CONCLUSION.Atthe age of forty-three Lorenzo was called away. His span of life had been but a short one for such manifold activity and such lasting fame. A remarkable man, he was the most brilliant representative of a remarkable time; in no one else were its qualities and excellences united in such a harmonious whole. Energetic in action, and earnest in his endeavours to watch the phases of progress in the establishment of a new order of things; endowed with the liveliest susceptibilities and the quickest perceptions, combined with the earnestness and thoroughness of a student; with a strongly sympathetic feeling for art, yet capable of immediate application to the business of life; he united imaginative power with clear common sense, the capacity for lofty projects with that for patient calculation; he had all the qualities of poet and statesman, connoisseur and patron of learning, citizen and prince. He was indefatigable and persevering in the endless business thrown upon him by his position as the leader of a peculiarly constituted state; with a quick and unerring eye he was able to grasp the whole and yet observe its smallest detail; in his riper years he was cautious and prudent, keeping his object immovably in view without blind self-confidence or presumption, though fully alive to his own position and that of the state which he represented. He passed with wonderful ease from practical to speculative politics, from science to poetry. Few could equal him in comprehensive, manifold, creative gifts, or in the most delicate sense of beauty, and the most active interest, with the deepest insight,into the character and purposes of art. In his home and family relations he was kindly, sociable, cheerful, even amid physical sufferings; not free from errors which even in earlier years and afterwards far more decidedly loosened the bond between him and his wife, yet still unaffectedly attached to all his family; to the admirable mother, many of whose qualities he had inherited, to the wife who was not of his own choosing, to the children to whom he was a wise and prudent counsellor, and a tender but not a weak father. Moreover he was a warm, attentive, and constant friend, attracting and attaching to himself the most different natures, ever ready to help in counsel and action, interposing and interceding for high and low with equal zeal amid a thousand occupations. He was gifted with a delicate sense of propriety, though he could not keep himself free from the Epicureanism of the time, which exacted a sacrifice even from him; and vividly conscious of the power of culture in the field of the Church, though a frivolous materialism threatened to weaken that power and lead him seriously astray in his views of life.He was not without the weaknesses and vices of his time. They cramped his policy, though it still stood far higher than that of most princes and statesmen of the age, both Italian and others. He was superior too in honesty and consistency, and, at least during the last ten years of his life, in unalterable adherence to the preservation of peace and unity, and to a feeling of nationality such as answered to the ideas of the time, from which it is not fair to demand conceptions unfamiliar to it. His home policy has called forth severe blame both on account of his progressive violations of the constitution to increase his personal authority, and of the corruption he employed in order to obtain undisturbed control of the finances. With regard to the latter, it is hard to see how, had he lived longer, he could have avoided national bankruptcy, unless indeed he and the state had contrived by the preservation of peace to restore an internal equilibrium, for which in his last years he had begun to laysome slight foundation. As to the former, many of his contemporaries expressed the opinion that he aimed at becoming a recognised prince, and was only waiting for a favourable opportunity—such as his entrance on the office of Gonfalonier, as soon as that dignity should fall to him on his reaching the legal age. And yet he, who had everything in his power, could not have lacked means and opportunities, if this had been his object. But he knew the city and the people too well to be blind to the obstacles and dangers which threatened to impede that path.Perhaps the worst evil of Lorenzo’s government lay in the increasing incongruity between the outward form and the real power, and in the displacement of authority from its legal centre, whereby both law and moderation were called in question. Personal influence decided everything in politics, in administration, in finance, even in the dispensation of justice. The more clear-sighted among Lorenzo’s contemporaries did not fail to perceive this radical evil, and expressed their opinion of it in the bitterest terms. Nevertheless not merely did Florence escape such excesses as occurred in all other Italian states, almost without an exception, but Lorenzo’s government was on the whole free from the violence which had characterised that of Cosimo. Doubtless the greater tranquillity of the time, the more secure position of the Medici, the fact that the people had been longer accustomed to their rule, contributed to this result; but so also did the character of the man himself. Lorenzo was ambitious to rule, but he was no tyrant. On the one hand he was too keen-sighted, and had calculated too accurately the character and traditions of the people; on the other hand his own nature was too grand, too open, too high-minded, too warm-hearted, and also too fond of enjoyment; finally, he was too much of a Florentine