Between 1512 and 1527 the Medici never satisfactorily resolved the question of who should manage the regime, or how. As head of the family, Giovanni would have been the logical choice, but even before he was elected pope his duties as cardinal and papal legate kept him in Rome and Bologna. Some advised that the regime needed a strong leader with power no longer camouflaged in the old myth of the Medici as citizens with a little more authority than others had. Despite the relatively few reprisals and exiles in the fall of 1512, the radical ottimati recognized that the Medici had enemies and would have to govern, as Paolo Vettori told the cardinal, “more with force than skill. . . . The city has lived well for ten years, and the memory of that time will always be your enemy.” He boldly warned that Giuliano “does not yet understand the affairs of the city” and would be unable to assess properly the views of citizens motivated more by self-interest than devotion to the Medici. Giuliano’s weaknesses and lack of sufficient interest in governing were widely perceived among the ottimati and confirmed by his frequent absences. Vettori recommended that he would thus need an inner cabinet of ten or twelve men and even within this group would ultimately have to rely on one or two to resolve disagreements and make decisions.646
In February 1513 a conspiracy to assassinate Giuliano (and possibly other Medici) was disclosed, and within days its leaders, Pietropaolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi, were executed. A list of potential sympathizers was found that included, besides members of prominent families, Machiavelli and his friend Giovanni Folchi, whose confession to the authorities included a report of Machiavelli’s percipient skepticism concerning the regime’s leadership: “it appeared to him that this regime would not be governed without difficulty, because it lacked someone to stand at the tiller, as [the elder] Lorenzo de’ Medici had properly done.”647 Although he had no part in the conspiracy, Machiavelli was arrested, tortured, and jailed for a month in the Bargello. Niccolo Valori, nephew of Francesco, a strong Soderini ally, and friend of Machiavelli, was similarly tortured and incarcerated; he claimed he tried only to dissuade Boscoli when he divulged the plot to him.648 The complicity, suspected or real, of several ottimati undercut Medici trust in the leading families, and the regime’s brutal reaction to this and other conspiracies and critics from Savonarolan circles in 1513 ended the hopes for moderation in Medici rule.649
Medici fortunes rose spectacularly when Cardinal Giovanni became Pope Leo X on March 11, 1513. Suddenly, the attention he could devote to Florentine affairs was very restricted and it became even more necessary to delegate power in Florence to family members. He first entrusted the task to his nephew Lorenzo. If Giuliano had difficulty understanding Florentine politics, Lorenzo was even less capable of doing so. Whereas Giovanni and Giuliano had grown up in Florence and were, respectively, nineteen and sixteen years of age when exiled in 1494, Lorenzo, born in 1492, was literally and culturally of another generation and had no experience of life in a republican polity. Among his grandparents, only his namesake was a Florentine, and the chief influence on him was his Neapolitan mother, Alfonsina Orsini. Lorenzo grew up in Rome amid courtly rituals, noble titles, and military trappings alien to Florence’s civilian and republican customs. When he arrived in August 1513 to assume the reins of leadership (or rule, as he no doubt preferred to see it), his uncle gave him, through Giuliano, a set of guidelines (the so-called Instructione) counseling the careful placement in crucial magistracies of trusted friends to serve as informers, cooperation with leading ottimati, respect for older and prestigious families, and impartial administration of justice.650 That Lorenzo even needed such advice was proof of his dangerous lack of familiarity with Florence’s political culture and elite families. He was warned in particular “not to offend the families... accustomed to having lo stato,” and, if he suspected someone’s loyalty, to extend favor to other members of the same family. Despite the advice, Lorenzo and Alfonsina, who had a voice in many decisions, managed routinely to offend the ottimati with highhanded interventions in elections, magistracies, and the courts on behalf of favorites.651
According to Cerretani, Lorenzo and eight advisers “ran everything.” Nerli identifies them: Piero Alamanni, Lorenzo Morelli, Jacopo Salviati, Pandolfo Corbinelli, Piero Ridolfi, Lanfredino Lanfredini, Filippo Strozzi, and Francesco Vettori.652 Particularly important were Strozzi and Vettori. Strozzi was closer to Lorenzo than anyone except Alfonsina and was with him at every important event down to his illness and death in 1519. Lorenzo (and his mother) prevailed upon Leo in 1514 to put the Depository General of the Apostolic Chamber under Strozzi’s control, making him in effect the pope’s banker, and in 1515 Lorenzo appointed Strozzi to the equivalent office in Florence, the Depository of the Signoria. With government revenues deposited into, and disbursed from, his bank, Strozzi was able to divert public funds, disguised as private loans, to Lorenzo. Even more ominously, with significant portions of both papal and Florentine revenues flowing into the same bank, Strozzi ultimately enabled two Medici popes to appropriate huge sums from the Florentine treasury to pay for papal wars and family ambitions. Under Clement the looting of Florence through Strozzi’s hands for the aggrandizement of the Medici reached staggering proportions.653
