The Medici: Money, Power, and the Purchase of Eternity

Easter Sunday, April 26, 1478. More than ten thousand Florentines packed the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore for High Mass, light pouring from Brunelleschi’s great dome onto the kneeling crowd. Minutes earlier, Francesco de’ Pazzi had thrown a companionable arm around Giuliano de’ Medici—an embrace, everyone later understood, meant to check whether he wore mail under his clothes.

At the elevation of the Host, when every head in the cathedral bowed, the daggers came out.

Giuliano, twenty-five, fell at the first blows; Francesco stabbed the body so frantically that he drove the blade into his own thigh. Across the church, two priests slashed at Lorenzo de’ Medici’s throat. Bleeding, he whipped his cloak around one arm as a shield, drew his sword, and backed into the sacristy behind bronze doors that rang with the assassins’ knives. “Giuliano?” he shouted. “Is he safe?” No one answered.

Outside, the conspirators ran through the streets crying “People and liberty!”—waiting for the republic to rise against its uncrowned masters. What came back was a different roar: “Palle! Palle!”—the balls, the six red balls of the Medici arms. Florence had chosen. By nightfall Francesco de’ Pazzi hung naked from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio, and beside him, in full vestments, hung the archbishop of Pisa. Botticelli was paid forty florins to paint the executed men on the palace wall. Some eighty conspirators died in the purge.

The plot’s ultimate patron was the pope himself, Sixtus IV. Why would the highest authority in Christendom try to murder a banker’s sons at Mass? Why would a city bleed for a family that held no office at all? And how did a house nearly exterminated at its own altar go on to ignite the Renaissance, produce two popes and two queens of France, and last another two and a half centuries? The answer begins not with genius but with patience, calculation, and a valley family of moneylenders.

In the Name of God and of Profit

“Medici” is the Italian plural of “doctor”; the six red balls are sometimes read as pills. The family came out of the Mugello valley north of Florence, wool traders and small lenders in a business the Church had damned outright—the Lateran Council of 1179 denied moneylenders Christian burial. That moral gray zone became the family’s opening. So did a failed revolution: in 1378, when Florence’s wool carders revolted, Salvestro de’ Medici sided with the workers and was banished for it, leaving the family a label worth more than respectability—friend of the people. A century later, that seed flowered in the cry of “Palle!”

The bank was built by Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici (1360–1429), fatherless at three, who apprenticed at a kinsman’s bank in Rome and grasped the age’s great commercial secret: the papacy was Europe’s largest financial client, damning interest from the pulpit while depending utterly on the men who moved its tithes and indulgence money. As Tim Parks observed, a pope could hardly send to hell the men who collected his taxes. In 1397 Giovanni came home and founded his own bank—small, which is why it survived where Florence’s giants, the Bardi and Peruzzi, had died of an English king’s default a generation earlier, just before the Black Death halved the city. His legacy to his son Cosimo was a single instruction: stay out of the public eye. Cosimo compressed it further: envy is a weed best left unwatered.

Florentine ledgers opened with one line: “In the name of God and of profit.” The bank’s core device was not the loan but the exchange transaction—florins swapped into pounds at one rate and back months later at another, the interest folded invisibly into “natural” currency movements. Of sixty-seven recorded exchange deals, the bank lost money exactly once. Its deepest innovation was structural: every branch a separate partnership, the local manager holding a minority stake, the family’s Florentine holding company the rest—so London’s collapse could never sink Rome. The design anticipated the modern holding company by five centuries. Under the general manager Giovanni Benci, who audited each branch’s “secret books” yearly, the network grew to eight branches, and profits neared twenty thousand florins a year, in a city where a maid earned ten.

More than half of it flowed from Rome and the papal account. The house rules were sober—no more than three hundred florins to a cardinal, two hundred to a courtier, and “never, never lend to Germans”—but politics broke every rule. Cosimo sank roughly 190,000 florins into making Francesco Sforza duke of Milan, a loan never to be repaid; the Bruges manager lost over a hundred thousand florins, two years of the bank’s entire profit, on private galleys; and the men responsible were adopted sons and in-laws. Four of the most important branches, Parks wrote, were run by men who could not be fired. When Benci died in 1455, the holding structure was quietly abandoned; no surviving letter explains the decision that doomed the bank. The family’s shrewdest enemy, Renato de’ Pazzi, needed no ledger to see it: don’t assassinate Lorenzo, he advised—lend him money and watch him spend.