citizen, and that not merely in name but in his appearance, his dress and his bearing. He would have had nothing to distinguish him from the rest of the community, had there not been permitted or granted to him, ever since the Pazziconspiracy, a suite consisting at first of four of his own confidants, afterwards of twelve men paid by the Signoria. It is true that this was a grave offence against civil equality. This citizen-character was not kept up by Lorenzo’s sons—it was said of Piero that he was not a Florentine by nature—and its outward signs vanished altogether in some others of the race. In his own family Lorenzo maintained simplicity; in public affairs, however completely he held the real direction of them, he tried to keep up fair appearances; though indeed he could not prevent a complaint that Ser Piero da Bibiena brought into his court of chancery matters which rightly belonged to the police-jurisdiction of the Eight. On important occasions he liked to consult with many persons, but with each one separately; and then he formed his own decision independently.On his arbitrary proceedings in money matters there were very divided opinions even in his own time. If he had not used the money of the state he would have been ruined; and it was said that his ruin would have entailed that of everybody else; that all he took to save his credit and to lead a showy life was nothing in comparison of the losses to which a state would be exposed by incapable administration; that one single unskilful or ill-timed measure might cost a state dearer than Lorenzo’s whole course of government; that the ultimate and highest object of the Medici, for which they calculated everything they did or left undone, was indeed their own benefit; but they were and always had been Florentine citizens, and in most cases their interest and that of the state was one and the same. So said the favourable party after Lorenzo’s death and Piero’s fall. To this it was answered that the ultimate object of the Medici was not supremacy like that of the Albizzi in a state becoming more and more aristocratic in form, but simply autocracy, which they had sought to attain under the form of democracy, by removing the influence of the noble families and favouring many members of the lower classes. A cunning tyranny like that of Cosimo,or one softened by affability and generosity like that of Lorenzo, was all the worse because it spread poison among the people, preparing the way for the endurance of something harder. The truth of this view was proved at no very distant time.For good or for evil the Medici’s influence struck deep root in Florence. They made the lasting existence of the Republic impossible. ‘We are suffering’—such are the words placed by Francesco Guicciardini in the mouth of a man frequently named in this history—Paol’Antonio Soderini—after their expulsion in 1494—‘from two mortal wounds: the Pisan war, and the exile of the Medici. With their numerous friends in the city and country, and the greatness of their name abroad, they will give us a great deal of trouble.’ He was right. The Medicean party would have given the death-blow to the Republic of 1495 as well as to that of 1527, even if external circumstances had not come to their assistance. The work was made easier for them because here, as in many other republics, the relation of the ruling commonwealth to her subject towns and districts was an unnatural and very oppressive one; these subjects, influenced by the traditions of their old freedom, obeyed only on compulsion; and endured a personal government such as was permanently established forty years after Lorenzo’s death, more easily than their former position—perhaps because their old masters now had to bow their necks to the same yoke.In the ninth chapter of his Florentine history, the great writer just mentioned sums up at the close, in a few words, his masterly picture of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s influence on his native city. The city, he says, was not free under him; but it could not have found a more endurable and better master. For while there proceeded from him much good, owing to his natural goodness and amiable disposition, the evils, so far as they proceeded from the nature of the tyranny itself, were slight and limited to absolute necessity, and infinitelyslighter still where his own will was concerned. Therefore, although many might rejoice at his death, yet it grieved those who had a share in the government, and even those who had some ground of complaint against him, for no one knew whither the change might lead.This was soon discovered. Lorenzo the Magnificent had been scarcely two years and a half in his grave, and his sons had not yet found time to raise a monument to his memory, when the stately edifice of which Giovanni d’Averardo had laid the foundation-stone, which Cosimo had built up, and Piero and Lorenzo enlarged and adorned, crumbled to pieces. On November 9, 1494, Luca Corsini, one of the Priori, shut the gate of the palace of the Signoria in the face of Piero de’ Medici, on his return from the French camp at Sarzana, and thus gave the signal for a great change in the destinies of the commonwealth. Lorenzo’s son and successor had neither his father’s sagacity and experience, nor his father’s authority with the great men nor the attachment of the people, to help him. In the long-threatened division which brought down France to interfere in the dynastic troubles of Italy, he first made common cause with the house of Aragon against the Moro and the French king, and then, as soon as the latter, having crossed the Alps without obstacle, was threatening Florence, the young man lost his head and his courage, and without a shadow of right delivered up the fortresses of the state, Sarzana, Pietrasanta, Pisa, Livorno, to the foreigner. As soon as the old cry of ‘People and liberty!’ was raised in a burst of anger at this unheard-of proceeding, Piero mounted his horse and was glad when he found himself safe on the road to Bologna, whither he was followed by his brothers and those of his adherents who were most deeply compromised, while the mob was sacking the Medici palace and the houses of the most detested tools of their financial administration. Thus in a moment a revolution was accomplished which created a new popular state, under the eyes of a foreign sovereign. That same November 9 CharlesVIII. entered Pisa, where the rising against Florence began, and a week later he was in the palace in the Via Larga. This state lasted, amid the greatest internal and external difficulties, for nearly eighteen years, and then gave way to a new Medicean supremacy, which after another three years’ interruption, brought about by similar extraneous circumstances, formed itself into an hereditary autocracy, lasting till, after the lapse of two full centuries, the altered family died out in the altered country, and was mourned even then, when but little was left of the qualities which had lent it so much splendour.Lorenzo’s friends and adherents met with various fates. Of the heads of the party, now left to their own resources, some attained influence and power in the new commonwealth; others came to a bloody end. Of the friends who stood round his death-bed, one, Angelo Poliziano, did not live to see the catastrophe that befell the once splendid house. He was taken away on September 24, 1494; and the evil reports which his life, notwithstanding all his high intellectual gifts, had in some measure called forth, did not spare him even in death. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola died on the day of the French king’s entry, and the comforter of his last moments was the man whom Lorenzo, too, had summoned in the hour of death—the Predicant monk of Ferrara who was destined to stir Florence to her deepest depths, and to die amid the flames lighted by his own hand. Marsilio Ficino and Cristoforo Landino were doomed to witness the misfortunes of the family to whom they owed everything and were attached by hereditary affection, and to survive the execution of many friends, and the dispersion of the rich treasures of art and learning which adorned the house in which they had been born and grown up. Of the younger members of the circle, some spent eighteen years in exile and vicissitude, to come back at last and sun themselves in the splendour, brilliant indeed but fleeting, of the pontificate of Leo X. Then the seeds of literature and art sown in thedays of Lorenzo, sprang up in the works of Ariosto and Machiavelli, of Raphael and Michelangelo; but the political edifice, whose chief pillar he had been, and the national polity were irrecoverably destroyed; Italy had become the whole world’s battle-field; Lombardy was subject to the French, Naples to the Spaniards; the crowd of dynasties in Romagna had been swept away by the flood; while of those who had once held in their control the weal and woe of the peninsula, Ferrante and Alfonso of Aragon had died in distress and remorse, and Lodovico il Moro had ended his days in a French prison.
CONCLUSION.Atthe age of forty-three Lorenzo was called away. His span of life had been but a short one for such manifold activity and such lasting fame. A remarkable man, he was the most brilliant representative of a remarkable time; in no one else were its qualities and excellences united in such a harmonious whole. Energetic in action, and earnest in his endeavours to watch the phases of progress in the establishment of a new order of things; endowed with the liveliest susceptibilities and the quickest perceptions, combined with the earnestness and thoroughness of a student; with a strongly sympathetic feeling for art, yet capable of immediate application to the business of life; he united imaginative power with clear common sense, the capacity for lofty projects with that for patient calculation; he had all the qualities of poet and statesman, connoisseur and patron of learning, citizen and prince. He was indefatigable and persevering in the endless business thrown upon him by his position as the leader of a peculiarly constituted state; with a quick and unerring eye he was able to grasp the whole and yet observe its smallest detail; in his riper years he was cautious and prudent, keeping his object immovably in view without blind self-confidence or presumption, though fully alive to his own position and that of the state which he represented. He passed with wonderful ease from practical to speculative politics, from science to poetry. Few could equal him in comprehensive, manifold, creative gifts, or in the most delicate sense of beauty, and the most active interest, with the deepest insight,into the character and purposes of art. In his home and family relations he was kindly, sociable, cheerful, even amid physical sufferings; not free from errors which even in earlier years and afterwards far more decidedly loosened the bond between him and his wife, yet still unaffectedly attached to all his family; to the admirable mother, many of whose qualities he had inherited, to the wife who was not of his own choosing, to the children to whom he was a wise and prudent counsellor, and a tender but not a weak father. Moreover