselves, that the Medici controlled electoral politics, fiscal policy, and foreign affairs. An early indication of the intention to anchor the regime in alliance with elite families was the quiet setting aside of the Catasto and the return to forced loans assessed by neighborhood committees that the wealthy families had always preferred.364 When cooperation from wealthy and prestigious families was extensive, to some the regime seemed headed toward the kind of broad upper-class consensus that undergirded Venice’s legendary stability (at least in the perception of its Florentine admirers). In 1438 Niccolo Soderini, a Medici partisan in those early days, wrote to a friend that “at Florence there is an extremely strong regime which will prove permanent,” adding that “we will eventually end up in the Venetian style, but it’s happening very slowly.”365
Dependence on the ottimati was also, paradoxically, the regime’s weakness, because the elite was not easily reconciled to the hegemony of one family, much less of one man, a power everyone recognized but few, among both Medici partisans and ottimati supporters, were willing to acknowledge openly. Unlike Venice, where the doge was largely a constitutional figurehead and real power rested in the Senate, Florence’s leading “private citizen” acted more like a reigning prince and was increasingly described by fawning humanists and propagandists as the “ruler of all things,” as a model Platonic philosopher-ruler, and even as a latter-day Augustus.366 While insisting that he was just another citizen, Cosimo did nothing to discourage such flattery. But many ottimati were clearly uncomfortable with it, preferring to see themselves as equal partners of the Medici and Cosimo as the first among equals, an ambiguous notion that contradictorily encompassed the equality of all and the preeminence of one. Lodged at the center of the elite’s confused perception of Cosimo, this ambiguity obfuscated, even denied, an unpleasant truth, and it took the ottimati a long time to admit what foreigners could see more clearly, namely, that they were all gradually being reduced to the status of clients in a hegemonic patronage system: an entire class made dependent on the Medici for offices and voices in the regime, for financial favors and fiscal relief, advantageous marriages, beneficial positions in trade and banking, preferred treatment in Rome, lucrative ecclesiastical appointments, places of honor in civic rituals, and, not least, for protection of their social prestige and wealth from the popolo and the Catasto. Ottimati alternated between collective denial of this reality and resistance to it. War and the patriotic impulses it generated, together with the indispensability of Medici money for the republic’s military and foreign policy, allowed the ottimati to tell themselves that their declining power as a ruling class was the temporary result of circumstances and that their former equality and collective hegemony would return once the emergencies had passed. That illusion no doubt sustained Niccolo Soderini’s belief that the republic was evolving toward stable upper-class dominance on the Venetian model.
The mix of cooperation, denial, and resistance in ottimati reactions to Medici control was rooted in their own conflicted self-image: on the one hand, traditional defenders of the privileges and right to rule of the well-born, patrons in their own right, and enemies of popular governments; on the other, statesmen who had absorbed the languages of republican politics and humanism. In their attempts to rein in the Medici, the rhetoric of republican liberty served their purposes rather better than did old ideas (which they had never abandoned) about the privileges of their class. Although ottimati republicanism was obviously very different from that of the popolo, republican liberty could usefully be juxtaposed to Medici “tyranny.” Appropriating the language of civic humanism signaled yet another step in the elite’s evolution, as some now styled themselves aristocratic defenders of republican liberty and virtue. But in the equally important, and longer, moments of recognition that they were no longer masters of what they always considered their own house, and thus of acquiescence in Medici leadership, the ottimati also gave early signs of what was to be their final metamorphosis into a domesticated court aristocracy.
Three major crises punctuated the twenty years between 1458 and 1478, and all had at their core the problematic relationship between the Medici and the ottimati. The first, in 1458, was precipitated by the Medici party itself, desperate to regain the power lost in the restoration a few years earlier of traditional electoral and legislative institutions. Unlike the inception of the regime in 1434 which occurred under the legal authority of a duly drawn Signoria, what happened in 1458 was in essence a Medici coup d’etat openly supported by threats of force from private armies and Milanese troops. In its aftermath, no illusions remained concerning the extensive extra-constitutional power on which the regime rested.
