Magnifico (58 page)
Authors: Miles J. Unger
The republican experiment came to an embarrassing end in 1512 after Piero Soderini had made the unlucky decision to back the French in their struggle against the armies of Spain. The Spaniards, combined with the Holy Roman Empire, Venice, and the pope (now Julius II, formerly Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere), ultimately routed the French forces, and when the victorious army marched on Florence, the government quickly capitulated. After putting up little or no resistance, Piero Soderini,
Gonfaloniere
for life, threw off his ceremonial robes and fled the city. Machiavelli was so disgusted with Soderini’s cowardice that he penned this epitaph for his former boss:
On the night when Piero Soderini died, his soul descended
to the mouth of hell; at which Pluto snorted: Silly soul, hell is
no place for you; your place is in the limbo of babies.
On September 14, 1512, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici returned in triumph to his native city, backed by the might of Spanish arms. Taking up residence at the now desolate palace on the Via Larga, he set about restoring the political machinery that had served his father so well, placing in key positions only those of proven loyalty to his family. Giovanni might have remained the de facto ruler of the city but for the death in February 1513 of Julius II. Hurrying back to Rome for the conclave, Giovanni was elected pope on March 11. Taking the name Leo X, the thirty-seven-year-old finally fulfilled his father’s greatest dream, vaulting the once humble family into the stratosphere of European nobility.
As great a coup as this was for the Medici, it seemed equally propitious for the Florentine people, who gave themselves over to delirious celebrations. Leo was the first Florentine to sit on St. Peter’s throne and his elevation augured well for City of the Baptist. Rome, her ancient rival, was now bound to Florence by ties of blood and history, and the hope of Florence was that the centuries-old struggle for hegemony would now make way for an era of peaceful and prosperous coexistence.
Unfortunately reality did not meet expectation. Leo was a cultured and intelligent man but his intellectual gifts were not matched by equal energy or commitment to a larger cause. Upon his accession he was reported to have said, “As God has seen fit to give us the Papacy, let us enjoy it,” words that sum up his rather negligent approach to his duties as the leader of the Christian flock. In 1517, four years into Leo’s reign, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the castle church of the University of Wittenberg, ushering in the Protestant Reformation. But Leo was far more concerned with ensuring that his family retain its hold on his native land than he was with the rantings of an obscure German cleric. For this purpose he installed as his representative in Florence his nephew Lorenzo, son of the unfortunate Piero, who had drowned in 1503 while retreating along with the French army in which he was serving.
The restored Medici rule, carried on after Lorenzo’s untimely death by his cousin Cardinal Giulio, did not lead to a renewed era of Florentine greatness. Nor did a second expulsion of the Medici, followed by a second restoration of republican rule in 1527 reverse the inexorable slide of the once great city into oblivion. The truth, from which most Florentines shrank, was that her glory days were behind her. In the dawning age of the nation state, the puny city-states of Italy could no longer count themselves among the great powers. They were prizes to be fought over by their more populous neighbors, and few were more attractive or more defenseless than Florence. The last spasm of that fiercely independent and democratic spirit that had sustained Florence for centuries ended in 1530 when Pope Clement, backed by the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V, reasserted Medici control over the city. In 1532 the republican constitution was officially abolished when Clement named Alessandro, son of Lorenzo (and great-grandson of
il Magnifico
), Duke of Florence. With Alessandro, and with his successor, Grand Duke Cosimo I, the Florentine republic finally became the hereditary possession of the Medici family.