he was a warm, attentive, and constant friend, attracting and attaching to himself the most different natures, ever ready to help in counsel and action, interposing and interceding for high and low with equal zeal amid a thousand occupations. He was gifted with a delicate sense of propriety, though he could not keep himself free from the Epicureanism of the time, which exacted a sacrifice even from him; and vividly conscious of the power of culture in the field of the Church, though a frivolous materialism threatened to weaken that power and lead him seriously astray in his views of life.He was not without the weaknesses and vices of his time. They cramped his policy, though it still stood far higher than that of most princes and statesmen of the age, both Italian and others. He was superior too in honesty and consistency, and, at least during the last ten years of his life, in unalterable adherence to the preservation of peace and unity, and to a feeling of nationality such as answered to the ideas of the time, from which it is not fair to demand conceptions unfamiliar to it. His home policy has called forth severe blame both on account of his progressive violations of the constitution to increase his personal authority, and of the corruption he employed in order to obtain undisturbed control of the finances. With regard to the latter, it is hard to see how, had he lived longer, he could have avoided national bankruptcy, unless indeed he and the state had contrived by the preservation of peace to restore an internal equilibrium, for which in his last years he had begun to laysome slight foundation. As to the former, many of his contemporaries expressed the opinion that he aimed at becoming a recognised prince, and was only waiting for a favourable opportunity—such as his entrance on the office of Gonfalonier, as soon as that dignity should fall to him on his reaching the legal age. And yet he, who had everything in his power, could not have lacked means and opportunities, if this had been his object. But he knew the city and the people too well to be blind to the obstacles and dangers which threatened to impede that path.Perhaps the worst evil of Lorenzo’s government lay in the increasing incongruity between the outward form and the real power, and in the displacement of authority from its legal centre, whereby both law and moderation were called in question. Personal influence decided everything in politics, in administration, in finance, even in the dispensation of justice. The more clear-sighted among Lorenzo’s contemporaries did not fail to perceive this radical evil, and expressed their opinion of it in the bitterest terms. Nevertheless not merely did Florence escape such excesses as occurred in all other Italian states, almost without an exception, but Lorenzo’s government was on the whole free from the violence which had characterised that of Cosimo. Doubtless the greater tranquillity of the time, the more secure position of the Medici, the fact that the people had been longer accustomed to their rule, contributed to this result; but so also did the character of the man himself. Lorenzo was ambitious to rule, but he was no tyrant. On the one hand he was too keen-sighted, and had calculated too accurately the character and traditions of the people; on the other hand his own nature was too grand, too open, too high-minded, too warm-hearted, and also too fond of enjoyment; finally, he was too much of a Florentine citizen, and that not merely in name but in his appearance, his dress and his bearing. He would have had nothing to distinguish him from the rest of the community, had there not been permitted or granted to him, ever since the Pazziconspiracy, a suite consisting at first of four of his own confidants, afterwards of twelve men paid by the Signoria. It is true that this was a grave offence against civil equality. This citizen-character was not kept up by Lorenzo’s sons—it was said of Piero that he was not a Florentine by nature—and its outward signs vanished altogether in some others of the race. In his own family Lorenzo maintained simplicity; in public affairs, however completely he held the real direction of them, he tried to keep up fair appearances; though indeed he could not prevent a complaint that Ser Piero da Bibiena brought into his court of chancery matters which rightly belonged to the police-jurisdiction of the Eight. On important occasions he liked to consult with many persons, but with each one separately; and then he formed his own decision independently.On his arbitrary proceedings in money matters there were very divided opinions even in his own time. If he had not used the money of the state he would have been ruined; and it was said that his ruin would have entailed that of everybody else; that all he took to save his credit and to lead a showy life was nothing in comparison of the losses to which a state would be exposed by incapable administration; that one single unskilful or ill-timed measure might cost a state dearer than Lorenzo’s whole course of government; that the ultimate and highest object of the Medici, for which they calculated everything they did or left undone, was indeed their own benefit; but they were and always had been Florentine citizens, and in most cases their interest and that of the state was one and the same. So said the favourable party after Lorenzo’s death and Piero’s fall. To this it was answered that the ultimate object of the Medici was not supremacy like that of the Albizzi in a state becoming more and more aristocratic in form, but simply autocracy, which they had