Christopher - The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

On the morning of 25 September, Rinaldo’s troops began to take up their positions. But the Signoria were not to be caught unawares. They brought their own troops into the Piazza, ordered others to march up and down through the streets, and made preparations to withstand a siege by having provisions brought into the Palazzo. They then shut and barricaded the gates, and summoned reinforcements from the surrounding districts. To gain time while these reinforcements were being assembled, they also sent two Priori to enter into negotiations with the Albizzi and called upon the services of another far more powerful intermediary who had now arrived in Florence, Pope Eugenius IV.

Having quarrelled with the powerful Colonna family, to which his predecessor, Martin V, had belonged, Pope Eugenius had been driven from Rome by a rampaging mob and had fled to Florence where he was given shelter in the monastery of Santa Maria Novella. Here he was known to have spoken sympathetically of the Medici and to have entertained the hope that a strong government in Florence might ally itself with Venice and help him return to Rome, backed by Medici money. On the afternoon of 26 September, the Pope’s representative, Cardinal Vitelleschi, left Santa Maria Novella to find Rinaldo and to bring him back to the monastery for discussions with his Holiness.

By now Rinaldo’s situation was becoming desperate. He had succeeded in occupying the Piazza Sant’ Apollinare and in closing all entrances to it as preliminary measures before seizing the Bargello, attacking the Piazza della Signoria and burning all the houses of the Medici as well as those of their principal supporters. But although numerous mercenaries, promised the prospect of plunder rather than pay, had been enlisted outside Florence, they were slow in arriving; and many of Rinaldo’s troops already inside the city were gradually deserting him. Worst of all, Giovanni Guicciardini, whose support he had deemed essential to his success, now declared that he was prepared to do no more than ensure that his brother, Piero, a known Medici adherent, would not back up the Signoria; while Palla Strozzi, who had previously indicated that his five hundred personal men-at-arms would be at Rinaldo’s disposal, changed his mind, rode into the Piazza Sant’ Apollinare with merely two servants in attendance and then, having spoken briefly to Rinaldo, rode quickly off again. Rinaldo’s main supporter, Ridolfo Peruzzi, also began to waver, accepted a summons to appear before the Signoria and, having wasted time in fruitless discussions with them, urged Rinaldo to accept Cardinal Vitelleschi’s invitation to go to talk to the Pope at Santa Maria Novella.

Accompanied by Peruzzi and Barbadori, and followed by a disorderly squad of armed supporters, Rinaldo rode off to see the Pope soon after six o’clock in the evening. As they approached the houses of the Martelli family, whose senior members were close friends and sometimes business associates of the Medici, an attempt was made to block their way. Fighting broke out, several men were badly wounded, and after the Martelli’s guards had been driven back inside their walls, Rinaldo had the utmost difficulty in inducing his men to follow him to Santa Maria Novella rather than to break into the Palazzo Martelli and plunder it. 7When at last they arrived grumbling before the monastery they sat down in the Piazza, obviously unwilling to wait there long.

Few of them did wait long. Night had long since fallen when Rinaldo emerged from the monastery to find only a small group of them still sitting in the Piazza. It was clear that his spirit was broken. The Pope, so commanding in appearance and manner, so skilled in argument, had persuaded him of the futility of further resistance to the wishes of the Signoria which were also, so Rinaldo was informed, the wishes of the Curia. Little reassured by the Pope’s promise to do what he could to protect the Albizzi from the vengeance of their opponents, Rinaldo returned to his palazzo.

Two days later, for a full hour, the huge Vacca in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria was tolled to summon the citizens to a Parlamento . As the people gathered in the Piazza, which was ringed by troops, Cardinal Vitelleschi and two other representatives of the Pope appeared on the ringhiera . Soon afterwards, to the clamorous welcome of fanfares, they were joined there by all the members of the Signoria and the officials of the Republic, including the Notaio delle Riformagioni who in the time-honoured way called out, ‘O, people of Florence, are you content that a Balìa shall be set up to reform your city for the good of the people?’ The crowd obediently gave their consent; and a Balìa of three hundred and fifty citizens was accordingly elected. The sentence of banishment passed on the Medici was immediately revoked, and the family were commended for their good behaviour during the time of their exile from which they were now formally recalled.

On the same day, 28 September 1434, Cosimo left Venice with an escort of three hundred Venetian soldiers; and a few days later, cheered by the peasants in the villages through which he passed, he arrived at his villa at Careggi in time for dinner. 8The grounds were crowded with welcoming people. There were crowds, too, along the road leading into Florence, and in the city itself masses of people were waiting in the streets, hoping to witness the triumphal return of the Medici to their palace. For fear of uproar, the Signoria sent an urgent request to Cosimo not to enter the city that day, but to wait until nightfall. So, after sunset, accompanied by his brother, Lorenzo, one servant and a mace-bearer from the city, he re-entered Florence by a small gateway near the Balikrgello. He spent the night in a room which had been specially prepared for him in the Palazzo della Signoria; and the next morning, after visiting the Pope to thank him for all he had done for him, he returned to the Palazzo Bardi to the tumultuous cheers of the crowds gathered in the streets ‘as though he were returning from a great victory’.

Already sentences had been passed on his opponents. Rinaldo degli Albizzi, his sons and descendants were all banished from Florence – so were branches of several other families, and, in some cases, families in their entirety, in accordance with the custom of considering a crime as much a collective as a personal responsibility. Included in the decrees of banishment were members of the Peruzzi, Guasconi, Guadagni and Guicciardini families, Niccolò Barbadori, and Matteo Strozzi. Indeed, so many well-known names – over seventy in all – appeared in the list of exiles that someone complained to Cosimo that he was almost emptying Florence of its leading citizens. His typically brusque and sardonic reply was, ‘Seven or eight yards of scarlet will make a new citizen.’

Rather than risk sharing the fate of the Albizzi upon Cosimo’s return, Francesco Filelfo had already fled to Siena where, in the service of the Visconti, he wrote a stream of slanderous abuse of the Medici, incited the Florentines to rise up against them, and even, so it seems, helped to hire a Greek assassin to murder Cosimo. Few regretted the departure from Florence of this tiresome, vain and cantankerous scholar. But many lamented the banishment to Padua of the revered and honest Palla Strozzi, who had never given his full support to the Albizzi and had ultimately abandoned them altogether. Cosimo, however, recognizing that his position in Florence would be more secure if Palla Strozzi, so enormously rich and so dangerously impressionable, were to be compelled to leave, decided not to risk his being pardoned. When asked to put in a good word for him for the sake of past friendship, he did so in a characteristically ambivalent manner, raising no protest when the decision to banish him was finally taken. He apparently comforted himself with the thought that Palla Strozzi would be much happier in Padua where, free from the temptation to meddle in politics, which were not his métier , he would settle down contentedly – as, in fact, he did – to a life of quiet study, conversation and bibliomania.