In his absence his enemies spread rumours in Florence that he was using his enormous wealth to overthrow the government by hiring condottieri to invade the Republic. There were those who believed these rumours; and there were many more who, while not believing them, were prepared to use them as an excuse for ridding Florence of an over-successful rival. A deputation of disgruntled Grandi and Magnati called upon the elderly Niccolò da Uzzano, the most respected statesman in Florence, to seek his advice and enlist his support in their proposed attack on Cosimo. Niccolò received the deputation at his palace in the Via de’ Bardi; he listened to them politely, but was wary and discouraging: even if it were possible to get rid of the Medici, would it really be desirable to increase thereby the power of the Albizzi who might even become tyrants like the Visconti of Milan? Besides, it might very well not be possible to get rid of them. If it came to a contest between the adherents of the two families, it was doubtful that the Albizzi would get the best of it. The Minuto Popolo, grateful for past favours, were still on the Medici’s side. They had other supporters too: several of the most prominent families in the city, the Tornabuoni and the Portinari amongst them, were closely associated with them in various business undertakings; other families were indebted to them for loans and gifts; yet others were linked to them by marriage – the Bardi by Contessina’s marriage to Cosimo, the Cavalcanti and Malespini by his brother, Lorenzo’s, marriage to Ginevra Cavalcanti.2 Moreover, in the close-knit circle of the humanists, Cosimo had numerous friends, whereas Rinaldo degli Albizzi – an outspoken not to say bigoted critic of the new classical learning as being inimical to the Christian faith – had many enemies.
Niccolò Niccoli, Carlo Marsuppini, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni and Ambrogio Traversari were all close friends of Cosimo and each one of them was already an influential figure in Florentine society. They were all remarkable men. Niccolò Niccoli, the handsome, aesthetic son of a rich Florentine wool merchant, was at sixty-six the oldest. A most fastidious, exquisitely dressed and almost excessively neat dilettante, he had never cared for trade and had exhausted his inherited fortune on a beautiful house and a magnificent collection of books and manuscripts, medals, coins, intaglios, cameos and vases which ‘no distinguished visitor to Florence ever failed to inspect’. He had begun this collection when Cosimo, twenty-five years younger than he, was a child; and, as Cosimo grew up, he had been inspired by it to make a similar collection of his own. They had once planned to go to the Holy Land together in search of Greek manuscripts; but a journey for such a purpose had not commended itself to Giovanni de’ Medici, who had packed off his son into the bank before he caught any other fanciful ideas from Niccolò. For Niccolò’s devotion to classical antiquity was an obsession. He eventually amassed eight hundred books, by far the largest library of his day, and was adding new volumes to his shelves up to the day of his death, selling off land and borrowing money from Cosimo in order to do so. He never wrote a book himself, since he never managed to finish a paragraph that wholly satisfied his exacting taste; but he did develop a cursive script which enabled his scribes to copy out manuscripts quickly, neatly and elegantly and which became the basis for the italic type used by the early Italian printers. He became an object of curiosity to visitors to Florence, who looked out for his dignified figure as he passed gracefully down the street but who were warned that he could be very brusque, ill-tempered and dismissive. The only person of whom he himself appeared to be in awe was his termagant of a mistress whom he had taken over from one of his five brothers, much to the annoyance of the rest of the family. One day two of these brothers, enraged by the girl’s brash ill-temper, bundled her out of the house and gave her a good thrashing. Niccolò, to whose sensitive ears even the’ squeaking of a trapped mouse’ was intolerable, burst into tears at her screams.
Many of Niccolò’s manuscripts were discovered for him by his friend Poggio Bracciolini, who was to achieve lasting fame as a scholar, orator, essayist, historian, satirist and author of a collection of humorous and indecent tales, the Facetiae. Born in a village near Florence in 1380, he was the son of an impoverished apothecary, and came to the city as a boy with only a few coins in his pocket. He contrived to get a place at the Studio Fiorentino,3 the university which had been founded in 1321 after the Pope’s excommunication of Bologna and which Cosimo, as one of its trustees, had helped to extend by pressing for the employment of professors of moral philosophy, rhetoric and poetry in addition to those already teaching grammar, law, logic, astrology, surgery and medicine. Poggio studied law, entered the guild of notaries and obtained employment as a writer of apostolic letters at the Curia. He went with Pope John XXIII to the Council of Constance and, some years later, accompanied Cosimo on a holiday to Ostia where they made an archaeological study of the area. Resourceful, charming, cheerful, convivial, humorous, highly intelligent and not above bribing monks whose assistance could not otherwise be procured, he was immediately and remarkably successful as Niccolò Niccoli’s agent in seeking out manuscripts in Germany, France and Switzerland. He brought all manner of treasures to light, discovering whole masterpieces long since lost and the full texts of what had previously been known only in mutilated copies. In the library of one Swiss monastery, for instance, which was housed in a dingy, dirty dungeon at the bottom of a tower, he found Lucretius’s De rerum natura, a history by Ammianus Marcellinus, a book on cookery by Apicius and an important work on Roman education by Quintilian.
Texts which could not be purchased he copied out in an exquisite, easily-read and well-spaced hand, using as his model the eleventh-century Carolingian script rather than the tiresome, clumsy Gothic handwriting which had superseded it. When Cosimo de’ Medici saw Poggio’s script he decided to have all his own books copied in a similar manner. It was also admired by the early Italian printers who used it as a basis for their Roman type, just as they had used Niccolò Niccoli’s cursive script for their italic. In Poggio’s script lay the origins of modern handwriting and of modern printing.
Poggio, however, was not one of those humanists who became so involved in study they lost their taste for life. He loved eating and drinking, making jokes and making love. Ideally he liked to work in the company of pretty girls. He told Niccolò Niccoli how one day, when he was copying an inscription, he had broken off to feast his eye on two girls who were watching him. Niccolò had been rather shocked; but Poggio replied that whenever he was working he would always choose to have well-shaped girls beside him ‘rather than a long-horned buffalo’. He had several mistresses and, by his own admission, fourteen illegitimate children for whom he could afford to care well; with his business sense, and through his connection with the Curia, he had been able to make a great deal of money. It was not until he was fifty-five that he decided to get married. Then, characteristically, he chose a pretty girl of eighteen who brought him a handsome dowry with which he purchased a palazzo where, in due course, six more of his children were born.