“LORENZO’S GREATEST FAILING,” wrote the historian Guicciardini in 1509, “was suspicion.” First of a new species — the aristocrat by education, marriage and money, rather than hereditary right — Lorenzo was afraid that others wouldn’t recognize his superiority, then afraid, when they did, that they would try to bring him down. A pattern of behavior emerged: imagining himself threatened, or offended (it was the same thing), he would overreact and bring about the clash he feared. That was how the massacre in Volterra was provoked. There was worse to come.
Pope Sixtus, who had been so generous to Lorenzo with the chalcedony cups at his coronation, who supported him over the Volterra affair and even granted him and his mother and brother a plenary indulgence — a place in heaven no less — now tries to regain control of Città di Castello in the northern Papal States, not far from the southern borders of the Florentine Republic. The signore of the town — or usurper, as Sixtus sees it — is a friend of Lorenzo’s and appeals for his help. Lorenzo immediately takes the pope’s campaign as a personal affront and sends troops to help his friend, though not enough troops to do anything more than alienate the pope, his bank’s most important client. Despite all the diplomatic missions in adolescence, Lorenzo is still a very young man to be running a state.
Pope Sixtus announces that he wants to buy the lordship of Imola, a town northeast of Florence, for his nephew, Girolamo Riario. Almost everything Sixtus does, he does for his nephews. To secure the deal, however, he needs to borrow more than 40,000 florins. From his banker, obviously, who else? But Lorenzo feels that Imola should be in Florence’s sphere of influence, not the pope’s. Looking at the map, one can’t help but agree. He refuses the money. He warns another Florentine bank dealing with the pope to refuse too. The Pazzi are an ancient and highly respected family — one old uncle and a dozen adult nephews — with an international bank similar in structure to that of the Medici. Not only do they go ahead and lend the cash to Sixtus, but they actually inform him of Lorenzo’s attempt to stop them, as if the Medici were the merest commercial competitors and not the rulers of Florence. This is a major insult, and a big risk for the Pazzi. Clearly they feel that Lorenzo hasn’t been giving their family the honors it deserves — for example, in the scrutiny of 1472 when the Pazzi got very few name tags in the electoral bags. Well, they certainly wouldn’t be getting any more now.
In 1474, Pope Sixtus proposes Francesco Salviati as archbishop of Florence. But Salviati is a close friend of the Pazzi. The pope, however, despite Lorenzo’s attempt to stop him from buying Imola, proves amenable to protest and nominates Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, Rinaldo Orsini, instead. Which was generous. Then the archbishopric of Pisa falls vacant, and this time the pope appoints Salviati without consulting Lorenzo. In the meantime, he has ordered an audit on the Curia’s alum accounts with the Medici bank. The price in Bruges and London has plummeted. The forecast income isn’t forthcoming. Lorenzo is deeply offended. It’s a dishonor to audit me! My family has served the pope for decades. And he denies the new archbishop, Salviati, right of entry to Pisa. Pisa is subject to Florence. I should have been consulted. No one can be bishop in Pisa without my consent. The pope threatens Lorenzo with excommunication. And he appoints a Pazzi as bishop down in Sarno near Naples.
“Puffed up by his Majesty [King Ferrante of Naples] … these Pazzi relatives of mine are seeking to harm me as much as they can.” Thus Lorenzo in a letter to Duke Galeazzo Sforza in Milan, begging him to put pressure on the pope to withdraw the appointment of Salviati to the archbishopric of Pisa. Lorenzo refers to the Pazzi as relatives because his older sister Bianca has long been married to one of the Pazzi nephews, Guglielmo.
But Pisa is a battle Lorenzo can’t win. The Church is too strong. Not long after Salviati is finally allowed to enter the town and take up his archbishopric, the pope declines to renew the Medici’s alum monopoly and gives it instead to the Pazzi. Again the bank pays the consequences for the politicking that its wealth has made possible.
Would the tit-for-tat never end? Apparently not. In March 1477, a dispute arose between Giovanni Pazzi, another of the dozen nephews, and the cousin of his wife, Beatrice Borromei. The Borromei family was extremely rich. Beatrice’s father had just died. Since Beatrice had no brothers or sisters, she expected to inherit the old man’s wealth, which would thus enter into the Pazzi family. But her cousin, Carlo, disagreed. He seized part of the fortune and insisted that, being male, he should have it. Lorenzo intervened — Don’t do this! his younger brother, Giuliano, warned him — to get a law passed that would give nephews precedence over daughters. This was a major change in social custom, no doubt affecting hundreds of lives, calculations, prospects. Despite urgent advice to the contrary, Lorenzo went ahead and the money was kept from the Pazzi family. “Giuliano de’ Medici complained over and over to his brother,” writes Machiavelli, “that by wanting too many things, all of them might be lost.” As far as Giuliano was concerned, they were. He was assassinated by the Pazzi during mass in the duomo in April 1478. Lorenzo escaped.
THE HUMANISM OF the fifteenth century has generally received an enthusiastic press: the enquiring mind turns away from abstruse metaphysics to concentrate on what is human. That must be a good thing. Yet the phenomenon was so various, the human is so various, that it is truly hard to approve of every manifestation of the movement. Unless perhaps what most attracts us to humanism, what makes most of us humanists in fact, is the movement’s greatest outrage: its dismissal of what came before as a thousand years of darkness, as if the middle ages had somehow been inhuman. Why did the humanists have to do that? Why is the dismissal still so important to us?
Marsilio Ficino, protégé of Cosimo de’ Medici, spoke little of darkness but a great deal about illumination. Sixteen years older than Lorenzo, he made, in the early 1470s, a rather more successful bid than the aging patrician Soderini to influence the young ruler, presenting himself as a philosophical father to a privileged disciple, not an interested party with advice to give on contentious issues. As a thinker, Ficino’s most characteristic gesture was conflation. Reading and translating widely, searching back in time long before Rome and abroad far east of the Aegean, he had an uncanny ability to find the same thing wherever he looked and above all to superimpose one tradition on another. The mountain Dante ascends in the Commedia is obviously the Olympus of the Greeks, the Pradesha or “supreme field” of Sanskrit, the Pardes of the Chaldeans, the Arab mountain of Qaf, and even the mons Veneris of sensual delight. The Orphic Hymn to the Sun, which Ficino translated, was clearly akin to Plato’s metaphor of the cave and the light in The Republic, which Ficino translated, to the late classical theologian Proclus’s Hymn to the Sun, which Ficino translated, and to St. Augustine’s notion of God as “the sun of the soul,” which, in the Soliloquia, Ficino both translated and wrote a commentary on. The whole world, it seemed, had always followed a single faith whose ancient priests included Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, St. Paul, St. Augustine.