The House Of Medici

Christopher Hibbert

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062228192
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

It was a dynasty with more wealth, passion, and power than the houses of Windsor, Kennedy, and Rockefeller combined. It shaped all of Europe and controlled politics, scientists, artists, and even popes, for three hundred years. It was the house of Medici, patrons of Botticelli, Michelangelo and Galileo, benefactors who turned Florence into a global power center, and then lost it all.

The House of Medici picks up where Barbara Tuchman's Hibbert delves into the lives of the Medici family, whose legacy of increasing self-indulgence and sexual dalliance eventually led to its self-destruction. With twenty-four pages of black-and-white illustrations, this timeless saga is one of Quill's strongest-selling paperbacks.

PART ONE

Il Quattrocento

I

FLORENCE AND THE FLORENTINES

‘A Florentine who is not a merchant…enjoys no esteem whatever’

ONE SEPTEMBER morning in 1433, a thin man with a hooked nose and sallow skin could have been seen walking towards the steps of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence.¹ His name was Cosimo de’ Medici; and he was said to be one of the richest men in the world. As he entered the palace gate an official came up to him and asked him to wait in the courtyard: he would be taken up to the Council Chamber as soon as the meeting being held there was over. A few minutes later the captain of the guard told him to follow him up the stairs; but, instead of being shown into the Council Chamber, Cosimo de’ Medici was escorted up into the bell-tower and pushed into a cramped cell known as the Alberghettino – the Little Inn – the door of which was shut and locked behind him. Through the narrow slit of its single window, so he later recorded, he looked down upon the city.

It was a city of squares and towers, of busy, narrow, twisting streets, of fortress-like palaces with massive stone walls and overhanging balconies, of old churches whose façades were covered with geometrical patterns in black and white and green and pink, of abbeys and convents, nunneries, hospitals and crowded tenements, all enclosed by a high brick and stone crenellated wall beyond which the countryside stretched to the green surrounding hills. Inside that long wall there were well over 50,000 inhabitants, less than there were in Paris, Naples, Venice and Milan, but more than in most other European cities, including London – though it was impossible to be sure of the exact number, births being recorded by the haphazard method of dropping beans into a box, a black bean for a boy, a white one for a girl.

For administrative purposes the city was divided into four quartieri and each quartiere was in turn divided into four wards which were named after heraldic emblems. Every quartiere had its own peculiar character, distinguished by the trades that were carried on there and by the palaces of the rich families whose children, servants, retainers and guards could be seen talking and playing round the loggie, the colonnaded open-air meeting grounds where business was also discussed.

The busiest parts of the city were the area around the stone bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, which spanned the Arno at its narrowest point and was lined on both sides with butchers’ shops and houses;² the neighbourhood of the Orsanmichele, the communal granary, where in summer the bankers set up their green cloth-covered tables in the street and the silk merchants had their counting-houses;³ and the Mercato Vecchio, the big square where once the Roman Forum had stood.⁴ Here, in the Mercato Vecchio, the Old Market, were the shops of the drapers and the second-hand-clothes dealers, the booths of the fishmongers, the bakers and the fruit and vegetable merchants, the houses of the feather merchants and the stationers, and of the candle-makers where, in rooms smoky with incense to smother the smell of wax, prostitutes entertained their customers. On open counters in the market, bales of silk and barrels of grain, corn and leather goods were exposed for sale, shielded by awnings from the burning sun. Here also out in the open barbers shaved beards and clipped hair; tailors stitched cloth in shaded doorways; servants and housewives gathered round the booths of the cooked-food merchants; bakers pushed platters of dough into the communal oven; and furniture makers and goldsmiths displayed their wares. Town-criers marched about calling out the news of the day and broadcasting advertisements; ragged beggars held out their wooden bowls; children played dice on the flagstones and in winter patted the snow into the shape of lions, the heraldic emblem of the city. Animals roamed everywhere: dogs wearing silver collars; pigs and geese rooting about in doorways; occasionally even a deer or a chamois would come running down from the hills and clatter through the square.

