If you come at the king

The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici by Christopher Hibbert

Florence is today a jewel of Europe, one of the most beautiful city centres on earth and deservedly (if annoyingly) crowded in the holiday season. Young art students still go there to study, but most just visit Florence to feel the Renaissance, that incredibly fruitful period when Europe’s intellectual curiosity exploded and something special happened in Italy. We come to walk in the footsteps of the many famous figures who called this home: Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Machiavelli, Savonarola and, casting their identity over the city most of all, the Medicis.

The famous Florentine banking dynasty are the subject of much historical interest, including a characteristically entertaining recent series of the Rest is History, as well as The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, one of many entertaining works by Christopher Hibbert. Hibbert is one of my favourite reliable holiday reads, a generalist who wrote dozens of books on a whole range of subjects, the earliest from 1957 and the last, on the Borgias, published soon after his death in 2008.

Family legend has it that the Medicis were descended from Averadi, a knight who fought with Charlemagne; he passed through Tuscany on his journey to Rome and in the Mugello area to the north of Florence came across a savage giant who was terrorising the neighbourhood. Averadi battled and killed the Goliath and during the struggle his shield was dented - which is how the red balls on a field of gold became the insignia of the Medici family.

Obviously, none of this is true. The name is related to ‘medic’, they were not from a grand aristocratic lineage, and had come from the surrounding countryside and made their money as accountants and high-interest money-lenders, often making loans to corrupt church officials. Understandably, some of the grander rival families saw them as upstarts.

Yet they came to rule an upstart city, for the Republic of Florence was one of the first middle class states, where a newly enriched borghese surpassed the old nobility in wealth and power. Indeed here the nobility were excluded from politics, with the borghese controlling its functions through a complicated election system.

In Florence, the aristocratic philosophy where honour came from military strength and ancestry came to seem old-fashioned; honour instead came from wealth, whether won by an ancestor on the battlefield or in commerce.

Gregorio Dati, one of the city’s international silk merchants, went so far as to say, ‘A Florentine who is not a merchant, who has not travelled through the world, seeing foreign nations and peoples and then returned to Florence with some wealth, is a man who enjoys no esteem whatsoever’, showing himself to be almost the ur-liberal metropolitan snob.

Leon Battista Alberti, a renaissance man and philosopher-poet as well as musician, architect, artist and athlete, wrote that no one poor would ever ‘find it easy to acquire honour and fame by means of his virtues’, because poverty ‘threw virtue into the shadows’ and subjected it to ‘hidden and obscure misery’.

Wealthy Florentines enjoyed riches that would have been unknown to northern Europe’s aristocrats: they had large, canopied beds, often 12 feet wide and big enough for four people to sleep naked beneath lined sheets; scents and herbs burned slowly in pierced globes hanging from the ceiling.

A city of maybe 60,000 people after the Black Death had killed half the population, Florence itself was divided into four quartieri with each of these divided into four wards, each with its own heraldic emblems. The busiest part of town was around the Ponte Vecchio, while the Orsanmichele neighbourhood was the communal granary where bankers set up green cloth-covered tables in streets and silk merchants had counting houses. Banking and counting was how the city made its money.

Being a republic, Florence quite consciously modelled itself on Rome, and this sense of association with the ancient past would grown from the mid-14^th century as writers from antiquity were rediscovered and disseminated among its ruling elite.

Like Rome’s elites, Florence’s wealthy would build villas in the surrounding countryside, the Mugello. Like Rome, they kept slaves - Greeks, Turks, Russians, Circassians or Tartars. It was forbidden to enslave Christians in theory, and certainly Catholics in practice, but Muslims and other infidels were fair game; Tartars were favoured for being tough, the Circassians for their good looks and pleasant temperaments. That so many notable Florentines had bastards by their slaves points to the sexual exploitation and abuse inherent in slavery.

Florence came to dominate the world of art but its greatness came from banking or, as Sandbrook and Holland put it, accountancy: it was their invention of double-entry bookkeeping which funded some of the greatest works of art ever produced. Church sleaze also played a part.

The Papal States, Hibbert tells us, were ‘a disorderly array of petty tyrannies which sprawled across the peninsula from Rome to the Adriatic… in a condition approaching anarchy’. Rome itself was notoriously violent and filled with prostitutes and, the following century, riddled with syphilis. Giovanni Medici, founder of the family bank, had made a lot of money lending money to various cardinals in Rome who needed cash to build their power base through bribery.

The 15th century had opened with the papacy wracked by schism, with two different popes at odds, one in Rome and the Avignon. To resolve the issue, a meeting was held at Pisa in 1409 at which a compromise pope, Alexander V, was elected; unfortunately, neither side recognised him, so they now just had three popes.

Alexander V soon died and was replaced by Baldassare Cossa, who became ‘antipope’ (unrecognised) John XXIII. Cossa was an unusual choice - he had been a pirate before taking up a law degree, and was notorious as a philanderer, sleeping with hundreds of women; fortunately for the Medicis, however, Giovanni had lent him large amounts of money to buy the office of cardinal, and this made the family ever more powerful.

