This constant travelling was not good for him, so one of his tutors implied: it unsettled him, made it difficult for him to concentrate on his work, and led him to yearn to leave his books for the pleasures of the countryside and the excitement of the soldiers’ camp. It was his ambition, indeed, to become a soldier. At the age of fourteen, so Pope Clement was informed, he already ‘went about clad like a cavalier and seeming such in his actions’. He was also reported to be surrounded by officers formerly in his father’s service. Disturbed by these reports, the Pope sent orders for him to abandon his ‘foreign dress’ and to wear instead the ordinary Florentine lucco. He obeyed the command with a sulky ill grace.
Yet Cosimo was neither an uneducated nor an uncouth young man. Graceful in his movements, reserved in his manner, he was shrewd and silent If there were gaps in his knowledge, he was prepared to fill them; and once filled they were filled for ever, for his memory was astonishingly retentive. There were those who already noticed a certain secretiveness about him which was later to become notorious; there were those who were repelled by an undoubted coldness in his nature which was to leave him unmoved by cruelty; and there were those who had good cause to fear that he would make a stern, tyrannical ruler. The general opinion, however, as Benedetto Varchi put it, was that Cosimo,
with the twelve thousand ducats granted him as his private income, would devote himself to enjoyment and employ himself in hunting, fowling and fishing (sports wherein he greatly delighted) whilst Guicciardini and a few others would govern and, as the saying goes, suck the State dry. But it is no good reckoning without your host; and Cosimo, who had been considered slow witted, though of sober judgement, now showed himself so admirably endowed with understanding that people went about telling each other that as well as having the State bestowed upon him, he had also wisdom given to him by God.
Trusting no one, neither Cardinal Cibò nor Alessandro Vitelli nor Guicciardini, all of whom, he felt, wanted to make use of him for their own purposes, Cosimo was determined to be his own master. He listened to the advice of his gifted secretary, Francesco Campana, and to his mother who could tell him all he needed to know about the ruling families of Florence; yet he kept his feelings and opinions hidden even from them and made up his mind alone.
His opponents were far less resolute. With the support of the lower classes who had gained nothing from their masters in the days of the recent Republic, of those who would have rallied to the help of any son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, of the reconstituted militia and of several of Florence’s most patrician families, Cosimo gradually overwhelmed his enemies. First, with Spanish help, he rid himself of danger from the Fuorusciti, exiles from Florence plotting his overthrow, whose forces were routed at Montemurio near Prato in July 1537. Throughout the city after this battle were heard cries of Palle! Palle! Victory! Victory!’reported a Sienese observer. ‘There is great rejoicing, and from two windows on the ground floor of the Signor Cosimo’s palace much bread hath been thrown and is still being thrown, and from two wooden pipes they are continually pouring out streams of wine.’
The free entertainment was well advised, for the rejoicing was far less spontaneous than the Sienese supposed and far from universal. The exiles’ army had included young men from several of Florence’s most distinguished families and had been led by Piero Strozzi, son of the great Filippo. Piero had escaped but scores of others had been taken prisoner and, after being ignominiously paraded through the the streets of Florence, were savagely punished. Sixteen were condemned to death; many more died in prison; others were tracked down and assassinated in the foreign cities where they had sought refuge.
Having dealt with the exiles and executed their captured leaders, four of whom were beheaded each morning on four consecutive days in the Piazza della Signoria, Cosimo turned his attention to the Spaniards whose garrisons he now wished to remove from the Tuscan fortresses. At first the Emperor declined to comply with Cosimo’s requests. He was prepared to recognize Cosimo as Duke of Florence, but he insisted that the Duchy must be considered an Imperial fief. He would not order the withdrawal of Spanish troops; nor would he consent to Cosimo’s marriage with Alessandro’s young widow, Margaret, who was given instead to Ottavio Farnese, grandson of Pope Paul III, Clement VII’s successor, since the Emperor considered it more important to oblige the Papacy than Florence. Yet Cosimo did manage to obtain for himself a politically useful bride in Eleonora, daughter of Don Pedro de Toledo, the extremely rich Spanish Viceroy at Naples.1 And not long after his marriage to Eleonora had taken place, the Emperor, who had fallen out with the Pope and had come to recognize that the Duke of Florence was in a position to render him important services, agreed to the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Tuscany.
Free from foreign occupation, Cosimo had also by now freed himself from interference in his government by any of his ministers. Although the Signoria and the office of Gonfaloniere were abolished by decree, there were still councils and magistracies in existence; but the Duke, as president of all of them, was easily able to ensure that they came to no decisions of which he disapproved; and as time went by he troubled himself less and less even to consult them. Guicciardini and Vettori were both ‘put aside’; so was Cardinal Cibò and, according to Luigi Alberto Ferrai, ‘in so dexterous a way that he was alienated and offended as little as possible’.
Cosimo was not, however, a tactful man by nature. On the contrary he was brusque to the point of asperity, often so ungracious as to appear gratuitously insulting; and in ridding himself of his opponents he displayed a harshness quite untempered by compunction or remorse. He had no qualms about throwing real or imagined enemies into the dreadful dungeons of Volterra, or about hiring assassins to dispose of troublesome dissidents and dangerous rivals. After surviving as an outlaw for ten years, during which he published his Apologia in celebration of tyrannicide as a selfless act of the greatest merit, Lorenzaccio was eventually caught in Venice, where he was stabbed to death with a poisoned dagger near the Ponte San Toma. Likewise, wishing to rid himself of the Dominicans of San Marco, Cosimo accused them of having made ‘public professions of dissent’, and had no hesitation in expelling them from their monastery. To their nervous protestations he curtly replied, ‘Tell me, my fathers, who built this monastery? Was it you?’
‘No.’
‘Who put you in this monastery then ?’
‘Our ancient Florentines and Cosimo the Elder of blessed memory.’
‘Right. Well, it’s the modem Florentines and Cosimo the Duke who are kicking you out.’
Master of Florence, Cosimo, after a long and cruel war, became master of Siena too. The war began in 1554, but it was not until 1557 that the cession of the city to Cosimo, to be held by him and his descendants as a Spanish fief, was at last ratified. By then the Sienese, whose population had been reduced from 14,000 to 6,000, had undergone unspeakable sufferings; and their surrounding territory had been ravaged without mercy. Their traditional dislike of the Florentines was fixed for generations to come, while Cosimo’s enemies at home were able to point with derision and disgust to the folly of expending so many lives and such huge sums of money on acquiring lordship over a devastated territory yielding less than 50,000 ducats a year.