In 1345 Cinto Brandini and nine others were put to death for organizing the poorer workers in the woolen industry, and foreign laborers were imported to break up these unions.10 In 1368 the “little people” attempted a revolution but were suppressed. Ten years later the tumulto dei Ciompi— the revolt of the wool carders—brought the working classes for a dizzy moment into control of the commune. Led by a barefoot workingman, Michele di Lando, the carders surged into the Palazzo Vecchio, dispersed the Signory, and established a dictatorship of the proletariat (1378). The laws against unionization were repealed, the lower unions were enfranchised, a moratorium of twelve years was declared on the debts of wage earners, and interest rates were reduced to further ease the burdens of the debtor class. Business leaders retaliated by shutting down their shops and inducing the landowners to cut the city’s food supply. The harassed revolutionists split into factions—an aristocracy of labor consisting of skilled craftsmen, and a “left wing” moved with communistic ideas. Finally the conservatives brought in strong men from the countryside, armed them, overthrew the divided government, and restored the business class to power (1382).
The triumphant bourgeoisie revised the constitution to consolidate its victory. The Signoria, or municipal council of signori or gentlemen, was composed of eight priori delle arti— priors or leaders of the guilds—chosen by lot from bags containing the names of those eligible for office. They in turn chose as their executive head a gonfaloniere di giustizia—a “standardbearer of justice” or executor of the law. Of the eight priors four had to be from the greater guilds, though these arti maggiori included but a small minority of the adult male population. The same proportion was required in the advisory Consiglio del Popolo or Council of the People; popolo, however, meant only the members of the twenty-one guilds. The Consiglio del Comune was chosen from any guild membership, but its function was confined to assembling when summoned by the Signory, and to voting yes or no on proposals put before it by the priors. On rare occasions the priors called a parlamento of all voters to the Piazza della Signoria by ringing the great bell in the Palazzo Vecchio tower. Usually such a general assembly chose a balia or commission of reform, gave it supreme power for a stated period, and adjourned.
It was a generous error of nineteenth-century historians to credit pre-Medicean Florence with a degree of democracy quite unknown in that plutocratic paradise. The subject cities, though themselves fertile in genius and proud of their heritage, had no voice in the Florentine Signory that governed them. In Florence only 3200 males could vote; and in both councils the representatives of the business class were a rarely challenged majority.11 The upper classes were convinced that the illiterate masses could form no sound or safe judgment of the community good in domestic crises or foreign affairs. The Florentines loved freedom, but it was, among the poor, the freedom to be commanded by Florentine masters, and, among the rich, the liberty to rule the city and its dependencies without imperial or papal or feudal impediment.
The indisputable defects of the constitution were the brevity of its terms of office, and the frequent changes in the constitution itself. The evil results were faction, conspiracy, violence, confusion, incompetence, and the inability of the republic to design and execute such consistent and long-term policies as made for the stability and power of Venice. The pertinent good result was an electric atmosphere of conflict and debate that quickened the pulse, sharpened sense and mind and wit, stirred the imagination, and lifted Florence for a century to the cultural leadership of the world.
III. COSIMO “PATER PATRIAE”
Politics in Florence was the conflict of wealthy families and factions—the Ricci, Albizzi, Medici, Ridolfi, Pazzi, Pitti, Strozzi, Rucellai, Valori, Capponi, Soderini—for control of the government. From 1381 to 1434, with some interruptions, the Albizzi maintained their ascendancy in the state, and valiantly protected the rich against the poor.
The Medici family can be traced back to 1201, when Chiarissimo de’ Medici was a member of the Communal Council.* Averardo de’ Medici, great-great-grandfather of Cosimo, founded the fortune of the family by bold commerce and judicious finance, and was chosen gonfalonier in 1314. Averardo’s grandnephew, Salvestro de’ Medici, gonfalonier in 1378, established the popularity of the family by espousing the cause of the rebel poor. Salvestro’s grandnephew, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, gonfalonier in 1421, further endeared the family to the people by supporting—though he himself would suffer heavily from it—an annual tax (catasto) of one half of one per cent on income, which was reckoned at seven per cent of a man’s capital (1427).12 The rich, who had previously enjoyed a poll or head tax merely equal to that paid by the poor, vowed vengeance on the Medici.
