Tommaso was now forty. His bride, Maria di Francesco di Bandini Baroncelli, was fifteen. The proud husband immediately had portraits painted by Hans Memling, with the well-bred adolescent wearing the pointed hat (with drapes) of the Flemish well-to-do, plus a lavish necklace of the kind the Officers of the Night would gladly have confiscated back in Florence. Is a pattern emerging: Tornabuoni, Sassetti, Portinari? After Tommaso and Maria’s first children arrived, the whole family would appear kneeling in prayer on either side of Ugo van der Goes’s bizarre and beautiful Adoration of the Shepherds, a painting that would cause such a stir when it arrived as an altarpiece in Florence. Meantime, despite that tough new clause in his contract, the loans to the duke of Burgundy continued and, come 1473, the Medici bank was still running those miserable, loss-making galleys when they were set upon by pirates off the Channel coast at Gravelines. The San Giorgio escaped. The San Matteo was captured, thirteen of its crew killed, and its cargo seized — another big loss for the bank — including a Last Judgment by Memling commissioned by Tommaso’s ex-boss, Agnolo Tani. Instead of going to Florence, the painting ended up in Danzig, where it remains to this day.
WITH OR WITHOUT the “last judgment,” the writing was definitely on the wall for the bank. In 1467, Tani had been sent to London to see if he could turn around the now-familiar scene of excessive lending to the local monarch — in this case, Edward IV. During the financial crisis of the mid-1460s, it had been imperative for Piero to guarantee a flow of raw wool to Florence — not just for his own workshops but also to maintain employment in general and prevent the kind of labor unrest that would feed opposition to the Medici regime. Again political convenience was bad news for the bank, since to get the export licenses for the raw wool from England, the London branch had had to do endless favors for the king. “I well understand, that what I have to do here,” Tani wrote back to Piero once he had seen the accounts, “is resurrect the dead, no less.” Did he already have Memling’s commission in mind? “But if you and Tommaso do what I say, then with the grace of God….”
Nobody did what he said. Giovanni Tornabuoni in Rome refused to accept finished English cloth in part-payment for the London branch’s debt. Later, suddenly fearing he would never be paid at all, he lost his nerve, hurried to Florence, and seized a huge quantity of cloth that Tani had sent from London to pay monies owed to Bruges, and that Bruges had then sent on to Italy (in those famous Burgundy galleys) in part-payment of their debt toward the Florence branch. Tornabuoni’s seizure of the cloth was illegal and the source of endless future accounting headaches; Francesco Sassetti as general director of the Medici bank should have prevented it, or at least censured it. But Tornabuoni was Lorenzo il Magnifico’s uncle. He was family, whereas Agnolo Tani was just a conscientious bank manager. The London branch now owed the Rome branch more than 40,000 florins, and with Pope Paul II borrowing heavily, it was becoming more and more urgent for Tornabuoni — who, as a shareholding partner in the Rome venture was liable for eventual losses — to receive prompt payment of the papal tributes that the other branches were collecting.
In London, however, it was clear to Tani that his only chance of saving the branch lay in accepting as payment for loans the one product the English wanted to give him, finished wool cloth, and getting the other branches of the Medici bank to sell it all over Europe. “Please advance me 3,000 florins for the cloth you have received,” he begged Sassetti in Florence. But Sassetti wouldn’t pay anything until the cloth was sold. He sent letters of cautious advice. “We need help, not advice,” Tani growled, this time writing directly to Lorenzo de’ Medici. “A quarter of the men in this kingdom are lawyers so I get advice in plenty…. Before I came here everybody was telling me to perform miracles, but now you’ve all gone quiet.”
In 1468, when King Edward’s sister, Margaret, became the duke of Burgundy’s third wife, Tani took advantage of the lavish celebrations to sell the king 6,000 florins’ worth of Florentine silk. Quite a coup. But in order to get the sale, he had to make another loan. To have any clout when collecting loans, it seemed one must always appear to have more to lend. In the end, only the willingness of the Milan branch of the bank to advance London money against receipt of finished English cloth eventually allowed Tani to accomplish his mission and return the London branch, if not to health, then at least to some kind of zombie status. In the spring of 1469, the aging manager made the punishing trip back to Italy, on horseback, no doubt determined to tell the Medici that if the various branches of the bank were not better directed and coordinated, then before very long the whole network would collapse.
No sooner had Tani left England than the War of the Roses, which had brought Edward IV to the throne in 1461, broke out again. This time, in October 1470, Edward lost power and all the Medici money with it. The bank was again in desperate straits. Having fled to the Netherlands, however, Edward regrouped his forces and in May 1471 returned to England and won back his throne. But the Medici had no cause for celebration. Not only had Edward had to borrow heavily to pay for his military campaigns, making it even less likely that he would pay back the bank, but to make matters worse, a long roll call of other noble Medici debtors lay dead on the battlefields of Barnet and Tewkesbury, where Edward had triumphed.
Together with his appetite for the aristocratic life, Francesco Sassetti, at the head of the organization, was also afflicted by a chronic inability to fire anyone. The two character traits are united perhaps in the love of ease, comfort, cordial relations. In any event, when the efficient Tani left London, having just about turned around the bank’s fortunes there, Sassetti did not take the opportunity to replace the local manager, Gherardo Canigiani, who had been largely responsible for causing the mess that Tani had gone to sort out. One would have thought that the crises of the previous years would have demonstrated once and for all the folly of tying up a bank’s capital in loans to a monarch who not only was barely solvent but liable at any moment to be overwhelmed by civil war. So if, on Edward’s return, Canigiani at once started extending fresh credit to the king, he presumably knew, as Portinari knew when he lent money to Charles the Bold, that he was not operating in the best interests of his employer. At last smelling a rat that was now in an advanced stage of decay, the Medici bank closed down its London operation in 1472 and terminated its contract with Canigiani, who promptly obtained a letter of naturalization from Edward IV, married a rich woman, and, with the king’s help, became a very proper English country gentleman with lands in Buckinghamshire and his own coat of arms.
While men such as Agnolo Tani, Leonardo Vernacci, and Francesco Nori (the man who had tried to inspect Accerito Portinari’s accounts in Milan) were serious and attentive bankers of the old Florentine school, ever anxious about the bottom line, others, it seemed, were only playing at banking in order to be close to kings and queens. Resurrecting the Medici business in this world was not of great importance to men like Canigiani and Tommaso Portinari, so long as they themselves could be reborn in the next: the world of royalty, art, and luxury clothing. As a major shareholder in Bruges, Tani was furious when he heard that, behind his back, Tommaso Portinari, in his role as director, had agreed that the branch would take on all London’s debts when the English operation was wound up. Why on earth had Portinari done such a stupid thing? The only answer is: to be close to the London bank’s major debtor, King Edward IV, now in military alliance with his rash Burgundy brother-in-law, planning the great invasion of France, which would eventually be launched in 1475.