In fact, for at least the first half of this book — until the mid-1450s, that is — the reader can take it that Florence is always at war, and that these wars have fewer consequences for most people than almost any other war we are used to thinking of. To understand this strange phenomenon and how profoundly it altered the nature of the Medici bank and the destiny of its founding family — for no commercial organization lives in a vacuum — we must get a grip on the state of Italy in the early fifteenth century.
It’s complicated. Because the country was fragmented into a score of small and even tiny states, historians like to say that the name Italy was “nothing more than a geographical expression.” This is quite wrong. Italians were perfectly aware of a shared history, church, culture, and language (however varied its dialects). As a result, they were also aware that it might occur to someone to unite the country, as once it had been united under Rome. This is what they were afraid of. At the local level, they yearned for unity, the better to avoid it at the national level. Group identity and community pride were, and in Italy still are, very much a city thing.
Let us dispense with the “boot” image and imagine a cylinder topped by an inverted equilateral triangle. The cylinder is surrounded by the sea and mostly mountainous, the triangle is generally flat but shut off to the north by the Alps. There are five major players in the game. In the lower part of the cylinder, the Kingdom of Naples; in the middle, Rome and its Papal States; at the conjunction of cylinder and triangle, Florence; toward the top left of the triangle, Milan; at the top right, Venice. In between these larger states is a generous scattering of smaller ones, there to be gobbled up by predators, like fruit in a computer game.
All five larger powers are imperialist by vocation, if only because conquest tends to confer an aura of legitimacy on their leaders. You don’t argue with a winner. Their overseas empire mostly lost to the rampant Turks, the Venetians are looking to expand inside the northern Italian plain (Verona, Brescia) and down the Adriatic coast (Ferrara, Forlì, Rimini). Conscious of the vastness of France to the north, Duke Filippo Visconti of Milan has his eyes on the western port of Genoa and various other towns to the south and east as a counterweight. The duke is rapacious, incorrigible, his emblem a snake swallowing a child. Despite its pacifist rhetoric and republican vocation, Florence has recently captured Arezzo, Pisa, and Cortona, and bought Leghorn (for 100,000 florins) to secure an outlet to the sea. Now the Florentines want Lucca, and perhaps one day Siena too.
In Rome, Pope Martin will be happy if he manages to gain some kind of real control over his small and turbulent client states on the eastern side of the cylinder, the Adriatic coast. Like any other duke or prince, he engages in military campaigns, his army commanders for the most part being bishops. No smiles, please. Just as a vow of celibacy doesn’t stop a man from having children, so cassock and crucifix won’t prevent him from being effective in battle. To the south, Naples is run by the Angevins, a French family whose members are also counts of Provence. Naturally, they are eager to expand northward from Naples and dream of eventually connecting up with their French possessions. Being about halfway between the two, the port of Genoa would seem to be the appropriate link, if only they could get their hands on it before Duke Visconti of Milan does. But meantime the Angevins’ right to the Neapolitan crown is contested by the Spanish royal family of Aragon, which already rules Sicily. There are frequent skirmishes.
Given this play of forces, the pattern that endlessly repeats itself is as follows: One of the “big five” states — say, Milan — attacks a smaller independent town or towns. Inevitable military success arouses the suspicions of the other major players, two of whom — say, Florence and Venice — form an alliance. When Milan’s next victim sends out an SOS, the allies dive in. They too seize a few towns but then get suspicious of each other. Milan strikes directly at Florence to draw off a siege elsewhere. The Venetians move west to grab Verona and Brescia. The pope charges up the Apennines to the east, hopeful of subduing a couple of rebel towns while everybody is too busy to notice. Not to be left out, the Neapolitans march north. To help or hinder? Nobody is sure. Everything is fluid. Everything is up for grabs.
Or is it? Clearly, Rome has a special status. Not just a despot, but God’s vicar on earth, the pope, if seriously threatened, can order an interdiction, as he did in Florence in the fourteenth century. Then the priests won’t perform your marriage ceremony or give you last rites or bury your dead. Without ritual, the world comes to a standstill. Rome, aside from moments of Angevin delirium, or internal republican revolt, is untouchable.
Nor, aside from brief interludes of Visconti aberration, do Milan, Venice, and Florence really believe they could conquer and absorb one of the others, since that would provoke an unstoppable alliance against them. Begun with great energy and straightforward goals, these wars immediately complicate. The combatants suffer a loss of faith. Armies get bogged down and confused. Winter comes. People are tired and cold. Eventually, they make peace and the prewar situation is reestablished, give or take a citadel or two. Even where a large city is captured, it is rarely integrated into the conquerors’ territory. The Pisans, for example, conquered in 1406, do not enjoy the benefits of Florentine citizenship. Pisa is a subject town, a cow to milk, an outlet to the sea. Hence the Pisans are determined to rebel the moment circumstances are favorable. Gobbled up, the fruit is never properly swallowed. The game can start again, and always does.
Looking back on it all from the vantage point of the 1520s, Machiavelli was disgusted: “One cannot affirm it to be peace where principalities frequently attack one another with arms; yet they cannot be called wars in which men are not killed, cities are not sacked, principalities are not destroyed, for these wars came to such weakness that they were begun without fear, carried on without danger, and ended without loss.” Without much loss of life and territory, that is. But not without the loss of huge sums of money. This is where the Medici came in. Even when it most resembles a sport, even when it is most futile, war is always cruelly expensive. And where war is never conclusive, a constant supply of money becomes absolutely essential.
BUT HOW WAS it that so few people were killed? Machiavelli puts it down to the tendency of the states involved to use mercenary troops led by professional condottieri. By-product of a decadent feudalism, the condottiere is a warlord with a private army. Many signori of small towns and citadels find that renting out themselves and their soldiers is the only way to stay solvent and independent. A condottiere without a small town has no scruples about acquiring one. An army needs a base. For the big players who hire the mercenaries, there is the advantage that few of their own citizens need risk death when war is declared. People can get on with business as usual. Also, there is no danger that some parvenu commander from their own ranks will attempt a coup. The last thing a state with a fragile government needs is some home-bred, charismatic military leader.
The Italians were more advanced in the art of warfare than the other states of Europe and as a result their condottieri were much in demand in other countries. These men deposited their earnings with their preferred Italian bank — in Bruges or Geneva — and had the money sent home. However, since the mercenary soldier had nothing to gain from putting himself out of work, there was the drawback that the condottieri, particularly in Italy where they all knew each other, were notoriously disinclined to finish a job. “Enemies were despoiled, but then neither detained nor killed,” complains Machiavelli, “so that the conquered only put off attacking the conqueror again until such time as whoever was leading them could refurbish them with arms and horses.” Which meant spending a great deal of money, of course. Not to mention the fact that even when they lost, mercenary troops still demanded their wages. When they won, on the other hand, they had a habit of taking all the booty for themselves. In fact, in a certain sense, when you used condottieri, even when you won, you lost. In 1427, having spent the vast sum of 3 million florins in five years of war, Florence was plunged into an economic crisis that wonderfully clarified the political situation in the town. There was a dominant faction, headed by the Albizzi family, desperate to raise new taxes, and there was the immensely wealthy Medici family who, without actually proposing anything, had become a nucleus for discontent.