Giovanni di Bicci died in 1428, bequeathing to his son Cosimo a good name and the largest fortune in Tuscany—179,221 florins ($4,480,525?).13 Cosimo was already thirty-nine years old, fully fit to carry on the far-flung enterprises of the firm. These were not confined to banking; they included the management of extensive farms, the manufacture of silk and woolen goods, and a varied trade that bound Russia and Spain, Scotland and Syria, Islam and Christendom. Cosimo, while building churches in Florence, saw no sin in making trade agreements, and exchanging costly presents, with Turkish sultans. The firm made a specialty of importing from the East articles of little bulk and great value, like spices, almonds, and sugar, and sold these and other products in a score of European ports.
Cosimo directed all this with quiet skill, and found time left for politics. As a member of the Dieci, or War Council of Ten, he guided Florence to victory against Lucca, and as a banker he financed the war by lending large sums to the government. His popularity excited the envy of other magnates, and in 1433, Rinaldo degli Albizzi launched an attack upon him as planning to overthrow the Republic and make himself dictator. Rinaldo persuaded Bernardo Guadagni, then gonfalonier, to order Cosimo’s arrest; Cosimo surrendered himself, and was confined in the Palazzo Vecchio. Since Rinaldo, with his armed retainers, dominated the parlamento in the Piazza della Signoria, a decree of death seemed imminent. But Cosimo managed to convey a thousand ducats ($25,000?) to Bernardo, who suddenly became more humane, and compromised by having Cosimo, his sons, and his chief supporters banished for ten years.14 Cosimo took up his residence in Venice, where his modesty and his means made him many friends. Soon the Venetian government was using its influence to have him recalled. The Signory elected in 1434 was favorable to him, and reversed the sentences of exile; Cosimo returned in triumph, and Rinaldo and his sons fled.
A parlamento appointed a balia, and gave it supreme power. After serving three short terms Cosimo relinquished all political positions; “to be elected to office,” he said, “is often prejudicial to the body and hurtful to the soul.”15 Since his enemies had left the city, his friends easily dominated the government. Without disturbing republican forms, he managed, by persuasion or money, to have his adherents remain in office to the end of his life. His loans to influential families won or forced their support; his gifts to the clergy enlisted their enthusiastic aid; and his public benefactions, of unprecedented scope and generosity, easily reconciled the citizens to his rule. The Florentines had observed that the constitution of the Republic did not protect them from the aristocracy of wealth; the defeat of the Ciompi had burned this lesson into the public memory. If the populace had to choose between the Albizzi, who favored the rich, and the Medici, who favored the middle classes and the poor, it could not long hesitate. A people oppressed by its economic masters, and weary of faction, welcomed dictatorship in Florence in 1434, in Perugia in 1389, in Bologna in 1401, in Siena in 1477, in Rome in 1347 and 1922. “The Medici,” said Villani, “were enabled to attain supremacy in the name of freedom, and with the support of the popolo and the populace.”16
Cosimo used his power with shrewd moderation, tempered with occasional violence. When his friends suspected that Baldaccio d’Anghiari was forming a conspiracy to end Cosimo’s power, they threw Baldaccio out of a sufficien
tly high window to ensure his termination, and Cosimo did not complain; it was one of his quips that “states are not ruled with paternosters.” He replaced the fixed income tax with a sliding scale of levies on capital, and was accused of adjusting these assessments to favor his friends and discourage his enemies. These levies totaled 4,875,000 florins ($121,875,000) in the first twenty years of Cosimo’s ascendancy; and those who balked at paying them were summarily jailed. Many aristocrats left the city and resumed the rural life of the medieval nobility. Cosimo accepted their departure with equanimity, remarking that new aristocrats could be made with a few yards of scarlet cloth.17
The people smiled approval, for they noted that the levies were devoted to the administration and adornment of Florence, and that Cosimo himself contributed 400,000 florins ($10,000,000?) to public works and private charities;18 this was almost double the sum that he left to his heirs.19 He labored assiduously to the end of his seventy-five years, managing at once his own properties and the affairs of the state. When Edward IV of England asked for a substantial loan, Cosimo obliged him, ignoring the faithlessness of Edward III, and the King repaid him with coin and political support. Tommaso Parentucelli, Bishop of Bologna, ran out of funds and asked for aid; Cosimo supplied him; and when Parentucelli became Pope Nicholas V Cosimo was given charge of all papal finances. To keep the varied threads of his activity