Christopher Hibbert - The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

Meanwhile Archbishop Salviati and the other conspirators had gone as planned to the Palazzo della Signoria with their armed supporters, most of them villainous-looking mercenaries from Perugia disguised as his suite. Salviati informed the Gonfaloniere , Cesare Petrucci, that he had an urgent message for him from the Pope. Petrucci, who was in the middle of dinner, gave orders for the Archbishop and his attendants to be admitted. Salviati himself was shown into a reception room, while the Perugians were placed in nearby offices, the doors of which were closed behind them. The Archbishop’s other companions, including Jacopo di Poggio Bracciolini, were left outside in the corridor.

Having completed his dinner, Petrucci came out to receive Salviati who by now was so nervous he was trembling. The Archbishop delivered what he claimed to be the Pope’s message in a thick and mumbling voice, almost incoherently, changing colour alarmingly, and glancing round from time to time at the door. Petrucci, having listened to him for a few moments only, called out the guard, whereupon Salviati rushed from the room, shouting to his own men that the moment to strike had come. The response to his cries, however, were muffled shouts and hangings; for, on assuming office as Gonfaloniere , Petrucci had had the rooms of the Palazzo della Signoria fitted with special catches which could not be operated from the inside. The Perugians were, for the moment, effectively imprisoned.

As they hammered on the doors, Jacopo do Poggio Bracciolini rushed at the Gonfaloniere who caught him by the hair and threw him to the ground. Then, shouting for the Priori to follow him and for the Vacca to be tolled, the strong and energetic Gonfaloniere snatched up an iron cooking-spit as the nearest weapon to hand and rushed at the Archbishop and his companions who were quickly beaten to the ground. The notes of the great bell were by then booming through the city as the people poured into the Piazza. Members of the Pazzi family and small groups of their supporters rode up and down through the streets shouting, ‘ Libertà Libertà! Popolo e Libertà! Abasso i Medici! Abasso le pallet Libertà! Libertà! ’ But although some of the people in the crowd joined in these shouts, most of them responded insistently with,’ Vivano le palle! Vivano le palle! Palle! Palle! Palle! ’

A group of about fifty armed Medici supporters burst into the Palazzo della Signoria, and, joined by the palace guard, attacked the Perugians. Having killed them all, they rushed out into the Piazza again, bearing the dripping heads of their victims on the ends of lances and swords. News of Giuliano’s murder had by now reached the Palace where immediately a rope was tied round Jacopo di Poggio’s neck, the other end was fixed to a transom and his body was hurled from a window. Archbishop Salviati was treated in the same way. So, too, was Francesco de’ Pazzi who, still bleeding profusely from the thigh, had been dragged from his hiding place in the family palace and stripped naked. Two of the Archbishop’s companions were strangled, and their bodies also hurled out. All five bodies were left dangling above the heads of the surging mob in the Piazza, twisting and swaying in the shadows beneath the machicolations of the northern wall. Poliziano, who was in the Piazza at the time, recorded the gruesome fact that as the Archbishop rolled and struggled at the end of his rope, his eyes goggling in his head, he fixed his teeth into Francesco de’ Pazzi’s naked body.

Following the fierce lead of the executioners in the Palazzo della Signoria, hundreds of people now ran through the streets, seeking out other conspirators or any unpopular citizen who could conveniently be charged with complicity in the plot. They swarmed beneath the windows of the Medici Palace, demanding to see Lorenzo who appeared before them, his neck in bandages, his brocade waistcoat covered with blood, to assure them that he was only slightly injured and to beg them not to wreak vengeance on those whom they merely suspected of murder. He urged them to save their energy to resist the enemies of the State who had engineered the conspiracy, and who would now undoubtedly attack the city that had thwarted it.

If the people cheered his words, they did not heed them. They attacked the conspirators, and those whom they chose to accuse of conspiracy, killing some, mutilating others, and dragging their remains through the streets. For several days the rioting continued, country people pouring into the city to see what pleasures or rewards were to be had, until some eighty people had been killed.

Few of those involved in the attempted coup escaped punishment. The young cardinal, Raffaele Riario, who had stood as though stunned by the High Altar during the uproar in the Cathedral until led to a safe place inside the old sacristy, was rescued by Lorenzo who sent some of his servants to bring him back to the Medici Palace. After the rioting was over, Lorenzo had him escorted in disguise to Rome where, to the end of his days, so it was said, his face never lost the pallor which the ghastly events he had witnessed had imposed upon it. Raffaele Maffei, a brother of the priest who had tried to murder Lorenzo, and Averardo Salviati, a relative of the Archbishop, were also saved from the mob through Lorenzo’s intervention. But with the one exception of a certain Napoleone Francesi, whose complicity in the plot was in any case by no means clear, not one of the known conspirators escaped either public or private vengeance. Jacopo de’ Pazzi, so overcome by despair at the failure of the plot that he boxed his own ears and threw himself to the floor in despair and rage, managed to escape from the city to the village of Castagno; but the villagers recognized him and brought him back to Florence where, after being tortured, he was stripped naked and strung from a window of the Palazzo della Signoria next to the Archbishop. Later, he was buried in Santa Croce; but the people, blaming the subsequent heavy rains upon his evil spirit, dug up the body and threw it into a ditch in an apple orchard. From here also it was later removed, to be dragged through the streets by a mob shouting, ‘Make way for the great knight!’ It was then propped against the door of the Pazzi Palace where, to the accompaniment of obscene jokes and cries of ‘Open! Your master wishes to enter!’ its decomposing head was used as a knocker. Eventually, the putrid corpse was thrown into the Arno from which it was fished by a gang of children who strung it up on the branch of a willow tree, flogged it and tossed it back into the water again.

The two priests, Antonio Maffei and Stefano da Bagnone, were also discovered in hiding. Both were castrated, then hanged. Renato de’ Pazzi, Jacopo’s brother, who was found in a house in the Mugello, was also executed, being hanged in a peasant’s grey smock ‘as if to make a masquerade’, though his involvement in the plot was never established. Other members of his family escaped with terms of imprisonment in the dungeons of Volterra, though Lorenzo’s sister’s husband, Guglielmo de’ Pazzi, who seems to have been innocent, was merely confined to his villa.

Montesecco, one of the last of the conspirators to be taken, was discovered on I May. He was closely questioned under torture and gave a detailed account of the origins of the conspiracy and of the Pope’s involvement in it. All the information which he could give having been forced out of him, he was, as a soldier, beheaded by sword on 4 May in the courtyard of the Bargello. Baroncelli, who had helped to murder Giuliano, succeeded in making his escape from Florentine territory and got as far as Constantinople; but there he was recognized and, following Lorenzo’s official request to the Sultan, he was brought back in chains to Florence where he, too, was executed in the Bargello.