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The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 08 · Chapter 10Lorenzo De' Medici Rules in Florence

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During the twelfth century several of the Italian cities—especially Florence and Venice—rose to great wealth and power. Venice, through her favorable situation, became preeminent in commerce, while Florence was coming to be the most important industrial centre of Europe. In the thirteenth century Florence was the scene of continual strife between the Guelfs and Ghibellines, but she not only continued to develop in material prosperity, but also attained to intellectual activities whereby in the next century she gained a higher distinction. She took the foremost part in the Renaissance, and was the birthplace or the home of Dante, Boccaccio, and other leaders of the modern movement.

In the fifteenth century Florence reached a still loftier eminence under the Medici, a family celebrated for the statesmen which it produced and for its patronage of letters and art. Its most illustrious members were Cosmo (1389-1464) and his grandson Lorenzo, surnamed the "Magnificent." Lorenzo was born January 1, 1449, when the second great period of the Renaissance was nearing its close. That was the "period of arrangement and translation; the epoch of the formation of the great Italian libraries; the age when, in Florence around his grandfather Cosmo, in Rome around Pope Nicholas V, and in Naples around Alfonso the Magnanimous, coteries of the leading humanists were gathered, engaged in labors which have made posterity eternally their debtors."

Conjointly with his younger brother Giuliano, Lorenzo, on the death of his father Piero, in 1469, succeeded to the vast wealth and political power of the family. In 1478 the death of Giuliano left Lorenzo sole ruler of Florence.

To few men has either the power or the opportunity been given to influence their epoch, intellectually and politically, to a degree so marked as was the lot of Lorenzo de' Medici. One of the most marvellously many-sided of the many-sided men who adorned the Italy of the fifteenth century, he did more to place Florence in the forefront of the world's culture than any other citizen who claimed Val d'Arno[1] as his birthplace. His influence was great because he was in sympathy so catholic with all the varied life of his age and circle. While during the one hour he would be found learnedly discussing the rival claims of the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophers with Ficino and Landino, the next might witness him the foremost reveller in the Florentine carnival, crowned with flowers and with the winecup in his hand, gayly carolling the ballate he had composed for the occasion; while the third might behold him surrounded by the leading painters and sculptors of Tuscany, discoursing profoundly on the aims and mission of art. Truly a unique personality, at one and the same time the glorious creation and the splendid epitome of the spirit of the Renaissance!

When Lorenzo de' Medici consented to assume the "position" occupied by his father Piero and his grandfather Cosmo, he was not the raw youth his immature years would lead one to suppose. Although intellectual maturity is reached at an earlier age in the sunny South than in the fog-haunted lands of Northern Europe, Lorenzo had enjoyed a long apprenticeship before being called to undertake the duties devolving on him as the uncrowned king of Florence. From his thirteenth year he had been the companion and shared the counsels, first of his grandfather and father, and subsequently of his father alone. From the former especially he learned many important lessons in statecraft. The matter is open to question, however, if any advice had more far-reaching results or was laid more carefully to heart than this which is contained in more than one of Cosmo's letters: "Never stint your favors to the cause of learning, and cultivate sedulously the friendship of scholars and humanists." Toward such a course Lorenzo's inclinations, as well as his interests, pointed, and during his life Florence was the Athens not only of Italy but of Europe as a whole. Here, among many others, were to be found such "epoch-makers" as Poliziano, Ficino, and Landino, Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista Alberti, Michelangelo, Luigi Pulci—men who glorified their age by crowning it with the nimbus of their genius.

The literary and artistic greatness of Florence was not due, however, to the comparative intellectual poverty of the other states in Italy. Florence was only primus inter pares—greatest among many that were great. When the fact is recalled that such contemporaries as Pomponius Laetus, Bartolommeo Sacchi, Molza, Alessandro Farnese (Paul III), Platina, Sabellicus at Rome; Pontanus, Sannazaro, and Porcello in Naples; and Pomponasso and Boiardo at Ferrara, were then at or nearing their prime, the position of Florence as the acknowledged centre of European culture was conceded by sense of right alone. Than this nothing proves more emphatically the strides learning had been making. It was no longer the prerogative of the few, but the privilege of the many. From the first, Lorenzo recognized what a strong card he held in the affection and respect of the Italian as well as of the Florentine humanists.

The great secret of Lorenzo's preëminence in European and Italian, as well as in Tuscan, politics lies in the fact that he was able to unite the sources of administrative, legislative, and judicial power in himself. All the public offices in Florence were held by his dependents, and so entirely was the state machinery controlled by him that we find such men as Louis XI and the emperor Maximilian, Alfonso of Naples, and Pope Innocent VIII recognizing his authority and appealing to him personally, in place of to the seigniory, to effect the ends they desired. Such power enabled him to avoid the risks his grandfather Cosmo had been compelled to run to maintain his authority. The Medicean faction was better in hand than in his grandfather's days, and Lorenzo, therefore, in playing the rôle of the peacemaker of Italy, at the time when he held the "balance of power" through his treaties with Milan, Naples, and Ferrara, could speak with a decision that carried weight when he found it necessary to threaten a restless "despot" with a political combination that might depose him.