After two years as the republic’s ambassador to the papal court, the period of his life best known for the memorable correspondence with Machiavelli,654 Francesco Vettori returned to Florence in 1515 in Lorenzo’s company and as his most important political adviser. Over the next four years, he supported Lorenzo’s ambitions, accompanied him into war as civilian commissioner of the army under Lorenzo’s command, and functioned as his personal agent in marriage negotiations in France.655 Vettori continued to serve Lorenzo’s reputation after his death in the brief and flattering biography he dedicated to Lorenzo’s sister (and Strozzi’s wife) Clarice. Describing himself as Lorenzo’s “intimo servitore,” Vettori rather improbably praised Lorenzo for humanity and modesty and for instilling obedience and order into a previously licentious and undisciplined army. Perhaps to soothe Clarice, who was reportedly incensed over the amorous escapades in which her husband and Lorenzo were said routinely to engage, Vettori insisted that the “obscene lust” that infected so many young men did not touch Lorenzo (and by implication did not lead Filippo into temptation either).656
But Lorenzo was not well liked. One problem was the frequency of his long absences from the city. Although he had been advised to make himself available in regular audiences to citizens and to listen to their requests for help (but not actually to grant them all), he was away from Florence from September 1514 to May 1515, for much of the summer and autumn of 1515, from October 1516 to spring 1517, and again during the spring and summer of 1518 when he was in France for his wedding: cumulatively, for more than two of the fewer than five years in which he was meant to be governing Florence.657 These absences did not make Florentine hearts grow fonder, especially because, not fully trusting even his friends among the ottimati, he assigned responsibilities of governance to a distant and young relation, Galeotto de’ Medici, and later to his arrogant secretary Goro Gheri, notoriously more Medicean than the Medici, while his mother took control of the patronage network from the family palace.658 Lorenzo’s real objective was the acquisition of a territorial state, and Florence and its finances and institutions were merely a base from which to pursue more grandiose ends. In 1515 he told Galeotto that Florence was “my support and estate and, to put it better, la poppa mia,” literally the breast, and thus the milk, nourishing his ambitions.659
A widening gap opened between the plan for “civil” governance outlined in the Instructione and Medici steps toward “princely” rule. In May 1513 the balia granted Giuliano the power to act in the name of the commune as its “syndic and procurator,” to make war and peace and to do anything the commune itself could do.660 Although framed in the old language of corporate representation, such broad authority in the hands of one person was unprecedented. The mandate lasted only until September, by which time Lorenzo had replaced him. When Leo appointed Giuliano Captain-General of the Church in January 1515, Lorenzo, determined not to be outshone by his uncle, told his associates that he would soon be named Captain-General of Florence. He pressured the government to hire 500 troops and got himself appointed as their commander in June with a formal three-year condotta, a stipend of 35,000 florins, and legal immunity for his soldiers and officers. Never before had a Florentine citizen been given command of what was in effect a private army (despite the purely formal, face-saving stipulation that he use it in conformity with government orders).661 Lorenzo’s captain-generalship was a controversial and dramatic step toward a very different relationship between the Medici and Florence.662 Many opposed it (although not openly in the councils), and even some Medici friends feared the reaction it might provoke. Leo himself, who would have preferred a slower, more cautious approach to the assumption of such power, remarked: “I have named two captains who have no experience at all and hold offices [usually] held by trained and expert men. I don’t know how they’ll do if they have actually to exercise their offices.”663
In foreign policy indecision and family disagreements also undermined support in Florence. Early in 1515 Louis XII died and was succeeded by his young son-in-law, Francis I, who immediately announced his intention to invade Italy and retake Milan. Opposing France were Spain, the emperor, and the Swiss, who had humiliated the French in 1512. Leo played a dangerous double game of secretly adhering to the anti-French league while negotiating with Francis and trying to win his support for papal sovereignty over Modena, Reggio, Parma, and Piacenza. It was rumored that Leo planned to give these territories to Lorenzo and, if the French expelled Spain from southern Italy, to install Giuliano on the Neapolitan throne. Family ambitions of the most naked sort now drove Medici policy into conflict with both church and Florentine interests. Two years earlier Vettori had lamented the contradiction between Leo’s preoccupation with “giving states to his relatives” and his objective of protecting the church’s prestige and power.664 Now this contradiction and its potential dangers were magnified by the French invasion, Leo’s wavering, the papacy’s military weakness, and two other factors: Lorenzo’s independent foreign policy, and reviving hopes among frateschi and anti-Mediceans that a French king was once again, as in 1494, coming to liberate Florence from tyranny.
