The Story of Florence

This rough and half-naked wool-comber, whose mother made pots and pans and whose wife sold greens, is one of the heroes of Florentine history; and his noble simplicity throughout the whole affair is in striking contrast with the self-seeking and intrigues of the rich aristocratic merchants whose tool, to some extent, he appears to have been. The pious historian, Jacopo Nardi, likens him to the heroes of ancient Rome, Curius and Fabricius, and ranks him as a patriot and deliverer of the city, far above even Farinata degli Uberti. The next day the Parliament was duly summoned in the Piazza, Michele confirmed in his office, and a Balìa (or commission) given to him, together with the Eight and the Syndics of the Arts, to reform the State and elect the new Signoria–in which the newly constituted Guilds of the populace were to have a third with those of the greater and minor Arts. But, before Michele's term of office was over, the Ciompi were in arms again, fiercer than ever and with more outrageous demands, following the standards of the Angel and some of the minor Arts (who appear to have in part joined them). From Santa Maria Novella, their chosen head-quarters, on the last day of August they sent two representatives to overawe the Signoria. But Michele di Lando, answering their insolence with violence, rode through the city with the standard of Justice floating before him, while the great bell of the Priors' tower called the Guilds to arms; and by evening the populace had melted away, and the government of the people was re-established. The new Signoria was greeted in a canzone by Sacchetti, in which he declares that Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance are once more reinstated in the city.

For the next few years the Minor Arts predominated in the government. Salvestro dei Medici kept in the background, but was presently banished. Michele di Lando seemed contented to have saved the State, and took little further share in the politics of the city. He appears later on to have been put under bounds at Chioggia; but to have returned to Florence before his death in 1401, when he was buried in Santa Croce. There were still tumults and conspiracies, resulting in frequent executions and banishments; while, without, inglorious wars were carried on by the companies of mercenary soldiers. This is the epoch in which the great English captain, Hawkwood, entered the service of the Florentine State. In 1382, after the execution of Giorgio Scali and the banishment of Tommaso Strozzi (noble burghers who headed the populace), the newly constituted Guilds were abolished, and the government returned to the greater Arts, who now held two-thirds of the offices–a proportion which was later increased to three-quarters.

The period which follows, from 1382 to 1434, sees the close of the democratic government of Florence. The Republic, nominally still ruled by the greater Guilds, is in reality sustained and swayed by the nobili popolani or Ottimati, members of wealthy families risen by riches or talent out of these greater Guilds into a new kind of burgher aristocracy. The struggle is now no longer between the Palace of the Signory and the Palace of the Party–for the days of the power of the Parte Guelfa are at an end–but between the Palace and the Piazza. The party of the Minor Arts and the Populace is repressed and ground down with war taxes; but behind them the Medici lurk and wait–first Vieri, then Giovanni di Averardo, then Cosimo di Giovanni–ever on the watch to put themselves at their head, and through them overturn the State. The party of the Ottimati is first led by Maso degli Albizzi, then by Niccolò da Uzzano, and lastly by Rinaldo degli Albizzi and his adherents–illustrious citizens not altogether unworthy of the great Republic that they swayed–the sort of dignified civic patricians whose figures, a little later, were to throng the frescoes of Masaccio and Ghirlandaio. But they were divided among themselves, persecuted their adversaries with proscription and banishment, thus making the exiles a perpetual source of danger to the State, and they were hated by the populace because of the war taxes. These wars were mainly carried on by mercenaries–who were now more usually Italians than foreigners–and, in spite of frequent defeats, generally ended well for Florence. Arezzo was purchased in 1384. A fierce struggle was carried on a few years later (1390-1402) with the "great serpent," Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, who hoped to make himself King of Italy by violence as he had made himself Duke of Milan by treachery, and intended to be crowned in Florence. Pisa was finally and cruelly conquered in 1406; Cortona was obtained as the result of a prolonged war with King Ladislaus of Naples in 1414, in which the Republic had seemed once more in danger of falling into the hands of a foreign tyrant; and in 1421 Leghorn was sold to the Florentines by the Genoese, thus opening the sea to their merchandise.

