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

That this campaign did not end in the disaster for Florence which Commines expected was due far more to good fortune and to the peculiar traditions of fifteenth-century Italian warfare than to any notable competence in either the Florentine army or in its commander, the Duke of Ferrara, who appeared unwilling to test his strength against the Duke of Calabria, a skilful soldier who also happened to be his brother-in-law. Always careful to keep a good two days’ march away from the enemy, the Duke of Ferrara took three weeks to cover the fifty miles between Pisa and Sarzana. When urged by the Florentines to move his men more quickly, he ridiculed such exhortation from ‘mere mechanics who [knew] nothing of war’. ‘The system of our Italian soldiers is this,’ commented the Florentine apothecary, Luca Landucci. ‘You turn your attention to plundering in that direction, and we will do the same in this. Getting too near each other is not our game.’ By November 1478, no decisive battle having yet been fought, both armies retreated to their winter quarters.

The next year was less favourable for Florence. First of all, the uncles of the young Duke Gian Galleazo Sforza, worsted in their efforts to gain power in Milan, had gone to Naples where King Ferrante incited them to go back north with an army and seize the Duchy by force. The return of her brothers-in-law to Lombardy so alarmed the Duchess that she recalled the Milanese contingent from the defence of Florence to help defend her own government in Milan.

The Duchess was particularly alarmed by the return of Lodovico Sforza, known as il Moro, the Moor, because one of his Christian names was Mauro and he had a very dark skin. He was a rather effeminate-looking man with an extremely small mouth and neatly curled hair. He was vain, boastful and cowardly; yet he was undoubtedly clever. A bad judge of men, he knew a great deal about art and literature. He was cynical and amoral, but he was courteous and considerate. He had a definite talent for administration and diplomacy, and a remarkable memory. He was a man to be reckoned with.

By September he had come to terms with the Duchess, had established himself in power in Milan, and had made up his mind that the Florentine Republic, on the verge of collapse, was no longer a suitable ally for his Duchy. At the same time the Duke of Calabria’s forces, rampaging about in the Val d’Elsa, captured the fortress of Poggio Imperiale and would have attacked Florence itself had not the small town of Colle, less than thirty miles south of Florence, offered so determined a resistance that he was held up there for two months. When at last Colle fell on 14 November – after the Duke’s mortars, so Luca Landucci recorded in his diary, had been’ fired at it a thousand and twenty four times’ – the winter was too far advanced for the Neapolitan army to continue its operations in the Val d’Elsa and the Duke of Calabria took his men away once more to hibernate in Siena. But though they had been given another breathing-space, the Florentines’ situation was now more desperate than ever. The various condottieri in their service were perpetually quarrelling with each other; the Duke of Ferrara had wandered off in the wake of the Sforzas; gangs of brigands, pretending to be enemy raiding-parties, plundered the Tuscan countryside; plague had broken out in Florence; and its citizens were beginning to grumble about the heavy taxes which the war had forced the emergency committee to introduce. Moreover, the Florentine economy was in decline, partly due to the virtual cessation of imports of wool from England where manufacturers were now making their own cloth; while hundreds of workers were locked out of their factories by merchants with no work for them to do. Well aware that the Republic could not survive another season’s campaigning and that his allies supported the general wish for peace, Lorenzo now took what appeared to the Florentines as an extraordinary and courageous decision: he made up his mind to go to Naples and to present himself at his enemy’s court. Leaving the city in the care of the recently elected Gonfaloniere , Tommaso Soderini, he rode away to the sea. Before embarking he wrote to the Signoria from the town of San Miniato Tedesco on the road to Pisa:

In the dangerous circumstances in which our city is placed, the time for deliberation is past. Action must be taken… I have decided, with your approval, to sail for Naples immediately, believing that as I am the person against whom the activities of our enemies are chiefly directed, I may, perhaps, by delivering myself into their hands, be the means of restoring peace to our fellow-citizens… As I have had more honour and responsibility among you than any private citizen has had in our day, I am more bound than any other person to serve our country, even at the risk of my life. With this intention I now go. Perhaps God wills that this war, which began in the blood of my brother and of myself, should be ended by my means. My desire is that by my life or my death, my misfortune or my prosperity, I may contribute to the welfare of our city… I go full of hope, praying to God to give me grace to perform what every citizen should at all times be ready to perform for his country. I commend myself humbly to your Excellencies of the Signoria . Laurentius de Medici.

When this emotional letter was read out to the Signoria , not a single one of the Priori , according to Filippo Valori, was able to restrain his tears. Profoundly distrusting King Ferrante, who was reported to preserve the bodies of his enemies embalmed in a private museum, they thought that they might never see Lorenzo again. Yet it was recognized that his offer of personal sacrifice was a gesture, perhaps the only gesture, that might save the Republic. The Signoria , therefore, gave Lorenzo their blessing, nominated him ambassador to Naples and wished him every success. The day after he received their reply he sailed from Vada, arriving in Naples just before Christmas 1479. He was twenty-nine years old.

Standing on the quay to meet him was King Ferrante’s second son, Federigo, whom Lorenzo had met and grown to like as a boy. They greeted each other warmly. Lorenzo was welcomed with equal warmth by the Duke of Calabria’s clever wife, Ippolita Sforza, whom he had also known well for years; and by Diomede Carafa, one of King Ferrante’s principal advisers, an elderly author, connoisseur and collector of antiques for whom Lorenzo had done many favours in the past, by helping and entertaining his friends when they visited Florence, and to whom he had presented an exquisite bronze head of a horse which was one of the finest Roman antiquities in Carafa’s collection. Indeed, it soon became clear to Lorenzo’s suite that his mission was far less foolhardy than it had seemed and far less dramatic than he had been astute enough to present it in his letter to the Signoria .

Before writing that letter, he had for long been in secret communication with the Neapolitan court and had assured himself that his arrival there would not be unwelcome. The ship in which he had sailed, in fact, had been sent from Naples to fetch him. He knew that the Duke of Calabria, whose troops now controlled large tracts of land in southern Tuscany, was opposed to any peace settlement that did not recognize his conquests; but Lorenzo also knew that King Ferrante was extremely apprehensive about the King of France’s continued threats of renewing Angevin claims to the throne of Naples and about the intentions of the Turks whose squadrons were sailing threateningly up and down the Italian shores of the southern Adriatic.

King Ferrante was not, however, a man with whom it was easy to come to terms. Shrewd and with much political ability, he was at the same time hard, vindictive and dissimulating. A sallow-faced man inclined to fat and to periods of moody silence, it was impossible to tell, so Commines commented, what he was really like or what he was thinking: ‘no man knew when he was angry or pleased’. But he shared Lorenzo’s love of country life, of falconry and hunting; he shared his taste for poetry, for the new learning and for the distant past. During his long talks with Ferrante, Lorenzo frequently alluded to those rulers in classical times who had achieved greatness by being men of peace, rather than of war, and to the ideal of a united Italy. In more practical terms, he argued that, although the Pope had been cultivating Naples of late, though he had created Ferrante’s son, Giovanni, a cardinal, though his nephew had given a banquet of unparalleled magnificence for Ferrante’s daughter, though he had waived the customary annual tribute due from Naples to the Pope, the Papacy could never prove so useful a friend to Naples as could Florence. Sixtus was merely trying to use Naples for his own selfish purposes.