Antipope John had been among those who called the Council of Constance which began in 1414 in order to end the schism. However, as the council went on, he came under personal attack and was accused of heresy, tyranny, simony, murdering his predecessor by poison and seducing 200 ladies from Bologna. Edward Gibbon wrote of John that ‘the most scandalous charges were suppressed: the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.’ He fled to Germany where he ended up being jailed by Ludwig III, elector of Bavaria, until the Medici rescued him with a ransom of 38,500 Rhenish gulden.

In 1420 the running of the bank passed to Giovanni’s son Cosimo, who extended the family interest into politics; indeed, the secret to Medici power was that their moneylending was so extensive that domestic rivals were unable to sideline them without facing the wrath of foreign investors.

The Adoration of the Magi, which includes several members of the Medici family and, including Lorenzo on the left

The background to Cosimo’s rise was a long running conflict between two of northern Italy’s greatest powers, Milan and Venice, who were constantly at war from the 1420s onwards.

Milan had been ruled by a succession of cruel and eccentric dukes for some time, and it was now under the control of Filippo Maria Visconti, who was absurdly obese and widely believed to be mad. Hibbert wrote how in the summer Visconti would ‘strip the rich clothes from his grotesquely fat and dirty body and to roll about naked in his garden. So ugly that he refused to have his portrait painted, so weak on his deformed legs that he could not rise from his chair without leaning on a page; so nervous that he had been known to scream at the sight of a naked sword; so frightened of thunder that he had a sound-proof room built in his palace; so fond of practical jokes that he would suddenly produce a snake from his sleeve while talking to an unsuspecting courtier, he was also wilful, secretive and inordinately suspicious.’ Although, being in Renaissance Italian politics, that was probably wise.

Filippo was married twice, first to the rich widow of one of his father’s condottieri, or mercenaries. He had her charged with adultery and executed. His second wife he had locked up after a dog howled on their wedding night, which he took to be a bad omen. He produced no children by either of them – unsurprisingly - although he had a daughter by a mistress.

Duke Filippo had enlarged Milan but attempts to conquer territory in Tuscany failed in 1437 and again the following year. Because Milan was a greater threat to Florence, so the ruling council voted to go to war on Venice’s side. Although Cosimo opposed the war, he lent money to the regime at 33 per cent interest, and it was a belief that he prolonging the war for his own profit (Dominic Sandbrook speculates that he probably was) that led his enemies to pounce.

So in 1433 there was a sort of bloodless cue led by the rival Albizzi and Strozzi families, which ended in Cosimo being imprisoned before he managed to secure exile instead. Some might say that his enemies failed because they weren’t ruthless enough, but the Medicis had friends abroad and this led to foreign investors withdrawing their money from the city - and so they were forced to allow Cosimo back, now more powerful than ever.

The following year Cosimo de’ Medici took full control, and for the last 30 years of his life, he effectively ran the city. The Signoria made Cosimo Pater Patriae, ‘Father of the Fatherland’, one of many conscious echoes of ancient Rome – the title was given to both Cicero and the emperors.

When Visconti died in 1450, Cosimo was able to help mercenary Francesco Sforza take power as Duke of Milan; Florence now switched sides and supported the Milanese. Eventually, people would tire of his rule, and after ten years the 32-year-old ruler was stabbed to death in the groin by a conspiracy of enemies, motivated by a mixture of republican idealism and sexual jealousy.

Hibbert is at his most enjoyable when drawing pen-portraits of the often hideous figures who ruled Renaissance Italy,a and describes Francesco’s son and successor Galeazzo Maria Sforza as ‘a competent ruler with an increasingly sinister reputation for acts of appalling viciousness and cruelty’. Enemies said he raped the wives and daughters of many noblemen, ‘that he took sadistic pleasure in devising tortures for men who had offended him; that he supervised these tortures himself and pulled limbs apart with his own hands; that he delighted in the moans of dying men and in the sight of corpses.’

Galeazzo’s daughter Caterina Sforza, one of many bastards, was also an interesting figure, and Hibbert writes that during one of the duchy’s various periods of factional fighting, a rival group kidnapped one of her children and Machiavelli, who had met her, described how Sforza pulled up her skirt to the besiegers to reveal ‘her genital parts’, telling them that she had the powers to make more children if need be. (A story which sounds remarkably, indeed suspiciously, similar to that of a young William Marshal)

Cosimo was unassailable in this life, although he worried about the next, since money-lending was strictly prohibited by the Church. It was this that caused him to spent more than 600,000 gold florins, estimated at several hundred million dollars in today’s money, on art. He paid for Donatello’s David, the first nude male sculpture since the fall of Rome, and he also funded the magnificent San Marco and St Lorenzo’s. Whatever one things about the manner of how Renaissance oligarchs gained their wealth, the prestige competition to fund buildings and art bequeathed a legacy that is impressive and beneficials (American billionaires today are notably generous, but I struggle to think of many great buildings they will leave to future generations.) Cosimo was also a true renaissance man and kept a library filled with the great Roman writers.