The deaths of Giovanni Galeazzo and Ladislaus freed the city from her most formidable external foes; and for a while she became the seat of the Papacy, the centre of Christendom. In 1419, after the schism, Pope Martin V. took up his abode in Florence; the great condottiere, Braccio, came with his victorious troops to do him honour; and the deposed John XXIII. humbled himself before the new Pontiff, and was at last laid to rest among the shadows of the Baptistery. In his Storia Florentina Guicciardini declares that the government at this epoch was the wisest, the most glorious and the happiest that the city had ever had. It was the dawn of the Renaissance, and Florence was already full of artists and scholars, to whom these nobili popolani were as generous and as enlightened patrons as their successors, the Medici, were to be. Even Cosimo's fervent admirer, the librarian Vespasiano Bisticci, endorses Guicciardini's verdict: "In that time," he says, "from 1422 to 1433, the city of Florence was in a most blissful state, abounding with excellent men in every faculty, and it was full of admirable citizens."

Maso degli Albizzi died in 1417; and his successors in the oligarchy–the aged Niccolò da Uzzano, who stood throughout for moderation, and the fiery but less competent Rinaldo degli Albizzi–were no match for the rising and unscrupulous Medici. With the Albizzi was associated the noblest and most generous Florentine of the century, Palla Strozzi. The war with Filippo Visconti, resulting in the disastrous rout of Zagonara, and an unjust campaign against Lucca, in which horrible atrocities were committed by the Florentine commissioner, Astorre Gianni, shook their government. Giovanni dei Medici, the richest banker in Italy, was now the acknowledged head of the opposition; he had been Gonfaloniere in 1421, but would not put himself actively forward, although urged on by his sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo. He died in 1429; Niccolò da Uzzano followed him to the grave in 1432; and the final struggle between the fiercer spirits, Rinaldo and Cosimo, was at hand. "All these citizens," said Niccolò, shortly before his death, "some through ignorance, some through malice, are ready to sell this republic; and, thanks to their good fortune, they have found the purchaser."

Shortly before this date, Masaccio painted all the leading spirits of the time in a fresco in the cloisters of the Carmine. This has been destroyed, but you may see a fine contemporary portrait of Giovanni in the Uffizi. The much admired and famous coloured bust in the Bargello, called the portrait of Niccolò da Uzzano by Donatello, has probably nothing to do either with Niccolò or with Donatello. Giovanni has the air of a prosperous and unpretending Florentine tradesman, but with a certain obvious parade of his lack of pushfulness.

In 1433 the storm broke. A Signory hostile to Cosimo being elected, he was summoned to the Palace and imprisoned in an apartment high up in the Tower, a place known as the Alberghettino. Rinaldo degli Albizzi held the Piazza with his soldiery, and Cosimo heard the great bell ringing to call the people to Parliament, to grant a Balìa to reform the government and decide upon his fate. But he was too powerful at home and abroad; his popularity with those whom he had raised from low estate, and those whom he had relieved by his wealth, his influence with the foreign powers, such as Venice and Ferrara, were so great that his foes dared not take his life; and, indeed, they were hardly the men to have attempted such a crime. Banished to Padua (his brother Lorenzo and other members of his family being put under bounds at different cities), he was received everywhere, not as a fugitive, but as a prince; and the library of the Benedictines, built by Michelozzo at his expense, once bore witness to his stay in Venice. Hardly a year had passed when a new Signory was chosen, favourable to the Medici; Rinaldo degli Albizzi, after a vain show of resistance, laid down his arms on the intervention of Pope Eugenius, who was then at Santa Maria Novella, and was banished for ever from the city with his principal adherents. And finally, in a triumphant progress from Venice, "carried back to his country upon the shoulders of all Italy," as he said, Cosimo and his brother Lorenzo entered Florence on October 6th, 1434, rode past the deserted palaces of the Albizzi to the Palace of the Priors, and next day returned in triumph to their own house in the Via Larga.

