A cousin of Filigno, Salvestro de’ Medici, reclaimed the family’s prestige by being elected Gonfaloniere in 1370 and again in 1378, the year of the riots of the ciompi. Salvestro was known to be in sympathy with the ciompi and for a time his reputation blossomed in the light of their success. But their ultimate failure ruined him; and thereafter the Medici, whose name was now inevitably associated with the party of the people, were regarded with suspicion by many of the leading families of the city.
It was a suspicion which Cosimo’s father, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, had always been anxious to allay. He had not been born rich: the little money left by his own father had had to be divided between a widow and five sons. And having made his own fortune, Giovanni was determined not to put it in jeopardy. His sympathies, like Salvestro’s, were supposed to be with the Minuto Popolo and he consequently enjoyed much popularity with them. Yet he was a man of the utmost discretion, acutely aware of the danger of arousing the Florentines’ notorious distrust of overtly ambitious citizens, anxious to remain as far as possible out of the public eye while making money in his rapidly expanding banking business.
He enjoyed the reputation of a kind man, honest, understanding and humane; yet no one could mistake the worldly-wise shrewdness in his hooded eyes nor the determined set of his large chin. He was never eloquent, but in his talk there were occasional flashes of wit which were rendered all the more disarming by the habitually lugubrious expression of his pale face. Although his riches had been increased by the handsome dowry which his wife, Piccarda Bueri, had brought into the family, he lived with her and his two sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo, in a modest house in the Via Larga before moving to a slightly larger but still unpretentious house in the Piazza del Duomo not far from the unfinished cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.2 Giovanni would have preferred to avoid public life altogether, as many minor merchants contrived to do; he would ideally have liked to divide his time between his house in Florence and his country villa, between his office in the Piazza del Duomo and his bank in the Via Porta Rossa3 near the present Mercato Nuovo.4 But in Florence, as one of his grandsons was to say, rich merchants did not prosper without taking a share in the government.
So Giovanni reluctantly accepted office as one of the Priori in the Signoria in 1402, in 1408 and again in 1411; and in 1421, for the statutory two-month period, he occupied the office of Gonfabniere. For the rest he appeared content to sit in the shadows of his counting-house, contributing generously to public funds and private charities, investing in land in the surrounding countryside, adopting no more definite a political stance than one of moderate opposition to the civic aspirations of the dispossessed Grandi – whose banker he was nevertheless happy to be – and allowing the rich Albizzi family to exercise control of the government through their friends and nominees in the Signoria.
It had to be agreed even by their political opponents that this period of rule by the Albizzi and their associates had not so far been particularly unpopular in Florence, coinciding as it did with a time of relative prosperity. It had been a harsh rule to be sure: opposition to it had been rigorously crushed; malcontents and rivals had been arrested, banished, impoverished, even executed. But Florentine territories had gradually and continually expanded. Before the Albizzi came to power these territories already stretched far beyond the walls of the city and included the towns of Pistoia, Volterra, and Prato which was bought from the Queen of Naples in 1351. But since they had successfully taken over the government, the Albizzi had not only gained possession of Arezzo; they had also opened up a passage to the sea by capturing Pisa and its port, Porto Pisano, in 1406, and in 1421 they had bought Leghorn from the Genoese.
The acquisition of these ports – celebrated at Pisa by the launching of the first Florentine armed galley – immensely increased the wealth of the Republic, and gave a new impetus to the trade in wool and cloth upon which its prosperity had long depended. From England and the Low Countries, as well as from the hills and valleys of Tuscany, vast quantities of wool had for generations come into Florence to be refined, dyed and re-exported. Before the Black Death the industry was believed to have supported as many as 30,000 people. This explained the importance and influence of the Arte di Calimak and the Arte della Lana, the cloth and wool trade guilds, which for so long had played an essential part in the government of the city and had been responsible for the construction of so many of its finest buildings. The building of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, for instance, had been entrusted to officials of the Arte della Lana whose emblem of a lamb was a notable feature on its walls.
The owner of two wool workshops in Florence, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was a member of the Arte della Lana; but, since his main interest was banking, he was also a member of the Arte del Cambio, a guild whose prestige had been increasing ever since 1252 when the bankers of the city had issued a beautiful small gold coin, stamped on its reverse side with the city’s Latin name, Florentia, and on the obverse with its emblem, the lily.5 This was the famous Jiorino d’oro which became internationally known as the flower, the florence or the florin. It contained fifty-four grains of fine gold, and in terms of purchasing power the florin of the 1430s might be considered the equivalent of about £20 today: certainly a man could live very comfortably indeed on an annual income of 150 florins; a small house and garden in the city could be rented for about thirty-five florins a year; a handsome palazzo could be bought for a thousand; a maidservant would cost him no more than ten florins a year and a slave could be bought for fifty. The florin had rapidly gained universal confidence and was soon in common use throughout Europe, to the great credit of the city of its origin and to the banking houses which conducted business there. In 1422 there were two million golden florins in circulation and seventy-two bankers and bill-brokers in the neighbourhood of the Mercato Vecchio. One of the most prosperous and certainly the most rapidly expanding of these businesses was that of the Medici.
An office in Rome had been established in the previous century by Giovanni’s distant cousin, Vieri di Cambio de’ Medici; there were also branches in Venice and Genoa, Naples and Gaeta. Giovanni de’ Medici, who had begun his career as an apprentice to his cousin Vieri, opened a new branch in Geneva, a second branch in Rome, and, as a consequence of the growth in trade following the conquest of Pisa, established correspondents in Bruges and London. But Giovanni’s success as a banker was not so much due to the prosperity of the Florentine wool trade as to his friendship with the Pope.
It seemed a most improbable friendship, for Baldassare Cossa, who was elected Pope in 1410, was not at all the sort of man with whom a rather staid and provident banker might be expected to associate. Sensual, adventurous, unscrupulous and highly superstitious, Baldassare Cossa came of an old Neapolitan family and had once been a pirate. When he decided to enter the Church it appeared to those who knew him best that he sought further adventure rather than the service of God. Adventures he certainly had.