The family also declares ownership of a villa at Careggi, just outside the town to the north, and a fortified villa at Trebbio, some miles farther north in the low hills of the Mugello, where the family also owns a great deal of agricultural land and again employs many poor people. A possible private army perhaps. In fact, it’s time to stop thinking of the Medici, as just one family, or just a bank. Cosimo’s older cousin, Averardo di Francesco de’ Medici declares possession of Cafaggiolo, another fortified villa near Trebbio. The extended family controls important official appointments in the nearby towns of Scarperia, Borgo San Lorenzo, and Marradi. There are family chapels in the churches. Averardo also has a bank, albeit not as big as Cosimo’s. The Rome branch is losing money, his 1427 declaration claims. A likely story.
Averardo is in partnership with a Bardi who runs things for him in Rome. On taking over the main Medici bank in 1420, Cosimo moved Ilarione de’ Bardi up from Rome to Florence to be the bank’s new general director and brought in a distant Bardi cousin, Bartolomeo, to manage things in Rome. These men are paid-up partners. Bartolomeo’s brother, Ubertino, runs a bank in London that regularly serves as the Medici’s English agent.
Then there is the Portinari family. Again in 1420, Cosimo fired the head of the Florence branch and replaced him with Folco d’Adovardo di Portinari, brother of Giovanni d’Adovardo Portinari, who is running the Venice branch. These two men are great-grandsons of the brother of Dante’s Beatrice Portinari.
So now we have three powerful old Florentine families — the Medici, the Bardi, the Portinari — tightly knotted together in and through the bank. Or rather two banks. And actually it’s four families, if we count Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo’s marriage to a Cavalcanti. Lorenzo himself is also a director of the bank. This is more than a financial institution. It’s a political entity, a clan, a party even, in a city where to form a political party is treason. By law, there can be no declared divisions in this most divided of towns. No political campaigning. The government has recently banned the meetings of various religious confraternities. All that whipping and singing and praising God has often been used as a cover for political conspiracy.
Overjoyed to hear the wealthy whine, the plebs start to demand that the new tax system be applied retroactively. We’ve been paying too much for too long, they complain. For centuries, in fact. They look to Giovanni di Bicci for support. It would be a mistake to ask too much, he warns. Giovanni is good at playing wise peacemaker, at deferring the crisis, at having it both ways — the rich man with the poor on his side. Behind his bent old shoulders, Cosimo and Averardo are alert and ready.
Meanwhile, the papacy has at last brokered a peace treaty among Florence, Milan, and Venice. No sooner has he signed it than Duke Visconti goes on the warpath again, only to be soundly beaten by Carmignuola at Maclodio, near Brescia. Clearly, the turning point of this whole war was the failure to poison that condottiere. When peace is finally concluded in 1428, the Venetians get Brescia and Bergamo — a great leap westward for them — while Florence merely recovers the peanuts they had lost. There is no territorial acquisition to pay off a towering war debt.
Perhaps it was precisely this frustration that prompted the sheer madness of Florentine policy in the five years to come. In any event, departing this life in 1429, Giovanni di Bicci was choosing a good time to go, a rare moment of peace. Thirty family members (all male) followed the coffin, plus a long procession of officials and ambassadors, lenders and account holders. He was buried in San Lorenzo, a northerly stone’s throw from the duomo, in a sacristy he had commissioned from the great Brunelleschi. Later, Cosimo had this most elegant of spaces decorated by Donatello. At the four corners of the chapel, he hung shields showing eight red balls on a field of gold, the Medici family’s insignia, sign of things to come. From now on, San Lorenzo would be the Medici church.
“PEACE HAVING BEEN achieved outside, war began again inside,” Machiavelli observes. As if this were some logical necessity. People were still fighting over the catasto, the wealth tax. Discrimination! the merchants raged. Our books are being checked by government inspectors who actually work for rival companies. As always, their strategy was to have the new tax so brutally and extensively enforced that its enemies would multiply. You’ll have to register all the property in all the outlying territories too, they insisted. Some of it is owned by Florentines. You’ll have to register every loom, every mill.
There were those in the government who felt that extending the tax was not a bad idea. The Florentines had a flair for bureaucracy, which is why we now have so many records of the city’s history. So the process of bringing all the outlying towns into the tax register began. In protest, an eighteen-man delegation arrived from the small subject town of Volterra. We can’t pay, they complain. They are arrested. On release, one of the men returns to Volterra and starts a rebellion. Niccolò Fortebraccio, a now out-of-work condottiere, is engaged to go and sort things out. Before he and his mercenaries arrive, the Volterrans have already rebelled against the rebels and the town is in Florentine hands again. But Fortebraccio doesn’t want to be unemployed. In November 1429, he marches into the territory of Lucca northwest of Florence and, acting on his own initiative, captures a couple of small citadels. Suddenly, the Florentines are unanimous in deciding that the capture of Lucca is absolutely indispensable. Wealthy Lucca will be their compensation for the disasters of the previous seven years. As always when there is a war, the city forms a ten-man committee to decide military strategy, the so-called Ten of War. Now undisputed head of the Medici clan, Cosimo is on it.
A cloud of ambiguity hangs over these crucial years that bring Cosimo to power. But then a cloud hangs over everything to do with him: the bank, his patronage of the arts, his relationship with slaves, his foreign policy. When Rinaldo degli Albizzi proposed that the other patrician families get rid of him, the now-decrepit Uzzano is reported by Machiavelli to have pointed out how difficult this would be: “The deeds of Cosimo that make us suspect him are these: he helps everyone with his money, and not only private individuals, but the state, and not only Florentines, but the condottieri; he favors this or that citizen who has need of the magistrates; by the good will that he has in the generality of people he pulls this or that friend to higher ranks of honor.”
Did Uzzano really say these words? Commissioned to write the Florentine Histories for a later Medici and a grand duke at that, Machiavelli admitted in a letter to a friend that he couldn’t honestly say “by what means and tricks one [Cosimo] arrives at so great a height.” Hence: “That which I don’t want to say myself, as coming from me, I will make his [Cosimo’s] adversaries say.” And he makes Uzzano conclude: “So we will have to allege as the causes for driving him out that he is merciful, helpful, liberal, and loved by everyone.” In a cash-starved town, Cosimo had for some years now been using his wealth to gather political consensus. To what end?
“It is hard for the rich to live in Florence, unless they rule the state.” Such would be the comment of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Cosimo’s grandson. And the implication was, if you don’t control the state, the state will ruin you. You will become the object of punitive taxation deliberately aimed at confiscating your fortune. But was this just an excuse? Would it have been possible for the Medici to run a spectacularly profitable bank and to stay out of government? In Rome or Milan, perhaps it would. One can become only so powerful in the shadow of a despot. Insist on a loan repayment from a prince and he arrests you. A pope excommunicates you. Even in republican Venice, the doge was elected for life and that was that. You couldn’t take his place, so you could hardly be feared either.