Lorenzo's services to learning were inspired by feelings infinitely more noble than those actuating his political plans. A patriotism as lofty as it was beneficent led him to desire that his country should be in the van of Italian progress in Renaissance studies. His sagacious prevision enabled him to proportion the nature and extent of the benefit he conferred to the need it was intended to supply. Many statesmen do more harm than good by failing to appreciate this law of supply and demand. They grant more than is required, and that which should have been a boon becomes a burden. Charles V, at the time of the Reformation, on more than one occasion committed this error, as also did Wolsey and Mazarin. Lorenzo, like Richelieu, recognized the value of moderation in giving, and caused every favor to be regarded as a possible earnest of others to come.

The earlier years of his power were associated with many stirring events which exercised no inconsiderable influence on the state of learning. For example, his skilful playing off of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan against Ferrante, King of Naples, led to greater attention being directed by the Florentines to Neapolitan and Milanese affairs, with the result that humanists and artists from both these places paid frequent visits to Florence, where they were welcomed by Lorenzo as his guests. Then when the revolt of the small city of Volterra from Florentine rule was suppressed by Lorenzo's agents, with a rigorous severity that cast a stain on their master's name, owing to many unoffending scholars having suffered to the extent of losing their all, Lorenzo made noble amends. Not only did he generously assist the inhabitants to repair their losses, not only did he make grants to the local scholars and send them copies of many of the codices in his own library to supply the loss of their books which had been burned by the soldiery, but he purchased large estates in the neighborhood, that the citizens might benefit by his residence among them. In this way, too, he brought the Volterran scholars into more intimate relations with the Florentine humanists, and thus contributed to the further diffusion of the benefits of the Renaissance.

All was not plain sailing, however, as regards the progress of the "New Learning." Despite his efforts, Lorenzo could not prevent its development being checked during the papal-Neapolitan quarrel with Florence. That war originated in a dispute with Pope Sixtus IV, who kept Italy in a ferment during the whole duration of his pontificate, 1471-1484. Were no other proof forthcoming of Lorenzo's marvellous diplomatic genius than this one fact, that he checkmated the political schemes of Sixtus, and finally so neutralized his influence as to render him wellnigh impotent for evil-doing, such an achievement was sufficient to stamp him one of the greatest masters of statecraft Europe has known. In any estimate of his ability we must take into account the unsatisfactory character of many of the instruments wherewith he had to achieve his purposes, and also the fact that he had neither a great army at his back with which to enforce the fulfilment of treaty obligations—for Florence never was a city of soldiers—nor had he the prestige of an official position to lend weight to his words. To all intents and purposes he was a private citizen of the Florentine republic. Yet such was the dynamic power of the man's marvellous personality, and the reputation he had earned, even in his early years, for supreme prescience and far-reaching diplomatic subtlety, that far and wide he was regarded as the greatest force in Italian politics. Sixtus sallied forth to crush; he returned to the Vatican a crushed and a discredited man, to die of sheer chagrin over his defeat by Lorenzo in his designs upon Ferrara.

Then followed the memorable dispute, in 1472-1473, over the bishopric of Pisa, when the Pope's nominee, Francesco Salviati, was refused possession of his see, Pisa being one of the Tuscan towns under the control of Florence. To this Sixtus retaliated by seeking the friendship of Ferrante of Naples, a move Lorenzo anticipated by forming the league between Florence, Milan, and Venice. This league thoroughly alarmed both the Pope and Ferrante, and on the latter visiting Rome in 1475 a papal-Neapolitan alliance was formed.

Even then hostilities might not have broken out had the young Duke of Milan not been assassinated in 1476, leaving an infant heir. This entailed a long minority, with all its dangers, and the apprehensions regarding these were not fanciful, inasmuch as Lodovico Sforza, uncle of the baby Duke, usurped the position under pretext of acting as regent. These crimes were plainly responsible for the Pazzi conspiracy in 1478 against the Medici themselves, a conspiracy which resulted in Giuliano, the younger brother of Lorenzo, being murdered in the cathedral, during mass, on the Sunday before Ascension, while Lorenzo himself was slightly wounded. That Sixtus and his nephew were accessories before the fact is now regarded as unquestionable. The vengeance taken by the enraged Florentines on the conspirators, their relatives, friends, and property, was terrible; the innocent, alas! being sacrificed indiscriminately with the guilty.

The Archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, had entered eagerly into the scheme, and, although his sacred office prevented him from actually assisting in the deed, he was present in the cathedral until the signal was given for the perpetration of the deed, when he left the building to secure the Palazzo Publico. He was therefore summarily hanged with the others from the windows of the civic buildings. Sixtus made the execution, or the "murder" as he called it, of Salviati, his pretext for calling on his allies to make war on Florence. When he saw, however, that this action was only throwing the city more completely than ever into the arms of the Medici, he changed his tactics and said he had no quarrel with "his well-beloved children of Florence," but only with "that son of iniquity and child of perdition, Lorenzo de' Medici," and those who had aided and abetted him, among whom the humanists were expressly mentioned. Against Lorenzo and his associates a brief of excommunication was launched, and the city was urged to regain the papal favor by surrendering the offenders.

The result might have been predicted. The "brief" only tended to knit the bonds of association closer between Lorenzo and the "City of the Flower," while the humanists to a man rallied round their patron. Even the choleric Filelfo, now a very old man, who had been on anything but friendly terms with the Medici, addressed two bitter satires to Sixtus, in which the Pope was styled the real aggressor, while the great humanist offered to write a history of the whole transaction, that posterity might know the true facts. The only power which gave its adhesion to Sixtus was Naples, while Venice, Ferrara, and Milan declared for Florence.

Thus commenced that tedious war which not only ruined so many Florentine merchants, but retarded the cause of learning so materially. When the people were groaning under heavy taxes, when all coin which Lorenzo could scrape together had to be poured out to pay the condottieri, or soldiers of fortune, by whom the battles of Florence were fought, there was of course but short commons for the humanists who had made Florence their home. Many of those adapted themselves to circumstances, but others, to whom money was their god, left the banks of the Arno for those southern cities where the pinch of scarcity did not prevail.

In this campaign the Florentines gained but little prestige. The larger share of the cost was quietly suffered by their allies to fall on the city of bankers. The Milanese were occupied with their own affairs, owing to the coup d'état accomplished by Lodovico Sforza. The Duke of Ferrara withdrew owing to some disagreement with the condottieri engaged by Lorenzo. The Venetians only despatched a small contingent under Carlo Montone and Diefebo d'Anguillari; accordingly, in the end, the whole burden of the struggle fell on Florence. The Magnifico's position gradually became precarious, inasmuch as many persons declared the war to be in reality a personal quarrel between Pope Sixtus and the Medici. Complaints began to be heard that the public treasury was exhausted and the commerce of the city ruined, while the citizens were burdened with oppressive taxes. Lorenzo had the mortification of being told that sufficient blood had been shed, and that it would be expedient for him rather to devise some means of effecting a peace than of making further preparations for the war.

In these circumstances, and confronted by one of the most dangerous crises of his whole life, Lorenzo rose to the occasion and effected a solution of the difficulty by daring to perform what was undoubtedly one of the bravest acts ever achieved by a diplomatist. By some statesmen it might be condemned as foolhardy, by others as quixotic. Its very foolhardiness and quixotry fascinated the man it was intended to influence, the blood-thirsty, cruel, and pitiless Ferrante of Naples, who was restrained from crime by the fear neither of God nor man, and who had actually slain the condottiere Piccinino when he visited him under a safe-conduct from the monarch's best ally. But the Renaissance annals are filled with the records of men and women whose natures are marvellous studies of contrasted and contradictory traits. Such was the Neapolitan tyrant. While a monster in much, he had his vulnerable points. He was ambitious to pose as a friend of the "New Learning," and he knew that Lorenzo was not only the most munificent patron, but also one of the most illustrious exponents, of the Renaissance principles.

Although his enemy, Ferrante received Lorenzo with every demonstration of respect and satisfaction. He lost sight of the hostile diplomatist in the great humanist. Two Neapolitan galleys were sent to conduct him to Naples, and he was welcomed on landing with much pomp. Never did Lorenzo's supreme diplomatic genius, never did his versatile powers as a statesman, as a scholar, as a patron of letters, and as a brilliant man of the world, blaze forth in more splendid effulgence than during his three-months' stay in Naples. Though opposed by all the papal authority and resources; though Sixtus by turns threatened, cajoled, entreated, promised, in order to prevent Lorenzo having any success, the successor of St. Peter was beaten all along the line, and the Magnifico carried away with him a treaty, signed and sealed, which practically meant that henceforth Naples and the papacy would be in antagonistic camps.

It was the Renaissance card which won the trick. With startling boldness, yet with consummate art, Lorenzo played the game of flattering Ferrante. No ordinary adulation, however, would have had success with the Neapolitan Phaleris. He was too strong-minded a man for anything of that kind. But to be hailed by the great Renaissance patron of the period, by one also who was himself one of the leading humanists, as a brother-humanist and a fellow-patron of learning, was a delicate incense to his vanity which he could not resist. He liked to be consulted on matters of literary moment, and, when he blundered, Lorenzo was too shrewd a student of human nature to correct him.

