Given the tensions between the Bruges and Rome branches of the bank, particularly since Giovanni Benci’s death in 1455, the problems arising from the alum monopoly were predictable enough. As always, Bruges and London were slow to send money down to Rome. As always, Tornabuoni, in Rome, was impatient, suspecting as he did that Bruges and London were squandering the incomes from alum sales in loans to dukes and duchesses. An employee from the Rome branch was sent north to see what was going on. Then the pope sent his own negotiators to tackle the duke. But if there was one thing Tommaso Portinari loathed, it was interference. Papal spies! he complained in a letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici. If I can’t counsel the duke, what chance has a bishop got?
As the years pass, the situation deteriorates. A Florentine galley sinks. The cargo is lost. Then two galleys arrive simultaneously from Genoa and Venice, bringing Turkish alum. At this point, the port of Bruges is warehousing a three-year supply of the mineral all at once. Needless to say, the price collapses. More and more, the alum deal comes to assume the function of a chimera; if only the bank could really impose this monopoly, everything would be okay. But in the meantime, there are shipping costs and warehousing expenses and very little income. On March 18, 1475, Tornabuoni tells Lorenzo de’ Medici that between paying the producers and the papal dues and the galleys, the bank is actually losing money on alum. Meantime, there was the Volterra affair.
ALONG WITH THE family’s source of wealth, another thing to be got out of the way, in young Lorenzo’s Neoplatonic vision of things, was the regime’s hold on power. It seemed that whatever balia, council, or institution the Medici set up to guarantee their authority, as time passed even the most carefully selected allies began to vote along more republican lines. People have a stubborn bias toward freedom. When Lorenzo took over from his father, the signoria was being selected by nine accoppiatori, who in turn were selected annually by the Council of 100, the sort of permanent Medici balia established after the 1458 parliament. But the council was no longer doing as it was told. Lorenzo found he had to attend its assemblies in person if members weren’t to vote against him. It was irritating. “I plan to behave the way my grandfather did,” he had told the Milanese ambassador soon after his father’s death, “which was to do these things in as civil a way as one can, and as far as possible within the constitution.”
But how civil and constitutional can one be if one wants to have a rock-solid guarantee of remaining in power? Almost immediately, Lorenzo went far beyond his grandfather. By the end of 1471, the signoria was still being chosen by nine accoppiatori, but now the accoppiatori were chosen every July by their nine outgoing predecessors together with the signoria in office at the moment. Power was thus entirely circular. To console the Council of 100 for their loss of influence over the accoppiatori and hence the government, they were now allowed to ratify the decisions of the signoria directly, without the need of further ratification from the traditional Councils of the Commune and of the People — which more or less ceased to have any reason to exist.
At this point, the Medici are exercising almost complete control over the affairs of state. And yet a certain façade of constitutionality is maintained: The councils do meet and vote; the selection of the signoria is still recorded as though it were a fair lottery. Such pretenses of constitutionality quickly fell away when both banking income and political authority were threatened by the discovery of alum in Volterra.
Volterra is a small town some forty-five miles southwest of Florence. In the fifteenth century, it was a subject community, paying a tribute to Florence but running its own government. Naturally, everybody was excited about the alum, then disappointed when the mining concession was given to a private consortium with Florentine backing. It was important, of course, for the Medici bank to bring this new source of the product into their monopoly. The government in Volterra, run by a faction opposed to the consortium, confiscated the mine. Florence intervened to reverse the decision.
This is June 1471. Lorenzo has had a busy eighteen months since his father died. A rebellion, instigated by the conspirators of 1466, was put down in Prato. There were executions. His first child, Lucrezia, was born in 1470 and his first son and heir, Piero, arrived in February 1471. Clarice was playing her part. In March, Lorenzo was host to Galeazzo Sforza, duke of Milan, who brought an embarrassingly large entourage and indulged the scandalous habit of eating meat during Lent. Inevitably, God showed his wrath by having the Church of Santo Spirito burn down, and the frightened Florentines did penance with some strict new laws on luxury clothes and foods.
Throughout his wife’s pregnancies, Lorenzo continued to write love sonnets to Lucrezia Donati and was simultaneously working on a parodic Symposium of more than eight hundred lines featuring a wildly drunken evening among local philosophers and clergymen. It is hilarious. Certainly more of his time was given to this first experiment in satire than to the reopening of Medici bank branches in Venice and Naples.
Then, just as the Volterra crisis was hotting up, Pope Paul II died — this in July 1471—and Lorenzo had to hurry down to Rome for the coronation of Pope Sixtus IV. One can imagine how hard it was for a twenty-two-year-old to concentrate on politics, banking, babies, and poetry all at once. In his brief ricordi, Lorenzo describes the trip to Rome thus: “I was much honored, and brought back two antique marble busts of Augustus and Agrippa, that Pope Sixtus gave me, plus an inlaid cup of chalcedony and many other cameos and medals that I purchased.” Though he wrote these memories in 1473, Lorenzo doesn’t mention the most important event of his rule to date, the sacking of Volterra. It was not something to be proud of.
With the quarrel between the mining consortium and the town’s ruling faction deadlocked, the Volterrans appeal to Lorenzo to arbitrate. Predictably enough, Lorenzo decides that the alum consortium, which includes two prominent, pro-Medici Volterrans, should keep its concession. The opposing faction rebels, riots, kills the two prominent Lorenzo supporters, and declares independence from Florence. Nevertheless, the aging counselor Tommaso Soderini tells Lorenzo that there really is no need to send an army. A crisis like this can be solved with patience and negotiation.
Soderini, who had remained faithful to the Medici throughout his elder brother’s rebellion in 1466, was now pushing seventy. He was married to Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s sister, Lorenzo’s aunt, and, as the regime’s most senior man, he no doubt expected to exercise a certain influence over his young nephew. But this was precisely the kind of presumption that Lorenzo would not accept. Less like his grandfather Cosimo than he claimed, Lorenzo was determined not just to be in charge, but to be seen to be so. He, a Medici, a man married into the Orsini family, a man who had hosted the duke of Milan in his palazzo, had been insulted, his friends killed.
Lorenzo hires and sends an army. After a month’s siege, the Volterrans surrender on the understanding that their lives and properties will be spared. Entering the town, the mercenaries sack, rape, and kill. It is the right of a mercenary army to sack the town they have taken. Everybody knows that. From now on, the Volterrans will be Lorenzo’s implacable enemies. Appalled by the bloodshed resulting from his decisions, Lorenzo tries to make amends with a personal gift to the Volterrans of 2,000 florins. It is less than a fifth of what had been spent on his famous marriage tournament three years earlier. Even before the material damage to the town can be repaired, the recently discovered alum mine is closed down. The deposit turns out to be scanty and the quality poor. The whole brutal affair has been completely unnecessary.