The charge against the accused is vague. Cosimo de’ Medici has sought “to elevate himself above others.” But don’t we all? Put on the rack, two Medici supporters “confess” that Cosimo has been planning an armed rebellion with foreign help. No one believes it. It’s not his style. Venice immediately sends three ambassadors to plead on Cosimo’s behalf. The Medici bank has important business dealings with influential Venetians. The new pope, Eugenius IV, is also Venetian and from just the kind of rich merchant family that deals with people like the Medici. The Vatican representative is eloquent on Cosimo’s behalf. The Church does not want its banker beheaded and Pope Eugenius has all kinds of sanctions at his disposal.
Then the marquis of Ferrara muscles in. He’s another client who appreciates Cosimo’s services. Lying as it does in the noman’s-land between Venice and the Papal States, Ferrara is an important ally for Florence. The members of the balia are impressed. The mobility of money, it seems, makes the fate of a banker an international affair. Had the Medici merely been wealthy landowners, they could have been dispatched without anyone’s noticing. Paid by Cosimo’s friends, Florence’s only military leader of note, Niccolò da Tolentino, gathers his soldiers and marches toward Florence from Pisa on the coast. At the same time, Cosimo’s younger brother, Lorenzo, is busy raising an army from among the peasants to the north of the city, where the family has its villas and agricultural land. Already the balia has been deadlocked for a week or more.
Back in his cell, under the roof of the Palazzo della Signoria, Cosimo finally agrees to start eating when his jailer offers to pre-taste his meals for him. The man will be generously reimbursed. Visitors start to climb up to the banker’s cell from the lower floors of the same palazzo where the balia is meeting. It’s a sign that Albizzi is losing his grip. Cosimo is allowed pen and paper: Pay the bearer, he begins to write, this or that sum of money. And he signs. Bernardo Guadagni, head of the signoria, receives 1,000 florins, far more than his miserable tax arrears, paid by Rinaldo degli Albizzi, were worth. “He could have had ten times more,” Cosimo later remarked, “if only he had known to ask.” In return for his thousand florins, Guadagni fakes illness, stays at home, and delegates his authority to another prior, likewise bribed.
Suddenly, the moment to kill has passed. The Medici army in the Mugello is ready to march. Niccolò da Tolentino and his mercenaries are within striking distance. Under pressure from foreign diplomats, the banker Palla Strozzi, a constitutionalist who genuinely believes that wealth can and should keep out of politics, withdraws his support for the proposed death sentence. Needless to say, his money carries a lot of votes with him. Everything that happens, it seems, is the result of each participant’s calculation of his private interest. There are no ideals involved. An ideal situation for a banker. On September 28, three weeks after Cosimo’s arrest, fearing an attack from without and a rebellion within, Rinaldo at last backs down and proposes a sentence of exile rather than execution. Relieved, the balia gives him a majority. Cosimo is to go to Padua for ten years, his cousin Averardo to Naples, his brother Lorenzo to Venice. That should keep the family apart. Fearful that there may still be plans to assassinate him, Cosimo begs to be allowed to leave the city at night and in secret. Throughout the remaining thirty years of his life, he will never again allow himself to be so completely at the mercy of events.
WHAT DID COSIMO do in exile? Much the same as he had done at his villa in Trebbio before imprisonment. He runs his bank and waits. He behaves. The postal service is effective enough. After two months, a newly appointed signoria allows him to move to Venice, where he stays in San Giorgio Maggiore, the old monastery of his client the pope. Immediately, he offers to build the monks a new library and supply the books. The Venice branch of the bank has been making profits of 20 percent a year on a capital outlay of 8,000 florins. What better way to spend it than by making friends and building support? Cosimo has brought his own personal architect, Michelozzo, into exile with him, almost as if this kind of project formed part of a predetermined plan. When a distant Medici relative tries to involve him in a conspiracy to engineer his return to Florence with the help of Milanese troops, Cosimo scores moral points by reporting the scheme to the government of Venice, which passes on the information to Florence. This is hardly generous to the relative, but Cosimo knows that the Florentines are bankrupt, and that no one will lend the priors “so much as a pistachio nut.” How furious they must be to think of Cosimo lavishing his money on libraries in Venice when he could be helping out in Florence. Every generous display of wealth abroad will turn minds at home. In 1433–34, the profits of the Venice bank almost double. Much of this is business lost to Florence.
And now the wars have begun again, the usual complicated mix of rebellion and opportunism. Pope Eugenius has fled an uprising in Rome and taken up residence in Florence. He needs his banker more than ever. He needs money to buy friends and pay mercenaries. The city of Bologna, part of the Papal States, likewise falls to rebels. The Venetians and Florentines form an alliance to put down the uprising. Milan wades in on the other side, and in the late summer of 1434, the Florentines are soundly defeated by the now-inevitable Piccinino near Imola. A disaster. Immediately afterward, to top it all, Rinaldo degli Albizzi commits the unpardonable error of allowing a pro-Medici group of priors to appear from the electoral bags. Why didn’t he rig the election? Cosimo is invited back. Rinaldo’s attempt at armed rebellion is headed off with pathetic ease by a few empty reassurances from Pope Eugenius. His only consolation a few days later when he himself is exiled will be a big told-you-so to the seventy other prominent men obliged to leave the city with him. Cosimo should have been killed: “Great men must either not be touched, or, if touched, eliminated.”
Taking over the reins of power, Cosimo at once exiles the dithering Palla Strozzi along with Rinaldo, thus demonstrating that to have money and not commit it politically is folly. Why else do big organizations give to political parties? In short, the banker is back, he is revered, he wields unconstitutional powers, and he hasn’t even broken the law. Such was and no doubt is the power of money. Historians choose to praise the bloodless nature of this transfer of power. “Yet it was tinged with blood in some part,” Machiavelli reminds us. Together with four other citizens, Antonio Guadagni, son of Bernardo (the gonfaloniere della giustizia who had accepted Cosimo’s bribe), left his designated place of exile to go to Venice. Given the city’s good relations with Cosimo, this was unwise. The five were arrested, sent to Florence, and beheaded.
Donatello’s David. The first we know of this extraordinary statue with its effeminate boy hero is its appearance in the courtyard of Palazzo Medici. There were those who accused Cosimo de’ Medici of approving of homosexuality.
4. “The Secret Things of Our Town”
He was accused of being friendly to sodomites. The first we know of Donatello’s David is in Cosimo’s house. It is hard to think of a better advertisement for homosexuality than this life-size naked youth in polished bronze who slays a giant to place a dainty foot on the severed head and assume an erotic pose. Hermaphroditus, a book of poems dedicated to Cosimo, was publicly burned. It promoted sodomy, said celebrity preacher Bernardino di Siena. But Cosimo never used his power to abolish the Officers of the Night, the vice police who prowled the piazzas in search of serving girls with too many buttons, perverse men in platform shoes, gay lovers caught in the unnatural act.