Another fact in Lorenzo's favor was that he had the warm support not only of the beautiful Ippolyta Maria, daughter of Cosmo's friend, Francesco Sforza of Milan, and now wife of Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, King Ferrante's heir, as well as of Don Federigo, the monarch's younger son, who, along with Ippolyta, was a friend to the "New Learning," but he also had the whole body of Neapolitan humanists on his side, scarce one of whom but had experienced in some form or another the Medicean bounty. Such powerful advocacy was not without its influence in bringing about the result; while Ferrante more and more realized that if the Florentine Medici were crushed he would have no ally to whom to look for help when the inevitable shuffle of the political cards took place on the death of Sixtus.

In February, 1480, therefore, Lorenzo returned in triumph to Florence, to be received with rapture by his fellow-citizens. Had he delayed a few months longer, his visit and his ad-miseri-cordiam appeals would not have been needed. In August of that year Keduk Achmed, one of the Turkish Sultan's (Mahomet II) ablest generals, besieged and took the city of Otranto. In face of the common danger to all Italy, Sixtus was compelled to accept the treaty made by Ferrante with Lorenzo, and a general peace ensued. The decade accordingly closed with an absolution for all offences granted by the Pope to Florence, conditional on the Tuscan republic contributing its share to the expenses of the military preparations to resist the invasion of the Turk.

Notwithstanding the war, the progress of the Renaissance during the first decade of Lorenzo's rule was very marked. To the rapid diffusion of printing this was largely due. Lorenzo had not imbibed the prejudices against the new art entertained by Cosmo and Federigo of Montefeltro. He looked at the practical, not the sentimental, side of the question as regards the new invention. Having seen that the press could throw off, in a few days, scores of copies of any work, of which it took an amanuensis months to produce one; also that the scholars of all Italy could be furnished almost immediately, and at a low price, with the texts of any manuscript they desired, while they had to wait months for a limited number of copies whose cost was wellnigh prohibitive, he supported the new invention from the outset. Having resolved to further his father's efforts to establish printing in Florence, he stimulated the local goldsmith, Bernardo Cennini, to turn his attention to type-casting in metal, and even agreed to pay him an annual grant from the year 1471 until he had fairly settled himself in business. Nor did he confine his favors to him. John of Mainz and Nicholas of Breslau, who arrived in Florence, the former in 1472 and the latter in 1477, also participated in his open-hearted liberality. Printing struck its roots deep into the Tuscan community and flourished excellently. Though the Florentine craft never attained the reputation of the Venetian Aldi and Asolani, the Giunti of Rome, the Soncini of Fano, the Stephani of Paris, and Froben of Basel, it had the name, for a time at least, of being one of the most accurate of all presses.

To Lorenzo it owed this celebrity. At an early date he perceived that the new art would be of little value if there were not careful press readers. He was therefore among the first to induce scholars of distinction to engage in this task. For example, he enlisted the aid of Cristoforo Landino, who in his Disputationes Camaldunenses had really inaugurated the science of textual criticism by urging that a careful comparison of the various codices should constitute the preliminary step in any reproduction of the classics. Landino's work on Vergil and Horace merits the warmest praise. Lorenzo also impressed Poliziano into the work, whose labors in marking the various readings, in adding scholia and "notes" illustrative of the text of Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, etc., were of the utmost value. To Lorenzo and to his younger brother Giuliano, another great humanist, Giorgio Merula of Milan, dedicated his Plautus, published in Venice in 1472, showing at how early an age the Magnifico had taken his place among the recognized patrons of the Italian Renaissance.

We ought not, moreover, to omit mention of another achievement of Lorenzo, though performed in a sphere of effort lying outside of the strict limits of our Renaissance survey. Seeing it was the "Revival of Letters," however, which induced the revival of the cultivation of the vernacular Italian literature, surely it is not out of place to refer to it here. Early in life Lorenzo became imbued with the conviction that his native tongue was unsurpassed as a medium for "the expression of noble thoughts in noble numbers." Not only did he encourage others to study Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, but by following out his own precepts he became one of the great Italian poets. His Selve d'Amore, his Corinto, his Ambra, his La Nencia da Barberino, his Laude, his Sonetti, his Cansoni, etc., are all poems that live in the Italian literature of to-day. Not as a man ashamed of the vernacular, and forced to use it because he can command no better, does Lorenzo write. "He is sure of the justice of his cause, and determined by precept and example and by the prestige of his princely rank to bring the literature he loves into repute again."

But of these poems we cannot here take further note. By the scholars of the Renaissance such work was looked askance at. If they did produce any of these "trifles," as they were called, they almost blushed to own them, and were ashamed to communicate them to each other. That he dared to be natural says much for Lorenzo, and it was largely due to his encouragement that Cristoforo Landino undertook his great work on "Dante," to which we owe so much to-day.

