At the Medici bank’s head office, Giovanni Benci was dead. Cosimo’s younger and favorite son, Giovanni, proved a poor replacement. He preferred the high life to the calculation of profit and loss. Immoderately fat, he bought himself a nice slave girl while serving as ambassador to the Curia in Rome. It was becoming a family tradition. Disappointed, Cosimo brought home the Geneva director, Francesco Sassetti, one of the world’s all-time great flatterers, to work beside his son. It was a sign the old banker was losing his grip. Sassetti wasn’t up to it. Having achieved his position through servility, he was incapable of imposing discipline. A branch was opened in Milan, but like the venture in Ancona years ago, it was mainly there to serve Sforza. There was very little serious trade in and out of Milan and hence little chance of profits from exchange deals. While a bank benefited an economy doing business — an economy such as Venice, for example — there was nothing it could do in Milan but encourage a duke to spend more than he ought.
Still, at least Italy was mostly at peace, and Cosimo was taking a lot of the credit for it. His astuteness, if it was that, lay not so much in his having switched Florence’s alliance from Venice to Milan as in having reduced the number of major players in the political game to match the number of states available. Anchored in Milan, Sforza was no longer a loose cannon, a military power without a state. Hence he no longer needed to fight to have an income. Cosimo hadn’t quite foreseen the consequences of this. He had expected Sforza would help Florence conquer Lucca in exchange for all the Medici money that had been showered on him in his struggle to become duke. Perversely, Sforza hung up his sword and settled down with wife and nineteen children, legitimate and otherwise, to enjoy his earthly possessions.
FREQUENTLY BEDRIDDEN, Cosimo no longer accepted public office. His sons, themselves middle-aged, were sick too. They all suffered from gout. When not away at their country estates, all three had to be carried around the huge palazzo they had built in town, among their beautiful collections and possessions. Cosimo cried in pain when he was lifted. There was a problem with urine retention. Taking a keen interest in Plato’s ideas about eternal life, paying generously for a new translation of the complete works of the philosopher, he now did most of his business in the windowless, candlelit chapel at the heart of the Palazzo Medici. On the walls, Gozzoli’s wonderful Journey of the Three Kings glimmered all around, showing Cosimo and his family beside the Magi, their donkeys carrying heavy merchandise across distant landscapes, rather as if bank and Bible had got mixed up. There was a monkey, too, sitting on a horse, and a cheetah. The bank occasionally dealt in exotic animals. Archbishop Antonino, who had not in the end excommunicated anyone over the 1458 coup, made a point of condemning supposedly sacred pictures that distracted the viewer’s attention with frivolities. He explicitly mentioned monkeys and cheetahs. Such is an established church’s opposition to the regime it lives with.
Cosimo heard mass. Above the altar, there was Lippi’s lovely painting of the Virgin and Child, plus a reliquary with genuine fragments from Our Lord’s passion. Hard to come by. And to make the man feel even safer, there was a secret tunnel to escape through — to be carried through, that is — should anyone ever have the nerve to try the frontal assault. It was in this tiny chapel that Cosimo received the men of the regime, to discuss “the secret things of our town.” It was in the chapel that Francesco Sforza’s son, Galeazzo, found him in 1459. Likewise, the marquis of Mantua’s son in 1461. On the second occasion, both Cosimo and Piero were in too much pain from their gout to give the youngster a tour of the great house. Only Giovanni was mobile. Limping heavily, his arm hanging on a servant’s neck, the obese man insisted he would oblige, but gave up when it came to tackling the stairs. Money and magic were impotent here. Moving goods all over Europe, the Medici men rarely made it to the top floor.
Giovanni died in 1463. Depressed, Cosimo knew he was next. Burial arrangements were carefully negotiated. No doubt money changed hands. He would lie beneath the very center of the nave of the Church of San Lorenzo, in close proximity to the relics of the holy martyrs. Above the sarcophagus, a stone column would connect it to the tomb-marker on the church floor, a large white porphyry circle enclosing two crossed oblongs, a magical motif signifying, apparently, eternity. The effect, when one visits San Lorenzo today, is both unobtrusive and absolutely centraclass="underline" the banker’s vocation. Barely noticed, he is the ground beneath the communicant’s feet. A last generous endowment paid for a mass to be said for Cosimo’s soul 365 days a year in perpetuity, and quality funeral clothes for all the mourners, including four female slaves. It is the only news we have of them.
5. Blue Blood and White Elephants
During the hot days and nights of August 1466, an old drama played itself out in the streets and palazzi of Florence. Once again the city was divided into two armed camps. Once again a transfer of power was in the air. Yet the principal actors seemed strangely hesitant, as if reluctant to rehearse what had been done so many times before, or unsure perhaps as to how to proceed in these different times.
Cosimo had died and something had to change. “With Cosimo your plan is impossible,” the exiled Palla Strozzi had told Girolamo Machiavelli when the rebel came looking for support to overturn the banker’s regime. “Without him it will be unnecessary.” Cosimo was revered and he had had the money. Members of other old and wealthy families addressed him as “father.” Still, they had built the regime with him, they told themselves, not for him. And certainly not for his son. Piero had no hereditary right, no special charisma, nor perhaps so much money. The bank was in difficulty. Banks in general were in difficulty. So while in 1458 the challenge to the Medici had been launched through legal institutions, in line with the constitution, it now came, more seriously, from Cosimo’s ex-partners in the regime — the ones who for decades had manipulated the constitution on his behalf. Suddenly, four canny old men were talking about liberty.