The social disparity between the Medici and the families they married into was not evident in the children’s early years. The Medici lacked noble status and came originally from the Mugello – the area north of Florence in the foothills of the Apennines, where they always retained possessions. Although some of the family were to be found in Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they were there as moneylenders, participating in the city’s government as members of the Cambio, or Moneychangers’ Guild. Only a few members of the clan became wealthy – messer Averardo (called Bicci) in the first half of the fourteenth century and Veri di Cambio in the latter half of the century – and despite making good marriages, many of the family retreated to the Mugello after the economic downturn in the mid-fourteenth century. Those who remained became overbearing and litigious, including messer Salvestro de’ Medici, Veri’s cousin, who happened to be Gonfalonier of Justice at the beginning of the Ciompi uprising in 1378. Cosimo and his cousin Averardo descended from two sons of Bicci, Giovanni and his elder brother Francesco. Because Francesco died in 1402 when Giovanni was first elected a prior, Giovanni and his descendants were able to overtake Averardo politically, even though as cousins Averardo and Cosimo remained close allies. Giovanni worked for Veri di Cambio in Rome until 1397, when he returned to Florence to establish his own banking company.1

Although Piero was criticised for his love of sports and footballing in the streets, sportsmanship – like cultural patronage – contributed to the soft power increasingly enjoyed by Renaissance rulers. Visits to the antiquities in the Medici palace and to the model farm at Poggio a Caiano formed part of diplomats’ tours of Florence, while the sports of horse racing and falconry provided invaluable items for gift exchanges with other rulers. So too did Piero’s famous Spanish runner Garzerano, who was regarded as a trophy (‘like some prince’, in the eyes of the royal court) when borrowed by Alfonso of Naples for his son.1 So if Piero’s sporting activities were unappreciated at home, they gave him more standing outside Florence than his critics may have realised.

As Bernardo Dovizi had said, as long as there was fighting in Italy, Piero was not without hope. So although the new year, 1498, opened with Piero enjoying ‘little reputation and less credit’, renewed fighting in Italy kept his hopes alive for the remaining years of his life.1 Two events helped to change the political scene, principally the succession of Louis of Orleans to the French throne in April, but also the execution of Savonarola the following month. With claims on Milan as well as Naples, King Louis XII forged new alliances in Italy, most notably with Venice and Pope Alexander VI, who used France to further his son Cesare Borgia’s attempts to build a state for himself in central Italy. The destabilisation they created encouraged Piero’s military adventurism, while the final unravelling of Savonarola’s life – his attack on the pope, his last defiant sermons and the aborted Trial by Fire in March and early April 1498 – also helped to revivify Piero by discrediting the Florentine government at home and abroad.2 So Piero’s little-known movements in these years provide a novel outside-in view of Florence’s crisis that helps to explain the threatened coup d’état in 1500 and the life Gonfaloniership two years later.

Although Florence was where Piero lived and where his fate would be decided, he was nevertheless sustained by an extensive web of patronal, as well as banking, relationships that stretched outside Florence into its dominion and beyond, providing Piero with support from clients and supporters that helped to sustain him in his exile with a high price on his head. Through his great-grandmother Contessina, Piero was already in close contact with his Bardi relations in the Mugello and with old feudal families in Pistoia and Siena, and his father took care to nurture his role as patron and boss by introducing him early on to these client networks and teaching him through his own example. Like Lorenzo, Piero was called ‘master of the workshop’ to describe his role as boss – even if neither enjoyed the success of Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo as bankers. Piero was appointed head of the Medici Bank in Pisa in 1489 (aged seventeen) under the aegis of his manager Giovanni Cambi, and he enjoyed a close relationship with his cousin Nofri Tornabuoni, who became manager of the Medici Bank in Rome, both cities of strategic and cultural importance that must have contributed to his political experience if not to his banking skills.

Piero de’ Medici’s life remains unstudied, despite being pivotal to the crisis faced by Italian states in the late fifteenth century. Following the French invasion in 1494, Piero was not only driven out of Florence but spent the remainder of his life in exile, drowning in 1503 in an overladen baggage train while fighting with the French in southern Italy against Spain. As Lorenzo il Magnifico’s eldest son and heir, he also experienced the problems of all Italy’s communal regimes as they transformed themselves into territorial states in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Since Florence was still nominally a republic, many of its citizens were alienated by the way Lorenzo – and his son Piero – were treated by other rulers as de facto princes and as the ‘idols’ of their adherents in Florence, and they later blamed Piero for the regime’s collapse in 1494.1 This created great ambivalence towards him during his years in Florence and hostility afterwards. Yet as the narrative of his life will show, he was more intelligent and talented than his critics suggest, and he provides an invaluable prism through which to view these confused years of crisis for Florence and for Italy.