sought to attain under the form of democracy, by removing the influence of the noble families and favouring many members of the lower classes. A cunning tyranny like that of Cosimo,or one softened by affability and generosity like that of Lorenzo, was all the worse because it spread poison among the people, preparing the way for the endurance of something harder. The truth of this view was proved at no very distant time.For good or for evil the Medici’s influence struck deep root in Florence. They made the lasting existence of the Republic impossible. ‘We are suffering’—such are the words placed by Francesco Guicciardini in the mouth of a man frequently named in this history—Paol’Antonio Soderini—after their expulsion in 1494—‘from two mortal wounds: the Pisan war, and the exile of the Medici. With their numerous friends in the city and country, and the greatness of their name abroad, they will give us a great deal of trouble.’ He was right. The Medicean party would have given the death-blow to the Republic of 1495 as well as to that of 1527, even if external circumstances had not come to their assistance. The work was made easier for them because here, as in many other republics, the relation of the ruling commonwealth to her subject towns and districts was an unnatural and very oppressive one; these subjects, influenced by the traditions of their old freedom, obeyed only on compulsion; and endured a personal government such as was permanently established forty years after Lorenzo’s death, more easily than their former position—perhaps because their old masters now had to bow their necks to the same yoke.In the ninth chapter of his Florentine history, the great writer just mentioned sums up at the close, in a few words, his masterly picture of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s influence on his native city. The city, he says, was not free under him; but it could not have found a more endurable and better master. For while there proceeded from him much good, owing to his natural goodness and amiable disposition, the evils, so far as they proceeded from the nature of the tyranny itself, were slight and limited to absolute necessity, and infinitelyslighter still where his own will was concerned. Therefore, although many might rejoice at his death, yet it grieved those who had a share in the government, and even those who had some ground of complaint against him, for no one knew whither the change might lead.This was soon discovered. Lorenzo the Magnificent had been scarcely two years and a half in his grave, and his sons had not yet found time to raise a monument to his memory, when the stately edifice of which Giovanni d’Averardo had laid the foundation-stone, which Cosimo had built up, and Piero and Lorenzo enlarged and adorned, crumbled to pieces. On November 9, 1494, Luca Corsini, one of the Priori, shut the gate of the palace of the Signoria in the face of Piero de’ Medici, on his return from the French camp at Sarzana, and thus gave the signal for a great change in the destinies of the commonwealth. Lorenzo’s son and successor had neither his father’s sagacity and experience, nor his father’s authority with the great men nor the attachment of the people, to help him. In the long-threatened division which brought down France to interfere in the dynastic troubles of Italy, he first made common cause with the house of Aragon against the Moro and the French king, and then, as soon as the latter, having crossed the Alps without obstacle, was threatening Florence, the young man lost his head and his courage, and without a shadow of right delivered up the fortresses of the state, Sarzana, Pietrasanta, Pisa, Livorno, to the foreigner. As soon as the old cry of ‘People and liberty!’ was raised in a burst of anger at this unheard-of proceeding, Piero mounted his horse and was glad when he found himself safe on the road to Bologna, whither he was followed by his brothers and those of his adherents who were most deeply compromised, while the mob was sacking the Medici palace and the houses of the most detested tools of their financial administration. Thus in a moment a revolution was accomplished which created a new popular state, under the eyes of a foreign sovereign. That same November 9 CharlesVIII. entered Pisa, where the rising against Florence began, and a week later he was in the palace in the Via Larga. This state lasted, amid the greatest internal and external difficulties, for nearly eighteen years, and then gave way to a new Medicean supremacy, which after another three years’ interruption, brought about by similar extraneous circumstances, formed itself into an hereditary autocracy, lasting till, after the lapse of two full centuries, the altered family died out in the altered country, and was mourned even then, when but little was left of the qualities which had lent it so much splendour.Lorenzo’s friends and adherents met with various fates. Of the heads of the party, now left to their own resources, some attained influence and power in the new commonwealth; others came to a bloody end. Of the friends who stood round his death-bed, one, Angelo Poliziano, did not live to see the catastrophe that befell the once splendid house. He was taken away on September 24, 1494; and the evil reports which his life, notwithstanding all his high intellectual gifts, had in some measure called forth, did not spare him even in death. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola died on the day of the French king’s entry, and the comforter of his last moments was the man whom Lorenzo, too, had summoned in the hour of death—the Predicant monk of Ferrara who was destined to stir Florence to her deepest depths, and to die amid the flames lighted by his own hand. Marsilio Ficino and Cristoforo Landino were doomed to witness the misfortunes of the family to whom they owed everything and were attached by hereditary affection, and to survive the execution of many friends, and the dispersion of the rich treasures of art and learning which adorned the house in which they had been born and grown up. Of the younger members of the circle, some spent eighteen years in exile and vicissitude, to come back at last and sun themselves in the splendour, brilliant indeed but fleeting, of the pontificate of Leo X. Then the seeds of literature and art sown in thedays of Lorenzo, sprang up in the works of Ariosto and Machiavelli, of Raphael and Michelangelo; but the political edifice, whose chief pillar he had been, and the national polity were irrecoverably destroyed; Italy had become the whole world’s battle-field; Lombardy was subject to the French, Naples to the Spaniards; the crowd of dynasties in Romagna had been swept away by the flood; while of those who had once held in their control the weal and woe of the peninsula, Ferrante and Alfonso of Aragon had died in distress and remorse, and Lodovico il Moro had ended his days in a French prison.
Atthe age of forty-three Lorenzo was called away. His span of life had been but a short one for such manifold activity and such lasting fame. A remarkable man, he was the most brilliant representative of a remarkable time; in no one else were its qualities and excellences united in such a harmonious whole. Energetic in action, and earnest in his endeavours to watch the phases of progress in the establishment of a new order of things; endowed with the liveliest susceptibilities and the quickest perceptions, combined with the earnestness and thoroughness of a student; with a strongly sympathetic feeling for art, yet capable of immediate application to the business of life; he united imaginative power with clear common sense, the capacity for lofty projects with that for patient calculation; he had all the qualities of poet and statesman, connoisseur and patron of learning, citizen and prince. He was indefatigable and persevering in the endless business thrown upon him by his position as the leader of a peculiarly constituted state; with a quick and unerring eye he was able to grasp the whole and yet observe its smallest detail; in his riper years he was cautious and prudent, keeping his object immovably in view without blind self-confidence or presumption, though fully alive to his own position and that of the state which he represented. He passed with wonderful ease from practical to speculative politics, from science to poetry. Few could equal him in comprehensive, manifold, creative gifts, or in the most delicate sense of beauty, and the most active interest, with the deepest insight,into the character and purposes of art. In his home and family relations he was kindly, sociable, cheerful, even amid physical sufferings; not free from errors which even in earlier years and afterwards far more decidedly loosened the bond between him and his wife, yet still unaffectedly attached to all his family; to the admirable mother, many of whose qualities he had inherited, to the wife who was not of his own choosing, to the children to whom he was a wise and prudent counsellor, and a tender but not a weak father. Moreover he was a warm, attentive, and constant friend, attracting and attaching to himself the most different natures, ever ready to help in counsel and action, interposing and interceding for high and low with equal zeal amid a thousand occupations. He was gifted with a delicate sense of propriety, though he could not keep himself free from the Epicureanism of the time, which exacted a sacrifice even from him; and vividly conscious of the power of culture in the field of the Church, though a frivolous materialism threatened to weaken that power and lead him seriously astray in his views of life.
He was not without the weaknesses and vices of his time. They cramped his policy, though it still stood far higher than that of most princes and statesmen of the age, both Italian and others. He was superior too in honesty and consistency, and, at least during the last ten years of his life, in unalterable adherence to the preservation of peace and unity, and to a feeling of nationality such as answered to the ideas of the time, from which it is not fair to demand conceptions unfamiliar to it. His home policy has called forth severe blame both on account of his progressive violations of the constitution to increase his personal authority, and of the corruption he employed in order to obtain undisturbed control of the finances. With regard to the latter, it is hard to see how, had he lived longer, he could have avoided national bankruptcy, unless indeed he and the state had contrived by the preservation of peace to restore an internal equilibrium, for which in his last years he had begun to laysome slight foundation. As to the former, many of his contemporaries expressed the opinion that he aimed at becoming a recognised prince, and was only waiting for a favourable opportunity—such as his entrance on the office of Gonfalonier, as soon as that dignity should fall to him on his reaching the legal age. And yet he, who had everything in his power, could not have lacked means and opportunities, if this had been his object. But he knew the city and the people too well to be blind to the obstacles and dangers which threatened to impede that path.
