Avignon closed down in 1478. Likewise Milan. The famous palazzo was sold. One of the two wool workshops had already gone. The silk workshop closed in 1480. That same year, the London and Bruges branches with all their debts were formally handed over to Portinari. Venice closed in 1481. In 1482, a proposal for restructuring the whole bank was drawn up. There would be two holdings, one under Tornabuoni, running Rome and Naples, the other under Sassetti, running Florence, Lyon, and Pisa. Two barons, two entirely separate entities to satisfy two considerable egos. Total capital would be only about 52,000 florins, of which Lorenzo’s part was under 20,000, the merest trifle compared with the vast sums he had inherited. Nothing became of the plan. Nothing was done to coordinate the remaining branches or to have their directors care about each other’s losses. Making no serious contribution to economic activity, serving only to finance wars and the consumption of luxury goods on the part of a debt-ridden aristocracy, the Medici bank continued its inglorious decline through those years that would soon be referred to as “golden.” Pisa closed in 1489. Which left just Florence, Rome, Naples, and Lyon.
FORTUNATELY, THERE WERE other things for bankers to do aside from banking. Cosimo had used his staff to hunt down ancient manuscripts. Piero had bought paintings, tapestries, ponies for the kids. After 1483, Lorenzo began to send his bank managers on a hunt for lucrative Church appointments for his fourth child and second son, Giovanni, who had just received the tonsure and ordination into the priesthood. He was eight years old. Almost immediately, the Lyon branch of the bank entered into negotiations that would make the boy abbot of Fontdouce in western France. Later he acquired the priory of Saint Gemme, near Chartres. Ecclesiastical incomes were steady and risk-free. The monks of the Abbey of Le Pin, near Poitiers, barricaded themselves inside when Cosimo Sassetti arrived with orders to take possession in the name of the infant bishop. Having lost so much through banking, Lorenzo had finally found a way of making money in which he excelled. It was a question of connections, favors, gifts, promises. One by one the Church benefices fell into his son’s lap: the Abbey of Passignano on the road to Siena, churches in Prato, the Arno Valley, the Mugello; the Abbey of Monte Cassino near Naples, Morimondo, near Milan. By the time the bank collapsed, the Church incomes would be there to give the family a new economic base.
It was a policy that required the investment of whatever resources Lorenzo could muster. As with every project, he was ambitious. Shortly after marrying off his young daughter Maddalena to the pope’s dissolute son, he had the bank lend the Curia 30,000 florins. This was stretching credit to the limit. He accepted alum instead of cash for arrears repayments on papal loans, though the Medici no longer held the monopoly on merchandising alum and had few outlets from which they could sell the mineral. Every diplomatic courier traveling from Florence to Rome starts to bring gifts for Pope Innocent. Apparently the pontiff loves to eat game. Then ply him with game. He loves wine. Here are eighteen flasks of finest Vernaccia. And beautiful fabrics. And the best artists. Anything that will make His Holiness happy. “The pope sleeps with Lorenzo il Magnifico’s eyes,” commented a delegate from Ferrara. Until at last the seduction was complete. In 1489, the pope caved in, waived age restrictions, and made the thirteen-year-old Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici a cardinal. Now he could accumulate even more benefices. “The greatest honor ever conferred upon our house,” Lorenzo announced. Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, later Pope Leo X, would keep the Medici fortunes alive after their expulsion from Florence in 1494 until their return in 1512.
BUT THE CHURCH was not entirely rotten. While the Medici were seeking to consolidate the family’s temporal power through acquiring Church incomes, Il Magnifico’s near-contemporary, Girolamo Savonarola, was climbing the ecclesiastical hierarchy in an entirely different spirit. Like the young Giovanni, Savonarola too would one day be offered a cardinal’s hat. And as with Giovanni, the appointment, or rather its offer, came as part of a bargain, an exchange, as though Church appointments were a recognized form of currency. With Giovanni, the honor constituted a payment for favors the Medici had already granted to pope and Church; in Savonarola’s case, the offer of the cardinalship was conditional on his granting a favor to Rome in the future: He must moderate his inflammatory preaching, he must get back into line, he must stop behaving as if he were in direct contact with God and holier than the official Church. Savonarola refused. “I don’t want any hats,” he replied to the pope, “nor mitres great or small; the only thing I want is what you gave your saints: death. A red hat, a hat of blood, that’s what I desire.”
Savonarola was the antithesis of Lorenzo and of the Medici and bankers in general. Here, at last, was a man who wouldn’t trade, a man who had no use for the art of exchange, who couldn’t be seduced. Yet, like Lorenzo, Savonarola was an artist, and in his own way a showman. His terrifying sermons of gloom and doom, of the need for radical spiritual renewal, transformed the Florence of Lorenzo’s and the Medici bank’s last years, setting Il Magnifico’s ethos and achievements in sharp and twilit relief.
It had taken medieval Christianity a thousand years to produce the cautious revolution that was humanism, a movement eager to escape Christianity’s straitjacket, but careful never to renounce its principles. It took eclectic humanism only a hundred years to provoke the reaction that was Savonarola. But from the moment the secular began to creep into the sacred space, the bankers to gratify their vanity in altarpieces and tombs, the cardinals to collect their “discretionary” returns on deposits, the popes to mix up myth and prayer book — not to mention holy wars and commercial monopolies — Savonarola and, soon after him, Luther were figures in the making, men formed in opposition to a Church authority that was seen as corrupt; fundamentalists. Unlike the early Christians, they did not call their followers out of the world to a radically separate life. Instead, they demanded that official and powerful Christendom become truly Christian. The political consequences of such a transformation, should it ever take place, were enormous.
Born in Ferrara in 1452, called away from a career in medicine by a verse from Genesis—“Get thee out of thy country!”—Savonarola first preached in Florence between 1482 and 1487. “He introduced almost a new way of pronouncing God’s word, Apostolic, without dividing up the sermon, not proposing questions and answers, never singing, avoiding ornament and eloquence. His aim was just to expound something from the Old Testament and introduce the simplicity of the early church….”
Thus the comment of a contemporary. It was not, then, a return to medieval Christian preaching. The negatives in this description tell us that. There would be no old-style scholastic caviling. But neither would there be pretty quotations from classical authors, nor any reference to authorities outside the word of God. In a society buzzing with too many ideas, a Church cluttered with pricey secular bric-a-brac, Savonarola strips his Christianity down to the bare scriptures, the naked crucifix. “I sense a light within me,” he says. It is Christ, the light of the world. But not, as Ficino would have it, Plato’s light, or Proclus’s, or that of some Orphic hymn. “Oh priests, oh prelates of the Church of Christ,” cries Savonarola, “leave your benefices, which you cannot justly hold, leave your pomp, your splendid feasts and banquets.” He might have been preaching directly to Giovanni de’ Medici. Lorenzo also warned his son not to be corrupted by that “pit of iniquity” that was Rome. But there was no question of abandoning the benefices. Why else did one go into the Church?