JTortign "tatt~mtll . - Dhananjayarao Gadgil Library IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII~ GIPE-PUNE-002923 COSIMO DE' MEDICI COSIMO DE' MEDICI BY K. DOROTHEA EWART LAr. SCBOL£a 0 .. SOIlKRvtLLE COLLEGE, OXFORD lLonbon MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPAlIo'- 1899 A If rigId. r~st"'(d V 1,-<.2..t F'd-7 ~ C~ Z .. 72-3 I WISH to express my sincere thankS to Mr. Armstrong, of Queen's College, Oxford, for his kind help, both in suggestion and criticism, and in the revision of the proofs. K.D.E. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE INTRODUCTION-FLORENCE UNDER THE OLIGARCHY CHAPTER II THE BANISHMENT AND RESTORAnON OF COSlllO DE' MEDICI 41 CHAPTER III FOREIGN POLICY FROM 1435 TO 1447-THE VENETIAN ALLIANCE-THE BALANCE OF POWER 73 CHAPTER IV FOREIGN POLICY FROM 1447 TO 1464-THE CONQUEST OF MILAN FOR SFORZA-TnE FRENClI AND MILANESE ALLIANCES 105 CHAPTER V THB DOMESTIC POLICY OF COSIMO DE' MEDICI AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF HIS PowIm 140 viii cosmo DE' MEDICI CHAPTER VI PAGB CHARACTER AND BASES OF COSIJoIO'S RULE-HIS PRIVATE LIFE 183 CHAPTER VII Cosnlo's PATRONAGE OF LITERATURR AND ART . 209 APPENDIX LIST OF PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES . 239 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION-FLORENCE UNDER THE OLIGARCHY WE, who live in the nineteenth century, .are accus­ tomed to the lifeoi a vast state with a population of many millions, to foreign relations which concern the destinies of the whole world, and to domestic affairs, in which the few politicians. who appear on the stage of action are merely representative of the interests of large classes and parties. For us, therefore, it is difficult to recognise Cosimo de' Medici as a statesman who required little less tenacity of purpose than a Bismarck, little less diplomatic skill than a Richelieu; For it may seem to us no great achievement for a man t~ make himself master of a little city-state, with a few thousand hi­ habitants, and a territory about as large as Yorkshire, and to carry on a career of successful diplomacy amongst other states of the same size, and extending but seldom beyond Italy. Yet, since to the student of political science and of statecraft the Florence of the fifteenth century and the Medicean power in Florence present political phenomena distinct from, though always related ~ B 2 COSIMO DE' MEDICI CHAP. to, those appearing in any other state or period, the life of Cosimo de' Medici is worth studying, not only from the romantic point of view, as that of a man with a remarkable character and extraordinary career, but as a chapter in the History of Politics, with a significance and an interpretation of its own. And first it should be realised that Florence, though a city, was a state, and as such totally distinct h'om the Florence of to-day, or from the English t.owns with which we are familiar. In her were to be found almost all the elements of national, as well as of municipal, life. She was far more independent, far more truly national, than the medireval German .free towns; the only parallel that can be in any way applied to her is that of the Greek cities, with whose life Aristotle has made ~s familiar. And Florence was more than a state, she was even in miniature an empire, since she ruled over several subject towns, each with its own measure of autonomy in domestic affairs, but all subject to the Imperial authority of the head city. Thus with Florence and her Tuscan Empire can best be compared Athens and her Empire about the shores of the Aegean Sea; and the comparison may be pursued yet further, and the rule of Cosimo over Florence compared with that of Pericles over Athens. The parallel can only be rough and superficial, yet we may remember that each founded his power upon the "people," as opposed to the "aristocracy"; that each first rose to supremacy upon the abortive attempts of his enemies to ostracise him, resulting in the exile of the enemies themselves; that each counted on preserving his power by leading the state to embrace a new line of foreign policy; that each INTRODUCTION 8 was ruler of his state at the time of the two greatest outbursts which the world has ever seen of the spirit of man into fresh regions of art and thought. And not only was Florence a state, she was also a modern state, in many respects one of the first of modern states. As her painters and savants stood at the head of the Renascence as the earliest artists and thinkers of the modern world, so her politics were now emerging from medirevalism and taking a modern com­ plexion. England, in the first half of the fifteenth century, had barely begun to emerge from the Middle Ages. There were to be found in her the hasty recourse to brute force in all matters of dispute, the dominating