With the new form of “elections”—just ten names in each bag, rather than hundreds — there had been no veduti, or very few. People were disappointed. Resuming control of the elections in 1443, after a brief return to the constitutional procedure, the accoppiatori began to arrange matters so that there would be plenty of veduti, as if the election had been carried out in properly random fashion. In short, they had names pulled out of the hat, names they knew were ineligible, not in order to take office but to be veduti. The trick was painfully obvious, but people were pleased all the same. They received an honor and were not burdened with responsibility. Such is the special humiliation of the fake democracy: the invitation to participate in farce. We have all sensed it. Cosimo, in fact, is creating a new kind of public figure: the person who declares his belief in the fairness of the system because it offers him a small sop, a public recognition. It treats him as though he were an equal. Among the eight priors, most of them Medici men who had served over and over again on all kinds of powerful commissions, there would often be one fellow who knew he was there for the only time in his life. A special favor. He would spend around a hundred florins, more than a year’s salary perhaps, to buy the prior’s expensive gown of saturated crimson; he would be feted and congratulated by all his relatives. But for the two months of his “power,” he knew to ask no questions, nor to seek to influence decisions. From now on, he would always support the Medici. “Many were called to office,” wrote one commentator, “but few were chosen to govern.”
However secret the mechanisms by which the regime kept its grip on power, the results were now clear to everybody. A group of initiates from Cosimo’s inner circle was fixing everything. And growing richer. Foreign ambassadors did their business at Cosimo’s palazzo, rather than at the Palazzo della Signoria. The Milanese ambassador actually lived in Cosimo’s house. Every decision required Medici consent. The man is a prince in everything but name, thought the other leaders in Italy. But there is a great deal in a name. Why else would princes worry so much about their coronations? Despite analogies, the Florentine citizen’s condition was not quite the same as that of a subject in, say, the Papal States, or Milan. Equally powerless, he was mocked, or flattered, by the rhetoric of republicanism. He could not bow before his monarch in dignified fashion, saying, This is God’s will, nor, alternatively, tell himself: This man is a usurper and I only bow down because brute force obliges me to. Why did he bow down, then? At the end of the day, the Councils of the Commune and of the People did still exist. They could veto legislation. Under the Medici, the Florentine mind was constantly fired by ideals of political freedom that were forever frustrated. A fizz of excited political thought frothed over the submerged reality of protracted dictatorship. If the war ever came to an end, a domestic showdown was inevitable.
IN THE PAY of the newly formed Republic of Milan, Francesco Sforza was fighting Venice. He also received money from the Medici bank. But the people of Milan soon realized that the condottiere was actually planning to take the city for himself. To defend themselves against him, they made peace with the Venetians behind Sforza’s back. It wasn’t enough. Sforza besieged the town, cut off its food supplies, and starved it into surrender. Quite simply, he was the most powerful military phenomenon in the area. Cosimo then shocked both Florence and the rest of Italy by being the first to give this bastard upstart official recognition as duke of Milan. Did he do it to secure the large amounts of money the bank had lent Sforza? Many members of Cosimo’s own inner circle were angry and suspicious. Or was it because he honestly believed that further Venetian inroads into a weak Milanese republic would be a serious threat to Florence? Or for both reasons?
In any event, the Medici bank had already pulled its money and merchandise out of Venice before this momentous switch of alliances became known. There was nothing for the frustrated Venetians to seize in revenge. Outwitted, they sent agents to Florence to foment anti-Medici feeling. There was plenty of it. But when Venice allied itself with Naples for a joint attack on Florence and Milan, the Florentine people swung around behind Cosimo. The key to unity in Italy is always the presence of a common enemy. “Never did a winning faction remain united, except when a hostile faction was active,” says Machiavelli of the Florentines.
Ultimately, it was an enemy common to all of Italy that ended this new war just as it had begun to go rather badly for Florence. In May 1453, the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II captured Constantinople. Eastern Christendom had gone. At once the powerful Turks started to raid the Adriatic coast. It was a wake-up call of September 11 proportions. Time to stop quarreling. In 1454, the Peace of Lodi was signed and in 1455, with shameless rhetoric, a “Most Holy League” was declared, uniting Rome, Milan, Venice, Florence, and Naples against the Infidel. It thus turned out to have been a stroke of luck for Cosimo that the Greeks had been so stubborn about the nature of the Holy Spirit and found themselves alone against the tidal wave of Islam.
WITH THIS SUDDEN, unexpected peace, the political showdown in Florence could no longer be avoided. Their economy exhausted by the conflict, by another bout of the plague in 1448, and by an earthquake in 1453, many Florentines were starving. The councils insisted on a return to the old election by lot without the interference of the regime’s accoppiatori. No sooner had they got what they wanted than a more neutral, less pro-Medici signoria introduced a property tax that seriously threatened the interests of the rich. Cosimo put on a brave face and said he approved of the tax. It was important for him to have support from the lower orders. His fellow travelers were not so pleased. Prominent men were having to sell property to pay the tax. Still unsatisfied, the councils now also wanted a new, free, and fair scrutiny, which would mean more anti-Medici names in the electoral bags. What would happen if the government were really chosen at random after an impartial assessment of those qualified to serve? Where would the Medici be then?
Nervous, the regime seized on the chance of a favorable signoria to ask the councils to grant unlimited powers again. They would not. Since members of the councils cast their votes (actually beans) secretly, it was hard to twist their arms. When the legislation was sent back for the nth time, the priors demanded that votes be cast openly. The signoria’s two-month term of office was running out. At this point, Archbishop Antonino got involved on the councils’ side and threatened the regime’s bullies with excommunication if they tried to alter the constitution in this way. Perhaps precisely because the Church had taken so much money from the Medici, it felt the need to declare its independence. Voting in secret, the Council of the Commune and the Council of the People again rejected the proposed legislation. They were determined to bring rhetoric and reality together. Florence must be governed as the constitution stipulated. They wanted freedom.
This was the summer of 1458. As a last resort, the pro-Medici priors of the signoria decided to call a parliament, the first since 1434. Cosimo’s consent was sought and given. But first they waited until the Milanese ambassador had convinced Sforza to dispatch troops to Florence. With soldiers from Milan in place at all entrances to the piazza, the parliament went as parliaments must. Old, tired, and chronically ill, Cosimo was careful not to attend. A new, hundred-strong council was formed with complete power over all “matters of security.” It was a permanent balia, but without the dangerous name. From that point on, the pretense of legality was pure formality: a limited group of men would go on electing each other to this or that body without fear of interference. You could join in, but only if you were willing to toe the Medici line. Any real opposition would have to be armed. No one had the stomach for it. If this was a success for the regime, it was certainly a defeat for Cosimo, who had much preferred the pleasant façade, the collusion of grateful clients, the satisfaction of having persuaded people to do something that he had never openly requested. But the tools of persuasion that make such things possible today — our modern media, mass production, and mass consumption — were not available to the Medici. Nor had anybody thought of the trick of allowing two apparently opposing but secretly complicitous factions to rotate in power at the whim of a complacently “enfranchised” population. The strategy of the two-party democracy lay far away in the future. Meantime, Cosimo was growing more and more preoccupied with the prospect of life after death, and friends were becoming rivals.