The Republic had practically fallen; the head of the Medici was virtually prince of the city and of her fair dominion. But Florence was not Milan or Naples, and Cosimo's part as tyrant was a peculiar one. The forms of the government were, with modifications, preserved; but by means of a Balìa empowered to elect the chief magistrates for a period of five years, and then renewed every five years, he secured that the Signoria should always be in his hands, or in those of his adherents. The grand Palace of the Priors was still ostensibly the seat of government; but, in reality, the State was in the firm grasp of the thin, dark-faced merchant in the Palace in the Via Larga, which we now know as the Palazzo Riccardi. Although in the earlier part of his reign he was occasionally elected Gonfaloniere, he otherwise held no office ostensibly, and affected the republican manner of a mere wealthy citizen. His personality, combined with the widely ramifying banking relations of the Medici, gave him an almost European influence. His popularity among the mountaineers and in the country districts, from which armed soldiery were ever ready to pour down into the city in his defence, made him the fitting man for the ever increasing external sway of Florence. The forms of the Republic were preserved, but he consolidated his power by a general levelling and disintegration, by severing the nerves of the State and breaking the power of the Guilds. He had certain hard and cynical maxims for guidance: "Better a city ruined than a city lost," "States are not ruled by Pater-Nosters," "New and worthy citizens can be made by a few ells of crimson cloth." So he elevated to wealth and power men of low kind, devoted to and dependent on himself; crushed the families opposed to him, or citizens who seemed too powerful, by wholesale banishments, or by ruining them with fines and taxation, although there was comparatively little blood shed. He was utterly ruthless in all this, and many of the noblest Florentine citizens fell victims. One murder must be laid to his charge, and it is one of peculiar, for him, unusual atrocity. Baldaccio d'Anghiari, a young captain of infantry, who promised fair to take a high place among the condottieri of the day, was treacherously invited to speak with the Gonfaloniere in the Palace of the Priors, and there stabbed to death by hireling assassins from the hills, and his body flung ignominiously into the Piazza. Cosimo's motive is said to have been partly jealousy of a possible rival, Neri Capponi, who had won popularity by his conquest of the Casentino for Florence in 1440, and who was intimate with Baldaccio; and partly desire to gratify Francesco Sforza, whose treacherous designs upon Milan he was furthering by the gold wrung from his over-taxed Florentines, and to whose plans Baldaccio was prepared to offer an obstacle.

Florence was still for a time the seat of the Papacy. In January 1439, the Patriarch Joseph of Constantinople, and the Emperor of the East, John Paleologus, came to meet Pope Eugenius for the Council of Florence, which was intended to unite the Churches of Christendom. The Patriarch died here, and is buried in Santa Maria Novella. In the Riccardi Palace you may see him and the Emperor, forced, as it were, to take part in the triumph of the Medici in Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco–riding with them in the gorgeous train, that sets out ostensibly to seek the Babe of Bethlehem, and evidently has no intention of finding Him. Pope Eugenius returned to Rome in 1444; and in 1453 Mahomet II. stormed Constantinople, and Greek exiles thronged to Rome and Florence. In 1459, marvellous pageants greeted Pius II. in the city, on his way to stir up the Crusade that never went.

In his foreign policy Cosimo inaugurated a totally new departure for Florence; he commenced a line of action which was of the utmost importance in Italian politics, and which his son and grandson carried still further. The long wars with which the last of the Visconti, Filippo Maria, harassed Italy and pressed Florence hard (in the last of these Rinaldo degli Albizzi and the exiles approached near enough to catch a distant glimpse of the city from which they were relentlessly shut out), ended with his death in 1447. Cosimo dei Medici now allied himself with the great condottiere, Francesco Sforza, and aided him with money to make good his claims upon the Duchy of Milan. Henceforth this new alliance between Florence and Milan, between the Medici and the Sforza, although most odious in the eyes of the Florentine people, became one of the chief factors in the balance of power in Italy. Soon afterwards Alfonso, the Aragonese ruler of Naples, entered into this triple alliance; Venice and Rome to some extent being regarded as a double alliance to counterbalance this. To these foreign princes Cosimo was almost as much prince of Florence as they of their dominions; and by what was practically a coup d'état in 1459, Cosimo and his son Piero forcibly overthrew the last attempt of their opponents to get the Signoria out of their hands, and, by means of the creation of a new and permanent Council of a hundred of their chief adherents, more firmly than ever secured their hold upon the State.