from tangling, he rose early, and went nearly every day to his office, like an American millionaire. At home he pruned his trees and tended his vines. He dressed simply, ate and drank temperately, and (after begetting an illegitimate son by a slave girl) lived a quiet and orderly family life. Those who were admitted to his home were astonished at the contrast between the homely fare of his private table and the lavish feasts that he provided for foreign dignitaries as a lure to comity and peace. He was normally humane, mild, forgiving, reticent and yet known for his dry wit. He was generous to the poor, paid the taxes of impoverished friends, and hid his charity, like his power, in a gracious anonymity. Botticelli, Pontormo, and Benozzo Gozzoli have pictured him for us: of middle stature and olive complexion, with gray receding hair, long, sharp nose, and a grave, kindly countenance bespeaking shrewd wisdom and calm strength.
His foreign policy was dedicated to the organization of peace. Coming to power after a series of ruinous conflicts, Cosimo noted how war, actual or imminent, hobbled the march of trade. When the rule of the Visconti in Milan collapsed in chaos at Filippo Maria’s death, and Venice threatened to absorb the duchy and dominate all nothern Italy to the very gates of Florence, Cosimo sent Francesco Sforza the means to establish himself in Milan and check the Venetian advance. When Venice and Naples formed an alliance against Florence, Cosimo called in so many loans made to their citizens that their governments were induced to make peace.20 Thereafter Milan and Florence stood against Venice and Naples in a balance of power so even that neither side dared to risk a war. This policy of balanced powers, conceived by Cosimo and continued by Lorenzo, gave Italy those decades of peace and order, from 1450 to 1492, during which the cities grew rich enough to finance the early Renaissance.
It was the good fortune of Italy and mankind that Cosimo cared as much for literature, scholarship, philosophy, and art as for wealth and power. He was a man of education and taste; he knew Latin well, and had a smattering of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic; he was broad enough to appreciate the piety and painting of Fra Angelico, the engaging rascality of Fra Filippo Lippi, the classical style of Ghiberti’s reliefs, the bold originality of Donatello’s sculpture, the grandiose churches of Brunellesco, the restrained power of Michelozzo’s architecture, the pagan Platonism of Gemistus Pletho, the mystic Platonism of Pico and Ficino, the refinement of Alberti, the learned vulgarity of Poggio, the bibliolatry of Niccolò de’ Niccoli; and all these men experienced his generosity. He brought Joannes Argyropoulos to Florence to instruct its youth in the language and literature of ancient Greece, and for twelve years he studied with Ficino the classics of Greece and Rome. He spent a large part of his fortune collecting classic texts, so that the most costly cargoes of his ships were in many cases manuscripts carried from Greece or Alexandria. When Niccolò de’ Niccoli had ruined himself in buying ancient manuscripts, Cosimo opened for him an unlimited credit at the Medici bank, and supported him till death. He engaged forty-five copyists, under the guidance of the enthusiastic bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, to transcribe such manuscripts as could not be bought. All these “precious minims” he placed in rooms at the monastery of San Marco, or in the abbey of Fiesole, or in his own library. When Niccoli died (1437), leaving eight hundred manuscripts valued at 6000 florins ($150,000), along with many debts, and naming sixteen trustees to determine the disposal of the books, Cosimo offered to assume the debts if he might allocate the volumes. It was so agreed, and Cosimo divided the collection between San Marco’s library and his own. All these collections were open to teachers and students without charge. Said the Florentine historian Varchi, with patriotic exaggeration:
That Greek letters were not completely forgotten, to the great loss of humanity, and that Latin letters have been revived to the infinite benefit of the people—this all Italy, nay all the world, owes solely to the high wisdom and friendliness of the house of the Medici.21
Of course the great work of revival had been inaugurated by the translators in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and by Arabic commentators, and by Petrarch and Boccaccio. It had been continued by scholars and collectors like Salutati, Traversari, Bruni, and Valla before Cosimo; it was carried forward independently of him by Niccoli, Poggio, Filelfo, King Alfonso the Magnanimous of Naples, and a hundred other contemporaries of Cosimo, even by his exiled rival, Palla Strozzi. But if we embrace in our judgment not only Cosimo Pater Patriae, but his descendants Lorenzo the Magnificent, Leo X, and Clement VII, we may admit that in the patronage of learning and art the Medici have never been equaled by any other family in the known history of mankind.