In conjunction with his patronage of printing, there was no line of effort in which Lorenzo did more real good than in collecting manuscripts and antiquities, and in making them practically public property. On this account he is styled, by Niccolo Leonicino, "Lorenzo de' Medici, the great patron of learning in this age, whose messengers are dispersed through every part of the earth for the purpose of collecting books on every science, and who has spared no expense in procuring for your use, and that of others who may devote themselves to similar studies, the materials necessary for your purpose." The agents he employed travelled through Italy, Greece, Europe, and the East—Hieronymo Donato, Ermolao Barbaro, and Paolo Cortesi being the names of some of his most trusted "commissioners." But the coadjutor whose aid he principally relied on, to whom he committed the care and arrangement of his vast museum and great library, was Poliziano, who himself made frequent excursions throughout Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa to discover and purchase such remains of antiquity as suited the purposes of his patron. Another successful agent, though at a later date, was Giovanni Lascaris, who twice journeyed into the East in search of manuscripts and curios. In the second of these he brought back upward of two hundred copies of valuable codices from the monasteries on Mount Athos.

To still another service rendered by Lorenzo to the cause of the Renaissance attention must be called—the founding of the Florentine Academy for the study of Greek. This institution, distinct, be it remembered, from the Uffiziali dello Studio (or high-school), exercised a marvellous influence on the progress of the "New Learning." Accordingly, as Roscoe says, succeeding scholars have been profuse in their acknowledgments to Lorenzo, who first formed the establishment from which, to use their own classical figure, as from the Trojan horse, so many illustrious champions have sprung, and by means of which the knowledge of the Greek tongue was extended not only throughout Italy, but throughout Europe as well, from all the countries of which numerous pupils flocked to Florence—pupils who afterward carried the learning they had received to their native lands.

Of this institution the first public professor was Joannes Argyropoulos, who, having enjoyed the patronage of Cosmo and Piero, and directed the education of Lorenzo, was selected by the latter as the fittest person to be the earliest occupant of the chair. During his tenure of it he sent out such pupils as Poliziano, Donato Acciaiuoli, Janus Pannonius, and the famous German humanist Reuchlin. Argyropoulos did not hold the appointment long. His death took place at Rome in 1471, and he was succeeded first by Theodore of Gaza, and then by Chalcondylas. Poliziano certainly discharged the duties of the office frequently, but at first only as locum tenens. He was then almost incessantly engaged in travelling for his patron in Greece and Asia Minor, and was too valuable a coadjutor to be tied down to the routine of teaching until he had completed his work. During the next decade he became the "professor," and discharged the duties with a genius and an adaptability to circumstances that won for him the admiration and love of all his students.

This decade was also remarkable for the commencement of the devotion to the cultivation of literary style, a pursuit yet to reach its culmination in Poliziano in Florence and in Bembo and Sadoleto in Rome. Originality gradually gave place to conventionality, until men actually came to prefer the absurdities of Ciceronianism, and a cold, colorless adherence to hard-and-fast rules of composition, to a work throbbing with the pulsation of virile life. Humanism was beginning to take flight from Italy, to find a home and a welcome beyond the Alps.

The final decade of Lorenzo's life constituted the midsummer bloom of the Tuscan renaissance, the meridian of the intellectual and artistic supremacy of Florence. In Lorenzo it found its fullest expression. He was typical of its spiritual as well as of its moral meaning; typical, too, of that mental unrest which sought escape from the pressing problems of an enigmatic present by reverting to the study of a classic past whose ethical, social, and political difficulties were rarely of a complex character, but concerned themselves principally with what may be termed the elementary verities of man's relations to the Deity and to his fellows.

Lorenzo's amazing versatility has been pronounced a fault by some who believed they detected in him the potential capacity of rivalling Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto on their own ground, had he only conserved his energies. This is a foolish supposition. Lorenzo's many-sidedness was but the reflection in himself, as the most accurate mirror of the time, of all that wondrous susceptibility to beauty, that eager craving after the realization of the [greek: to kalon] ("the Good") so characteristic of the best Hellenic genius, whether we study it in the dramas of Sophocles or the Republic of Plato or in the statesmanship of Pericles. If Lorenzo had resembled his grandfather and concentrated his energies upon finance and politics, there might have been a line of reigning Medicean princes in Florence half a century earlier than actually was the case, but Europe would have been distinctly the loser by the absence of the greatest personal force making for culture which characterized the Renaissance.

This last decade of Lorenzo's life—from his thirty-first to his forty-second year—was memorable in many respects. In the year 1481 he was again exposed to the danger of assassination. Battista Frescobaldi and two assistants in the Church of the Carmeli, and again on Ascension Day, made an attempt to stab him, but were frustrated by the vigilance of Lorenzo's friends. There is no doubt that this second attempt was also instigated by Girolamo Riario, the nephew of Sixtus IV. Thereafter Lorenzo never moved out without a strong bodyguard of friends and adherents—a precaution rendered necessary by the repeated plots that were being hatched against him by his enemies.

