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

As yet unaware of the worst of what Machiavelli was later to describe as ‘an appalling spectacle of horrors’ and afterwards unable to prevent them, the Cardinal wrote blandly to the Pope on 29 August 1512:

This day, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the town of Prato was sacked, not without some bloodshed such as could not be avoided… The capture of Prato, so speedily and cruelly achieved, although it has given me pain, will at least have the good effect of serving as an example and a deterrent to the others.

Certainly it had this effect. Even as the reports of the sack of Prato were still coming into Florence, a party of Medici supporters marched to the Palazzo della Signoria to demand that Soderini should resign. He was fully prepared to do so, and thought it as well to escape while he still could. So, having sent Machiavelli to ask for a safe passage for him, he was escorted from the city on his way into exile on the Dalmatian coast.

Later the Florentines were required to agree to the return of the Medici, to join the Holy League and to elect a new Gonfaloniere . The militia was abolished; and in the purge of Soderini’s officials, Machiavelli was replaced by a Medicean. Soon afterwards, denied the opportunity of serving the Medici which he would have welcomed, Machiavelli left Florence for his country house at Sant’ Andrea in Percussina where, the following year, he wrote The Prince .

ON THE day that Soderini left Florence – 1 September 1512 – Cardinal Giovanni’s younger brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, entered it. Having shaved off the beard he had grown in exile and dressed himself in an inconspicuous lucco , he walked unattended through the streets. Workmen were already busy removing the crimson cross of the Florentine citizens which had replaced the Medici palle on various buildings in the city, and, to the cheers of a crowd of onlookers in the Via Larga, painters and masons were hard at work restoring the Medici emblems on the family palace. But Giuliano did not go to the palace. He went instead to the house of Antonfrancesco degli Albizzi, seeming anxious by the modesty of his demeanour to demonstrate his willingness to be accepted as a private citizen of Florence with little interest in the control of its government.

This was an attitude quite contrary to his elder brother’s plans. The Cardinal had not gone to all this trouble just to find the Medici a home. He himself returned to Florence with 1,500 troops, and entered his former palace in the full panoply of his rank with the air of a man who had returned to his native city in order to rule it.

He seemed at first content to allow the republican institutions of the State to remain outwardly unchanged. But two days after his ceremonial entry into the city a demonstration was organized in the Piazza della Signoria which was filled with people shouting ‘ Palle! Palle! Palle! ’ and demanding a Partamento . The request was granted; a Portamento was called; and power was handed to a Balla of forty members, nearly all of them members of the Medicean party.

Yet although the Florentines were to be left in no doubt that they now had a master, Cardinal Giovanni appeared ready to reassure them that his rule would not be severe, nor would their burdens be heavy. The significance of his personal device – an ox-yoke – was unmistakable; but the motto beneath it was ‘ Jugum enim meum suave est ’ – ‘Truly my yoke is easy’. Indeed, from the beginning, the Cardinal was careful to persuade the Florentines that the restoration of the Medici would lead to a return to the happy days of his father, not to the dismal interregnum of Savonarola. Entertainments and pageants were to be encouraged; the carnival songs, which Lorenzo had so much enjoyed and which Savonarola had so rigorously denounced, were now once more to be heard in the streets; and the presence in the city of the Cardinal’s kindly brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, was to be a pledge that the government would be understanding and humane.

Less than six months after his family had been returned to power in Florence, the Cardinal was informed that his benefactor, Pope Julius II, was dying. Giovanni, now aged thirty-seven, was himself ill; but in order to attend the enclave he gave orders that he should be carried south to Rome in a litter.

Exhausted by the journey, in great pain from a stomach ulcer and troubled by an anal fistula, he arrived in Rome on 6 March 1513. Weeping women, mourning the death of their patriotic Pope, were kissing the pontifical feet which had been left protruding from the grille of the mortuary chapel. The Cardinal had missed the opening ceremonies of the conclave, including the Mass of the Holy Spirit which, since St Peter’s was being reconstructed, was sung in the chapel of St Andrew, where the wind had howled through the cracks in the walls repeatedly extinguishing the candles on the altar. For several days Giovanni was too ill to get out of bed, submitting gloomily to the painful ministrations of his doctor, while the other cardinals, in little groups, argued and plotted. After a week, in order to force them to a decision, their daily meal was reduced to a single unappetizing dish which, combined with the stale air of the building whose doors were locked and whose windows were sealed as custom directed, soon led to a decision.

In the early discussions the name of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici had been little mentioned but as time went by he was admitted to be notably papabile . He was amiable and well liked, tactful, gregarious and approachable. He was relatively young, but had been a cardinal for over twenty years and so was not inexperienced. He took his religious duties seriously and fasted twice a week. He was evidently prepared to be ruthless when the interests of his family were threatened; but how many popes were not? Moreover, he was not in good health, so if his election proved ill-considered his Papacy might well be of no lengthy duration. The younger cardinals from ruling families such as Ippolito d’Este of Ferrara, Ghismondo Gonzaga of Mantua and Alfonso Petrucci of Siena were all anxious for the election of a man like themselves, rather than another rough peasant like Julius II who might march them off again on some tiresome campaign. Cardinal Francesco Soderini, Piero’s brother, naturally did not favour him; but Giovanni’s secretary, Bernardo Dovizi, gradually won Cardinal Soderini over by suggesting the possibility of a marriage between the Medici Cardinal’s nephew, Lorenzo, and some young lady from the Soderini palace. So, on 11 March, when the votes were taken out of the urn and counted by Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici himself as Senior Deacon, he was able to announce his own nomination. He did so with becoming modesty, announcing that he would, if the Sacred College approved the choice, be known as Leo X.

The news of the election of a Medici pope was greeted by the Palleschi in Florence with the wildest excitement. For four days the celebrations continued to the constant clanging of bells, the explosion of fireworks and crackers, the boom of cannon fired from the surrounding hills, the lighting of bonfires fuelled with the furniture of former Piagnoni , the repeated drunken shouts of ‘ Palle! Palle! Papa Leone I Palle! Palle! ’ ‘In the Mercato Nuovo youths tore boards and planks from the establishments of the silk-merchants and the bankers, so that by next morning every single roof belonging to them was burned. If the authorities had not intervened, no doors or roofs in the whole area would have remained.’ On the ringhiera of the Palazzo della Signoria the citizens were offered sweet white wine from rows of gilded barrels; and in front of the Medici Palace trestle tables were piled with food to welcome a procession bearing the miraculous statue of the Virgin, arrayed in cloth of gold, from Impruneta. 1