IN BED, Piero calls for lists to be made of those for him, those against. Interestingly, the two lists include many of the same names. It’s a good sign: minds are malleable, or susceptible to patronage perhaps. In late August, the sick man precipitates the crisis. An ambush, he claims, was laid to murder him as he was being carried toward Florence in a litter from the family villa in Careggi. The assassins were troops of Borso d’Este, marquis of Ferrara. Could this be true? They were in the pay of Luca Pitti and Agnolo Acciaiuoli. So Piero claims. Anyway, he is taking up arms in response. Suddenly, the whole Medici countryside to the north of the town is on the move. Two thousand Milanese troops are approaching from Bologna. And I need 10,000 florins, Piero tells his business partner and cousin Pierfrancesco. At once!
Despite having sworn that oath to defend the republic, Pierfrancesco obeys. Why? Does he believe this unlikely assassination story? Is he afraid that if Piero were to be murdered, the bank might collapse? Whatever the reason, he produces this vast sum at once, in cash. Hours later, all the bread, wine, and arms in the town have been bought up. These provisions are a magnet to the waverers. Scaffolding appears around the Palazzo Medici, creating vantage points from which to pelt attackers. The nearest city gate is seized to allow friendly troops to enter. So much for the coward who would run away from everything that required effort.
The opposition is thrown. They are indeed in alliance with Borso d’Este of Ferrara, but can they get the condottiere and his army into the town before the Milanese arrive? Are they willing to put their hands in their pockets, or other people’s, as deeply and drastically as Piero has? They hesitate. To arms, Niccolò Soderini insists. They must ride through the streets, now, rousing the common people who are doubtless on their side. They must attack Piero’s house. There is no time to lose. But what, the others ask, if the people, after winning, want real power? What if, having sacked Piero’s palazzo, the plebs start attacking other palazzi? In the middle of the night, armed men bang on the gates of the Palazzo Medici. Panic spreads among Piero’s defenders. It’s only Antonio Ridolfi, another supporter come to join them. The opposition has missed its moment. It is never enough just to have money — the Strozzi family, for example had had more money than the Medici in 1433, and they were still in exile — you must know how to use it when it matters. Above all, you can never afford to be tight.
Piero staged this melodrama on August 27, one day before a new signoria was to be elected, by lot. Was this because he feared that he would need to be armed if the draw went against him? Or because he had fixed the election somehow and knew it would be in his favor? As it turned out, the new signoria was decidedly pro-Medici. Fixed or not, nothing could have demonstrated more clearly the need for a less erratic form of election.
There is now a four-day interregnum before one signoria hands over to another. The city is surrounded by foreign troops, from both sides. Anything could happen. Negotiations begin. To discourage rash decisions, Piero makes promises. Behind the scenes, the Medici bank’s general director, Francesco Sassetti, goes to talk to the aging Pitti. Time to change sides, Luca. And Pitti, the figurehead of the opposition, betrays his friends in exchange for three guarantees: the promise of a position as accoppiatore for himself; the appointment of his brother to the otto di guardia (with the power over exile); and the marriage of his daughter Francesca to “someone very close to Piero.” By whom Pitti believes they mean Piero’s eldest son and heir, Lorenzo.
A few days later — and this is a coup within the coup — it is Luca Pitti, not Piero de’ Medici, who proposes the inevitable “parliament.” Two thousand Milanese troops preside. Joining them, armed and on horseback, is Piero’s son, the seventeen-year-old Lorenzo. It’s quite a show. In very short order, all the regime’s old electoral controls are reintroduced. And more. Seeing the makeup of the new police commission, which once again has special powers, Dietisalvi Neroni, Niccolò Soderini, and Agnolo Acciaiuoli flee the city before the inevitable sentence of exile is passed. If the 1458 crisis served to define the relationship between the regime and the institutions, the 1466 parliament settled the Medici’s position within the regime: total domination.
Ghirlandaio’s Birth of John the Baptist (detail), in Santa Maria Novella (Tornabuoni chapel). Acting on instructions from Giovanni Tornabuoni, the painter seems more interested in his portrayal of these fifteenth-century spectators — the women of the Tornabuoni family — than in the biblical scene itself. The older of the two women wearing white headscarves is Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lorenzo’s mother.
Despised and ignored, the turncoat Luca Pitti got his position of accoppiatore as promised, and with his brother on the Eight of the Guard, he was spared exile. But his young daughter, Francesca, did not get to marry Lorenzo. Instead she was given to Lorenzo’s uncle, Piero’s brother-in-law, the thirty-six-year-old Giovanni Tornabuoni, head of the Medici bank in Rome and already well advanced in negotiations to bring that Orsini girl to Florence for his nephew.
“She walks with her head a little stooped,” complained Lucrezia Tornabuoni. A bare six months after the political crisis, Lorenzo’s mother was down in Rome to size up her future daughter-in-law. “I believe this comes from shyness.” Did the child have breasts? “Hard to tell the way these Romans dress.” Anyway, “as well as half of Monte Ritondo,” Lucrezia writes home to Piero, “the family also owns three other castles and … are better off every day because, apart from being maternal nephews of the Cardinal, of the Archbishop Napoleone, and of the knight, they are also related as cousins via their father for he is second cousin to the aforesaid Lords who love them greatly.” This was what mattered. The girl was sixteen. Oh, her name is Clarice, the future mother-in-law remembers to say halfway through a second letter. Only eighteen, Lorenzo was taken down south to view the goods and said they would do. The Medici were about to move into a different class. The trend behind that move would be the ruin of the bank.
“THIS COMPANY USED to promote everyone who was good at his job, without any regard to family or privilege.” Back in 1453, Leonardo Vernacci, deputy director of the Rome branch, had written to Giovanni di Cosimo, then deputy director of the Medici holding, to complain about the promotion of Giovanni Tornabuoni. Tornabuoni had joined the company at the age of fifteen in 1443, the same year Piero di Cosimo married his sister, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. Vernacci accused young Giovanni of slacking. Now he was being promoted over the head of the talented young Alessandro Bardi, who quit as a result. Tornabuoni wrote to his sister’s husband, Piero (not to Giovanni), to complain about the complaints. “And Vernacci spies on me and reads my post!” In 1465 it would be Vernacci who now left the bank in disgust when Piero promoted his brother-in-law to the directorship of the Rome branch.
Giovanni Tornabuoni had no special talents; he was obstinate, touchy, and self-important, but as a relative of the family he did appear in that Magi procession that Benozzo Gozzoli painted in the chapel in the Palazzo Medici, and later in life he actually commissioned a number of fine frescoes himself — first in Rome, when the young wife whom Luca Pitti had given him died in 1477, and again back in Florence in Santa Maria Novella, where the painter Ghirlandaio depicted a now-elderly Tornabuoni and his friends and relatives in decidedly patriarchal poses. Here the religious themes, in a fresco such as The Angel Appearing to Zacharias, fade discreetly into the background, while the senatorial figures of the contemporary Florentines in their robes and caps dominate the scene in what is now almost a work of journalism.