In his private life Cosimo was the simplest and most unpretentious of tyrants, and lived the life of a wealthy merchant-burgher of the day in its nobler aspects. He was an ideal father, a perfect man of business, an apparently kindly fellow-citizen to all. Above all things he loved the society of artists and men of letters; Brunelleschi and Michelozzo, Donatello and Fra Lippo Lippi–to name only a few more intimately connected with him–found in him the most generous and discerning of patrons; many of the noblest Early Renaissance churches and convents in Florence and its neighbourhood are due to his munificence–San Lorenzo and San Marco and the Badia of Fiesole are the most typical–and he even founded a hospital in Jerusalem. To a certain extent this was what we should now call "conscience money." His friend and biographer, Vespasiano Bisticci, writes: "He did these things because it appeared to him that he held money, not over well acquired; and he was wont to say that to God he had never given so much as to find Him on his books a debtor. And likewise he said: I know the humours of this city; fifty years will not pass before we are driven out; but the buildings will remain." The Greeks, who came to the Council of Florence or fled from the in-coming Turk, stimulated the study of their language and philosophy–though this had really commenced in the days of the Republic, before the deaths of Petrarch and Boccaccio–and found in Cosimo an ardent supporter. He founded great libraries in San Marco and in the Badia of Fiesole, the former with part of the codices collected by the scholar Niccolò Niccoli; although he had banished the old Palla Strozzi, the true renovator of the Florentine University, into hopeless exile. Into the Neo-Platonism of the Renaissance Cosimo threw himself heart and soul. "To Cosimo," writes Burckhardt, "belongs the special glory of recognising in the Platonic philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of thought, of inspiring his friends with the same belief, and thus of fostering within humanistic circles themselves another and a higher resuscitation of antiquity." In a youth of Figline, Marsilio Ficino, the son of a doctor, Cosimo found a future high priest of this new religion of love and beauty; and bidding him minister to the minds of men rather than to their bodies, brought him into his palace, and gave him a house in the city and a beautiful farm near Careggi. Thus was founded the famous Platonic Academy, the centre of the richest Italian thought of the century. As his end drew near, Cosimo turned to the consolations of religion, and would pass long hours in his chosen cell in San Marco, communing with the Dominican Archbishop, Antonino, and Fra Angelico, the painter of mediæval Paradise. And with these thoughts, mingled with the readings of Marsilio's growing translation of Plato, he passed away at his villa at Careggi in 1464, on the first of August. Shortly before his death he had lost his favourite son, Giovanni; and had been carried through his palace, in the Via Larga, sighing that it was now too large a house for so small a family. Entitled by public decree Pater Patriae, he was buried at his own request without any pompous funeral, beneath a simple marble in front of the high altar of San Lorenzo.

Cosimo was succeeded, not without some opposition from rivals to the Medici within their own party, by his son Piero. Piero's health was in a shattered condition–il Gottoso, he was called–and for the most part he lived in retirement at Careggi, occasionally carried into Florence in his litter, leaving his brilliant young son Lorenzo to act as a more ornamental figure-head for the State. The personal appearance of Piero is very different to that of his father or son; in his portrait bust by Mino da Fiesole in the Bargello, and in the picture by Bronzino in the National Gallery, there is less craft and a certain air of frank and manly resolution. In his daring move in support of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, when, on the death of Francesco, it seemed for a moment that the Milanese dynasty was tottering, and his promptness in crushing the formidable conspiracy of the "mountain" against himself, Piero showed that sickness had not destroyed his faculty of energetic action at the critical moment. He completely followed out his father's policy, drawing still tighter the bonds which united Florence with Milan and Naples, lavishing money on the decoration of the city and the corruption of the people. The opposition was headed by Luca Pitti, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, Dietisalvi Neroni and others, who had been reckoned as Cosimo's friends, but who were now intriguing with Venice and Ferrara to overthrow his son. Hoping to eclipse the Medici in their own special field of artistic display and wholesale corruption, Luca Pitti commenced that enormous palace which still bears the name of his family, filled it with bravos and refugees, resorted to all means fair or foul to get money to build and corrupt. It seemed for a moment that the adherents of the Mountain (as the opponents of the Medici were called, from this highly situated Pitti Palace) and the adherents of the Plain (where the comparatively modest Medicean palace–now the Palazzo Riccardi–stood in the Via Larga) might renew the old factions of Blacks and Whites. But in the late summer of 1466 the party of the Mountain was finally crushed; they were punished with more mercy than the Medici generally showed, and Luca Pitti was practically pardoned and left to a dishonourable old age in the unfinished palace, which was in after years to become the residence of the successors of his foes. About the same time Filippo Strozzi and other exiles were allowed to return, and another great palace began to rear its walls in the Via Tornabuoni, in after years to be a centre of anti-Medicean intrigue.

