The Family - Mario Puzo [86]
When Cesare was a guest there, though he was only a boy of fifteen, he was treated with exquisite courtesy by Lorenzo and the other men in his company. But Cesare’s fondest memories of Florence were the tales he was told of the Medici family’s rise to power—especially the story Gio told him of his father Lorenzo’s narrow escape from the coils of a great conspiracy when he was a young man.
At the age of twenty, on the death of his own father, Lorenzo had become head of the Medici family. By this time the Medici family was banker to the Pope and various kings, the most powerful financial institution in the world. But Lorenzo saw that unless he wanted to jeopardize that position he would have to consolidate his own personal power.
He did so by financing great festivities as entertainment for the people. He staged mock sea battles on the river Arno, and financed musical dramas in the great Piazza of Santa Croce; he sponsored parades of the cathedral’s holy relics, with a thorn of the crown Jesus had worn, a nail from his cross, and a fragment of the spear that had been thrust into his side by a Roman soldier. All the shops in Florence were decorated with the Medici banner, its three red balls recognizable throughout the city.
Lorenzo was both bawdy and religious. On carnival days, gaily decorated floats carried the prettiest prostitutes of the city through the streets; on Good Friday the Stations of the Cross—portraying the life and death of Christ—were reenacted. Life-size figures of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and various saints were carried to the cathedral, and captive white doves were released and floated through the air like angels. There were beauty pageants for young women of respectable families, and processions of monks to warn people of hell.
Lorenzo was perhaps the ugliest man in Florence, but because of his wit and charm had many love affairs. His younger brother and best companion, Giuliano, on the other hand, was acclaimed the city’s most handsome man in a festival held in his honor, on his twenty-second birthday in 1475. Little surprise that he won: his costume for the event was designed by Botticelli and his helmet by Verrocio, at the cost of twenty thousand florins. It delighted the people of Florence to see the ugly but generous Lorenzo embrace his brother without a trace of envy.
But at the height of Lorenzo’s power in Florence, at the height of his happiness, the Medici family became the target of a powerful conspiracy.
The trouble began when Lorenzo refused to grant a huge loan demanded by a previous Pope, the monies to be used to purchase the strategic town of Imola in the Romagna. Pope Sixtus was enraged by this refusal. This Pope, too, was devoted to his family; he had already given seven of his nephews each a cardinal’s hat, and he had wanted the town of Imola for his natural son, Girolamo. When Lorenzo refused the loan, the Pope in retaliation turned instead to the Pazzi family, the great rivals of the Medici.
The Pazzi family and its bank gave the fifty thousand ducats to the Pope with utmost speed, and then applied for other accounts with the papacy, especially the account of the alum mines of Silverlake just outside of Rome. But this the Pope was not willing to do, perhaps because Lorenzo had sent him rich gifts to placate him. And yet the friction between Lorenzo and the Pope still festered.
When the Pope nominated Francisco Salviata as archbishop of Pisa, a Florentine possession—violating an agreement that all such posts would be subject to approval by officials of Florence—Lorenzo barred the archbishop from taking up his post.
The Pazzi family had much older roots in Florence, a longer lineage of fame, than the Medici. And its leader, Jacopo, a much older and more sober man, hated the young Lorenzo.
The Archbishop Salviata and Francisco Pazzi also burned with ambition and hatred. These two men engineered a meeting