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In Our Time: History
The Medici
00:42:03
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Medici family, rulers of Renaissance Florence.
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Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our Terms of Use, please go to BBC.co.uk radio4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello? In 1433, Cosimo de Medici, one of Florence's wealthiest citizens, was staying in his country villa just to the north of the city. His enemies seized power and grasped the opportunity to have a Cosimo arrested on a charge of treason. He was ordered by the city's chief magistrate to return to Florence, where he was imprisoned in the dungeon of the town hall. But there was soon a dramatic reversal in Cosimo's fortunes. Thanks to judicious bribery, he was released from jail and allowed to go into exile. Yet within a year, the Medici family was back in control of Florence's government, and Cosimo was able to return jubilantly to the city. For the next three centuries or so, the House of Medici dominated Florence's political and cultural life. Through their patronage of learning and the arts, Florence developed into one of the great centers of the Renaissance. Four Medici men became pope, and through strategic marriages, they formed connections with a number of major European royal families. With me to discuss the Medici are Evelyn Welsh, professor of Renaissance studies at King's College, London. Robert Black, professor of Renaissance History at the University of Leeds. And Catherine Fletcher, lecturer in Public History at the University of Sheffield. Evelyn Welsh. Can you tell us about the origins of the Medici family?
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B
It's Cosimo's father, Giovanni di Bici, who really establishes the family's fortunes and makes it the powerhouse that it is. The family comes from the Mugello, the countryside outside Florence, and is very involved in banking. Giovanni di Bici really sets up the Medici bank. He uses his wife's dowry to establish his own branch of a bank and then expands it. He really integrates himself into the Roman politics of the Papacy, lending money, helping in a very complex period to ensure that the right people become the right pope at the right time.
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A
Right for him.
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B
Right for him. Right for the Pope. Quite a complicated period there.
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A
How do you set up a bank?
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B
So you need capital, you need cash. And banking isn't the sort of banking that we understand today. It's a place where exchange takes place. So there are lots of different currencies. You need gold, you need silver and you need trust, so that when somebody comes from London to Florence, they're able to pick up a letter of exchange and get the funds that they need to do business there.
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A
What was the Florence like In the early 15th century, when the Medici really began to come into prominence?
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B
Well, Florence is a place of factional infighting, but. But it's also the most astonishing building site in Europe. The Duomo is going up, the cathedral is going up, the baptistery drawers are being made. There's a shrine called Orsa Michele, in which the different guilds of Florence are competing to put up the most grand statues by some of the best artists in Italy at the time.
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A
And in its constitution, and in its.
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B
Constitution, Florence is a republic, so the Florentine government is not one that we would understand today. It's a rotational government. Names are drawn by lot from a bag. And if your name is drawn, you will then govern Florence as part of a committee for around two to six months. The idea is that while you're in government, you are looking after the city of Florence rather than your own parochial family interests.
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A
So, Robert Black, in the scheme of things, was it in the early 15th century, when the Medici came there with their money, was it an important place in Italy? Was it known to be of growing importance?
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D
Well, Florence was one of the leading cities of Italy, had been since the 13th century. It was certainly the most important and the richest and the most powerful city in Tuscany. It then became a major player in Italian politics really from the 13th century, and Florence became one of the really key states, really, in Italy. It's often said that Florence was less important than places like Milan, Venice or Rome. This is really not true. Florence was an absolutely major power, one of the really major powers in Italy.
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A
Did the fact that it thought of itself as a republic have a deep bearing on its character, or was that idea a sort of COVID for what was really going on? Oligarchs keeping control?
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D
No, the republican ideology in Florence and the republican identity was one of the most powerful emotive issues and emotive feelings among all Florentines. The idea that they were a free republic, that they governed themselves, that they were independent, was key to their identity and something that they were absolutely determined not to lose. There were various brief episodes of loss of republican power in the earlier 14th century, but these then were really put aside by the 15th century. And so Florence's identity as a republic was absolutely key. There was, of course, you mentioned the oligarchy. Florence's government and Florence's became more and more restricted in the late 14th, early 15th century and became very, very narrow nevertheless. This never really in the Florentine's mind, contradicted the fact that it was a republic.