No sooner had the presence of the Turks at Otranto, in the extreme southeast of Italy, been rendered a thing of the past by the surrender of the Moslem garrison to the Duke of Calabria in September, 1481, than the peninsula was again ranged in opposing camps by the attempt of the Venetians, assisted by Sixtus and his nephew, to dispossess Ercole d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, of his dominions. The Duke had married the daughter of Ferdinand, King of Naples, an alliance which, by strengthening him, gave on that account great offence to the Venetians. They therefore sought to provoke him by insisting on their monopoly of the manufacture of salt in North Italy, and by building a fortress on a part of the Ferrarese territory which they pretended was within the limits of their own. When he remonstrated, they declined to remove it. In vain he appealed to Sixtus. The latter was one of the wolves waiting to devour him. He then turned to Lorenzo.

To the inexpressible chagrin of Venice and of Sixtus, the Magnifico promptly espoused his cause, formed an alliance with Ferdinand and other states, and, before the Pope and the Venetians were aware he had moved, they found themselves confronted by Naples, Florence, Milan, Bologna, Mantua, and Faenza. The allies were commanded by Federigo of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, while the Venetian-papal troops were placed under Ruberto Malatesta of Rimini. In this campaign, however, Lorenzo was really the master-spirit. Although successes were won on both sides, a more than usually tragic complexion was given to the war by the death of the two commanders of the opposing forces. They had been friends from youth, and such a trifle as the fact that they were hired to fight against each other never disturbed the tenor of their mutual regard. Armstrong says no more than the truth when he remarks: "It was a pathetic coincidence. The two rival generals had bequeathed to each other the care of their children and estates, a characteristic illustration of the easy good-fellowship in this game of Italian war."

The war dragged on with varying results until Lorenzo played his reserve card. He induced the Slavic Archbishop of Carniola, who, visiting Rome as the emperor Frederick's envoy, had been shocked by the shameless immorality of the Pope's life, to begin an agitation for a general council. In this he was supported by several of the rulers in Northern Italy and Eastern Europe. The move was so far successful. The Pope became alarmed, and hurriedly broke off his alliance with Venice, on the plea that the prevention of fresh schism in the Church must take precedence of every other consideration. The real fact of the matter was he dreaded the fate of Pope John XXIII, for he knew the actions of his nephew Girolamo Riario would not stand conciliar examination. Moreover, his other nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, afterward Pope Julius II, a bitter enemy to Girolamo, and Lorenzo's warm friend, had, during the disgrace of his cousin, gained the Pope's ear and told him some plain but wholesome truths regarding the unpleasant consequences of a permanent rupture with Lorenzo.

All these considerations induced Sixtus to yield and leave Venice to prosecute the war alone. This it did against a quadruple alliance, for the Pope, when the haughty republic of the lagoons refused to disgorge its Ferrarese prey at his orders, promptly changed sides, and was as keen against the aggressor as he had previously been favorable to it. The Venetians sustained two severe defeats, while their fleet was almost shattered by a storm. The pecuniary strain was beyond their resources longer to maintain. They therefore resorted to the customary project of inducing some other power to intervene. In this case they took the step of inviting the Duke of Orleans to lay claim to the dukedom of Milan, and the Duke of Lorraine to the throne of Naples. The move was successful as regards Ludovico of Milan; he withdrew from the alliance, and much against the wish of the other allies the peace of Bagnolo was concluded in August, 1484. To Sixtus the news came as the knell of his dearest hopes. He gave way to one wild outburst of passion, in which he cursed all who had been engaged in making peace, then apoplexy supervened, and within a few hours he was a corpse. He was succeeded by Cardinal Cybo, a warm friend toward the Medici, and one who had such a profound admiration for the genius of Lorenzo in statecraft that he seldom took any step without consulting him, though unfortunately he did not always follow the Magnifico's advice.

If no one else reaped honor and glory from this Ferrarese war, Lorenzo undoubtedly did so. By both sides the fact was admitted that he had acted throughout as a far-seeing, sagacious diplomatist, who, while giving preeminence, as was natural, to the welfare of his own state, had sought to conserve the cause of letters, even amid the turmoil incident upon the collision of political interests. He had proved the friend even of the enemies of his own country, when once they had passed from the scene of conflict, as, for example, when he dared Girolamo Riario to raise a finger in the direction of dispossessing the son of the Pope's general, Ruberto Malatesta, of his Rimini estates. He was the friend of the oppressed everywhere, and in more cases than one his powerful protection saved the children of his friends from being robbed by powerful relatives. This connection between Florence, Naples, Milan, Rome, and Ferrara tended to the promotion of intellectual intercourse between them. As printing was now being briskly prosecuted all over Northern and Central Italy, the interchange of literature went on ceaselessly among them.

