Education is a good place to start. Money buys it and it then generates a value that goes beyond money. Art achieves the same alchemy. “Money alone,” remarked the wondering Galeazzo Sforza (Francesco’s son), when shown around the art treasures of the Palazzo Medici, “would not be able to compete with what has been done here.” Yet everything had been bought with money.
What was the proper education for a rich banker? Giovanni di Bicci had done no more than follow fashion when he gave Cosimo his humanist tutors. Steeped in Cicero, the young man was seduced by the ideal of the noble leader. He wanted to be such a man. The Florentine constitution, with its system of election by lottery, forbade these ambitions, yet was so weak that it more or less invited a rich man to spend his way to an ambiguous, covert sort of power. If one of the huge problems of any democracy is what to do with big money and its attendant political ambitions, squalid or noble, Florence had clearly got it wrong.
No doubt aware of the many conflicts within himself, between private and public interest, between moneymaking and getting to heaven, Cosimo decided to educate his three sons for different and separate careers. Piero, the eldest, would be groomed for government; Giovanni, the favorite, for the bank; Carlo, the illegitimate boy with the foreign features, could go to the Church. It was as if the three strands of Cosimo’s achievements could be separated out. Though Cosimo’s genius had lain in intertwining those strands.
Carefully laid, the plans made no allowance for character and circumstance. Carlo was happy enough as a bishop, but fat Giovanni couldn’t get excited about banking. Jolly, well loved, and vain, he chose the peacock as his personal emblem. “For the view,” he explained to Cosimo, who couldn’t understand why his son was building a villa in Fiesole with no agricultural land around it. A villa was always a farmhouse for Cosimo. You give your children an expensive education and their values start to shift. Cosimo should have been ready for this, since his own education had led to radical departures from his father’s lifestyle.
Determined to please, perhaps precisely because he was not the favorite, Piero was most at home overseeing Cosimo’s commissions of buildings and works of art. An avid collector, in love with lavish furnishings and beautiful domestic interiors, he would spend hours gloating over stacks of illuminated manuscripts, or collections of antique coins. He slept on silk sheets embroidered with the family coat of arms. But you must train for government, his father insisted. And train Piero dutifully did. He held a number of government posts: prior, accoppiatore, even gonfaloniere della giustizia. As his personal emblem, he chose the falcon, which always returns faithfully to its master. “Honored, like your father,” was how people addressed him in their begging letters. “A most careful imitator of his father’s admirable virtues,” wrote Donato di Neri Acciaiuoli in a dedicatory preface to his Life of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus. But imitate as he might, Cosimo’s role wasn’t available to Piero. Because Cosimo hadn’t succeeded anyone.
Accusations that Cosimo had been eager to become a prince were off the mark. He thrived on the complications, the ambiguities, the idea that his fellow Florentines had elevated him despite the constitution. Florence had stripped its feudal nobles of their privileges and didn’t want a return to the past. Yet education was breeding aristocratic presumptions in the banker’s children. Their life began to resemble that of noblemen. Is it possible, they must have started to wonder, to invent an aristocracy, a new, more sophisticated version of the crude old birthright — not simply and brutally to seize power but to create, over two or three wealthy and well-read generations, a new hereditary privilege?
The future of Europe for centuries to come would depend on the answer to this question. And that answer, of course, is no. Money and culture do not amount to a divine right to pass on political power to one’s heirs. And yet … if sufficiently enlightened, if supported by effective propaganda, if interminably intermarried with others who had similar pretensions, or who had once been recognized as royal, perhaps the world might be convinced by an expensive parody, an ersatz aristocracy — especially if, at the end of the day and in the teeth of the evidence, the people enjoying the privileges were always willing to declare themselves ordinary citizens. Paralyzed on silk sheets through the summer of 1466, Piero de’ Medici could hardly be likened to a chrysalis turning into a butterfly. But before the year was out, he would have freed the Medici family from the sticky limitations of the old Florentine oligarchy. With wings bought from usury, the Medici bankers would soar above their station at last. The gouty man was plotting a marriage that would turn those republicans green with envy.
Like art and education, marriage was something that involved an exchange of money but also had the potential for distinctions that went beyond money. These are the interesting things in life, where countable and uncountable values rub and spark together. Traditionally, it was the bride who had to purchase, with her dowry, the right to her husband’s protection. Piccarda de’ Bueri’s 1,500 florins had been crucial for husband Giovanni di Bicci’s initial investments. The Bueri were solid Florentine merchant stock; no more. A distant cousin of Piccarda’s would serve the Medici bank as an agent in Lubeck, collecting papal dues from Scandinavia; trading in furs, amber, and linen; keeping all his accounts in Italian to baffle the local taxman.
But a future husband, or his negotiating parents, also had the option of accepting less money in return for more prestige. Her branch of the family being out of luck, Contessina de’ Bardi didn’t bring Cosimo much cash, but she was still a Bardi. It was a valuable alliance. The wife chosen for Cosimo’s son, Piero, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, brought even less money, a mere 1,000 florins, but in return for even more prestige. Once aristocratic, Lucrezia’s family had changed its name from Tornaquinci to Tornabuoni to avoid the ban on noblemen participating in public life. The girl had blue blood. How strange that the Florentines had banned the nobles from exercising political power but were still impressed by their pedigrees. Many modern democracies are still tensed by this contradiction. Lucrezia, however, legitimized her special status by being nobly educated as well as nobly born. But can one really say, “nobly educated”? Doesn’t such an expression mean we’ve accepted the premise that education can buy certain rights? In any event, Lucrezia was well read. She wrote devotional poetry, of the kind sung by religious confraternities. She made her own small venture into business, redeveloping some rundown sulfur baths, no doubt with her menfolk’s gouty joints in mind.
Accepting Piero’s illegitimate daughter, Maria — these little trials came with the territory — Lucrezia produced two daughters, Bianca and Lucrezia, and two sons, Lorenzo and Giuliano. Most of all, she presided over Lorenzo’s extremely noble education and, when his turn came, played an important role in choosing his wife. With Piero’s health so feeble, Lorenzo would have to marry young, while the family still had clout. In Rome, Medici banking agents were already negotiating for the hand of an Orsini. This was a family of feudal lords, cardinals, condottieri. A family with a private army, no less. Inevitably, news of the possible marriage fed the Florentine opposition. Why was Piero looking outside his hometown for his son’s wife? People started complaining, remarks Machiavelli, “that he who does not want citizens as relatives wants them as slaves.” Before bankers and feudal lords could mix, Piero de’ Medici would have to survive this dangerous summer of 1466.