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A
We've heard a bit about the banking, but Cosimi moved in from. Not exactly from nowhere, but from outside the city with his money and began to infiltrate committees, as I understand it, and become a powerful man in that sit, although not yet long way ahead in his family, an aristocrat. Can you give us a closer idea of the way his money influenced the influence he was allowed to, he took for himself?
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D
Well, I would put the money at a secondary level. It was very, very important in order to gain a place among the leading families of Florence. But there were other rich Florentines and there was lots of other money in Florence. Money could never, in Florence, political power. It had to be married to other things. And what the Medici were particularly astute at was patronage and how to gain a following of clients and a kind of network, a network of political power that was the key to their actual success. Is this very powerful and close clientage basis, partly based on where they lived in the city, but also extending further, that actually gave them a kind of route that was greater than any other family.
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A
Was this partly because he could lend people money?
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D
It had something to do with it, but it was also doing people favors. When they did one person, doing another person favor was a kind of almost. It wasn't really a mafioso thing, but it was the way, in the sense it wasn't illegal. Well, it was illegal, but it wasn't. It wasn't a criminal involved in violence, but it was something the way in which, through personal connections, power can be achieved just as you see it, as in the Mafia. I mean, power is achieved not just by money, but by personal ties and links that people had with one another.
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A
Having said they weren't the Mafia, you've slipped quite quickly into comparing them directly with the Mafia. Robert?
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D
Well, yeah, I mean, this often does happen. And there was a famous article on Cosimo. Was he the father of the city or was he the godfather of the city? And there are certain similarities, although it's very important to realize that the one similarity they didn't have with the Mafia is that it was not based on violence, it was not based on a criminal network in that sense, of all sorts of illegal activities, but it was based on these very close personal ties that, in that sense, it's similar to the Mafia.
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A
Before I go to you, Kalyan, can I come back to you for one moment? Evelyn, just the banking, the money, I don't think people are going to be quite clear as to how much, how he dispensed it. Obviously, a lot of these other families are rich and so on. What's he doing that they aren't doing? Or what's he doing that's better than what they are doing?
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B
So Cosimo, as Robert has said, is extremely astute at using his money, his favors, and I will use the word infiltrating, the republican systems. So he very rarely takes official power himself. He usually places people whom he trusts, who trust him, into places of power. He does finance things behind the scenes. So he lends money to the government. He pays for some of the statuary that goes up. He builds monuments on behalf of the city. He certainly loans money to influential people outside of Florence, and he uses his money judiciously to oil the wheels on behalf of the Republic.
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A
So he is, from the very beginning, the magic is saying we are going to make Florence a great place, and it's Florence that we're working for.
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B
That's right. So this is not done simply on behalf of me as an individual, Cosimo de Medici. It's not done for private, familial reasons. It's done to make Florence the great city that everyone wants it to be.
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A
Catherine Fletcher, after Cosimo, can we get to Lorenzo the Magnificent? Can you tell us how we get there and then talk about him?
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C
Well, yes, of course, one of the things that Cosimo had done was to expand the Medici bank right across Europe. And this, of course, gives him access to a huge quantity of information that he can then wield in policy making. And this is another source of influence for Cosimo, is his source of information. Now, Pope Pius has said, when you.
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A
Say all across Europe, you mean London, Paris?
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C
We mean we have branches in London, Bruges, Antwerp, in Basel, down right through Italy, across many of the Italian cities. And so when Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cosimo's grandson, comes to power, he has at his fingertips this huge European network. However, this is also a time of some problems for banking. Now, Cosimo has done very well, but from the 1430s to the 1470s, there's quite a consolidation of the banking industry in Italy and. And that's something that's going to hit the Medici. But putting that for one side to the moment, and coming back to Lorenzo, there's a great quotation from Francesco Guicciardini, the historian of Italy, saying that if Florence had to have a tyrant, she couldn't have a better or more delightful one than Lorenzo. And I think that really sums up the two sides of his character. He's at once the politician, but he's also this great poet and a connoisseur of the arts.