Among the final actions of the accoppiatori whose mandate ended in June 1455 was an evident act of political reprisal: the removal from the lists of eligible citizens of nineteen citizens, among them Giovanni Rucellai, already marginalized because of his marriage to Palla Strozzi’s daughter; Mariotto Lippi, who had dared to say in a 1449 pratica that “the people desire the recovery of the old ways and their pristine liberty” and that the continued authority of the accoppiatori was earning them the “greatest enmity”; and Marco Parenti, the chronicler and son-in-law of Alessandra Strozzi.28 Parenti’s punishment probably had less to do with his connections to the Strozzi than with his actions as a member of the priorate of March-April 1454, when, persuaded that Cosimo opposed peace, he quickly proclaimed the ratification of the Peace of Lodi before a new war tax and another term for the war balia could go into effect. Even though he apparently antagonized the Medici and provoked them to retaliate, in his chronicle he recalled the restoration of Rubinstein, Government, pp. 30n, 34, 51n.
Traditional electoral procedures in 1455 as a return to liberty: “It seemed to the citizens a recovery of some measure of liberty, being freed from the servitude of the accoppiatori,” for once the latter lost their authority “other citizens lost their fear and dared from time to time to do something worthwhile on their own, without first asking those whom they were accustomed to regard as the chief citizens.”367
Punishing the likes of Marco Parenti cost the Medici little. More serious was the defection of elite members of the regime and, worse still, of the inner circle. Standardbearer of Justice in the priorate of May-June 1454, which approved the balia’s dissolution, was the Medici insider Dietisalvi Neroni. Pushing aside such a man could have split the regime, and Cosimo preferred to send another of his inner circle, Tommaso Soderini, to reason privately with Neroni. Soderini could not save the balia, but he did prevent Neroni’s priorate from terminating a mano elections (which happened the next year). Cosimo’s son Piero was so impressed with Soderini’s loyalty that he arranged for him to become Standardbearer of Justice for July-August. But Soderini’s own brother Niccolo, who had so confidently praised the direction of the regime some years earlier, now emerged as a critic of Medici methods and a supporter of reforms.368 Within the inner circle some were no longer toeing the Medici line, choosing instead to support popular sentiment (of the sort that came from Mariotto Lippi and Marco Parenti) in favor of a restoration of traditional government and elections. Cosimo could do little unless and until the elite realized that its own class interests were threatened by the reviving influence of the popolo.
That realization came early in 1458 when the Signoria and legislative councils reinstated the Catasto, again threatening the wealthy with heavier taxes. Apprehension was fed by the prospect that the upcoming scrutiny would be the first in a quarter century not to be conducted by a balia.369 Suddenly rumors swirled about plans from within the Medici circle to “seize” or retake the government with another balia, and Medici opponents responded with a law in April making it more difficult to create balie and prohibiting any balia from conducting an electoral scrutiny. With sortition having been restored, once again the chance selection of the draw for a new Signoria created the opportunity for action: Luca Pitti, one of Cosimo’s most powerful lieutenants, became Standardbearer of Justice for July-August. Pitti’s priorate proposed to the councils the creation of a new legislative body of carefully selected citizens, in effect a permanent balia, and recommended that the scrutiny scheduled for the end of the year be held during Pitti’s term of office. When the councils firmly rejected both ideas, the Signoria, in an obvious attempt to intimidate council members with implied threats of reprisal for votes openly cast against these proposals, suggested that secret balloting be set aside in the stubbornly anti-Medici Council of the Popolo. But Archbishop Antoninus intervened and harshly denounced open balloting as a violation of council members’ oaths and thus a matter of conscience that came under ecclesiastical jurisdiction; thirty-one members of an advisory pratica that the Signoria was trying to influence welcomed his condemnation of Medici tactics.370
Among Medici partisans, some saw matters in class terms: at stake was whether the ottimati were going to keep or lose control of government: “There are two alternatives,” said Franco Sacchetti in the crucial pratica of August 1: “should we allow the prestantes cives [pre-eminent citizens] to be ruled by others, or should the others be ruled by them, as is right and just?” His views were seconded by Mediceans Tommaso Soderini and Otto Niccolini. Alessandro Alessandri escalated the sense of imminent crisis by asserting that the opposition was well organized and that the only solution was a parlamento. Mediceans were appealing to ottimati fears of an assault on traditional class privileges in order to push opinion toward the acceptance of an extra-constitutional resolution. Once the idea of a parlamento had surfaced, speaker after speaker declared the necessity of seeking Cosimo’s opinion, and the pratica agreed to summon a parlamento if the idea had Cosimo’s approval.371 Cosimo knew it was a risky step, in part perhaps because large crowds could be unpredictable, but also because circumventing normal institutional channels might establish a precedent that could be used against the Medici. If it was to work, it needed to be orchestrated perfectly, and the indispensable element was again, as in 1434, the presence of an armed force. On the same day that the pratica was debating the conditions for calling a parlamento, Cosimo met with the resident Milanese ambassador, Nicodemo Tranchedini, to discuss military intervention from Milan and other allies. Tranchedini immediately wrote to Sforza, and the duke responded on August 10 that he was sending the lord of Faenza and his troops. Such reassurance was all that Cosimo needed: opposition leaders were arrested, a few tortured, and some 150 persons placed under house arrest. The next day, Cosimo remained at home with his armed retinue (and the Milanese ambassador) as mercenary troops surrounded piazza Signoria and the citizens filed in for the parlamento. According to one observer, only a few people actually heard the notary of the Signoria read aloud the proposals, and correspondingly few gave their approval. Knowingly or not, they “agreed” to the resumption of a mano elections for the next five years, the suspension of the law against balie, the immediate institution of a balia to hold a scrutiny, and the creation of a new council, the Cento (Hundred), that was meant to resolve the regime’s institutional weakness. In a veritable purge, 1,500 citizens were removed from the lists of eligible officeholders. The police magistracy of the Otto di Guardia, which was given expanded powers to adjudicate political offenses and summarily punish the guilty, added to the ranks of the exiles many outspoken critics of Medici rule, including Girolamo Machiavelli, who was later arrested and executed for conspiring against the regime.