The realm over which these later Medici ruled, while encompassing more territory than the earlier city-state, was a shadow of its former self. After 1494, Italy entered a period of decline from which it never recovered, and Florence declined along with it. That remarkable moment in which a city of under fifty thousand souls sheltered the greatest geniuses of Europe came to an abrupt end once Lorenzo’s protective aegis was withdrawn. The poets, philosophers, painters, and sculptors who flocked to the city in the knowledge that
il Magnifico
would reward their genius found other more promising venues in which to ply their trade. Rome, rather than Florence, became the magnet for artistic genius as the great Renaissance popes—Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo X—spent lavishly in an effort to create a city to match their outsized egos. Michelangelo was one of the many artists who fled Florence for Rome (though only after sculpting a monumental
Hercules
in tribute to his deceased patron) where he worked for many unhappy years, carving figures for Julius II’s monumental tomb and painting the Sistine ceiling.
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Of those who remained, many succumbed to the new pessimistic spirit of the times. This spirit is easiest to trace in the work of Sandro Botticelli where the pagan hedonism of his
Birth of Venus
and
Primavera
is replaced in his final paintings by the religious mysticism and apocalyptic visions of the Dominican friar under whose spell he had fallen.
Florence’s eclipse was part of a larger transformation. As France, England, and Spain rose to greatness, and as the discovery of the New World shifted the focus of the great powers away from the Mediterranean and toward the world’s oceans, Italy lost its central role as the economic engine and cultural beacon of Europe. For centuries, Italy, and Florence in particular, continued to capture the imaginations of cultivated men and women, but her lingering prestige as a home for the muses was no longer matched by political or military power.
As the reality of their own impotence slowly dawned on the Italian people, and as each year brought renewed terror and humiliation, men began to look back on the age of Lorenzo with increasing nostalgia. His genius as a diplomat, holding together the fractious powers of the peninsula through the force of his personality, was never more appreciated than in the following decades when the lack of a comparable statesman doomed Florentines and Italians generally to suffer the agony of war and chaos. While some Florentines continued to look on his reign as a period of corruption and tyranny, the subsequent failure to arrive at a workable alternative made these aspects of his rule seem less distasteful. Seen through the haze of memory, which softens all harsh angles and ugly realities, the age of Lorenzo appeared suffused in a golden glow. The durable monuments of the age—the unsurpassed works of art and architecture, of music, philosophy, and poetry, all propelled by a fervent belief in man’s unmatched power—shone brighter in memory as the gloom of the present deepened. And at the center of this brilliant constellation, a sun encircled by glittering planets, was the uncrowned ruler of Florence, whose effortless command of all the graces of life seemed to sum up a bygone age of unsurpassed magnificence.
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Showing Relationship to Royal House of France
)
The basic form of the Florentine government was established by the Ordinances of Justice in 1293. These laws disenfranchised the feudal aristocracy and gave power to the merchant and artisan classes by making participation in the political process contingent on membership in one of the major or minor guilds. Multiple overlapping councils and committees and rapid rotation in office were intended to ensure that no group monopolized power, but the inefficiencies of the system worked to the benefit of families like the Albizzi and the Medici who were able to create coalitions strong enough to dominate the elected government. The following is a brief summary of the traditional structure of the Florentine government and of Medici innovations.
Tre Maggiori:
The “three major” offices of the state, selected on a bimonthly basis. To have one’s name drawn from the purses (to be
veduto
or “seen”) for one of the
Tre Maggiori
automatically meant inclusion in the political elite. The
Tre Maggiori
included:
Signoria
(the Lordship), the chief executive body of the state comprised of eight Priors—two for each of the quarters into which Florence was divided—and the
Gonfaloniere di Giustizia
(the Standard-Bearer of Justice), the official head of state. They in turn were aided by two advisory committees (also known as “colleges”):
Dodici Buonuomini
(the Twelve Wise Men) and the
Sedici Gonfalonieri
(the Sixteen Standard-Bearers), one for each of the sixteen districts, or
gonfaloni,
that formed the traditional neighborhoods of the city.
Consiglio del Popolo
(Council of the People) and the
Consiglio del Commune
(Council of the Commune): the two traditional legislative assemblies of the republic. Their role was to ratify legislation initiated by the
Signoria
and the two colleges. It was in these more democratic, representative bodies that opposition to the regime was most openly expressed. The two councils were slowly marginalized by Medici reforms.
