Yet at once it became clear that however sophisticated the structure you formulated, the choice of staff would always be crucial. To make money, you need astute men and honest. And healthy. No sooner had Castellano di Tommaso Frescobaldi been appointed, in 1400, to run things in Naples than he fell sick and died. Good management can do nothing about the plague. Neri di Cipriano of the once-noble Tornaquinci family became the first director in Venice, in 1402, and immediately broke contract by lending money to Germans. Even Poles! He never recovered it. Faking the books, both manifest and secret, he invented a first-year profit and borrowed at 8 percent to have further capital, which he went on losing. Since the Medici did not routinely send inspectors to their various branches, it was three years before the now-considerable reversal of nearly 14,000 florins was discovered. Dealing in money is so exciting because its liquid nature makes the losses as great and as swift as the profits. The medieval wheel of fortune has speeded up. Everything is levered and intensified. Condemned by the Venice courts, Tornaquinci surrendered his belongings and fled to Cracow, where he recovered some of the Medici cash from the Poles but did not return it to the Medici. Eighteen years later, hearing that Tornaquinci had fallen into poverty in Poland, Giovanni di Bicci sent him 36 florins, enough to live on for a year and more. In the end, we know very little about Giovanni, but it’s hard not to warm to someone who could show charity to an employee who had behaved so badly.
AS WELL AS choosing the right manager, one also had to get the right pope. When Giovanni di Bicci became Giovanni XXIII’s banker, there were actually three popes in vitriolic and even bloody conflict with each other: Giovanni in Rome, Benedict in Avignon, Gregory in Naples. In the second story of the Decameron, Boccaccio suggested that it was precisely the perverse antics of the Church, its corruption and interminable internecine quarrels, that demonstrated the resilience of the Christian faith. People went on believing regardless. All the same, three popes presented a serious administrative headache. Who makes the clerical appointments? To whom do I pay tithes? Who will shrive me? Weary of the division, the Holy Roman Emperor invited all contenders to a Church Council in Constance in 1414 to settle the matter. Giovanni XXIII, who was at that point taking refuge from his various enemies in Florence, set off, and with him the Rome branch of the Medici bank. The Rome branch — take this as read from now on — always travels with the pope and his entourage. In the end, for banking purposes, Rome is the Curia, the papal court. What has there ever been in Rome, Italians still complain, but bureaucracy, ecclesiastical or secular?
Everywhere the pope went, food and accommodation prices rose, endearing him to some and half-starving others. And what with three popes and all the cardinals arriving from all over Christendom and moving a great deal of money back and forth, the Italian banks did good business in Constance. Cosimo, now twenty-five, having just married Ilarione’s distant cousin, Contessina de’ Bardi, joined his in-law to get some experience and meet some useful people. Alas, their pope came out the loser. After some tortuous diplomacy, Baldassarre/Giovanni, sensing things were not going his way, tried to scuttle the council, upon which he was arrested and accused of heresy, incest, piracy, simony, sodomy, tyranny, murder, and fornication … with more than two hundred women. Perhaps there is a wild leverage in matters of morality as well as in banking. You are the world’s spiritual leader, or the worst of all villains. You are singing in paradise or utterly damned. In any event, the culprit ceased to be pope, and in fact, so far as the Church was concerned, never had been. Hence the title of Giovanni XXIII was still available for a less-ambiguous candidate five centuries later. Meantime, the Rome branch of the Medici bank split, one half staying with the now-imprisoned Baldassarre/Giovanni and the other attaching itself to the new Pope Martin V, the two other papal pretenders having wisely retired from the field.