The Invisible Throne

In September 1433 Cosimo de’ Medici was summoned to the Palazzo Vecchio and locked in a tower cell nicknamed the Little Inn. Convinced his enemies meant to poison him, he ate almost nothing for four days, until his jailer offered to share every dish. Then the banker recovered himself: a smuggled note dispatched eleven hundred ducats—a thousand for the standard-bearer of justice, a hundred for the courier; “they could have had far more,” he noted afterward—while fifteen thousand florins slid quietly to Venice. Venice sent ambassadors; the pope protested; the death his enemies intended softened into exile. Within a year the Albizzi, who had neglected to purge the election purses of Medici names, were banished themselves, and Cosimo rode back into Florence in triumph. For the next thirty years he ruled the city, and never once held a ruler’s title.

His machine had four gears: the supposedly random election lotteries, controlled through the committee that filled the purses; the property-tax register, turned on uncooperative rich men in crushingly “thorough” assessments; a web of offices, loans, and marriages; and money made visible—more than 663,755 florins spent on buildings, churches, and charity, which proved the subtlest instrument of all. Brunelleschi raised his impossible dome; Donatello, who kept his earnings in a basket hung from the ceiling for any friend to draw on, cast the bronze David, the first freestanding nude since antiquity; Fra Angelico wept as he painted, prompting Cosimo’s observation that every painter paints himself. Above all, Cosimo set Marsilio Ficino to translating the whole of Plato—“Come,” he wrote, “and bring your Orpheus lyre”—while his humanists pulled Cicero and Lucretius out of monastic cellars. Without those recovered texts there is no Renaissance. In the fresco of the Magi in his palace chapel, the master of Florence at last allowed himself to appear: riding a mule.

“You cannot govern a state with prayers,” he liked to say; and, late in life: “I know the Florentines. Within fifty years we will be expelled. But my buildings will remain.” He erred only on the date. The family was driven out three decades after his death, its palace sacked—and not one Medici church was touched. He had invented an insurance no other banker sold: private wealth converted into public patrimony, beyond the reach of any regime. When he died in 1464, the republic gave him Cicero’s old honor; his tomb bears two words: Pater Patriae.

The Magnificent

Power passed briefly to his gouty son Piero, and in December 1469 seven hundred notables gathered to “request” that a twenty-year-old take charge—a republic’s ritual dressing up a succession. Lorenzo de’ Medici was ugly by every account—flattened nose, jutting jaw, harsh voice, no sense of smell—and, in Guicciardini’s blunt verdict, magnetic all the same.

The Pazzi conspiracy was his crucible, and he had helped forge it: behind the plot lay a papal land purchase Lorenzo refused to finance and a 1477 change in inheritance law by which he stripped the Pazzi of a fortune. Sixtus IV blessed the conspiracy “so long as no one is killed,” a condition everyone understood to be decorative. His brother’s blood bought Lorenzo what no politician can purchase—a martyr’s halo over a monopolist’s power—and in 1480 he distilled the state into a Council of Seventy that he controlled. When the pope and the king of Naples made war on Florence, Lorenzo sailed alone to Naples in the winter of 1479, effectively volunteering as hostage, and in three months of talks pried King Ferrante out of the alliance. “If I am given danger,” he wrote, “let me be given the honor too.”

His patronage ran less to stone than to taste. He sent Leonardo to Milan bearing a silver lyre shaped like a horse’s head, and Botticelli to Rome to fresco the Sistine walls; the Primavera and the Birth of Venus grew from the Neoplatonist circle he kept at his villas. In his sculpture garden he found a teenager carving a faun with a full set of teeth and teased him—old men never keep them all—then brought the boy home to study and dine beside his own children for four years. The boy was Michelangelo.

The bank rotted beneath him. Lorenzo admitted he understood nothing of finance; his manager Sassetti more than doubled a personal fortune to 97,000 florins while the branches bled. Lorenzo drew more than 53,600 florins from his cousins’ inheritance and 75,000 from the public treasury; by 1482 the bank’s capital was a fifth of its peak. On the night of April 5, 1492, lightning burst the lantern of Brunelleschi’s dome and sent stone crashing toward the Medici palace; three days later Lorenzo died at Careggi, forty-three. Guicciardini supplied the epitaph: if Florence had to have a tyrant, she could never have found a better or more delightful one—and then the truth Florentines preferred not to hear: but he was a tyrant. Two years on, the French invaded, Lorenzo’s son capitulated, the family was expelled, and the friar Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities consumed mirrors, silks, and Botticelli canvases—until 1498, when the city hanged and burned the friar on the very same spot.

Two Popes, Two Queens

Lorenzo’s most farsighted act looked absurd: he made his second son a cardinal at thirteen. Of his three boys, he judged one dull, one clever, one good; the clever one he aimed at the Church, calling the red hat the greatest honor the house had ever received. The logic was a banker’s—if you cannot control your client, become him. In 1512 the family returned to Florence behind Spanish pikes and the massacre at Prato; a year later Giovanni was crowned Leo X. “Since God has given us the papacy,” he reportedly said, “let us enjoy it.” He emptied the treasury within a year, borrowed at 40 percent, and sold offices and indulgences on a scale that provoked, on October 31, 1517, a monk named Martin Luther to nail ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg. Western Christendom split for good; when Leo died in 1521, someone scrawled on his tomb: the worst of popes.