Elections:
Florentine elections were designed to spread the burden and the privilege of office holding to a broad cross-section of the citizenry. Elections followed an elaborate three-step process:
1)
Squittino
(the scrutiny)—The periodic canvass to determine those eligible for office. To qualify, a candidate had to be enrolled in one of the city’s seven major or nine minor guilds. Nominations for the
Tre Maggiori
were made by the
Gonfalonieri
for each district and vetted by a variety of different councils. Priority was given to members of prominent families whose relatives had already served in high office, thus ensuring the oligarchic nature of the government, but a small percentage of offices was also set aside for shopkeepers and artisans. The
squittino
was always a tumultuous event, since a family’s status in the city hierarchy was largely determined by the number of successful candidates.
2)
Sortition—
Names of those selected in the
squittino
were sorted into various bags or purses designating the offices for which they were eligible. Most important were those purses for the
Tre Maggiori,
which included a separate bag for the
Gonfaloniere di Giustizia.
It was at this point that the electoral process was most easily manipulated. Throughout much of the Medici era a body known as the
Accoppiatori
(see below) selected
a mano
(by hand) the name tickets distributed into each bag, giving the regime considerable control over who would ultimately serve in office.
3)
Extraction
—The actual drawing of the names from the purses. For the
Tre Maggiori
the extraction took place every other month in a ceremony at the
Palazzo della Signoria
. It was at this ceremony that Florentines learned who would actually be seated in office. But even those whose names were drawn from the purses but who were ineligible to serve—either because they had already served within the past five years, a close relative was currently serving, they were not old enough, or they owed back taxes, and so forth—gained a great deal. To be seen (
veduto
) even if not actually seated (
seduto
) conferred considerable prestige. In fact, membership in the important councils and committees was often determined by whether or not one’s ancestors and relatives had ever been
veduto
or
seduto
for one of the
Tre Maggiori.
Balìa
:
a special committee invested with extraordinary powers in times of crisis.
Balìe
were normally created by means of a
parlamento
(see below) called to give their approval to government reforms. The
parlamento
of September 1466, for instance, approved the
Balìa
dominated by Piero de’ Medici that purged most of the opponents of the regime (see below).
The Dieci di Balìa
(the Ten of War): a special committee appointed in times of war and given almost dictatorial powers. Lorenzo maneuvered to have himself appointed to this all-important committee during the Pazzi war.
The
Otto di Guardia
(The Eight of Security): the feared committee in charge of state security charged with rooting out treason and political sedition.
Parlamento:
assembly of all the citizens of Florence in the Piazza della
Signoria
called in moments of gravest danger to the state.
Medici innovations:
The following are the major “reforms” initiated by the Medici that helped strengthen their grip on power:
Accoppiatori
—
Usually five in number, the
Accoppiatori
had the crucial task of sifting through the names of candidates who had been successful during the
squittino,
selecting only those deemed reliable friends of the regime. Originally convened only in moments of gravest crisis, they became an almost permanent feature of the Medici regime.
The One Hundred—
Created by Cosimo de’ Medici as part of the reforms of 1458, the One Hundred included the most important members of the regime. Many of the responsibilities previously given to the more democratic councils of the People and the Commune were given to this compact body dominated by Medici allies.
The Seventy—
A committee created by Lorenzo in 1480 to streamline the government and place power in fewer, more reliable hands. Important legislation proposed by the
Signoria
now had to be approved by the Seventy. The Seventy also took over from the
Accoppiatori
in selecting candidates for the
Signoria
by hand.
Reggimento
(the regime)—the name given by Florentines to the small number of men who wielded real power in the government, regardless of who was actually seated in office. Throughout the era the
reggimento
consisted for the most part of Medici loyalists, though occasionally, as in 1466, the regime itself could split along party lines.
