The Medici and the Ottimati: A Partnership of Conflict

Part 2: Lorenzo

Lorenzo de’ Medici long ago became a figure of legend. Easily the most famous member of a family that later produced popes and grand dukes, he personifies the so-called golden age of Florence and Italy before 1494. In his History of Italy Guicciardini made him the indispensable guardian of the concord, happiness, and balance of power among the Italian states, whose death opened the door to the invasions and wars that engulfed Italy. Even in his own time, court poets and humanists extravagantly lauded him as the “savior of his country,” “born to reach all the heights,” dear to the Muses, a new Maecenas, and much more. Mythmaking around Lorenzo abandoned the model of the ideal republican citizen, as the vogue of neoplatonism elevated him to the rank of philosopher-king. Sixteenth-century architects of another phase of Medici rule and dynastic legend crafted in retrospect an image of Lorenzo as the figure on whose sacral presence and salvific power Florence and even all Italy depended.465 In later centuries Lorenzo came to symbolize the entire age. Voltaire identified fifteenth-century Italy as one of Europe’s four great cultural epochs (together with Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, and the France of Louis XIV) and made Lorenzo its defining personality.466

Indeed, he was unlike any Florentine before him. Of the members of his family, and among all Florentine political leaders, only Lorenzo was a writer and poet of genuine merit, with an established place in the history of Italian literature. He was also the most innovative political leader in the republic’s history. Whereas Cosimo remained in the role of a behind-the-scenes boss who, although no one doubted his power, represented himself as one of many leading citizens with whom he collaborated in governing, Lorenzo affected a far more visible, personal, and exclusive style of leadership and, moreover, did so from the very beginning, acting like a prince even before his father died in 1469. His unprecedented political style no doubt aimed at avoiding a repetition of the events of 1465-6. Seeing everything his family had built over decades nearly collapse must have been a frightening experience for the seventeen-year-old heir apparent. From it he drew political lessons that shaped a style of governance whose central feature was to make himself the indispensable point of reference for every public decision, election, and policy, for every officeholder and bureaucrat, for all aspects of Florence’s dealings with its subject territories and other states, and for its religious and ritual life. Despite some reversals, he succeeded in making no one feel safe about doing anything in politics (and elsewhere) without his tacit or explicit approval. He thus placed himself, visibly, indeed ostentatiously, at the center of everything from elections and patronage to ritual and culture, seeking to disabuse the Florentines of the illusion fostered by his father and grandfather that the Medici were citizens like others, only with greater responsibilities. In attempting to make himself the charismatic center that Florentines had tenaciously resisted for two centuries, he opened up an abyss between his methods and those of Cosimo and Piero.

There was of course resistance, albeit unsuccessful. Lorenzo’s reputation among those not beholden to the regime was never as brilliant as that fashioned by poets, humanists, and some modern historians; it was, in fact, often unfavorable. Despite Poliziano’s claim that Lorenzo and his family enjoyed the “willing support of all good men” and that the “whole city rejoiced” in his safety when it became known he had survived the Pazzi conspiracy,467 Lorenzo was in many respects a distant and unpopular figure for many Florentines. In their private diaries some denounced his arbitrary and highhanded abuses of power. He was accused of preventing or forcing marriages against the wishes of families, of confiscating inheritances and manipulating the law courts to favor his friends and punish his enemies. Ottimati ambassadors sometimes complained about Lorenzo’s private diplomacy and his insistence that they report to him first and only then say what he wanted them to say to the magistracies under whose authority they held their posts. Many grumbled about the lavishly expensive celebrations and state visits that more than once turned the city into a gigantic Medici theater. And those who knew of his interference in communal finances accused him of profiting at the public’s expense. Giovanni Cambi recounted the injustice done to his father Neri, whom Lorenzo dismissed as Standardbearer of Justice because he had (quite legally) fined friends of Lorenzo whose absence had prevented the needed quorum for the election of a new Signoria. Cambi denounced Lorenzo, after his death, as “a greater tyrant than if he had been a ruler with formal authority [signore a bacchetta].” An offended member of the (Medicean) Martelli family also branded him a “tyrant.” Alamanno Rinuccini called him “the malignant tyrant, who tried to become lord of the republic like Julius Caesar.” Piero Parenti, son of Marco, recorded that at Lorenzo’s death in 1492 “the lower classes were happy,” and “the popolo and elite [gentilotti] not especially sad. The leading citizens were divided in opinion: those who were close to Lorenzo and held power with him were extremely sad, thinking they would lose their position and perhaps lose power altogether; others who weren’t so close and were not involved in government instead rejoiced, thinking that the republic would recover its liberty and they would escape from servitude and enjoy a larger share in government. The people secretly accepted his death, especially because of their having been oppressed, since under his control the city was nothing other than enslaved.”468

The myths of Lorenzo’s magnificence and sacral presence may have been fashioned to cover this underlying dissatisfaction with his abuses of power and to mask the ever more brittle nature of his support with a mystification of that power. A golden age it may have seemed in retrospect, but Lorenzo’s more than two decades of leadership were in fact filled with crises whose root cause was the precariousness of the support behind him. Although by the 1480s he seemingly achieved uncontested power and complete control of government, elections, and institutions, the other side of the coin was that, by turning himself into a prince in all but name, yet without legal authority, he weakened the consensus that his grandfather had tried to build among the ottimati and gradually lost the cooperation of their class. Worsening relations with the ottimati made tighter political controls necessary, and the apex of Lorenzo’s power thus reflected the regime’s growing weakness as each crisis further narrowed the circle of those whom he could trust. His progressive isolation from the ottimati led to revolutionary transformations in the exercise of power, both in his generation and beyond.