The Pontiff was very displeased when Lorenzo's diplomacy achieved an alliance between Florence, Venice, and Milan, for such a combination was more than a match for the armies of the Church. Sixtus felt thwarted in his ambitions to expand the papal territory and uneasy about the safety of what the Church already held.
His hostility grew when he learned that Lorenzo was trying to buy the town of Imola, which was strategically important. Consequently the Pope agreed to a plot designed to rid Florence of both Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano. The chief conspirators were the Pazzi family, a rival banking house and bitter enemies of the Medici.
The plan was to assassinate the two brothers at a moment when their guard would be down, during the celebration of Mass on Easter Sunday, April 26, Giuliano was slain, but Lorenzo escaped with wounds. The people of Florence rallied to the Medici standard and visited a terrible retribution on the hapless conspirators, most of whom did not survive the day.
Among those killed was Francesco Salviato, Archbishop of Pisa. The Pope, enraged, excommunicated Lorenzo and placed an interdict on the city. Lorenzo, knowing that the safety of his city and his dynasty were at stake, undertook the most hazardous adventure of his colorful career. He went by sea to Naples, virtually placing his life in the hands of the King. Ferrante was won over by Lorenzo's charm and his persuasive argument that it would not do for Italy to be divided or Florence destroyed.
Lorenzo returned to Florence with the gift of peace and was received with great joy. Sixtus was bitter but grudgingly bowed to necessity and in made peace. Lorenzo's control over Florence and its possessions would not be challenged again. A new constitution in simplified the structure of Florentine government. The Signory, or executive branch, chose 30 citizens, who in turn selected 40 more, all to serve for life in a new council.
Hence forward all other branches, including the Signory, were responsible to this permanent Council of Seventy. While Lorenzo escaped the killers, there were hard political consequences. The Pazzi Conspiracy threatened to destabilise the entire Italian peninsula, which had been at an uneasy peace for the best part of two decades following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in As the Medici pursued the conspirators — including Francesco Salviati, archbishop of Pisa — the pope moved against the Medici.
There was a real prospect of war, only avoided by an impressive piece of personal diplomacy in which Lorenzo effectively made himself a hostage of King Ferrante of Naples, persuaded the king into an alliance and, eventually, in March , returned to Florence and to power.
The legacy that is most familiar today is one of patronage. It was at the villa in Careggi where he died on 8 April , regretting that his library was still not finished. He might have been satisfied to know that it survives, more than years on.
He died two years before the outbreak of war and the exile of the Medici. These men had made their money from trade and industry but were not titled lords. In the modern world, the Medici became a model for philanthropy — even if that meant overlooking some of the more dubious means by which they had acquired their wealth and their power. Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe.
As a rule, no man younger than 45 could take on the role of Gonfaloniere, but for Lorenzo an exception was made. When his father died, his fellow citizens asked Lorenzo to take up leadership of the Florentine Republic. He was only 21 at the time. But he had a charming personality; animated and enthusiastic with a joyful nature that made him enormously popular. During the Congiura dei Pazzi, there was a plot to assassinate him and his brother Giuliano.
Lorenzo, an able swordsman, reacted promptly and managed to stop the would-be attacker who merely scratched him with a dagger. Lorenzo was more than just an astute diplomat and politician out to secure power for himself. He was also a talented poet, and today Italian students study his poems as part their literature curriculum.
One of his most famous verses is a reflection on the brevity of life and his carpe diem philosophy. As a young man he and his brother Giuliano entertained Florence by organising and taking part in spectacular games and jousting tournaments in Piazza Santa Croce. Lorenzo married a beautiful young woman from Rome called Clarici Orsini. She was different from him in every way. Where he was extrovert and passionate, she was shy and reserved.
Where he was versatile and curious, she was conservative and quite petulant. The marriage was a political move , rather than a love match, and organised by his mother. Despite the nature of their alliance they stayed together in a peaceful marriage and had 10 children together.
He is said to have been distressed when she died in He had a romantic attachment to Lucrezia Donati , a woman who he had known since they were very young, and with whom he had more in common than his wife. But it seems that their relationship remained platonic, and lived mainly in the sonnets that we wrote praising her beauty.
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