This, however, was Lorenzo's last great war. True, he was implicated in the prolonged quarrel between the papacy and King Ferrante of Naples, yet it was more as a mediator between the two antagonists than as the ally of the last-named that he took part in it; although, as Armstrong points out, he paid for the services of Trivulsio and four hundred cross-bowmen, that by enabling the Neapolitans to check San Severino, the leader of the papal-Venetian troops, he might induce Innocent VIII to lose heart and retire from the struggle.

Lorenzo, during the last six years of his life, or, to speak more definitely, after the peace of Bagnolo, had become in Italian, as he was rapidly becoming in European, politics the master-spirit that inspired the moves on the diplomatic chess-board. In the mind of the historical student whose attention is directed to this period, admiration and wonder go hand-in-hand as we contemplate the marvellous sagacity and prevision of the man, together with the skill wherewith he made Florence—the weakest from a military point of view of the five greater Italian powers—the one which exercised the most preponderating influence upon the affairs of the peninsula. His supreme genius conceived and consummated the great scheme for ensuring the peace of Italy by a triple alliance of the three larger states—Florence, Milan, and Naples—against the other two, Venice and the papacy.

As showing how entirely it was dependent upon him, the alliance was operative only so long as he was alive to bind the antagonistic forces of Naples and Milan together by the link of his own personal influence. He, in a word, was the subtle acid holding in chemical combination many mutually repellent substances. When his influence was withdrawn by death, within a few months they had all fallen apart, the triple alliance was forgotten and Italy was doomed. Even by those with whom he was nominally at war he was resorted to for advice. He it was that kept Innocent VIII from taking up a position that would have rendered the papacy ridiculous in the eyes of Europe, when he sought to threaten Naples with consequences he was powerless to inflict.

Many writers have accused Lorenzo of cowardice, of pusillanimity, of want of political resolution on account of this very course of action, namely, that he assisted the enemies of Florence to extricate themselves from their dilemmas. Such criticism fails entirely to understand both the aim and the scope of his policy. He desired to keep Italy for the Italians. His clear-sighted sagacity saw nothing but danger in the plans of Ludovico of Milan to invite the French King into Italy, or in those of Venice to encourage the Duke of Lorraine to press his claims upon Milan. The intervention of either France or Spain in Italy was, in his idea, fraught only with dire disaster. Fain would he have patched up the quarrel between Naples and the papacy by mutual concessions, because he foresaw what would happen if the colossal northern powers had their cupidity aroused regarding Italy, and learned how defenceless she really was. Because he foresaw so clearly the horrors of the invasion of 1494 and 1527, he acted as he did, even toward those who were enemies of Florence. His alarm appears in the letter, dated July, 1489, which he addressed to his ambassador in Rome: "I dislike these Ultramontanes and barbarians beginning to interfere in Italy. We are so disunited and so deceitful that I believe that nothing but shame and loss would be our lot; recent experience may serve to foretell the future." How true a prophet he was, the subsequent course of Italian history revealed!

Anxious though the situation was, crucial though many of the problems he had to solve undoubtedly were, yet the statement may be accepted as approximately true that the last three or four years of Lorenzo's life were spent amid profound peace—at least as far as Florence was concerned. Roscoe's picture is highly colored, but not overcolored:

"At this period the city of Florence was at its highest degree of prosperity. The vigilance of Lorenzo had secured it from all apprehensions of external attack; and his acknowledged disinterestedness and moderation had almost extinguished that spirit of dissension for which it had been so long remarkable. The Florentines gloried in their illustrious citizen, and were gratified by numbering in their body a man who wielded in his hand the fate of nations and attracted the respect and admiration of all Europe; the administration of justice engaged his constant attention, and he carefully avoided giving rise to an idea that he was himself above the control of the law."

And Guicciardini adds: "This season of tranquillity was prosperous beyond any that Italy had experienced during the long course of a thousand years. Abounding in men eminent in the administration of public affairs, skilled in every honorable science and every useful art, it stood high in the estimation of foreign nations; which extraordinary felicity, acquired at many different opportunities, several circumstances contributed to preserve, but among the rest no small share of it was by general consent ascribed to the industry and the virtue of Lorenzo de' Medici, a citizen who rose so far above the mediocrity of a private station that he regulated by his counsels the affairs of Florence, then more important by its situation, by the genius of its inhabitants, and the promptitude of its resources than by the extent of its dominions, and who, having obtained the implicit confidence of the Roman pontiff Innocent VIII, rendered his name great and his authority important in the affairs of Italy."