IV. THE HUMANISTS
It was under the Medici, or in their day, that the humanists captivated the mind of Italy, turned it from religion to philosophy, from heaven to earth, and revealed to an astonished generation the riches of pagan thought and art. These men mad about scholarship received, as early as Ariosto,22 the name of umanisti because they called the study of classic culture umanità— the “humanities”—or literae humaniores—not “more humane” but more human letters. The proper study of mankind was now to be man, in all the potential strength and beauty of his body, in all the joy and pain of his senses and feelings, in all the frail majesty of his reason; and in these as most abundantly and perfectly revealed in the literature and art of ancient Greece and Rome. This was humanism.
Nearly all the Latin, and many of the Greek classics now extant were known to medieval scholars here and there; and the thirteenth century was acquainted with the major pagan philosophers. But that century had almost ignored Greek poetry; and many ancient worthies now honored by us lay neglected in monastic or cathedral libraries. It was mostly in such forgotten corners that Petrarch and his successors found the “lost” classics, “gentle prisoners,” he called them, “held in captivity by barbarous jailers.” Boccaccio, visiting Monte Cassino, was shocked to find precious manuscripts rotting in dust, or mutilated to make psalters or amulets. Poggio, visiting the Swiss monastery of St. Gall while attending the Council of Constance, found the Institutiones of Quintilian in a foul dark dungeon, and felt, as he reclaimed the rolls, that the old pedagogue was stretching out his hands, begging to be saved from the “barbarians”; for by that name the culture-conscious Italians, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, called their virile conquerors beyond the Alps. Poggio alone, undeterred by winter’s cold or snow, exhumed from such tombs the texts of Lucretius, Columella, Frontinus, Vitruvius, Valerius Flaccus, Tertullian, Plautus, Petronius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and several major speeches of Cicero. Coluccio Salutati unearthed Cicero’s letters ad familiares at Vercelli (1389); Gherardo Landriani found Cicero??
?s treatises on rhetoric in an old chest at Lodi (1422); Ambrogio Traversari rescued Cornelius Nepos from oblivion in Padua (1434); the Agricola, Germania, and Dialogi of Tacitus were discovered in Germany (1455); the first six books of Tacitus’ Annales, and a full manuscript of the younger Pliny’s letters were recovered from the monastery of Corvey (1508), and became a prize possession of Leo X.
In the half century before the Turks took Constantinople a dozen humanists studied or traveled in Greece; one of them, Giovanni Aurispa, brought back to Italy 238 manuscripts, including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles; another, Francesco Filelfo, salvaged from Constantinople (1427) texts of Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Aristotle, and seven dramas of Euripides. When such literary explorers returned to Italy with their finds they were welcomed like victorious generals, and princes and prelates paid well for a share of the spoils. The fall of Constantinople resulted in the loss of many classics previously mentioned by Byzantine writers as in the libraries of that city; nevertheless thousands of volumes were saved, and most of them came to Italy; to this day the best manuscripts of Greek classics are in Italy. For three centuries, from Petrarch to Tasso, men collected manuscripts with philatelic passion. Niccolò de’ Niccoli spent more than he had in this pursuit; Andreolo de Ochis was ready to sacrifice his home, his wife, his life to add to his library; Poggio suffered when he saw money being spent on anything else than books.