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A
So can you develop his character a little? Because he was there for a long time and the title the Magnificent does apply to the sort of things he did. Can you tell us more about him?
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C
Yes, of course. He had done his first diplomatic missions while he was still a teenager. He'd had this great education in the humanities, which I'm sure Robert will be able to tell us more about. He had been to Naples, he'd been to Pisa, he'd been to Rome on a diplomatic mission to congratulate the new pope, put Paul ii. Even as a child, he was already greeting dignitaries and reading poetry to them in Florence when people arrived and made their grand entries. And that makes him into a great statesman when he has to take over running this game, the Medici run in Florence of the rhetorical republic, holding power behind the scenes and maintaining the myth.
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A
But he saw himself as a writer and did indeed write a lot of poetry.
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C
He wrote some beautiful poetry. He wrote love poetry, he wrote pastoral poetry. There's a great poem about partridge hunting. He's a patron of the arts. He patronizes people like Filippino Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro, Botticelli in 1475, when he puts on public entertainment A great joust in honour of his brother Giuliano. It's Botticelli who designs the public entertainments for him. This is a bringing together of the politics and the art, which is very important in understanding the motivations for some of that art patronage in Florence.
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A
His Magnificence was a great patron and so on, but he wasn't much of a banker, by the sound of it.
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C
He wasn't much of a banker, although I'm not sure anybody could have entirely overcome the problems with banking in the period. The thing that gets the Medici bank into trouble is when it starts making political loans for political reasons. And in Milan and in England, they do this and they run up against a problem that is very familiar today, the problem of sovereign debt default, the problem of governments not repaying their loans to the banks, including the English kingdom.
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A
Shame.
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C
Edward iv. And they should have known with Edward iv, because Edward III had done precisely the same thing with his Italian bankers a century earlier. So Edward IV defaults. The Duke of Milan ends up owing the bank 179,000 ducats. And, you know, this is a phenomenal amount of money. This an amount of money that could pay the salaries of six or seven thousand building workers for a year. These are very big sums. The London branch is probably overextended by four times its capital and the banks got into a mess. And something that is quite familiar today.
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A
Did the decline of the banks mean that the Medici family influence also declined?
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C
I think it meant that the Medici family had to rely more on the state and more on politics and more on political alliances and trying to find alternative sources of political power. Now, one of those would be the Church putting strategically placing sons into church careers in order to gain access to church benefices. Other routes into power will be marriage alliances. So, for example, Lorenzo is the first of his family to marry outside Florence and to go into the Roman aristocracy, take a bride from there. That's Clarice, or so of one of the two great families of rome.
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A
Evelyn. In 1478, Lorenzo was attacked by the Pazzi conspiracy. How did this plot come about and what transpired?
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B
In April 1478, Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano are attending mass along with a large number of Florentine citizens. And as the host is raised by the priest, that's the signal for conspirators to rush up and to attempt to save stab them to death. Giuliano is killed almost immediately. Lorenzo flees into the sacristy, where luckily, someone's built a rather beautiful and very strong bronze door. There, closed behind him. And he survives there. The conspirators expect the citizens of Florence to rise up and support them, but this doesn't happen. Instead, the Pazzi family, and I'll come on to that in a moment. And their allies are hunted down, beheaded, hung. Their arms are removed from every possible visible place within the city and they're exiled there. So it sounds like that this is a sort of local resurrection of republicanism, or in an attempt to overthrow one clan, the Medici, by another clan. As Robert says, Florence is full of rich people there. But in fact, it's even more complicated than that, because behind the scenes, you have the Pope, Sixtus IV and his nephews, King of Naples and even the Duke of Urbino, all working, manipulating, in order to benefit from the fall of the Medici.
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A
And the Medici fight them off.