The brilliancy and splendour of Lorenzo's youth–he who was hereafter to be known in history as the Magnificent–sheds a rich glow of colour round the closing months of Piero's pain-haunted life. Piero himself had been content with a Florentine wife, Lucrezia dei Tornabuoni, and he had married his daughters to Florentine citizens, Guglielmo Pazzi and Bernardo Rucellai; but Lorenzo must make a great foreign match, and was therefore given Clarice Orsini, the daughter of a great Roman noble. The splendid pageant in the Piazza Santa Croce, and the even more gorgeous marriage festivities in the palace in the Via Larga, were followed by a triumphal progress of the young bridegroom through Tuscany and the Riviera to Milan, to the court of that faithful ally of his house, but most abominable monster, Giovanni Maria Sforza. Piero died on December 3rd, 1469, and, like Cosimo, desired the simple burial which his sons piously gave him. His plain but beautiful monument designed by Verrocchio is in the older sacristy of San Lorenzo, where he lies with his brother Giovanni.

"The second day after his death," writes Lorenzo in his diary, "although I, Lorenzo, was very young, in fact only in my twenty-first year, the leading men of the city and of the ruling party came to our house to express their sorrow for our misfortune, and to persuade me to take upon myself the charge of the government of the city, as my grandfather and father had already done. This proposal being contrary to the instincts of my age, and entailing great labour and danger, I accepted against my will, and only for the sake of protecting my friends, and our own fortunes, for in Florence one can ill live in the possession of wealth without control of the government."16

These two youths, Lorenzo and Giuliano, were now, to all intents and purposes, lords and masters of Florence. Lorenzo was the ruling spirit; outwardly, in spite of his singularly harsh and unprepossessing appearance, devoted to the cult of love and beauty, delighting in sport and every kind of luxury, he was inwardly as hard and cruel as tempered steel, and firmly fixed from the outset upon developing the hardly defined prepotency of his house into a complete personal despotism. You may see him as a gallant boy in Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco in the palace of his father and grandfather, riding under a bay tree, and crowned with roses; and then, in early manhood, in Botticelli's famous Adoration of the Magi; and lastly, as a fully developed, omniscient and all-embracing tyrant, in that truly terrible picture by Vasari in the Uffizi, constructed out of contemporary materials–surely as eloquent a sermon against the iniquity of tyranny as the pages of Savonarola's Reggimento di Firenze. Giuliano was a kindlier and gentler soul, completely given up to pleasure and athletics; he lives for us still in many a picture from the hand of Sandro Botticelli, sometimes directly portrayed, as in the painting which Morelli bequeathed to Bergamo, more often idealised as Mars or as Hermes; his love for the fair Simonetta inspired Botticellian allegories and the most finished and courtly stanzas of Poliziano. The sons of both these brothers were destined to sit upon the throne of the Fisherman.

A long step in despotism was gained in 1488, when the two great Councils of the People and the Commune were deprived of all their functions, which were now invested in the thoroughly Medicean Council of the Hundred. The next year Lorenzo's friend and ally, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, with his Duchess and courtiers, came to Florence. They were sumptuously received in the Medicean palace. The licence and wantonness of these Milanese scandalised even the lax Florentines, and largely added to the growing corruption of the city. The accidental burning of Santo Spirito during the performance of a miracle play was regarded as a certain sign of divine wrath. During his stay in Florence the Duke, in contrast with whom the worst of the Medici seems almost a saint, sat to one of the Pollaiuoli for the portrait still seen in the Uffizi; by comparison with him even Lorenzo looks charming; at the back of the picture there is a figure of Charity–but the Duke has very appropriately driven it to the wall. Unpopular though this Medicean-Sforza alliance was in Florence, it was undoubtedly one of the safe-guards of the harmony which, superficially, still existed between the five great powers of Italy. When Galeazzo Maria met the fate he so richly deserved, and was stabbed to death in the Church of San Stefano at Milan on December 20th, 1476, Pope Sixtus gave solemn utterance to the general dismay: Oggi è morta la pace d'Italia.