Since Leo’s election, preachers echoing Savonarola’s critique of the church were seen as dangerously anti-Medici and subjected to repressive measures. Early in 1515 the regime arrested and forced the confession of one such preacher, Don Teodoro, and printed a pamphlet detailing his activities, the contents of his sermons, and the danger he represented. His large following prompted the Florentine archdiocese to tighten controls over preaching and religious meetings. Leo intervened with a brief that approved the silencing of Don Teodoro, praised the new controls, and instituted ecclesiastical and lay boards to suppress heresy. Medici nervousness over the continuing popularity of Savonarolan prophecy and political ideas was intensified by the excitement generated by Francis’s intention to return French power to Italy. Leo and his cousin the archbishop, Cardinal Giulio, announced a synod of the Florentine church, which met in 1516-17, from which they expected an official condemnation of Savonarola and even tighter controls on preaching and religious publications. But pro-Savonarolan sentiment was still strong enough to block outright condemnation.665
There was in fact a good deal of pro-French sentiment in Florence, and even contacts with the French. Leo was urged by the foreign policy magistracy to reopen negotiations with Francis, and Lorenzo, aware of the implications for the Medici of growing pro-French sympathies, warned Leo that an uprising was possible if the pope openly sided with the anti-French league (as he did in July) and the French emerged victorious. To Leo’s dismay, Lorenzo opened his own channel to Francis, perhaps trying to reach a separate agreement that would protect him however the war turned out. He had the Florentine ambassador Francesco Pandolfini deliver a letter to Francis assuring him of Lorenzo’s loyalty and “servitu.” When Francis pressed Pandolfini on what he thought Lorenzo would do if Leo joined the anti-French league, he replied that he did not think it would come to that. Francis insisted: “and what if it does?” To which Pandolfini, evidently so instructed, replied that Lorenzo “would not be lacking in the servitu” he had promised the king. This earned Pandolfini, and indirectly Lorenzo, a rebuke from Leo delivered by Giulio.666 Leo even forbade the Florentine ambassadors appointed by Lorenzo, including Filippo Strozzi and Francesco Vettori, to go to the French court for fear that they were being sent to negotiate a separate agreement.667 In the midst of the diplomatic wrangling, Leo and Alfonsina secretly introduced 1,000 troops into the city to prevent a revolt. On the eve of war, as confusion and indecision among the Medici themselves angered many Florentines and raised hopes of an imminent “liberation from tyranny,” the Medici found it more urgent to deploy troops in defense of the regime than to contribute to the league’s efforts to stop the French.
Leo wanted Giuliano to go to war and Lorenzo to stay home and mind the regime, but when Giuliano fell ill Lorenzo took the troops to Lombardy, formally in support of the anti-French league. He prudently never got near the fighting that erupted south of Milan in September between the French and the Swiss. With decisive help from Venice, the French routed the Swiss at Marignano, retook Milan, and snatched Parma and Piacenza from the papacy. But the expectations of anti-Mediceans in Florence were dashed when Francis quickly came to terms with Leo, agreed to meet him in Bologna, and assured him that he would not lay hands on the regime. Jacopo Pitti later commented that the papal-French accord “dulled the spirits that had been raised against the regime by the king’s arrival, as they realized, to their intense sorrow, how much princes are by their nature more favorable to princes (as like to like) than they are to republics.”668 Leo traveled north for the meeting, but first stopped in Florence for a state visit complete with a triumphal entry on November 30 that was oddly discordant with the reality of his diplomatic humiliation and truncated territorial ambitions in Lombardy. Despite resentment over the huge expense and anti-Medici sentiments expressed in graffiti,669 this most spectacular ceremonial event in Florence’s history again turned the entire city into a ritual theater, adorned with triumphal arches representing the virtues allegedly embodied by the pope, through which he rode in a stately seven-hour procession from Porta Romana (see Map 2 and Plate 4), down via Maggio across the Santa Trinita bridge to piazza Signoria into via del Proconsolo, around the Duomo and finally to the papal apartments at Santa Maria Novella.670 Music, poetry, and humanist oratory exalted the pope, but his sense of triumph must have been tempered by the realization that his family’s political fortunes depended on the good graces of the French king waiting for him in Bologna.
