Even before the Pazzi conspiracy, which had aimed not merely at bringing down the Medicean regime but also at destroying the Medici bank, the whole complex organization was tottering on the verge of bankruptcy. Indeed, it was mainly because he felt sure it would soon go bankrupt anyway, and that Lorenzo would tumble with it, that Renato de’ Pazzi had declined to play a part in the plot. Now that the plot had failed, Lorenzo still faced financial ruin. Refusing as always to allow moral scruples to inhibit political or personal ambition, he did not hesitate to delay that ruin by dipping his hands into funds that did not belong to him. He helped himself to over 55,000 florins which was being held in trust for his two young cousins, the sons of Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, whose guardian he had been appointed; and when these boys came of age in 1485 he could not pay them back. He was obliged to make over to them the villa of Cafaggiolo and other property in the Mugello, though they claimed that this did not fully compensate them for their loss. Lorenzo also helped himself to money from the public treasury. After his death his heirs were held responsible for the return of almost 75,000 florins which had been withdrawn ‘without the sanction of any law and without authority, to the damage and prejudice of the Commune’.
Beset by financial worries, he was also troubled on his return to Florence by the continuing insecurity of the frontiers of the Republic. In his absence the Genoese had captured the fortress of Sarzana. Since then, Girolamo Riario had extended his possessions in the Romagna towards the borders of Tuscany; while the Duke of Calabria had taken advantage of an uprising in Siena to establish himself as its ruler. Worst of all, the Pope’s venomous dislike of Lorenzo had been much increased by his having come to terms with Naples, an arrangement which prompted the Pope’s other allies to forsake him. The Pope could not carry on the war by himself, yet he steadfastly refused to remove the interdict or to withdraw the Bull of Excommunication.
But then, in August 1480 – so conveniently for Lorenzo that it was afterwards suggested that it was he who had arranged the timing of the attack – a Turkish army of seven thousand men landed at Otranto and, having established a strong bridgehead in the heel of Italy, threatened to march across to Naples and from there north to Rome. This fearful calamity, dreaded for so long, brought the Duke of Calabria scurrying south from Siena, induced King Ferrante to hand back to Florence the towns that Neapolitan troops were still occupying in Tuscany, and persuaded the Pope that, with all Christendom in peril, this was no time for the Italian states to be quarrelling amongst themselves. So it was agreed that a deputation comprising members of leading Florentine families would go to Rome, make vague apologies for the city’s misbehaviour and, in return, receive His Holiness’s forgiveness. The deputation arrived in Rome on 3 December and in St Peter’s knelt before the Pope, who received them sitting on a canopied throne which had been specially erected in the nave for the occasion. Luigi Guicciardini, as leader of the deputation, mumbled their apology which could not be heard above the chatter of the onlookers. The Pope made a similarly inaudible speech of reproof, tapped them in turn on the shoulder with a penitent’s staff, formally lifted his interdict, then gave them his blessing. The ambassadors, having promised to supply and equip fifteen galleys for service against the Turks, returned to Florence to report to Lorenzo that all had gone as planned. A few months later the Sultan, Mahomet the Conqueror, died suddenly at Gebze. His forces at Otranto were brought home, and peace in Italy seemed assured.
It was a peace that throughout the last ten years of his life Lorenzo did his utmost to maintain, endeavouring to thwart the Pope’s attempts to embroil Italy in petty conflicts that might be turned to the advantage of his greedy family, and to create a united Italy powerful enough not only to keep the Turks at bay but also to frustrate the designs in Italy of France, Spain and the Empire. It was a policy which required patience and the most expert diplomacy, and was made all the more difficult to achieve by Girolamo Riario’s unsatisfied ambitions to extend his dominions beyond the borders of the Romagna. Twice war broke out; and twice Lorenzo’s personal intervention brought peace. On the second occasion, in August 1484, when the Pope’s representative returned to Rome to report that the terms of the peace treaty denied his nephew the towns of Cervia and Ravenna for which the war had been fought, Sixtus, already excessively ill-tempered because of his gout, was at first so angry that he could not speak. Then he burst out furiously that he would never countenance such humiliating terms. The next day he collapsed, and within a few hours was dead.
His successor, Innocent VIII, was a far more easy-going and genial man, willing enough to advance his children, whom he complacently acknowledged as his own, but without that obsessive ambition which had dominated the policies of Sixtus IV. One of Lorenzo’s agents referred to him as ‘a rabbit’, and there was certainly something undeniably rabbity about the slant of his rather doleful eyes and in his unassertive manner. Lorenzo, who had followed the course of the election with the greatest interest, had good cause to hope that in due course he might be able to exercise over him a profitable influence. For the moment, however, Innocent’s chief adviser was a rough and bellicose cardinal, Sixtus IV’s nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, whose influence in the Sacred College had been largely responsible for Pope Innocent’s election. But, having pushed the Papacy into a costly and unrewarding war with Naples, the Cardinal began to lose favour. He was further discredited when a certain freebooter, Boccolino Guzzoni, made himself master of Osimo, a small town in the Papal States south of Ancona. The Cardinal was sent as Legate to drive Guzzoni out of the town. He failed to do so, and Lorenzo astutely took advantage of his discomfiture by buying Guzzoni off for a fraction of the cost of the ill-fated military expedition.
Lorenzo lost no opportunity of increasing the respect which Pope Innocent now felt for him and of gaining his friendship, if possible his affection. He took the trouble to discover the Pope’s tastes and indulged them accordingly. He sent him regular consignments of ortolans; he sent him casks of his favourite wine; he sent him presents of fine Florentine cloth. He sent him courteous, flattering letters in which he assured him, when die Pope was ill, that he felt his sufferings as though they were his own, in which he encouraged him with such fortifying statements as ‘a Pope is what he wills to be’, and in which, as though incidentally, he included his views on the proper course of papal policies. Innocent was gratified by Lorenzo’s attentions and convinced by his arguments; he recognized in Lorenzo a man whom he could trust. So completely, indeed, did he come to share his opinions that, as the disgruntled Ferrarese ambassador put it, ‘the Pope sleeps with the eyes of the Magnificent Lorenzo’. The Florentine ambassador at Naples knew that this was so. ‘It is recognized perfectly well all over Italy,’ he assured Lorenzo,’ what influence you have with the Pope and that the Florentine ambassador quodammodo governs the policies of Rome.’
This influence was much increased after 1488 when Lorenzo’s daughter, Maddalena, was married to one of the several sons which the Pope had had before his entry into the Church, Franceschetto Cibò. The bridegroom was almost forty, a portly, boring man, who drank too much and was reputed never to have made a single interesting remark in his entire life; and Maddalena, a rather plain, sharp-featured, round-shouldered girl of sixteen, did not look forward to the match with relish. Nor did her mother, who was so devoted to her that Lorenzo referred to the girl as her mother’s occhio del capo – the eye within her head. But Maddalena was a dutiful child, and her mother was a dutiful wife: marriages were thus arranged in families such as theirs; besides, dull, sottish and addicted to gambling though he was, Franceschetto was said to be kind; and Lorenzo was generous. Since he was at the time in the midst of one of his recurrent financial crises, he found it difficult to pay Maddalena’s dowry of four thousand ducats, there being, as he admitted to the Florentine ambassador in Rome, so many other ‘holes to fill up’. But he did contrive to raise the money in the end. He also gave Franceschetto the Pazzi palace in Florence as well as the Pazzi villa at Montughi, and a fine estate at Spedaletto near Arezzo.