Interlogue One: I. Cosimo De’ Medici

Interlogue One

COSIMO DE’ MEDICI

THE TEMPTATION to include in this volume whole chapters about three men was not easy to resist. They were Cosimo de’ Medici, Sir Thomas Gresham, and Jacques Coeur. The essentials in the stories of these men were quite the same. They were the chief pioneers in organizing the forms of the new capitalist system in Italy, England, and France, respectively. They seemed, however, interesting and romantic in their personal histories, but less significant than Jacob Fugger, and it was not possible to include more than one.

When we speak of the Medici we may choose one of three—Giovanni di Bicci, surnamed the Friend of the People, or Cosimo, his son, called Pater Patriae, or Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo, known as the Magnificent. Giovanni laid the foundation of the fortune. Cosimo, however, ablest of the three, accumulated that vast wealth that gave the Medici their power in Florence. Lorenzo advertised, paraded, luxuriated in that fortune and laid the foundation for its ruin. All of them were merchants, moneylenders, bankers, manufacturers. Cosimo, however, added to the techniques of these professions the role of politician and the devices of homicide. One does not use these brutal terms about such splendid persons. Yet if truth is to be served we must describe Cosimo and Lorenzo as bankers, merchants, manufacturers, statesmen, and murderers.

Giovanni actually established a large business with branches all over Italy, in the Levant, Constantinople, and other cities. He opposed the Albizzi, rulers of Florence, and was hailed by the people as their leader. The Medici remained continuously heads of what is called a republic for four generations—from 1434 to 1494—sixty years in which the republic ripened into a thorough tyranny.

Cosimo, shrewd, iron-willed, looking the esthete, gracious but cruel, refused office and ruled Florence as the invisible power functioning behind some nominated tool, as Dick Croker or Charlie Murphy did, save that they ruled a vast city and he a small one of 70,000 souls. He dressed in simple robes, sometimes like a poor guildsman, shrank from notice like Rockefeller, whom he resembled in some respects, whereas his grandson Lorenzo resembled J. Pierpont Morgan. He mingled the virtues of the chalice and the dagger. The problems of competition that have continued to torture industrial barons, he met with the singularly effective application of the knife. Persons of power who were in his way in the state or the market place were driven out of Florence; the less fortunate were murdered. An important source of his business growth was the finances of the popes. The Medici became papal bankers. The possession of these large funds served him as the possession of the funds of the emperor served the Mitsuis in Japan.

A devout Christian, Cosimo fraternized with the Franciscans whom he presented with a monastery, providing it with a cell to which he himself retired at intervals for meditation and prayer. When he was seventy-five he went to his last rest with the perfect tranquillity of the righteous man, not at all ruffled by the memory of his climb to wealth and power. His son Piero, surnamed the Gouty, succeeded him, and died after a futile career of five years. Into his shoes stepped Lorenzo, who proceeded to lavish upon Florence the wealth his grandfather had amassed.

Lorenzo made money, of course, for he possessed a great fortune, a great money-making machine, and enormous prestige. From Pope Paul II he got a monopoly of the alum recently discovered in the hills around Volterra, his Holiness justly protecting the monopoly by proclaiming excommunication against anyone who competed by importing alum from the Turks. Thus excommunication was added to assassination as a defense against competition. Lorenzo was a good Catholic, but a better moneylender. He loaned Pope Innocent VIII 100,000 ducats for a year, taking as surety two tenths of the stipends of all newly appointed priests, and possession of the Città di Castello until paid. The Pope made Lorenzo’s fourteen-year-old son a cardinal and gave to Lorenzo’s daughter his own illegitimate son in marriage.

An attempt upon Lorenzo’s life was made by two priests during Mass, instigated by Pope Sixtus IV and the Pazzi, bankers. Lorenzo’s vengeance was swift. Certain of the Pazzi were hanged, others butchered in the streets, some cast into the Arno. He became an unrestrained tyrant, filled Florence with spies, was himself excommunicated by the Pope. He showered gold and favors upon painters, sculptors, poets, philosophers, enriched Florence with their works, bought rare manuscripts, books, antiquities, covered himself with the praise-giving of these subsidized flatterers, and, dying, left his city upon the brink of ruin. His son Pietro ruled disastrously for two years and was driven out of Florence to make way for the theocratic Fascism of the monkish enemy of bankers, national and international, Savonarola.