Perhaps the worst evil of Lorenzo’s government lay in the increasing incongruity between the outward form and the real power, and in the displacement of authority from its legal centre, whereby both law and moderation were called in question. Personal influence decided everything in politics, in administration, in finance, even in the dispensation of justice. The more clear-sighted among Lorenzo’s contemporaries did not fail to perceive this radical evil, and expressed their opinion of it in the bitterest terms. Nevertheless not merely did Florence escape such excesses as occurred in all other Italian states, almost without an exception, but Lorenzo’s government was on the whole free from the violence which had characterised that of Cosimo. Doubtless the greater tranquillity of the time, the more secure position of the Medici, the fact that the people had been longer accustomed to their rule, contributed to this result; but so also did the character of the man himself. Lorenzo was ambitious to rule, but he was no tyrant. On the one hand he was too keen-sighted, and had calculated too accurately the character and traditions of the people; on the other hand his own nature was too grand, too open, too high-minded, too warm-hearted, and also too fond of enjoyment; finally, he was too much of a Florentine citizen, and that not merely in name but in his appearance, his dress and his bearing. He would have had nothing to distinguish him from the rest of the community, had there not been permitted or granted to him, ever since the Pazziconspiracy, a suite consisting at first of four of his own confidants, afterwards of twelve men paid by the Signoria. It is true that this was a grave offence against civil equality. This citizen-character was not kept up by Lorenzo’s sons—it was said of Piero that he was not a Florentine by nature—and its outward signs vanished altogether in some others of the race. In his own family Lorenzo maintained simplicity; in public affairs, however completely he held the real direction of them, he tried to keep up fair appearances; though indeed he could not prevent a complaint that Ser Piero da Bibiena brought into his court of chancery matters which rightly belonged to the police-jurisdiction of the Eight. On important occasions he liked to consult with many persons, but with each one separately; and then he formed his own decision independently.
On his arbitrary proceedings in money matters there were very divided opinions even in his own time. If he had not used the money of the state he would have been ruined; and it was said that his ruin would have entailed that of everybody else; that all he took to save his credit and to lead a showy life was nothing in comparison of the losses to which a state would be exposed by incapable administration; that one single unskilful or ill-timed measure might cost a state dearer than Lorenzo’s whole course of government; that the ultimate and highest object of the Medici, for which they calculated everything they did or left undone, was indeed their own benefit; but they were and always had been Florentine citizens, and in most cases their interest and that of the state was one and the same. So said the favourable party after Lorenzo’s death and Piero’s fall. To this it was answered that the ultimate object of the Medici was not supremacy like that of the Albizzi in a state becoming more and more aristocratic in form, but simply autocracy, which they had sought to attain under the form of democracy, by removing the influence of the noble families and favouring many members of the lower classes. A cunning tyranny like that of Cosimo,or one softened by affability and generosity like that of Lorenzo, was all the worse because it spread poison among the people, preparing the way for the endurance of something harder. The truth of this view was proved at no very distant time.
For good or for evil the Medici’s influence struck deep root in Florence. They made the lasting existence of the Republic impossible. ‘We are suffering’—such are the words placed by Francesco Guicciardini in the mouth of a man frequently named in this history—Paol’Antonio Soderini—after their expulsion in 1494—‘from two mortal wounds: the Pisan war, and the exile of the Medici. With their numerous friends in the city and country, and the greatness of their name abroad, they will give us a great deal of trouble.’ He was right. The Medicean party would have given the death-blow to the Republic of 1495 as well as to that of 1527, even if external circumstances had not come to their assistance. The work was made easier for them because here, as in many other republics, the relation of the ruling commonwealth to her subject towns and districts was an unnatural and very oppressive one; these subjects, influenced by the traditions of their old freedom, obeyed only on compulsion; and endured a personal government such as was permanently established forty years after Lorenzo’s death, more easily than their former position—perhaps because their old masters now had to bow their necks to the same yoke.
