Franceschino drew in Archbishop Salviati in Pisa and Girolamo Riario, the pope’s nephew, now running Imola and eager to build up a serious dukedom before his uncle departed this world. The conspiracy could count on the military support of the Papal States and of Naples. Uncle Iacopo, however, the patrician head of the Pazzi family, a great blasphemer and gambler but highly respected all the same, was reluctant. The stakes were high and the odds poor. For a long time he argued against the assassination attempt. But eventually he came on board. Hadn’t Franceschino, he later justified himself, always been the lucky one?
Only two important members of the Pazzi family were not involved in the plot. Guglielmo Pazzi, Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, was not even approached. His loyalty would be divided. Renato Pazzi, on the other hand, reputedly the brains of the family, simply thought that murder was unnecessary. The Medici bank was in desperate straits. The best way to destroy Lorenzo would be to lend him money and watch him waste it. His debts would overwhelm him. Renato, then, believed that the Medici’s political prominence still depended on the bank. The family’s identification with the Florentine state was not complete. They were not, that is, in a position where they could just collect taxes for themselves to pay off their debts.
What did the Pazzi really know about the Medici’s financial troubles? In 1475, the Bruges branch had lost a legal battle against ex-London manager Gherardo Canigiani. This was public knowledge. Furious that Canigiani had used Medici money to become an English gentleman, Tommaso Portinari had invited him to act as agent for the bank and buy a shipload of English wool to send to Florence. As soon as the wool was safe at sea, Portinari refused to pay for it, claiming that Canigiani owed the Medici this and more. “Not even a Turk would behave so,” Canigiani protested, and, playing the card of his friendship with King Edward IV, managed to get an agent of the bank imprisoned and eventually to recover his money. Edward still owed the Medici around 30,000 florins.
The murder of Galeazzo Sforza, it was obvious to everybody, would make the chances of the Medici’s recovering the huge debts owed by that family even more remote. Galeazzo left an infant son and a shaky maternal regency that was constantly threatened by Galeazzo’s ambitious brother, Lodovico. Milan, Francesco Pazzi reckoned, would not be able to help Lorenzo in a crisis.
Then the death in yet another reckless battle, of rash Charles of Burgundy — this only three weeks after Galeazzo Sforza’s murder — was evidently another serious blow to the Medici bank. This was January 1477. Even assuming that Charles’s family were able to succeed to his dukedom, they wouldn’t want to pay off their debts in the near future. The director of the Pazzi bank in Bruges, Pierantonio di Bandini Baroncelli, was a close relative of Tommaso Portinari’s young wife, Maria di Bandini Baroncelli. They lived in the same small Italian community in a foreign town. If Pierantonio didn’t know that Tommaso was looking at overall losses of 100,000 florins — a vast sum — he certainly would have been aware that things were getting desperate. In the end, it was another close relative of Pierantonio’s, Bernardo di Bandini Baroncelli, who struck the first blow against Giuliano de’ Medici during mass in the duomo fifteen months after the duke of Burgundy’s death. More than anything else, it was the murder of Giuliano that saved the Medici bank and set it up for another fourteen years of Lorenzo’s mismanagement.
Girolamo Riario lent Francesco Pazzi his personal condottiere, Count Montesecco. They plotted. But Lorenzo refused their invitation down to Rome. He was suspicious. Where could they kill him then, and when and how? They must act soon, before someone got wind of the plot. In April 1478, the seventeen-year-old Cardinal Raffaele Riario (nephew to the lord of Imola and great-nephew to the pope — in short, nepotism incarnate) was visiting Florence. Armed men could be sent to the city as his escort. The Medici brothers had offered the child cardinal a celebratory lunch at their villa in Fiesole. The two could be murdered there. But Giuliano didn’t turn up for the party. There was no point, the conspirators had all agreed, in killing one brother without the other.
So the appointment with death was set back a week, to another Sunday lunch, after mass, at the Palazzo Medici in town, where the juvenile cardinal was now invited to inspect Il Magnifico’s famous collection of cameos. For all the animosity between the families, it seemed there was no question of renouncing formal visits with all their etiquette. Sometime during the morning, however, it turned out that once again Giuliano wouldn’t be eating with his brother. Frantic, the conspirators agreed they must do the deed at mass, only minutes away. But Count Montesecco shook his head. Not in church, he protested. God would see him in church. Did he imagine the Almighty was blind elsewhere? Montesecco had been Lorenzo’s designated assassin and was the most professional of the bunch. A key man. All in a hurry — because now it appeared that someone would actually have to go to Giuliano’s house and persuade him to come to church — two priests were given Montesecco’s brutal job. Nobody appears to have found their willingness strange. One hailed from Volterra and so had good reason to bear Lorenzo a grudge. Meantime, an army of papal soldiers was within striking distance of the town to the south and the archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, with about thirty armed men from Perugia, set off to take over the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government.
IT WAS ONE of the rules of Florentine republicanism that for their two-month term of government, the eight priors and one gonfaloniere della giustizia must spend the whole time together in the Palazzo della Signoria, eating and sleeping included. Looked at this way, eight weeks in power could seem rather a long time, which is perhaps why the Medici so rarely served on the signoria. In any event, as luck would have it, the gonfaloniere that day, Cesare Petrucci, was the same man who, as captain of Prato, had courageously put down an armed insurrection in 1470. When Salviati came asking for an audience, it took Petrucci just a few moments to appreciate that there was something suspicious about the archbishop’s behavior and to have both him and his men locked up.
In the church, too, everything goes wrong. The Medici brothers are standing well apart. At some agreed moment in the liturgy, Francesco Pazzi and Baroncelli simply massacre Giuliano. Why hadn’t they been assigned to Lorenzo? Francesco strikes so repeatedly and violently that he stabs himself in the leg and can barely walk. No doubt the packed church is in an uproar. But the two priests have failed to dispatch Lorenzo. Il Magnifico draws his sword, runs. Francesco Nori, once would-be inspector of Accerito Portinari’s accounts in Milan and now head of the Florence branch of the Medici bank, blocks the path of the assassins. It’s unusual to think of a bank manager protecting his boss with his body. Baroncelli stabs him to death. But Lorenzo is already locked in the sacristy. He is safe. Outside, at the city gates, the papal troops have failed to show. In desperation, old Uncle Iacopo takes to his horse yelling, “Liberty!” up and down the streets. The confused crowd is not impressed. In the end, the common people rally to Lorenzo. He speaks from the balcony of his house. He is identified with law and order. It’s a huge step toward a Medici dictatorship.