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B
The Medici fight them off. Lorenzo survives. In fact, his power, if anything, is consolidated. Florence is placed under an interdict in the period, he has to make his apologies to the powers that be. But Lorenzo not only survives. What are you apologizing for? Well, in the melee, he happens to arrange for the death of the Archbishop of Pisa, a member of the Salviati family. And this unfortunate death of an archbishop is taken rather badly by the Pope.
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A
Right. And we say. Did you say it wasn't like the Mafia? Was it you who said that earlier.
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D
On, this was a very extreme case of violence done to the Medici and done in these very overt circumstances. And so I don't think it was.
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A
No, I was teasing you. Can you tell us about the impact the Medici had on scholarship and education?
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D
Well, I think this is one of the most important, if not the most important, legacy and achievement of the Medici family. The word the Renaissance really comes in here. The Renaissance was put very simply, was an attempt to revive the culture of antiquity, of ancient Rome and Greece. Now, before the time of the Medici, it had been really Rome that had been most heavily than the Latin culture of Rome that had been favored in scholarship. And, of course, the Medici did tremendous amounts of patronage in this direction, too. One of the great people whom the Medici gave patronage and support to was Angelo Poliziano, who was the greatest Latin scholar of the 15th century and one of the greatest Latin scholars of all time. But the Medici also became highly interested in Greek scholarship, in the actual patronage of Greek, because Greek had something that had not been known widely in the Middle Ages in the West. It was not part of the education. People did not know Greek directly. Whatever Greek they knew, they read through translations. There were many Greek Texts that were not known well. The Medici gave tremendous support to the revival of Greek. First of all, the revival of Plato and Plato's philosophy. Plato had been largely on the back burner in the Middle Ages. He was now brought forward and Medici were responsible for giving patronage for the translation into Latin of all Plato's works and also not just of Plato, but all the other Platonic philosophers. And so this Greek scholarship was highly important. Fundamental was really the greatest achievement of the Renaissance, in many ways was the actual opening up of Greece as well as Rome. But also the Medici gave very important patronage to more contemporary educational institutions. For example, the University Florence had had a second rate sort of university in the 14th and earlier 15th century, but it was always struggling and it was having periods when it didn't even have any teaching going on. It was in virtual state of closure. Lorenzo decided that this was really because Florence, the university was in the wrong place, that in other great cities, for example, Venice or Milan, had had their universities in outside the city. Lorenzo decided it would be much better to have the university not in main university seat, not in Florence, but in Pisa. And so he really established the University of Pisa as a major university in the which it has remained.
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A
So today we seem to we're going to swing between great achievements, amazing achievement in the arts and culture and fairly base basic politics anyway, because following the Pata conspiracy, a war broke out between Florence and the papacy. How did Lorenzo win that war?
- [21:38]
C
Catherine Fletcher, as Evelyn said, Pope 6th IV had sequestered the assets of the Medici bank and excommunicated Lorenzo and 6th had also joined an alliance with Ferrante, who was the King of Naples. Now Ferrante's son Alphonse, the Duke of Calabria, went into battle against the Florentines. Isaiah went into battle with a bit of caution because in fact, there wasn't a great deal of fighting. The Florentine mercenary commander was in fact Alphonse's brother in law, the Duke of Ferrara. So they spent their time manoeuvring to make maximum income with minimum losses, as many mercenaries did in the period. And the war didn't go particularly particularly well and make a great deal of progress. And in fact, it was down to Lorenzo the Magnificent to settle this dispute. In a remarkable piece of personal diplomacy, he actually took himself off to Naples. He spent a couple of months there, really trying to charm the King of Naples, charming him with his ability in poetry, with his love of hunting and. But also with a great deal of money. He'd taken out a 60,000 Florin mortgage on his own lands in an attempt to give out bribes and such like, and eventually he won Ferrante round. But I have to say he was helped in this and helped in settling the overall dispute by the Turks, who very conveniently invaded the south of Italy in 1480, thus concentrating mines and all the Italian powers said, okay, what we really don't want is to be fighting amongst ourselves when the Turks are invading. Let's make peace again. And of course, there were rumours inevitably went round that Lorenzo had put the Turks up to it, but. But I'm not sure there's a great deal of evidence for that.