Lorenzo de’ Medici’s marriage to Clarice Orsini in June 1469 had created a precedent, for it was the first time that the Florentine mercantile and banking family had married out of Tuscany and into a family of long-established Roman aristocrats. The Milanese ambassador predicted at the time that it would give ‘the populace, as well as some of the leading citizens, plenty to talk about’, and so, too, did the lengthy wedding ceremonies.1 Only six months later, Lorenzo’s father Piero died, plunging the twenty-year-old Lorenzo into a political crisis, as he ‘hoisted his sails’ to secure his primacy in Florence, and all too soon – before the end of his first decade in power – he was at war with the pope and the king of Naples following his brother’s murder in 1478.2

Piero’s life has so far been described through the fond eyes of his family and his tutor Poliziano, who protected his childhood years with loving care. In 1484, however, Piero left Florence for his first semi-official mission abroad when he went with the Florentine embassy to Rome to congratulate and offer obedience to the new pope, Innocent VIII. Aged twelve, he was four years younger than his father had been when sent on his first ‘quasi-diplomatic mission’ to Milan in 1465, but unlike Lorenzo he was not on a solo visit but merely one of several young men accompanying the six ambassadors.1 It was a suitable occasion to launch him on the political scene not only because of the presence there of so many of his Orsini relatives, including his uncle Rinaldo who was put in charge of him, but also because Florence’s official delegation included his great-uncle, Giovanni Tornabuoni, as well as the chancellor Bartolomeo Scala, both sound mentors for Piero’s first diplomatic venture.2

Piero’s behaviour in the months before the denouement of the cousins’ conspiracy in late April showed the two contrasting sides of his nature: lazy and hyperactively scheming. Both were pinpointed by Becchi’s idiosyncratic turn of phrase when he criticised him – on one hand – for letting ser Piero Dovizi govern Italy as his boss while he rested on his oars, ‘allowing some wind to blow the boat where the oars can’t arrive, it wears you out to use your arms’, and on the other for restlessly moving in a rocking gondola: ‘keep still, for God’s sake, for you can’t see everything and you shouldn’t help the side opposite to yours’.1 Outwardly, at least, Piero seemed unworried either by his cousins or by the French expedition. He stood high in the pope’s esteem as the broker of a possible marriage for little Laura (the pope’s daughter) and, indeed, as Florence’s St. Peter, ‘the rock on which our city is now rising up’.2 He was also as ‘ambiguous’ as the pope, ‘temporising in order to see whom to please’. After receiving despatches from France, Milan, Rome and Naples in November 1493, with news of ‘Ferrante’s trepidation, the pope’s instability and the general state of affairs in Milan’, Piero told Dovizi he had little to reply except that he was waiting to hear more before writing to Becchi in France, so that, ‘well informed, [Becchi] can … temporise or do as he thinks fit’.3 In the meantime, he was busy organising the joust that he and his friends had long been practising for – probably on the large tract of public land along the walls he had enclosed in November as a jousting yard. In Piazza S. Croce the stockades had been built and the seating was being constructed.4 Then, at the end of January, everything came to an abrupt halt, not because of the cousins or news from France, but because of the death of Ferrante of Naples on 25 January 1494.

The much-feared event of Lorenzo’s death happened on 8 April 1492, heralded ominously by a bolt of lightning striking the cupola of the Duomo in the direction of the Medici palace.1 Piero’s years of apprenticeship were over and everyone awaited his response to the challenges ahead. ‘Who would Piero side with’, Parenti wondered, ‘and how would he be treated, as the boss, the equal or the inferior of the others?’2 Uncertainty about Piero’s reaction to the new, upside-down world that confronted him was widely shared, not least by Lorenzo’s secretary, ser Niccolò Michelozzi, who found himself isolated in Naples as his patron lay dying, consoled only by the letters he received from Florence.

Although Lorenzo had been planning Piero’s marriage to Alfonsina Orsini since the summer of 1486, he was unable to carry the plan forward until November, after the conclusion of the Barons’ War. He described it to Francesco Gonzaga the following March as a gift from Ferrante to Piero, ‘to whom it pleased him to give the daughter of the late illustrious Orsini knight’. With its huge dowry of 12,000 ducats, the marriage clearly represented a gesture of gratitude to Lorenzo for contributing to their victory in the war, in which the Orsini had played a crucial part in supporting Ferrante, not the pope. Virginio was Alfonsina’s guardian after the death of her father, Roberto, Count of Tagliacozzo and Alba, who had been a favourite condottiere of Ferrante’s. So the marriage served to confirm and consolidate the Medici’s bonds with both the Orsini and Ferrante – although initially risking the loss of his hard-won friendship with the pope.1

Lamberto dell’Antella’s confession and the execution of five leading Florentines in August 1497 marked a watershed in Piero’s years of exile. Before that, Piero’s friends met in Florence to discuss plans to bring him back to Florence, with Lamberto as a go-between carrying messages to and fro. In the early years of his exile, Piero had described himself in letters to the government and to his cousins as a good citizen who only wanted to be treated fairly and allowed to return home. But after 1497 everyone was afraid of contagion and we have to rely on the reports of ambassadors, merchants and spies to discover his movements. They show how high the stakes were in a conflict that pitted the leading families of Florence against each other.

Piero was only three years old when he was entrusted to the care of Angelo Poliziano in 1475 – two years after Poliziano entered the Medici household – and he remained close to him until Poliziano’s death in 1494.1 The tutor, who became one of Italy’s most outstanding humanists, was a precocious but impecunious youth from the provinces when he first met Lorenzo de’ Medici. He had been sent to Florence to be educated at the university not long after his father’s murder in Montepulciano, when Angelo was ten. Three years after openly asking for Lorenzo’s help in continuing his studies and completing his Latin translation of the second book of Homer’s Iliad in 1470 (which he dedicated to Lorenzo), he was invited to join the Medici household.2 Perhaps Lorenzo already saw Poliziano as a promising, avant-garde teacher for his very young son, as well as a stimulating companion for himself on his trips outside Florence, especially to the Pisan countryside, where he hunted and hawked while working to establish a new university in Pisa. But in promising Lorenzo great success as Piero’s tutor in return for patronage, Poliziano was signing a Faustian pact that may have exaggerated Piero’s achievements and compromised himself.3