Lorenzo came out of the near disaster better than his uncles did. Having promised Francis the constancy of his “servitu” and contributed nothing to the Swiss defense of Milan, he basked in the king’s favor and joined his court in Pavia and Milan where, according to Vettori, in many “feste” he urged Francis to reconcile with Leo.671 Francis apparently agreed to give Leo and Lorenzo a free hand in the papal states, for, just a few months later, Leo deposed the duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria della Rovere, and installed Lorenzo in his place. In 1518 Lorenzo cashed in on his still vibrant French connection by marrying Francis’s cousin, Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, a marriage that brought him a huge income and a fief in the south of France, in return of course for serving the king’s interests in Italy and Rome. It was the most prestigious marriage yet contracted by a Medici. As a cousin-in-law of the greatest king in Christendom, Lorenzo probably saw no limit to his ambition, and according to some, though denied by others, in the summer of 1518 he was determined to dissolve the republic and become Florence’s prince. In October he went to Rome with Filippo Strozzi and Francesco Vettori and allegedly tried, and failed, to win Leo over to the plan.672 True or not, many believed it and Lorenzo was as unpopular as ever when he suddenly became ill and died in the spring of 1519. Because Giuliano had died three years earlier, the Medici now had no legitimate heir to manage the regime.
As a stopgap Leo sent his cousin Giulio to Florence while they looked for a long-term solution. Giulio, born in 1478 (the year his father was murdered in the Pazzi revolt), was, like Leo, more inclined than Lorenzo to soothe ruffled ottimati feathers, and he initially gave the impression (which may have exaggerated actual Medici intentions) that he and Leo were contemplating a more broadly-based regime. He opened discussions with leading citizens, welcomed proposals for constitutional reform, restored sortition for some administrative offices, and slightly expanded the membership of the Seventy and Cento. He made gestures toward healing old wounds, reconciling with a number of Savonarolans, especially Girolamo Benivieni,673 and allowing Machiavelli to return to the fringes of public life. Jacopo Salviati was sufficiently encouraged to resume involvement in politics and became a member of Giulio’s inner circle. Expectations of a restoration of traditional republican government (which of course meant different things to different people) were high. Jacopo Nardi, the republican historian, had kind words for Giulio, comparing him to Piero Soderini and remarking that he “showed himself most humane in his actions toward the entire citizenry and very patient in his audiences.” But there is a hint of the looming catastrophe (and very different political destiny that Giulio later inflicted on the city) in Nardi’s comment that, of all the Medici regimes, none “concealed the principate” with a “greater appearance of civilta and liberty” than Giulio’s.674
Initial impressions were indeed deceiving. Giulio relinquished none of the regime’s control, and when he returned to Rome late in 1519 he showed his distrust of the ottimati by appointing Medici creatures as the executors of his decisions (as Lorenzo had done with Goro Gheri): at first Cardinal Silvio Passerini, then the notaries Jacopo Modesti and Agnolo Marzi, all three from the subject territories (respectively, Cortona, Prato, and San Gimignano), and, in 1524, after Giulio became Pope Clement VII, again Cardinal Passerini. In the 1480s the elder Lorenzo had begun the practice of entrusting key aspects of government to clients from outside the traditional political class, but now the Medici let such men act as their substitutes in positions of power.675 As Medici creatures lacking any connection to the city’s political life except as such, and totally dependent on Medici power for their own survival, these men were unswervingly loyal to their masters. For Florentines, who still thought of the inhabitants of the territories as their subjects, seeing the repuBlic, or what was left of it, in the hands of Medici clients was intolerable, and their accumulating resentments now waited for an opportunity to erupt. But these functionaries and their assumptions about their relationship to the prince they served, although swept away in 1527, were actually harbingers of the state that lay beyond the republic.
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