THE TALE OF Giovanni XXIII’s vicissitudes — his four-year imprisonment, the Medici’s remarkable loyalty to him, his bequest to them of the sacred finger of John the Baptist, their payment of 3,500 florins to ransom him, his assignment to them of his collection of rare jewels, their successful intercession with Martin V (after returning to the Curia a certain fabulously bejeweled mitre) to have their friend named on his release, whores and heresies forgotten, bishop of Tusculum (Frascati) — all this would be story enough to fill a book. Yet often it is not the obvious melodrama that really changes things, nor even the bewildering back-and-forth of money and sacred objects, but something quite different, apparently innocent. What mattered most in this tale — for the Medici, their bank, for Florence, and arguably, as we shall see, for us too — was Baldassarre/Giovanni’s funeral monument. For in 1419, six months after he was ransomed, the ex-pope coughed up, in Cosimo de’ Medici’s house, that final debt whose payment you can only put off for so long.
Let us return for a moment to the first story of the Decameron. Ser Ciappelletto, notorious liar, cheat, fornicator, murderer, and sodomist (the list begins to look familiar), a notary by profession, is sent to a foreign country to do some debt collecting. He lodges with the local Italians, who, true to the nation’s international vocation, are usurers. He falls mortally ill. They are terrified: if their guest doesn’t confess, he will be denied burial; if he does, the scandal of the company they are keeping will offer local people the excuse they are looking for to lynch them for their usury. But Ser Ciappelletto has a solution. He confesses himself, yet claims to remember no worse sins than having once spat in church and once cursed his mum when he was a little boy. No, he never lent money at an interest. No, he never had sex with anyone. He preserved his virginity. Convinced the man is a saint, the priest has him buried in the local convent, where his tomb becomes an object of frenetic popular devotion; those who pray over it claim miraculous results.
The comedy of the story depends on the absolute clarity of the underlying theology and metaphysics. This world is a trial for the next. Death is the day of reckoning, after which it is hell or heaven (purgatory being just a more or less extended annex of the latter). To tell lies, then, in a final confession is madness. It turns the world upside down. Ser Ciappelletto is quite brilliant in the way he resolves an earthly problem, but utterly blind because he does so at the expense of his soul. He is going to burn. Human astuteness, which is so seductive, so funny, has no place in a vision that divides the world into good or bad and sees no space between.
It is precisely this clarity, then, and people’s complete conviction in it (atheism is unimaginable), that leads to all the equivocation when it comes to describing complicated financial activities. For everything must be declared a sin or not a sin. “He who is not for me is against me,” Christ said. In the Baptistery, Florence’s oldest, most central church, a Last Judgment divided the domed ceiling into the blessed and the damned. Nothing else. The rigid, static Byzantine style, the hard little stones of the mosaic, allowed for no confusion, or even diversion. The image is its message. The beauty of color, line, and gesture only increases the clarity. For me or against me. Your fate. What could a banker do?
We know nothing of Giovanni di Bicci’s childhood. Presumably, like other middle-class youngsters, he was signed on at a guild in his teens and was working in his uncle’s bank as an adolescent. But for his sons he chose a more sophisticated education, first at a monastery school, then under the supervision of Roberto de’ Rossi, a humanist from a patrician family, a man who introduced the young Cosimo and his brother Lorenzo to other more celebrated early humanists, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Niccoli, and Ambrogio Traversari — men who instilled in the young banker a passion for the pre-Christian, classical world, and above all for finding, collecting, and even reading the manuscripts through which that world could be known. So while Cosimo was at the Church Council in Constance, and hence skipping his regular discussion groups with these men, he could enjoy the company of Poggio Bracciolini, who was present as secretary to Giovanni’s papal court and who took time out from his duties to visit the monasteries of Cluny and St. Gallen, where he uncovered various forgotten manuscripts of Cicero and Quintilian. About these much could be said, but for the essential, though rarely declared, inspiration that lies behind early humanism, we can go back a generation and read Boccaccio’s preface to his compendium book, De mulieribus claris, “About Famous Women.” “I have decided to exclude Christian women,” Boccaccio begins apologetically. Of course they are “resplendent in the true and unfailing light,” but, “their virginity, purity, holiness and invincible firmness in overcoming carnal desire” have already been amply praised “by pious men outstanding for their knowledge of sacred literature.” So I am going to turn elsewhere, Boccaccio tells us, to the pre-Christian world.