On May 30, 1433, Cosimo transfers 15,000 florins from Florence to Venice, sells 10,000 florins’ worth of personally held government bonds to the bank’s Rome branch, and deposits 3,000 Venetian ducats in the Monastery of San Miniato al Monte and a further 5,877 ducats in the Monastery of San Marco. He and his father have given generously to the Church over the years. Now the sacred and the profane are getting very seriously mixed up. Hidden among the miracle-working bones of long-dead martyrs, or wrapped in what might have been Christ’s shroud, Medici money is at hand to satisfy local customers if the political situation leads to a run on the bank — Cosimo mustn’t lose people’s confidence by asking them to wait for a withdrawal. On the other hand, it is safely out of the way should the Albizzi, or an Albizzi-controlled government, try to confiscate his wealth.
FOR MOST HISTORIANS, Cosimo is the innocent victim of what happens next. He is also a political genius. The unanimity of this paradoxical view is striking. Rinaldo degli Albizzi is written off as a tyrant and a prig. He was opposed to Cosimo’s humanist friends, the historian Christopher Hibbert complains, because he saw them as dangerous for Christianity. A bigot. But Rinaldo was right. The humanists certainly represented the first step toward the secularization of the West. That is not to say they were not Christian. Had they opposed Christianity, they would have been swept aside immediately. But their interests lay elsewhere, and their determination to see each written text as the product of a particular period of history would ultimately lead to an entirely different view of the Bible. At the level of political institutions, as early as 1440 the humanist Lorenzo Valla would demonstrate, through able textual scholarship, that the supposedly fourth-century Donation of Constantine, by which Constantine the Great was believed to have granted Pope Sylvester spiritual and temporal dominion over Rome and most of Western Europe, was in fact a ninth-century fraud. The pope’s rule was thus no more legitimate than that of any upstart condottiere. He too depended ultimately on money, military power, and false papers.
Cosimo supported the humanists and they him. Who else could fund them so generously? But who else funded the Church so generously? Pope Eugenius IV, who replaced Martin V in 1431, needed an efficient international bank. Cosimo advanced the cash for Martin’s burial and the funds for Eugenius’s coronation. Who wouldn’t deal with such a man? Money has this excellent quality: It can hold the most heterogeneous elements together. We meet our enemies in the account books of our banks, who, more often than not, are funding both of the political parties between which we are supposed to choose when we vote. Lavishing finance on such a wide range of clients, Cosimo knew he was putting himself in contention with a ruling faction that depended exclusively on the support of Florence’s old patrician families.
It’s the summer of 1433 and the road to power is blocked. Whoever makes the first move will be most in the wrong, most exposed to a public backlash, but also most able to deliver the killer blow. Cosimo retires to his stronghold in Trebbio to the north of the city. He stays there until the fall. Far from being the genius politician, he doesn’t seem to know how to proceed. Does he already consider himself indispensable? Is he waiting for the call to power, for an invitation to sort out the city’s finances? He has already lent the city a staggering 155,000 florins, as a result of which the Florence branch of the bank has been operating at a loss. Finally the call does come. Cosimo de’ Medici is requested to present himself at the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of government. Three days after returning to Florence, on September 7, 1433, Cosimo walks the couple of hundred yards from his house to the big central piazza and enters the massive building with its tall, solid tower. Even today, the place radiates a grim authority. And at once he is arrested.
Under Florentine law, a man couldn’t serve in government if he hadn’t paid his taxes. At the end of August, the name Bernardo Guadagni had been drawn from the bag that supplied the gonfaloniere della giustizia, the head of government. The officials checked his tax situation. Until shortly before that draw, Bernardo had been in arrears. But then Rinaldo degli Albizzi had paid his taxes for him. What a coincidence that his name was drawn! Rinaldo now has the city in his hands and Cosimo is in a trap. This is what all the banker’s money and genius have brought him to: a charge of treason, a sentence of exile or death.
THE GRAND TURNING points in the history of the Florentine Republic are marked by the summoning of a so-called parliament. At its most basic, the system of government is this: The eight priors and the gonfaloniere form the signoria, which initiates all legislation. In doing so, they consult two advisory bodies, the Twelve Good Men and the Sixteen Standard Bearers, who, like the priors, are chosen by lot. The laws proposed are then ratified or rejected by the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune, each about two hundred strong, and again chosen by lot, but this time for four- rather than two-month periods.
The system can be unwieldy. Since there is a well-established difference of wealth and class between those whose names are in the bags for drawing the priors and those in the bags for the two big councils, it is not surprising that sometimes the councils repeatedly refuse to ratify laws that successive governments insist are vital. So when an impasse is reached, or when some particularly momentous and difficult decision must be made rapidly, a parlamento is called, which is to say a gathering, in the open square outside the Palazzo della Signoria, of all Florentine males over the age of fourteen. The principle is not unlike that of the modern referendum. Sovereignty passes directly to the people. But, notoriously, modern governments call referendums only when they are sure that they can bully people into voting as they should.
So, in Florence on September 9, 1433, as the deep, old bell of the Palazzo della Signoria booms out to call the citizens to their political duty, armed men are already circling the square and controlling each point of entry. Medici supporters are discouraged from attending. Cosimo can see a corner of the scene from his cell window. Dutifully — and this is always the way at these parliaments — the men who do attend vote for the formation of a so-called balia. The word balia just means “plenary powers.” Basically, the proposal made at every parliament is that the people hand over their future to an ad hoc body of two hundred men chosen, of course, by the present signoria, thus bypassing the resistance of the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune. In 1433 the signoria meant Rinaldo degli Albizzi.
The balia has been called to decide the fate of the Palazzo della Signoria’s illustrious prisoner. Rinaldo wants Cosimo dead. Rinaldo is a landowner, the Albizzi family is old and rich. But it is not a family practiced in the art of exchange. Rinaldo is neither a banker nor a merchant, and he cannot compete with his rival when it comes to transferable wealth, to loans and bribes and patronage. He knows that Cosimo is one of a new generation who will not be destroyed by exile, as rich men were in the past. He has understood that banks do not exist in space in the same way as a castle, a farm, or even a factory does. The man must be beheaded, he tells the balia. It’s the only way.
But he can’t swing it. Even the men he has chosen for the balia are divided. Cosimo has so many friends. So many citizens are indebted to him. They see a future in him. Unlike a similarly rich banker, Palla Strozzi, Cosimo seems willing to spend his money more widely, for the civic good, to get involved in public affairs. Given more power, perhaps he would spend even more, rather than shifting capital to other cities.