Selecting the members of the Cento was entrusted to the Signoria and all those who had served as Standardbearers of Justice since 1434 or whose name-tickets had been drawn for the office without holding it (the so-called “veduti”). This body put to a vote all former members of the Signoria and colleges (or “veduti” for the same) since 1434. Thus a select group of Medicean insiders (Standardbearers of Justice had all been carefully chosen by the accoppiatori) screened themselves and the office-holding elite of the previous twenty-four years (also mostly selected by the accoppiatori) to produce a still narrower group of trusted friends of the regime. Among the Cento’s powers were to elect key magistracies (the Monte and Catasto officials and the Otto di Guardia) and to screen all legislation before it was sent to the older councils, which still, however, had to give final approval to laws and to any extension of the accoppiatori beyond the five years established by the parlamento. Finally, the balia replaced the old title of the “priors of the guilds” with the “priors of liberty,” an ironic exaltation of a liberty that had never seemed more threatened than in 1458. Sixty-five years later, in his Florentine Histories (7.4) Machiavelli commented wryly that the change was made “in order to have at least the name of the possession they had lost.” Benedetto Dei, a woolen-cloth manufacturer and son of a goldsmith, wrote that the 1458 parlamento had been engineered by Cosimo and Luca Pitti, “who wanted to secure for themselves the stato and reggimento and make it completely stable.” But they tried “in vain” to get the city back to work and normal life, “because of the pent-up feelings of the citizens who saw themselves deprived and stripped of all honor and office, so much so that many of the leading citizens left the city out of desperation and irritation at always having to see their enemies enjoying a free field with all the offices and honors and with their heads always in the trough. . . . And the city of Florence suffered such a blow and shock that it remained stunned and bewildered for more than eight years from 1458 to 1466.”34
In the last six years of his life, Cosimo withdrew from any public or visible role, no longer holding offices or even speaking in the pratiche. But no one doubted that his power, exercised largely from his grand new family palace (see Plate 5) on the via Larga (where the accoppiatori also met), was greater Benedetto Dei, La Cronica, ed. R. Barducci (Florence, 1984), p. 66. 7 Rubinstein, Government, pp. 69, 247, 369.
8 Najemy, Corporatism, pp. 321-2.
Plate 5 Palazzo Medici (now known as Palazzo Medici-Riccardi), built 1445-60, designed by Michelozzo (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Than ever. In the spring of 1459 he welcomed the new pope, Pius II, the Sienese humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who stopped in Florence on his way to Mantua to preside over a council he had summoned to declare a crusade against the Ottomans, and Francesco Sforza sent his fifteen-year-old son, Galeazzo Maria, to escort the pope from Florence to Mantua. Private citizen Cosimo never seemed more like a reigning monarch than during these two “state visits.” In his memoirs Pius said of him that he “was considered the arbiter of war and peace, the regulator of law; less a citizen than master of his city. Political councils were held in his home; the magistrates he chose were elected; he was king in all but name and legal status. . . . Some asserted that his tyranny was intolerable.”372 Machiavelli, noting the fate of his kinsman Girolamo, described the regime that emerged in 1458 as an “unbearable and violent” kind of rule in which “a few citizens plundered the city” and used “terror” and “fear” in order periodically to “retake power.”
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