Tim Parks - Medici Money - Banking, metaphysics and art in fifteenth-century Florence

The system can be unwieldy. Since there is a well-established difference of wealth and class between those whose names are in the bags for drawing the priors and those in the bags for the two big councils, it is not surprising that sometimes the councils repeatedly refuse to ratify laws that successive governments insist are vital. So when an impasse is reached, or when some particularly momentous and difficult decision must be made rapidly, a parlamento is called, which is to say a gathering, in the open square outside the Palazzo della Signoria, of all Florentine males over the age of fourteen. The principle is not unlike that of the modern referendum. Sovereignty passes directly to the people. But, notoriously, modern governments call referendums only when they are sure that they can bully people into voting as they should.

So, in Florence on September 9, 1433, as the deep, old bell of the Palazzo della Signoria booms out to call the citizens to their political duty, armed men are already circling the square and controlling each point of entry. Medici supporters are discouraged from attending. Cosimo can see a corner of the scene from his cell window. Dutifully — and this is always the way at these parliaments — the men who do attend vote for the formation of a so-called balia . The word balia just means “plenary powers.” Basically, the proposal made at every parliament is that the people hand over their future to an ad hoc body of two hundred men chosen, of course, by the present signoria , thus bypassing the resistance of the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune. In 1433 the signoria meant Rinaldo degli Albizzi.

The balia has been called to decide the fate of the Palazzo della Signoria’s illustrious prisoner. Rinaldo wants Cosimo dead. Rinaldo is a landowner, the Albizzi family is old and rich. But it is not a family practiced in the art of exchange. Rinaldo is neither a banker nor a merchant, and he cannot compete with his rival when it comes to transferable wealth, to loans and bribes and patronage. He knows that Cosimo is one of a new generation who will not be destroyed by exile, as rich men were in the past. He has understood that banks do not exist in space in the same way as a castle, a farm, or even a factory does. The man must be beheaded, he tells the balia . It’s the only way.

But he can’t swing it. Even the men he has chosen for the balia are divided. Cosimo has so many friends. So many citizens are indebted to him. They see a future in him. Unlike a similarly rich banker, Palla Strozzi, Cosimo seems willing to spend his money more widely, for the civic good, to get involved in public affairs. Given more power, perhaps he would spend even more, rather than shifting capital to other cities.

The charge against the accused is vague. Cosimo de’ Medici has sought “to elevate himself above others.” But don’t we all? Put on the rack, two Medici supporters “confess” that Cosimo has been planning an armed rebellion with foreign help. No one believes it. It’s not his style. Venice immediately sends three ambassadors to plead on Cosimo’s behalf. The Medici bank has important business dealings with influential Venetians. The new pope, Eugenius IV, is also Venetian and from just the kind of rich merchant family that deals with people like the Medici. The Vatican representative is eloquent on Cosimo’s behalf. The Church does not want its banker beheaded and Pope Eugenius has all kinds of sanctions at his disposal.

Then the marquis of Ferrara muscles in. He’s another client who appreciates Cosimo’s services. Lying as it does in the noman’s-land between Venice and the Papal States, Ferrara is an important ally for Florence. The members of the balia are impressed. The mobility of money, it seems, makes the fate of a banker an international affair. Had the Medici merely been wealthy landowners, they could have been dispatched without anyone’s noticing. Paid by Cosimo’s friends, Florence’s only military leader of note, Niccolò da Tolentino, gathers his soldiers and marches toward Florence from Pisa on the coast. At the same time, Cosimo’s younger brother, Lorenzo, is busy raising an army from among the peasants to the north of the city, where the family has its villas and agricultural land. Already the balia has been deadlocked for a week or more.

Back in his cell, under the roof of the Palazzo della Signoria, Cosimo finally agrees to start eating when his jailer offers to pre-taste his meals for him. The man will be generously reimbursed. Visitors start to climb up to the banker’s cell from the lower floors of the same palazzo where the balia is meeting. It’s a sign that Albizzi is losing his grip. Cosimo is allowed pen and paper: Pay the bearer, he begins to write, this or that sum of money. And he signs. Bernardo Guadagni, head of the signoria , receives 1,000 florins, far more than his miserable tax arrears, paid by Rinaldo degli Albizzi, were worth. “He could have had ten times more,” Cosimo later remarked, “if only he had known to ask.” In return for his thousand florins, Guadagni fakes illness, stays at home, and delegates his authority to another prior, likewise bribed.

Suddenly, the moment to kill has passed. The Medici army in the Mugello is ready to march. Niccolò da Tolentino and his mercenaries are within striking distance. Under pressure from foreign diplomats, the banker Palla Strozzi, a constitutionalist who genuinely believes that wealth can and should keep out of politics, withdraws his support for the proposed death sentence. Needless to say, his money carries a lot of votes with him. Everything that happens, it seems, is the result of each participant’s calculation of his private interest. There are no ideals involved. An ideal situation for a banker. On September 28, three weeks after Cosimo’s arrest, fearing an attack from without and a rebellion within, Rinaldo at last backs down and proposes a sentence of exile rather than execution. Relieved, the balia gives him a majority. Cosimo is to go to Padua for ten years, his cousin Averardo to Naples, his brother Lorenzo to Venice. That should keep the family apart. Fearful that there may still be plans to assassinate him, Cosimo begs to be allowed to leave the city at night and in secret. Throughout the remaining thirty years of his life, he will never again allow himself to be so completely at the mercy of events.

WHAT DID COSIMO do in exile? Much the same as he had done at his villa in Trebbio before imprisonment. He runs his bank and waits. He behaves. The postal service is effective enough. After two months, a newly appointed signoria allows him to move to Venice, where he stays in San Giorgio Maggiore, the old monastery of his client the pope. Immediately, he offers to build the monks a new library and supply the books. The Venice branch of the bank has been making profits of 20 percent a year on a capital outlay of 8,000 florins. What better way to spend it than by making friends and building support? Cosimo has brought his own personal architect, Michelozzo, into exile with him, almost as if this kind of project formed part of a predetermined plan. When a distant Medici relative tries to involve him in a conspiracy to engineer his return to Florence with the help of Milanese troops, Cosimo scores moral points by reporting the scheme to the government of Venice, which passes on the information to Florence. This is hardly generous to the relative, but Cosimo knows that the Florentines are bankrupt, and that no one will lend the priors “so much as a pistachio nut.” How furious they must be to think of Cosimo lavishing his money on libraries in Venice when he could be helping out in Florence. Every generous display of wealth abroad will turn minds at home. In 1433–34, the profits of the Venice bank almost double. Much of this is business lost to Florence.