influence of the Church, the wide scope of the feudal idea as the chief characteristics of history; the possession of land was still the one mark of social status, political theory and diplomacy were yet in their infancy. But the Italy of this date was the Europe of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries in miniature. The political con­ ditions in which Cosimo had to work were largely those of modern, not of mediawal politics. War was now .. waged chiefly by reputation," the Church -as a Church had no politicalinfluence,-for the position of the Pope was hardly distinguished from that of the head of a secular state; feudalism had ceased to be a force in politics. Political theory was discussed even in the market-place; Cosimo himself contributed to what had already been acquired the theory of the Balance of Power among states, and, with some help from Francesco Sforza, invented and elaborated those methods of diplomatic intrigue by which .the balance of power was maintained, and which were to last as long as it lasted. 4 COSIMO DE' MEDICI CHAP. Florence, too, was a commercial state; the possession of land was merely an accident in the possession of power,-a part, but the least important part, of wealth; we find all the commercial problems of a later date alreadyalive,-'the uneasy relations between capital and labour, the employment of foreign politics as a means to commercial extension, the manipulation of a state debt, with shares whose value. fluctuated as the prosperity of the Government. Here, too, are found in almost every individual that very modern craving to obtain a share, however small, in the direction of the national policy; here, as in modern politics, the difficulty of establishing an executive powerful enough and sufficiently many-sided to embrace and cope with the complicated and manifold conditions of modern administration; here efforts like those of a modern foreign minister to make his policy consistent and effective, and yet agreeable to the public whim. Government must be maintained either by brute force or by clearly-expressed public opinion, never by the inert acquiescence of the governed in any rule that had an appearance of hereditary right. Yet the size of the Italian, like that of the Aristo­ telian, city-state could not but introduce many conditions which differentiate it from modern nations. To take part in politics was the privilege of a very limited class of fully-enfranchised citizens of the town; the poor, the country people, and the subject towns had no share in the central government; the idea 'of representation was almost entirely unknown. Since there were no con­ stituents to whom politicians must account for their conduct, the responsibility of officials was obtained only I INTRODUCTION 5 by an elaborate system of checks and counter-checks amongst the branches of the administration, by ex­ tremely short periods and rapid rotation of office,by appointment by lot, and by what appears a most cumber­ lOme system of "Colleges" and "Councils," without the consent of all of which very little could be accomplished. Parties were not vast organisations with common pro­ grammes; they were merely groups of individuals, held together by the family tie as much as by any common interests that they might chance to possess. It was the work of the politician therefore to deal with men only, not with organisations ; with individual ambitions, not with party programmes. Yet it is deeply interesting to observe howmedirevalism still clung about every institution and coloured every circumstance. The family played the principal part in political grouping, there was still a tendency to regard it, rather than the individual, as the unit in the state; industry was still partially controlled by the Guild system; political institutions were all based upon medireval forms of government, and they retained more or less of their medireval complexion and limitations. For Florence had been originally simply a union of land-holders for the purpose of mutual defence, and, when it became a trading commUnity, many of the ideas of its agrarian past.Iingered on in it; early in the fifteenth century taxation was still mainly based upon land, though that had long ceased to be the chief source of wealth. The days of its existence as a trading community, struggling for bare life among powerful feudal neighbours, had left yet stronger traces upon Florence. The Guild was the original basis of political and social organisation; 6 COSIMa DE' MEDICI OHAP. the Guilds, or "Arts," as they were called, were divided into classes, according to their wealth and importance. Of these, the higher class consisted of the" Major Arts," seven in number,-the Guilds of the lawyers, bankers, merchants, manufacturers of woollen and of silken goods, doctors, and furriers.