Not many years before, though Dante had denounced their luxurious manners, the Florentines seem to have frowned upon any untoward display of wealth. They had dressed very simply, the standard costume for all men who were artisans being an ankle-length gown of dark-coloured cloth, buttoned down the front like a cassock. Their houses, too, had been unassuming. Even those of the richest families had been furnished with plain wooden tables and the most uninviting beds. The walls were generally whitewashed, tapestries being unpacked from chests to be displayed on special occasions only; floors were of bare stone, rarely covered with anything other than reed matting; the shuttered windows were usually made of oiled cotton. Glass and majolica ornaments were few and discreet; silverware was produced from the sideboard, or from a locked cupboard in the master’s room, for none but the honoured guest; and few families yet had forks. In more recent years, however, though the Florentines continued to enjoy a reputation for frugality, they had become noticeably less abstemious and restrained. The stone houses of the well-to-do still presented a severe, even forbidding appearance to the street; but behind the glazed and curtained windows of the upper storeys, the rooms were frequently carpeted, the walls painted with murals, hung with tapestries, religious pictures and occasionally concave looking-glasses to reflect light onto a table or desk. Fireplaces were much more common so that on cold winter nights warming-pans and scaldini – earthenware jars filled with hot charcoal – were not so necessary. Much of the furniture was painted or decorated with marquetry. The canopied beds, standing on raised platforms and surrounded by footboards, were very large – often twelve feet wide – big enough for four people or even more to sleep in them side by side, lying naked beneath the linen sheets and breathing in air made sweet by scent or by herbs burning slowly in pierced globes hanging from the ceiling.

Over their trunk hose and jacket men still wore the lucco, the dark ankle-length gown with long, wide sleeves and a hood attached to the neck; but many young men now preferred more gaily coloured clothes – a pink cape, perhaps, worn with a satin jacket, white stockings shot with silver lace, a velvet cap with a feather in the brim, scented gloves, golden rings and a golden chain, a jewelled dagger and a sword. There were sumptuary laws as there were elsewhere in Europe; but no one paid them much attention. Certainly the women did not. An official, who was ordered to compel women to obey the laws, submitted a characteristic report of his failure:

In obedience to the orders you gave me, I went out to look for forbidden ornaments on the women and was met with arguments such as are not to be found in any book of laws. There was one woman with the edge of her hood fringed out in lace and twined round her head. My assistant said to her, ‘What is your name? You have a hood with lace fringes.’ But the woman removed the laced fringe which was attached to the hood with a pin, and said it was merely a wreath. Further along we met a woman with many buttons in front of her dress; and my assistant said to her, ‘You are not allowed to wear buttons.’ But she replied, ‘These are not buttons. They are studs. Look, they have no loops, and there are no buttonholes.’ Then my assistant, supposing he had caught a culprit at last, went up to another woman and said to her, ‘You are wearing ermine.’ And he took out his book to write down her name. ‘You cannot take down my name,’ the woman protested. ‘This is not ermine. It is the fur of a suckling.’ ‘What do you mean, suckling?’ ‘A kind of animal.’

To the dismay of many an austere churchman, the wives of Florentine merchants were, indeed, renowned for their sumptuous clothes, their elegance, their pale skin and fair hair. If their hair was too dark they dyed it or wore a wig of white or yellow silk; if their skin was too olive they bleached it; if their cheeks were too rosy they powdered them. And they walked the streets in all manner of styles and colours, in dresses of silk and velvet, often adorned with sparkling jewels and silver buttons; in winter they wore damask and fur, showing off prized features of a wardrobe which might well have cost far more than their husband’s house. Unmarried girls of good family were not, of course, allowed such freedom, rarely being seen in the streets at all, except on their way to Mass, and then always heavily veiled. In some households young and precious daughters were not allowed out at all; they had to read Mass in their own bedrooms and to take exercise in their father’s garden or in the family loggia. When it was time for marriage their parents or guardians made all the arrangements, of which the amount of the dowry was the most significant.

Many dowries included foreign slaves whose importation had been officially authorized in 1336 after an outbreak of plague had led to a serious shortage of native servants. These slaves were generally Greeks, Turks or Russians, Circassians or Tartars, the Tartars being preferred by some households because they worked harder, the Circassians by others because they were better looking and better tempered. All were expected to be fully occupied from morning to night, as Fra Bernardino, a travelling preacher from Siena, urged housewives to remember for their own good:

It there sweeping to be done? Then make your slave sweep. Are there pots to be scoured? Then make her scour them. Are there vegetables to be cleaned or fruit to be peeled? Then set her to them. Laundry? Hand it to her. Make her look after the children and everything else. If you don’t get her used to doing all the work, she will become a lazy little lump of flesh. Don’t give her any time off, I tell you. As long as you keep her on the go, she won’t waste her time leaning out of the window.

Bought quite cheaply in the markets at Venice and Genoa, the slaves were usually young female children who spent the rest of their lives in bondage. An owner had complete power over them ‘to have, hold, sell, alienate, exchange, enjoy, rent or unrent, dispose of by will, judge soul and body and do with in perpetuity whatsoever may please him and his heirs, and no man may gainsay him’. They were, in fact, considered as chattels, and classed in inventories with domestic animals. Many of them became pregnant by their masters: the correspondence of the time is full of disputes arising from such inconvenience; and the foundling hospitals were continually being presented with little bundles of swarthy or Slavic-looking babies.