In the ninth chapter of his Florentine history, the great writer just mentioned sums up at the close, in a few words, his masterly picture of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s influence on his native city. The city, he says, was not free under him; but it could not have found a more endurable and better master. For while there proceeded from him much good, owing to his natural goodness and amiable disposition, the evils, so far as they proceeded from the nature of the tyranny itself, were slight and limited to absolute necessity, and infinitelyslighter still where his own will was concerned. Therefore, although many might rejoice at his death, yet it grieved those who had a share in the government, and even those who had some ground of complaint against him, for no one knew whither the change might lead.
This was soon discovered. Lorenzo the Magnificent had been scarcely two years and a half in his grave, and his sons had not yet found time to raise a monument to his memory, when the stately edifice of which Giovanni d’Averardo had laid the foundation-stone, which Cosimo had built up, and Piero and Lorenzo enlarged and adorned, crumbled to pieces. On November 9, 1494, Luca Corsini, one of the Priori, shut the gate of the palace of the Signoria in the face of Piero de’ Medici, on his return from the French camp at Sarzana, and thus gave the signal for a great change in the destinies of the commonwealth. Lorenzo’s son and successor had neither his father’s sagacity and experience, nor his father’s authority with the great men nor the attachment of the people, to help him. In the long-threatened division which brought down France to interfere in the dynastic troubles of Italy, he first made common cause with the house of Aragon against the Moro and the French king, and then, as soon as the latter, having crossed the Alps without obstacle, was threatening Florence, the young man lost his head and his courage, and without a shadow of right delivered up the fortresses of the state, Sarzana, Pietrasanta, Pisa, Livorno, to the foreigner. As soon as the old cry of ‘People and liberty!’ was raised in a burst of anger at this unheard-of proceeding, Piero mounted his horse and was glad when he found himself safe on the road to Bologna, whither he was followed by his brothers and those of his adherents who were most deeply compromised, while the mob was sacking the Medici palace and the houses of the most detested tools of their financial administration. Thus in a moment a revolution was accomplished which created a new popular state, under the eyes of a foreign sovereign. That same November 9 CharlesVIII. entered Pisa, where the rising against Florence began, and a week later he was in the palace in the Via Larga. This state lasted, amid the greatest internal and external difficulties, for nearly eighteen years, and then gave way to a new Medicean supremacy, which after another three years’ interruption, brought about by similar extraneous circumstances, formed itself into an hereditary autocracy, lasting till, after the lapse of two full centuries, the altered family died out in the altered country, and was mourned even then, when but little was left of the qualities which had lent it so much splendour.
Lorenzo’s friends and adherents met with various fates. Of the heads of the party, now left to their own resources, some attained influence and power in the new commonwealth; others came to a bloody end. Of the friends who stood round his death-bed, one, Angelo Poliziano, did not live to see the catastrophe that befell the once splendid house. He was taken away on September 24, 1494; and the evil reports which his life, notwithstanding all his high intellectual gifts, had in some measure called forth, did not spare him even in death. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola died on the day of the French king’s entry, and the comforter of his last moments was the man whom Lorenzo, too, had summoned in the hour of death—the Predicant monk of Ferrara who was destined to stir Florence to her deepest depths, and to die amid the flames lighted by his own hand. Marsilio Ficino and Cristoforo Landino were doomed to witness the misfortunes of the family to whom they owed everything and were attached by hereditary affection, and to survive the execution of many friends, and the dispersion of the rich treasures of art and learning which adorned the house in which they had been born and grown up. Of the younger members of the circle, some spent eighteen years in exile and vicissitude, to come back at last and sun themselves in the splendour, brilliant indeed but fleeting, of the pontificate of Leo X. Then the seeds of literature and art sown in thedays of Lorenzo, sprang up in the works of Ariosto and Machiavelli, of Raphael and Michelangelo; but the political edifice, whose chief pillar he had been, and the national polity were irrecoverably destroyed; Italy had become the whole world’s battle-field; Lombardy was subject to the French, Naples to the Spaniards; the crowd of dynasties in Romagna had been swept away by the flood; while of those who had once held in their control the weal and woe of the peninsula, Ferrante and Alfonso of Aragon had died in distress and remorse, and Lodovico il Moro had ended his days in a French prison.