Magnifico Read Free

Virgin were often followed by calls to riot and mayhem.
    By most measures the Medici were ill prepared for the coming contest. Piero’s poor health had thrust Lorenzo into a position of responsibility at an age when his companions were still completing their studies or were apprenticed in the family business. He had already served as his father’s envoy on crucial diplomatic missions, including the wedding of a king’s son and an audience with the newly elected pope. A few weeks earlier he had returned from a trip abroad to introduce himself to Ferrante, King of Naples, “with whom I spoke,” he wrote his father, “and who offered me many fine compliments, which I wait to tell you in person.” The importance for the Medici of such contacts with the great lords of Europe is suggested by Piero’s hunger for news of the meeting. Lorenzo’s tutor and traveling companion, Gentile Becchi, wrote an enthusiastic report of Lorenzo’s performance before the king. Referring to this account, Piero confessed, “Three times I read this for my happiness and pleasure.” Consorting with royalty provided this family of bankers much-needed prestige, though such social climbing if too vigorously pursued could also arouse the jealousy of their peers who believed that they were thus being left behind. *
    The looming crisis would demand of Lorenzo a set of skills different from those he had recently practiced in the courts of great lords. The retiring Piero needed Lorenzo to act as the public face of the regime, the charismatic center of an otherwise colorless bureaucracy. As preparations were made for the coming battle, it was often to Lorenzo, rather than the ailing Piero, that men turned to pledge their loyalty. Marco Parenti, a cloth merchant of moderate means whose memoirs provide an eyewitness account of the events of these months, tells how the countryside was armed in the days leading up to the August crisis. “Thus it was arranged,” he wrote,
    that there were 2000 Bolognese horsemen loyal to the duke of Milan. These were secretly ordered to be held in readiness for Piero; the Serristori, lords with a great following in the Val d’Arno, arranged with Lorenzo, son of Piero, a great fishing expedition on the Arno and many great feasts where were gathered peasants and their leaders, who, wishing to show themselves faithful servants of Piero, met amongst themselves and pledged themselves to Lorenzo. These pledges were accepted with much show as if it had not already been planned, though many were kept in the dark, to send them a few days hence in arms to Florence in support of Piero. And so it was arranged in other places, with other peasants and men who, when called on, would quickly appear in arms.
    The fact that those bending their knees were often rude peasants and their lord a banker’s son gives to the proceedings a distinctly Florentine flavor, but it is clear that Lorenzo had already begun to take on some of the trappings of a feudal prince.
    Lorenzo’s prominence, however, was actually a sign of weakness in the Medici camp. Florentines regarded youth as an unfortunate condition, believing that these giovanni —a term attached to all young men, including those in their twenties who had yet to assume the steadying yoke of marriage—were, like the entire female sex, essentially irrational and in thrall to their baser instincts. So far Lorenzo had given little indication that he was any better than his peers, having acquired a well-earned reputation for fast living. For the leaders of the Hill a trial of strength now, when the father was crippled and his heir not yet mature, was to their advantage. Jacopo Acciaiuoli, son of Agnolo, who had attended the meeting of King Ferrante and Lorenzo, reported to his father, “And returning to the arrival of Lorenzo, many fathers spend to get their sons known who would do better to spend so that they were not known.” Beneath the spiteful jab there is a more substantive