At least the slave, hard as she was worked, could generally be sure of eating well, for although she had few legal rights and was often dismissed in documents as a creature of little importance, she was regarded as one of the family and treated as such. In hard times she was certainly better off than the very poor native Florentines who were sometimes reduced to a diet of dried figs or bread made with oak bark. If she belonged to a moderately prosperous family she could look forward to sharing their evening meal of garlic-flavoured pasta, ravioli in broth, liver sausage or black pudding, goat’s milk cheese, fruit and wine, with an occasional pigeon or a piece of meat, usually lamb, on a Sunday. For the richer merchants, of course, there was more exotic fare. Excessive indulgence was forbidden by sumptuary laws; but, as with clothes, the laws were flagrantly disregarded and the most was made of every loophole. If the main course was to consist of no more than ‘roast with pie’, well, then, everything that could possibly be desired was tossed into the pie, from pork and ham to eggs, dates and almonds. An honoured guest of a well-to-do citizen might be offered first of all a melon, then ravioli, tortellini or lasagne, then a berlingozzo, a cake made of flour, eggs and sugar, then a few slices of boiled capon, roast chicken and guinea fowl, followed by spiced veal, or pork jelly, thrushes, tench, pike, eel or trout, boiled kid, pigeon, partridge, turtle-dove or peacock. For vegetables there was usually a choice of broad beans, onions, spinach, carrots, leeks, peas and beetroot. Finally there might be rice cooked in milk of almonds and served with sugar and honey, or pinocchiato, a pudding made out of pine kernels, or little jellies made of almond-milk, coloured with saffron and modelled in the shape of animals or human figures. Everything was strongly flavoured. A chicken minestra would be spiced with ginger and pounded almonds, as well as cinnamon and cloves, and sprinkled with cheese or even sugar. Into a fish pie would go olive oil, orange and lemon juice, pepper, salt, cloves, parsley, nutmegs, saffron, dates, raisins, powdered bay leaves and marjoram. The red sauce known as savore sanguino contained not only meat, wine, raisins, cinnamon and sandal, but also sumac which is now used only for tanning. In summer the main meal of the day in the families of most well-to-do merchants would be served just before dusk at a trestle table near to the open garden door, the guests sitting on straight-backed chairs or, more likely, on benches or the lids of chests, while musicians played softly in a far corner of the room.

From such households as these came the men who ruled Florence. Theoretically every member of the city’s several guilds, the arti, had a say in its government; but this was far from being the case in practice. There were twenty-one guilds in all, seven major ones and fourteen minor. Of the seven major guilds that of the lawyers, the Arte dei Giudici e Notai, enjoyed the highest prestige; next in importance were the guilds of the wool, silk and cloth merchants, the Arte della Lana, the Arte di Por Santa Maria and the Arte di Calimala which took its name from the streets where the cloth warehouses were to be found.⁵ Emerging as a rival to these in riches and consequence was the Arte del Cambio, the bankers’ guild, though bankers still suffered from the condemnation of the Church as usurers and felt obliged to adopt certain customs and euphemisms in an attempt to disguise the true nature of their transactions. The Arte dei Medici, Speziali e Merciai was the guild of the doctors, the apothecaries and the shopkeepers, of merchants who sold spices, dyes and medicines, and of certain artists and craftsmen, like painters who, buying their colours from members of the guild, were themselves admitted to it. The seventh major guild, the Arte dei Vaccai e Pellicciai, looked after the interests of both dealers and craftsmen in animal skins and fur.

The minor guilds were those of such relatively humble tradesmen as butchers, tanners, leatherworkers, smiths, cooks, stonemasons, joiners, vintners and innkeepers, tailors, armourers and bakers. But while a member of the Arte della Lana would look down upon the Arte dei Fabbri, the smiths, in their turn, could feel superior to tens of thousands of those ordinary workers in the wool and silk trades, the weavers, spinners and dyers, the combers and beaters who, like carters and boatmen, labourers, pedlars and all those who had no permanent workshop, did not belong to a guild at all and – though they constituted more than three-quarters of the population of the city – were not allowed to form one. Such deprivation had in the past caused bitterness and occasional outbursts of violence. In the summer of 1378, the lowest class of woollen workers, known as the ciompi – because of the clogs they wore in the wash-houses – rose in revolt, protesting that their wages were scarcely sufficient to keep their families from starvation. Shouting, ‘Down with the traitors who allow us to starve!’ they sacked the houses of those merchants whom they condemned as their oppressors, forced them and their elected officials to flee for their lives, and demanded the right to form three new guilds of their own. The right could not in the circumstances be denied them; but they did not enjoy it for long. The jealousy of their fellow w...