The Florentines by Paul Strathern

Author:Paul Strathern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2021-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

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Over the decades following Cosimo de’ Medici’s return from exile, he would consolidate his position in Florence to the point where Pope Pius II would write of him: ‘Political questions are settled at his house. The man he chooses holds office… He it is who decides peace and war, and controls the laws… His mind is keen and alert [although] he frequently passes entire nights without sleep. Nothing goes on in Italy that he does not know about… He is king in all but name.’ Cosimo’s sleepless nights would probably have been due to the increasing pain of his gout, as much as they were to problems at the bank or worries over the governance of the city.

As head of the Medici bank, Cosimo received intelligence from all its branches, and it was this which enabled him to guide Florence’s foreign policy with such skill. The politics of the Italian peninsula remained as volatile as ever – still relying upon a precarious balance between the five major powers: Milan, Venice, Rome, Naples and Florence. As the weakest of these powers, Florence had long relied upon its alliance with powerful Venice for protection. However, Milan posed a constant threat, and the enemies of Cosimo de’ Medici were beginning to make use of this. Within four years of being sent into exile, Rinaldo degli Albizzi had the ear of the mentally unstable Duke Filippo Maria, the Visconti ruler of Milan, who harboured fantasies that he would one day rule the whole of Italy. In 1437, and again the following year, Albizzi would lead a Milanese army into Florentine territory.

Fortunately, Cosimo had foreseen this threat, and since returning from exile he had cultivated a friendship with Francesco Sforza, the most powerful condottiere in the peninsula at the time. Francesco had been born in 1401 in San Miniato, in the contado. His father had been a farmer from the Romagna, the remote hilly territory of city-states across the mountains east of Florence. Nominally these city-states owed allegiance to the pope, but they were in fact mostly ruled by petty tyrants. Owing to its poverty and general lawlessness, the Romagna was a well-known recruiting ground for tough mercenaries.

Around the time of Francesco’s birth, his father returned from Tuscany to the Romagna and set up as a condottiere. Here he recruited a legion of peasants whom he trained into a formidable fighting force, offering his military services for hire. Indeed, to reinforce his reputation, he even changed his name to Sforza, meaning ‘force’. In his early twenties, when his father died, Francesco took over his father’s army. He immediately gained popularity amongst his men, owing to his physical prowess (he could bend an iron bar with his bare hands) as well as his tactical abilities (most notably his outmanoeuvring of his mercenary enemies into a position where they were forced to surrender, thus relinquishing their booty without a fight).

Such was Francesco Sforza’s military prowess that he was soon hired on a quasi-permanent basis by Filippo Maria, the Duke of Milan, who came to regard Sforza as his trusted right-hand man.

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