His cousin Clement VII—“too timid,” a Venetian ambassador judged—inherited the reckoning. Caught wavering between France and the emperor, he watched imperial troops break into Rome in May 1527: eight thousand civilians dead the first day, manuscripts strewn as stable bedding, Luther’s name scratched into Raphael’s frescoes. Erasmus mourned the destruction not of a city but of a world. Clement escaped to Castel Sant’Angelo, and seven months later out of it, dressed as a servant with melted papal jewels sewn into his clothes. Yet on the family’s ledger—the historian Paul Strathern’s point—his papacy was an absolute success: he married fourteen-year-old Catherine de’ Medici into the French royal house, and he made Alessandro hereditary duke of Florence, the bell that had summoned citizens smashed and melted into medals.

Catherine—orphaned within weeks of birth, nearly thrown to soldiers during the siege of Florence, humiliated for years at the French court—became, after a lance through her husband’s visor in 1559, the power behind three successive kings. She gave France ballet, the fork, Florentine cooks and much of what the world calls French cuisine—and the night of Saint Bartholomew in 1572, when some 2,500 Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris and about 8,000 across France, a massacre she at the very least knew of and did not stop. In 1600 a second Medici queen, Marie, followed with a 600,000-florin dowry, her wedding celebrated with the first complete opera ever staged. At home, the murder of the debauched Duke Alessandro in 1537 extinguished the elder line; seventeen-year-old Cosimo I, of the cadet branch, chosen by elders who assumed a boy could be managed, crushed them instead, conquered Siena, built the Uffizi—literally, “the offices”—and in 1569 was crowned Grand Duke of Tuscany. The family even stood godfather to the new science: Galileo named Jupiter’s moons the Medicean stars, and after the Inquisition forced his recantation in 1633, a Medici grand duke had his manuscripts smuggled north to the presses. In 1657 the family founded Europe’s first academy of experiment; its motto was try, and try again.

The Long Dusk

Then the blood thinned. Dynastic marriage, aimed ever higher, kept narrowing the pool, and the last generations curdled. Cosimo III, who reigned for fifty-three joyless years from 1670, married a French princess who wrote that not an hour passed in which she did not wish to see him hanged; he turned to devout persecution—banning contact between Christians and Jews, banning Galileo from the university—while Florence shrank below fifty thousand souls and travelers described streets given over to beggars and monks. By 1705 the treasury was bankrupt; the state sold prostitutes’ licenses. His son Gian Gastone began as a reformer—taxes cut, public executions abolished, Galileo restored to the curriculum—and ended entombed in his own bed, drunk, attended by hired companions, dining at two in the morning behind banks of roses arranged to mask the smell. When he died in July 1737, the male line died with him, and six thousand foreign troops marched in to hand Tuscany to the house of Lorraine. A family that had made popes and queens could no longer dispose of its own duchy.

The Last Trade

One Medici remained. Anna Maria Luisa, Gian Gastone’s sister, widow of a German elector—tall, proud, pious, and perfectly clear about being the last of her name. In 1737 she signed the Family Pact, the dynasty’s true testament: the whole accumulation of three centuries—the Botticellis and Raphaels, the bronzes, jewels, manuscripts, and instruments—was bound to Florence forever, for the benefit of the people and the curiosity of the world; none of it might ever leave the city. No later ruler could sell it, move it, or carry it off. It was a banking family’s final transaction—everything, exchanged for permanence—and it is the core of the Uffizi, the Pitti, and the Bargello today.

She died in February 1743, lucid nearly to the end; Florentines swore the brief hurricane that struck the city that morning had come to carry her off, as one had come for her brother. A French visitor recorded that the people of Florence would have given two-thirds of all they owned to have the Medici back.

What they got instead was the dynasty’s paradoxical lesson. Across 346 years, the house produced individuals more brilliant than any doge—yet plodding, procedural Venice endured a thousand years, while Florence rose and fell with the quality of one family’s heirs, and the bank’s peerless structure outlived its guardian by nothing at all. Institutions, not genius, are what last; and the one institution the Medici built for the ages was the gift itself. More than ten million visitors a year now file past the Primavera and under the dome. Lorenzo once wrote a carnival song all Italy learned to sing: how lovely is youth, and how fast it flies; let whoever would be happy be happy now, for of tomorrow nothing is sure. He was singing of youth, of Florence—and, though he could not know it, of the whole arc of his house: to acquire, to create, and at the last, to give it all back.