The Florentines were inordinately proud of this system which, upheld by them as a guarantee of their much vaunted freedom, they were ever ready to compare favourably with the forms of government to be found in other less fortunate Italian states. Venice, admittedly, was also a republic, but it was a republic in which, so its detractors soon pointed out, various noble families played a part in government which would have been impossible for such families under the constitution of Florence. Florence’s great rival, Milan, was under the firm rule of a tyrannical duke, Filippo Maria Visconti. The Papal States, a disorderly array of petty tyrannies which sprawled across the peninsula from Rome to the Adriatic, were in a condition approaching anarchy; while the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily was being torn apart by the rival factions of the Houses of Anjou and Aragon.
Compared with these other states, Florence certainly seemed fortunate to enjoy so commendably stable and democratic a government. But in practice the government was not democratic at all. Not only were the ordinary workers, the Minuto Popolo, successfully excluded from it; not only were the nobles, the Grandi, similarly denied representation in the councils of the Republic; but the whole process of election to those councils was controlled by a few of the richest merchant families who contrived to ensure that only the names of reliable supporters found their way into the horse, or, when this proved impossible, that a Portamento should be summoned and a Balìa appointed to ‘reform’ the horse, thus disposing of any unreliable Priori who might have been elected to the Signoria. In fact, it was a government carried on mainly by the rich and almost exclusively in their interests.
To the Florentine merchant, money had a quite extraordinary significance. To be rich was to be honourable, to be poor disgraced. According to that characteristic Renaissance man, Leon Battista Alberti, the philosopher, poet, athlete, painter, musician and architect, who came from one of Florence’s oldest merchant families,8 no one who was poor would ever ‘find it easy to acquire honour and fame by means of his virtues’; poverty ‘threw virtue into the shadows’ and subjected it to a ‘hidden and obscure misery’. Matteo Palmieri, another Florentine philosopher of old merchant stock, agreed with this view. In his opinion only the successful merchant who traded on a large scale was worthy of regard and honour: provided the lowest orders of society earned enough to keep them in food from day to day, then they had enough and should not expect to have more. Gregorio Dati, one of Florence’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.’
By common consent it was agreed that the trade from which the merchant’s riches were derived must be both ‘comely and grand’. Quickly made fortunes were highly suspect; so were those made from dealing in ‘ugly trades’, from ‘socially inferior skills’, from ‘low callings, suitable for wage earners’. Trade on an imposing scale and in fine merchandise, however, was not only a credit to the merchant who carried it on but also to the Republic itself which derived such benefit from it.
Having acquired riches the merchant must not be chary of spending them. He must have a fine palazzo and a commodious family loggia, a pleasant country villa and a private chapel. He must provide his family with suitably expensive if not unduly flamboyant clothes, and be ready to provide his daughters with handsome dowries. He must be generous in his donations to the building of churches and convents not only for the glory of God but also for the honour of his descendants and of Florence. If he were rich enough he would gain additional prestige by lending money to the. Republic. Giovanni Rucellai, whose enormous fortune was based on the famous Florentine red dye, the oricello, from which his family derived their name, declared that he had done himself much more honour ‘by having spent money well than by having earned it’; he had also derived deeper satisfaction in spending it, especially the money he had spent on his palazzo, a splendid edifice designed by Alberti.9
But to be a rich and munificent merchant in a respectable way of business was not in itself sufficient to gain esteem in Florentine society. Ideally a good marriage was also required; so was a tradition of family service to the Republic. Indeed, no one could pretend to high social rank who did not hold or had not held some public office. This was impressed upon the sons of merchants from their earliest years; and a family whose name did not feature on the parchment lists of former Priori, all of whom had been carefully recorded since 1282, was almost beyond the pale. The venerated and enormously rich patrician, Niccolò da Uzzano, kept one of these lists hanging on the wall of his study so that, when the candidature of someone unknown to him was canvassed, he could immediately satisfy himself that he was not a parvenu.10
The Medici were not parvenus. Yet, compared with many of their rivals, they were not an ancient family either. In later years all manner of legends gained currency.
II
THE RISE OF THE MEDICI
‘Always keep out of the public eye’
IT WAS said that the Medici were descended from one Averardo, a brave knight who had fought under the banner of Charlemagne. This Averardo had once passed through Tuscany on his way to Rome, and in the district to the north of Florence known as the Mugello he had come upon a savage giant, the terror of the poor peasants of the neighbourhood. He had done battle with the monster and had killed him. In the fight his shield had been dented in several places by the heavy blows of the giant’s ferociously wielded mace; and Charlemagne had rewarded Averardo’s bravery by allowing him to commemorate his great victory by representing the dents on his coat-of-arms by red balls or palle on a field of gold – ever afterwards the insignia of the Medici.1 More prosaically, and rather more probably, others maintained that these red balls represented pills or cupping-glasses, the Medici – as their name suggested – having originally been doctors or apothecaries, descendants of a charcoal burner who had moved into Florence from the Mugello. Yet others had it that the balls represented coins, the traditional emblems of pawnbrokers.
What at least was certain was that in more recent years the Medici had been leading lives of quiet respectability in Florence, prospering as the city prospered, and occasionally occupying public office. The first member of the family to become Gonfaloniere was one Ardingo de’ Medici who was elected to that office in 1296. His brother Guccio also became Gonfaloniere three years later and had the distinction of being buried in a fourth-century sarcophagus which was placed outside the black and white octagonal church of San Giovanni Battista, known as the Baptistery. Another Medici, Cosimo’s great-great grandfather, Averardo, was elected Gonfaloniere in 1314; but thereafter the family appear to have suffered a decline. One of Averardo’s grandsons, Filigno di Conte de’ Medici, lamented this decline in a short book of memoirs he wrote for his children. He was pleased to say that the family still owned several small houses in Florence, as well as two palazzi, an inn, and ‘the half of a palazzo with houses round it’ at Cafaggiolo in the Mugello. They were still quite well off, but not nearly as rich as once they had been; while their social position, though’ still considerable, ought to have been higher’. Gone were the days when it ‘used to be said, “You are like one of the Medici”, and every man feared [them]’.