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D
Robert Black, of course, I would agree with everything that Catherine has said, but I think it's important to realize that Florence and the Medici did not win the war, that the war was going disastrously badly for the Medici and Lorenzo's position in Florence before 1480 was absolutely collapsing. And this was a desperate measure, this move to go down to Naples. And what he secured was the. The fact of not the absolute collapse of the Medici family and so. And the collapse of Medici interests. And so he would then return to Florence. And that, of course, that was a triumph because Florentines were expecting a terrible defeat and instead they got. He signed a peace, and that gave him this possibility of consolidating his power in Florence.
- [24:01]
A
Evelyn, can I come to something which our listeners will be reasonably very familiar with, which is the art that came out of France. Can you develop that a little more? The Medici supported the arts on which persons were involved, which objects were involved.
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B
So if we go back to Cosimo, Cosimo the Elder, Pater Patria, as he's sometimes known as his strongest relationships with artists such as Donatello. And that's quite interesting because Donatello is experimenting with classicism. Donatello is creating these monuments to Florentine Republicanism. They're things like this remarkable young David, figure of David, Judith and Holofernes. And Lorenzo, as we've heard, follows to some extent in his footsteps. But like his own father, Piero so privatizes the arts. The kinds of artwork that Cosimo the Elder is financing are public monuments. By the time we get to Lorenzo, we're looking at Botticelli painting in the villas for the Medicis. Lorenzo does an astonishing thing. He acquires some of the most valuable cameos and gems and sardonic vases of the classical period, and he inscribes his own name, his own initials on them, so that you look at this very beautiful 2nd century AD Roman cameo. And it's got L A U R written on it. Lorenzo.
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A
But what did it seem, as it seems in television versions of history, a place of the ferment of artists.
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B
So Lorenzo is less responsible for the ferment of artists than he takes advantage of it. So this is a period in the 1490s, just before Lorenzo's own death there, where you have Leonardo, although he's working in Milan, you have young Raphael, you have Michelangelo there. So Florence is a kind of cradle of remarkable artistic achievement is something that Lorenzo uses by essentially saying, if you want a great artist, come to me and I'll give you advice on whom to hire.
- [26:15]
C
I think it's just worth bearing in mind that some of the early art patronage is very much connected to the idea of expiating the sins that are involved in banking. All those beautiful chapels, they are about saying, I acknowledge that lending at interest usury is bad behaviour in terms of the Christian Church beliefs at the time. And so I'm going to endow this beautiful chapel in order to help in my own salvation.
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A
Robert Black. After Lorenzo's death, that's 1492, he was succeeded by his son, Pierre de Medici, for a small, short amount of time. And then the Medicis were exiled from Florence. How did that come about?
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D
That came about through, principally through a huge diplomatic and military crisis, because Italy was invaded by the King of France, who had a dynastic claim to the Neapolitan throne. And this put the Medici family in an impossible, virtually impossible situation. One of the things we've heard about is that in 1480, there was a kind of major diplomatic realignment in Italy for Florence. At Florence, the closest ally up until 1480 had been Milan. But because of this, the way the resolution of the Pazzi war and Lorenzo's great diplomatic gesture going down to Naples, he had the real crux, the real heart. The hub of Florentine diplomacy and the diplomatic support now became Naples. And so when the King of France appeared on the scene and said, I'm the real King of Naples, these are just pretenders here, and claimed his throne. This puts the medicine into a huge position. Piero really didn't know where to turn and so he sometimes went back. And so he continued really to favor Naples. And so the French king then came down in the end with his army and nobody really thought he would ever come. He did come. He came and Piero went out to meet him and he completely panicked and he gave away all these fortresses, seven major Florentine fortresses. Of course, he had no right to do that at all, because he wasn't the ruler of Florence. He didn't own them. And when he came back to the city the very next day, all his supporters, virtually everybody, turned against him. He was banished from the city. He had to flee the city. He was banished and the Medici were outlawed from the city. And so it was mainly as a result of this diplomatic crisis, but also behind that there was another factor, is that the Medici, because they had taken so much power unto themselves, they had marginalized the traditional ruling families. And so there was a lot of resentment against the Medici. And so at that point, that combined with this diplomatic crisis.
