Christopher - The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

The Pope’s reception in Bologna was in sad contrast to this glorious day in Florence. He proceeded through the streets in a silence broken only by an occasional shout in support of the recently expelled Bentivoglio, and waited at the Palazzo Pubblico for the arrival of the French King. When Francis arrived, very late, he curtly informed Giulio de’ Medici, who had been sent to meet him at the city gates, that he ‘cared not a jot for processions’ and wished to get down to the negotiations without delay. He greeted the Pope courteously enough, but it was soon plain that he had not come to bargain. He insisted on the surrender of the cities of Parma and Piacenza, which he claimed by right as conqueror of Milan. He also insisted that Reggio and Modena, which the Pope had recently acquired from the Emperor, should be handed back to France’s ally, Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara. Faced by the King’s uncompromising attitude, the Pope declined to abandon his known intention of ejecting Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino, and refused, for the moment, to lend any support to Francis’s plans for assuming power in Naples, protesting that this would be out of the question while King Ferdinand of Spain was still alive.

It was not in the Pope’s nature, though, to provoke a quarrel. Eventually he undertook to restore Reggio and Modena to the Duke of Ferrara, though without any intention of abiding by the agreement; and he indicated that he might change his mind – as indeed he did change his mind – about ultimately helping Francis in his claim to Naples. He graciously created the King’s tutor a cardinal, and expressed profound satisfaction when, in return, Francis created Giuliano de’ Medici Duke of Nemours. He even smiled agreeably when Francis made the astonishingly importunate request that the Pope should present to him the marble group of Laocoön which, recently discovered in Rome, was one of the most prized treasures of the papal collection. 3

Outwardly complacent but, according to one of his companions, inwardly disgruntled by his unsatisfactory dealings with the French King, the Pope returned to Florence to find that the Arno was in flood, that the citizens were sullenly enduring a food shortage and that his brother was seriously ill with consumption at the Medici Palace. He had Giuliano moved to Fiesole, though there was little hope of his recovery there. He appeared ‘utterly shrunken and spent like an expiring candle’. The Pope visited him often, but their meetings were small comfort to Giuliano who, knowing of his brother’s intentions to oust Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino, begged him not to do so. Giuliano was fond of Della Rovere and his wife, Eleonora, who had always been kind to him during the days of his exile. The Pope brushed his pleas aside. ‘Do not bother yourself with politics, dear Giuliano,’ he would say to him. ‘You must concentrate on getting well.’

Giuliano grew rapidly worse, and on 17 March he died. He had no children by his wife, Philiberte of Savoy; but, like his uncle and namesake, he left an illegitimate child, Ippolito.

A month before Giuliano’s death, the Pope had left Florence never to return. He had been recalled to Rome by the death of King Ferdinand of Spain, and the accession to power in Spain and Naples of the Archduke Charles. This supremely important event, which brought an end to the series of wars initiated by the League of Cambrai, gave Lorenzo and the Pope their opportunity to deal with the Duke of Urbino, which they had been reluctant to do while Ferdinand and Giuliano were both still alive.

First of all a dreadful, half-forgotten scandal was raked up: five years before, the savage-tempered Duke had attacked and killed in a street in Ravenna his arch-enemy, Cardinal Francesco Alidosi. At the time a court of inquiry, of which the Pope himself had been a member, had decided that the Duke’s provocation by the unpleasant Alidosi – supposedly Julius II’s catamite – had been virtually irresistible. The Duke was now informed, however, that the murder, whether pardonable or not, made it impossible for him to hold Urbino any longer in the name of the Church. At the same time he was reminded of his refusal to comply with Pope Julius II’s request to assist in the restoration of the Medici to Florence and of his subsequent refusal to help to defend Italy against the invading army of King Francis I. He was summoned to Rome to explain his disgraceful conduct.

When he declined to go, the Pope excommunicated him and Lorenzo de’ Medici marched out of Florence to take Urbino from him. Lorenzo experienced little trouble in doing so. The Duke was forced to flee from Mantua, and Lorenzo entered Urbino in May. Less than a year later, however, the dispossessed Duke returned with Spanish troops to take his Duchy back. The short but arduous campaigns in the mountainous districts of Urbino cost the Florentines and the Pope a great deal of money. They aroused lasting resentments and resulted in Lorenzo’s being so badly wounded by an arquebus that he was gradually to waste away both in body and in will. The Pope, however, was for the moment well satisfied. Lorenzo was proclaimed Duke of Urbino and Lord of Pesaro, and seemed well on the way to becoming master of that large, unified, Medici-dominated state in central Italy which Leo dreamed of creating.

With Italy at peace and his family established in Urbino, Leo settled down happily to enjoy the pleasures of the Vatican. His expenditure was prodigious. It has been claimed that within a year he had got through not only all the savings of his parsimonious predecessor, but the entire revenues of himself and his successor. He ‘could no more save a thousand ducats’, Machiavelli’s friend, Francesco Vettori, remarked, ‘than a stone could fly through the air.’ Soon deeply in debt to almost every banking house in Rome, some of which were charging him interest at forty per cent, Pope Leo made not the slightest attempt either to reduce the enormous number of his household or to curtail the extravagance of his almost constant entertainments and banquets.

The cardinals followed his example. ‘Yesterday,’ the Marquis of Mantua was informed by his wife’s secretary,

Cardinal Riario gave us a dinner so extraordinarily sumptuous that it might well have sufficed for all the queens in the world. We sat for four full hours at table, laughing and chatting with those most reverend cardinals.

‘The meal was exquisite,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador, describing another dinner at the palace of Cardinal Cornaro.

There was an endless succession of dishes, for we had sixty-five courses, each course consisting of three different dishes, all of which were placed on the table with marvellous speed. Scarcely had we finished one delicacy than a fresh plate was set before us, and yet everything was served on the finest of silver of which his Eminence has an abundant supply. At the end of the meal we rose from the table both gorged with rich food and deafened by the continual concert, carried on both within and without the hall and proceeding from every instrument that Rome could produce – fifes, harpsichords and four-stringed lutes as well as the voices of a choir.

Cardinals and Roman patricians alike vied with each other to provide entertainments of unparalleled splendour. The immensely rich Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi, whose bathroom fixtures were all of solid silver, once invited the Pope to dinner in a magnificent room hung with the most exquisite tapestries. The sumptuous meal was served to the guests on plate specially engraved with their individual crests. When the last course had been served the Pope congratulated Chigi on the excellence of the meal and the beauty of his new dining-hall. ‘Your Holiness, this is not my dining-hall,’ replied Chigi giving a signal to his servants to pull down the tapestries which concealed rows of mangers. ‘It is merely my stable.’ On another occasion Chigi invited the entire Sacred College to dinner and placed before each of the assembled cardinals food specially brought from his own district or country. Chigi had even been known to order his servants to toss his silver into the Tiber after every course to show that he had so much he never had to use the same piece twice – though afterwards other servants were seen pulling up nets in which the discarded dishes had been caught.