Though he had never allowed the demands of civic affairs to interfere with his interest in the progress of the Renaissance, war-time, as we have said, is not favorable to the cultivation of letters. While the connection between the states during the course of hostilities undoubtedly promoted the increase of mutual interest in each other's intellectual development, the fact that the Magnifico had to disburse enormous sums for the prosecution of the campaigns necessarily limited his ability to extend the same princely patronage to the cause of learning. But with the conclusion of peace he resumed the original scale of his benefactions, and the last four years of his life were, perhaps, the most fruitful of all in sterling good achieved in the fostering of the Renaissance.

He encouraged the printers to double their output; he munificently assisted such undertakings as the first edition of Homer, edited by the famous scholars Demetrius Chalcondyles and Demetrius Cretensis, as well as other editions of the classics prepared by Poliziano, Marullus, and others. In the final estimate of his influence upon his age we hope to show that his aim was as pure as the prosecution of its realization was determined. He encouraged foreigners to come to Florence to study Greek, and, when their funds failed them, in many cases he generously entertained them at his own expense. Grocyn and Linacre, as well as Reuchlin, testify to the wise generosity of the great Magnifico, and all three declare that to him, more than to any other man, the Renaissance owed not only its development, but even the character it assumed in Italy in the second last decade of the fifteenth century.

The end came when he was literally in his prime. Only forty-two years of age, he might reasonably have looked forward to many years of active work and the enjoyment of his honors! But Lorenzo, although not a vicious, was a pleasure-loving man, and he had drained the cup of enjoyment to the very lees. His constitution was undermined by worry and late vigils, by the very intensity of interest wherewith he had devoted himself to the pleasures of the moment. Accordingly, late in 1491 he began to feel the gout, from which he had suffered for some years, becoming so troublesome that he was unable for the duties devolving on him. He had lost his wife, Clarice Orsini, in July, 1487, at a time when he was absent at the sulphur baths of Filetta, striving to obtain relief from pain; therefore his last years were lonely indeed.

Life had lost its relish to the dying Magnifico. The only thing over which he showed a flash of the old interest was in March, 1492, when his son Giovanni (afterward Leo X), on being made a cardinal by Innocent VIII, was invested with the insignia in the Abbey Church of Fiesole. Although then within a month of his end, although, moreover, so weak that he was unable to attend the investiture mass or to head his table at the banquet which followed, he caused himself to be carried in a litter into the hall, where he publicly paid reverence to his son as a prince of the Church. He then embraced him as a father and gave him his paternal blessing. That done, and after addressing a few words of welcome to his guests collectively, he was slowly borne back to his chamber to die. Nevermore was he seen in public.

His ruling passion was, however, strong in death. In place of surrounding himself with clergy, his last hours were spent with the humanists and scholars he had loved so well. To his beautiful villa of Careggi, and to that room facing the south which he called his own, he retired, and summoned Ficino, Poliziano, and Pico della Mirandola to bear him company until he dipped his feet in the River of Death. They discussed many things, but principally the consolations afforded by philosophy. Then they reverted to the subject of the classics, and to the valuable codices which Lascaris was bringing back from Greece.

But hope at last burned low, and the physicians had to confess that the case was beyond their skill. How rudimentary as regards medical science that skill was may be judged from the fact that the staple remedy prescribed by the great Milanese doctor, Lazaro da Ficino, who had been called in to consult with Lorenzo's own medical man, Pier Leoni of Spoleto, was a potion compounded of crushed pearls and jewels. As might have been expected, such a treatment accelerated rather than retarded the disease.

The last hours of Lorenzo, and particularly his historic interview with Savonarola, have often been described and are to this day the subject of debate. There are two sides to every story, and this one of the last visit of the haughty prior of San Marco's to the dying Magnifico is no exception. Poliziano relates the incident in one form, the followers of Savonarola in another; but neither report is absolutely authentic. Suffice it for us that Benedetto, writing a week after the Magnifico's death, says of the matter: "Our dear friend and master died so nobly, with all the patience, the reverence, the recognition of God which the best of holy men and a soul divine could show, with words upon his lips so kind, that he seemed a new St. Jerome."

Perhaps the most reasonable attitude to assume toward the problem is that Lorenzo died as he lived, feeling that strange, restless curiosity as to what was summed up in the idea of a "future life" which he had manifested all his days: "If I believe aught implicitly," he is reported to have said in earlier years to Alberti, "I believe in Plato's doctrine of immortality in the Phaedo, for religion is too much a matter of temperament for us to lay down hard-and-fast rules about it." Lorenzo outwardly conformed in his dying hours to the rites of the Catholic Church. He received the viaticum kneeling, he repeated the responses in an earnest and fervent tone, and then, when he felt that the grains in the hour-glass of life were running out, he pressed a crucifix to his lips and so passed within the veil. As a humanist he had been reared, as a humanist he had lived and labored, as a humanist he died, maintaining to the very last his interest in those studies which it had been his life's passion to pursue.

The sun of the Florentine renaissance had set forever!

[Footnote 1: By permission of Selmar Hess.]