- [29:06]
A
Catherine Fletcher, they were out from 1492 until 1512. How did they get back?
- [29:12]
C
They got back with a very impressive but extremely vicious military maneuver in 1512. Cardinal Giovanni de Medici, the future Pope Leo X, who by this time was in alliance with the Spanish troops who were fighting in these Italian wars. Now, Italy really, by this time was a crucible of a war between the Holy Roman Empire and France. Cardinal Giovanni, in alliance with the Spanish, wasn't sure whether they could defeat the citizen militia that Machiavelli and his friends had been drilling in Florence. So rather than attacking Florence directly, they attacked the smaller town of Prato, some 12 miles to the northwest. As Leo Giovanni said, not without some bloodshed, which consisted of about 2,000 deaths, mass rape, the torture of citizens to reveal where they'd hidden their valuables. And this was a piece of psychological warfare that, as the cardinal put it, would be an example and deterrent to other cities who dared to resist Spanish troops. And the Florentines panicked and they came to terms and they agreed to the readmission of Medici.
- [30:19]
A
So the Medici had come in, in the first phase with money, and they came in the second phase with blood. Really?
- [30:24]
C
Well, they came in certainly in a very different context, in a context where alliances with foreign powers and European alliances with either the Spanish or the French were going to be increasingly important. And as we see going on into the 1520s and 30s, it's Spanish backing that helps you get somewhere in Italy.
- [30:43]
A
One of the things about the Medici, which is fascinating, they're moving into Italian aristocracy, then they're moving around by alliances into European aristocracy. They've also make a big power grab for the papacy. Four Medicis become popes. Why was the. Why was that so important to them?
- [31:00]
B
So if we go back to the beginning, the origins of the Medici, we remember that it was as papal bankers that they are really making their fortune. And it's A short leap from wanting to control the money of the papacy to wanting to control the papacy itself. But before you can become pope, you. You need to become a cardinal. So the really smart thing that Lorenzo does is ensure that he places his children and his relatives into cardinalships. Even kids as young as 13 are placed into these positions of ecclesiastical authority. And then a huge amount of behind the scenes manipulation is done at conclaves to ensure that they then take authority, they take control of the papers.
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A
How did his second son, Giovanni, become Leo the. The Leo the 10th in 1513?
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D
Well, I mean, it was just. It was the luck of the conclave, really.
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A
And so it wasn't maneuvering.
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D
It was maneuvering, but it was always very dicey whether you would win a conclave.
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A
No, but Evelyn's point that he'd seeded cardinals in his own family was obviously a big factor, that he made a lot of them cardinals. So they were ready to be popes if.
- [32:13]
D
Well, there's only one cardinal.
- [32:16]
B
Well, Catherine can.
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C
Well, I think. I think part of the point is in 1513, Leo Giovanni, who then became Leo X, was the only Medici cardinal in the conclave. He was also very, very ill. And one of the things conclaves often like is to elect a pope who they think probably won't last very long. I mean, he arrived late to the conclave, he had to be carried in on a litter. And I just thought this is a great compromise candidate, because this is the guy who we know is going to shuffle off the mortal coil. Not too far down the line, there will eventually be a number of cardinals. Because one of the things that Leo does in 1517 is to make one of the biggest expansions of the College of Cardinals ever in history, and pack it with his friends and supporters, with his cousin, who will then become Pope Clement the second, seventh. And from there on in, you really have a Medici base of friends and family and supporters in the papacy. But that happens with Leo's maneuvers.
- [33:13]
B
Once you need one cardinal to catch a papacy, and then once you've got the papacy, you can then use it to embed your family, not only in ecclesiastical positions, but also in aristocratic positions.
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D
But could I just come in that it wasn't by any means inevitable that Medici there would have a succession? Because, I mean, the Medici, in 1521, after the death of Leo, on the 1st of December, the death of Leo X, they lost the papacy. There was a northerner, Hadrian vi. And so it was never inevitable that any family would control the papacy. Of course, you're quite Right. Saying that the Medici were in a stronger position because of all the patronage.
- [33:54]
A
But although you were right to say, obviously you're right, Lorenzo created one cardinal, the Medici created quite a lot of cardinals.
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D
Well, yes, right. But not of their family. Exactly. I mean, you know, so we're.
- [34:06]
B
So we're back to this issue of networks, contacts, connections. But we're working at a very different level here. We're working at the international elite level, where they're not only creating cardinals, they're creating queens.
- [34:19]
A
But in one sense, Rob, they seem to have deserted Florence and moved a lot of their power and influence, buildings, patronage to Rome.
- [34:27]
D
Well, this became a tremendous problem for the Medici in this period, because now they had. After the beginning of Leo X's pontificate in 1513, they now had two centers. They had Florence and Rome. And so it was really quite difficult how to juggle these two things. And, in fact, what really happened was that Florence became. Went under the back burner. They gave much more attention to what was going on in Rome and Florence. It was very. It was very difficult. They didn't know whom to place in Florence in order to rule the city, because all the various brother. The brother. The nephews that they put in there weren't really very interested in Florence. They were interested in building up a kind of a principality more permanent for themselves elsewhere, because Florence was just too much trouble to deal with these aristocrats and people who just were very hostile to the Medici, always and resentful of the Medici power. So it was a real problem how to deal with Florence at this time. And they had dealt with it by a series of absentee rulers and absentee governors, and they had secretaries and cardinals, people, other people from different families governing Florence for them, because they couldn't really have. They had no one really to put in there to rule or to run the city for them.
- [35:49]
A
Catherine Fletcher, there was. What about the Alessandro who became ruler in Florence in 1531?
- [35:56]
C
Well, Alessandro was one of two illegitimate nephews of Pope Clement vii. Pope Clement VII had no legitimate male heirs for the Medici family. He had two bastard boys, Alessandra Napolito and a daughter, Catherine, who will go on to be Queen of France. And he places them very carefully in these different positions. He places Catherine in a marriage alliance with the French. He places Hippolyto into the church as a cardinal, and he makes Alessandro, at the age of 19, in 1531, into ruler and then Duke of Florence with Spanish backing. Now, Alessandro is actually quite an interesting case for many people today, because there's an increasing view that he was in fact, the first black head of state in the modern West. His mother may well have been a slave. She was certainly a servant, as far as we can tell from the sources in one of the Medici households, and from the look of the portraiture, it appears very clear that she was of African heritage and that Alessandra was therefore what we would now call a mixed race child, although that terminology wasn't used in a period.
- [37:04]
A
Where is. Where are the Medicis in Florence at that time, then, Evelyn? Are they. Have they really abandoned or they ever gain as big a foothold again?
- [37:13]
B
So what happens is a whole series of. We go back to the bloodshed, assassinations, attempts to regain republicanism. It's not time to really go into the complexities of this kind of decade between running up to 1537 when another Cosimo takes charge. It's really by chance that they find somebody who's got the same name as the great heir there. He's a. I don't even know whether it's a second cousin once removed, but he shares the name of the great founder of the Medici family there. And he's put in power Cosimo, who will be Duke of Florence, Duke of Tuscan, Grand Duke of Tuscany there. He's put in power by people like Guicciardini, who think that they can control this young man who will be a sort of puppet figure behind which Florence can gain its greatness again. They're quickly proved wrong there and Cosimo sets about transforming the republic into an autocracy.
- [38:23]
A
Robert Black.
- [38:23]
D
Well, I just want to just say that we talked a lot about how the Medici was all the Medici's achievement to gain power in Florence. But I think we have to also realize that it was also the failure of the Florentines that allowed the Medici to do this. Because what happened was, is that Florentine aristocracy could never agree amongst themselves. They were terribly divided. And then they were also very much divided from these middle class. And there was all this tension. So there was this tremendous tension. And it was by no means clear that the Republican restorations of 1494-1512 and then 1527-1530 would fail. But it was really their failure that allowed the Medici to come in and take over. And it was by no means clear that either Clement VII or Leo X really wanted to. To establish a principate. This only really occurred in 1530 and 1531 after this, as a desperate, as a last measure, when they figured, well, Florence just cannot govern itself. And in order to protect our position, we're going to have to establish a principate. I think they did it quite because they were always very cautious about this.
- [39:35]
A
What do you think of the before I conclude by asking about you all about the legacy of Florence, the remark in the Third man that the it was partly the conjunction of the intense politics, often resulting in assassination attempts and so on, which helped to produce the great art. Do you think there's anything in that, Evelyn?
- [39:51]
B
I think there is because the intense competition for power, the intense competition for authority. The early Medici said you needed to control Florence because that was the only way you could protect your wealth from your enemies there. So you needed to demonstrate in both small scale and large scale ways that you were in control. And so you spent money lavishly to do so, because, as Roberts pointed out, regularly. It was not inevitable that the Medici would win.
- [40:22]
A
But it's interesting the way they spent money, isn't it? They didn't go around not only offering brides, but building great buildings, bringing great artists, building chapels, as Catherine said, and so on. Catherine?
- [40:32]
C
Well, yes, but they were also very famous for these great public entertainments, the jousts, the bull fighting, football in a piazza. Football was a Florentine institution, still is. They still play this historical football there. And this public spectacle was also extremely important in keeping the lower classes of Florence engaged and happy with the regime. It's very much a bread and circuses approach.
- [40:56]
A
Is it possible to encapsulate the legacy of the medicine roll?
- [41:00]
D
Well, I think this is a very controversial point among historians today, because on the one hand, there are those historians who feel that the legacy of the Medici was the death of the Florentine republic and they have this tremendously powerful republican heritage in Florence, and that what the Medici really did was to destroy, and ultimately deliberately to sabotage that and to impose and destroy Florentine liberty. There are other historians who say that, well, the Florentines really couldn't run the show themselves and that they. That it was really what the Medici did, was bring order, which is to some extent true. I mean, Cosimo and the regime set up from 1537 did bring a kind of political order and political. Greater political tranquility, not complete political tranquility, but greater political tranquility than had had, and raise Florence to the status of a second rate, but at least ultimately as good as independent power. So I think that. But the greatest heritage, of course, of the Medici, I think without doubt must be the intellectual and learned and of course, artistic heritage. This was, I think, there as great patrons of learning. And nobody was greater patron of learning than the Medici and of the arts. This must be their greatest heritage.
- [42:33]
A
Would you like to develop that, Evelyn? And then finally you, Catherine.
- [42:36]
B
So, for me, the great legacy of the Medici is that they made spending money on beautiful things acceptable. Not only acceptable, but expected. So the way philanthropy works today, the notion that if you have great wealth, you actually owe it to your community to return it by building beautiful buildings, spending money on artistic monuments, certainly was established as a key principle of magnificence by the Medici.
- [43:04]
A
And finally, Catherine.
- [43:04]
C
And of course, the final legacy of the final Medici person, Anna Maria, the last of the line, was to bequeath the art collection to the city with the proviso that it should never leave. And that has made Florence the art treasure it is today.
- [43:19]
A
Well, thank you very much. It was getting a quart into a thimble, but thank you very much for the elegant attempt. Catherine Fletcher, Evelyn Welsh, Robert Black. Next week, by happy coincidence, we'll be talking about Plato's Symposium. Thanks for listening.
- [43:34]
C
There are many more Radio for Arts.
- [43:36]
B
And discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website@BBC.co.uk.
- [43:47]
D
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