Despite his complaints to Pius, Cosimo de Medici certainly can be seen as more a reigning prince than he was a private citizen with limited power. Cosimo was effectively the ruler of Florence from 1434 to 1464, and although he was not the official sovereign, he could be described as “a king in all but name and ceremony”, as Pope Pius II so did. This is the view suggested by the few Florentine sources on the period extant, notably those of Vespassiano da Bisticci and Niccolo Machiavelli. The patronage of both writers by the Medici (both writing, the latter forty years, after the death of Cosimo), however, delivers their writing to be in all likelihood biased, and therefore they are not entirely credible sources on Florence under the Medici.
Cosimo’s apparent rise to power was a result of the enormous fortune amassed due to the success of the Medici bank. Cosimo inherited the large and stable family bank from his father, Giovanni di Bicci de Medici, whose astute skills in business found him banker to the Pope; a success allowed to go quite unchecked due to his very quiet political life and his loyal support of the Albizzi, the family who held power in Florence at that time. However, Cosimo did not hold the same political sentiments as his father. With the latter’s death in 1429, Cosimo was placed head of the family, and declared in 1433 that he did not support the Albizzi, causing his exile from the city. The next year, however, the Albizzi fell from power, and with the election of a pro-Medici government, Cosimo returned to Florence, presenting stable social and economic leadership as the hegemonic citizen of the city.
It was this firm economic basis, then, that allowed Cosimo and the later Medici to wield such great power over the city (it was said that by 1457 the family’s wealth was at least four times that of any other in Florence). Cosimo endeavored to control the state while making sure not to act so blatantly as to have his power stripped from him by the official rulers of this state. In a reflection of his wealth, he gained control of the Monte, and therefore effective control of the finance of the entire city, allowing tax cuts to his friends and increasing tax on his enemies. His ability to gain supporters through bribery was so important that Machiavelli wrote: “there was scarcely a citizen…in Florence on whom Cosimo had not bestowed large sums of money.”
Cosimo gained control of the elections, appointing Ten Electors who made sure that only pro-Medici men held office, and called a balia creating a Council of the Hundred, which was made up of chief pro-Medici citizens, who in turn elected the aforementioned electors and dealt with matters of the Florentine state. In addition to putting his own followers in positions of power, he stripped power from his adversaries, exiling as many as eighty enemy families, and promoting the leaders of the lesser guilds to higher ones in order to quell any opposition that could have possibly risen from them.
Due to the political climate of Florence, Cosimo needed to appear as if he did not, in fact, control the city, and that he was not the most powerful man there in order to keep his position. This is indeed reflected in his response to Pope Pius II’s remark of his prince-like characteristics, stressing that Florence is run by the populous, not by him; that it is free. Machiavelli, too, wrote that “although he was the chief man in Florence he never overstepped the bounds of prudence. In his way of living…he never appeared anything but a simple citizen,” and Bisticci that “he acted privately with the concealed discretion in order to safeguard himself, and whenever he sought to obtain an object he contrived to let it appear that the matter had been set in motion by someone other than himself.” Cosimo even employed the architect Michelozzo’s modest design for his palace to avoid jealous Florentine families from attempting to unseat him from his would-be obvious power. Because Cosimo’s rise to power came from a state that had long been unstable, and one that wished to keep a firm hold on its traditional political values, the key to controlling this state was to work within the basic outline of the already established governmental structure, appearing not to hold power or to want to hold power, when this power was truly held as a reigning prince.
Cosimo, however, did not actually completely control the city. The electors were objected to by the two large councils in the years 1449 and 1455, and it was the citizens who still held office; the basic Florentine government was always in place. But Cosimo was known to many Florentines as “Pater Patriae”, a reflection of his enormous reputation and significance in the city, and being held in such high respect would in turn lead to the office holders, the official rulers of the city, to follow Cosimo’s will. Indeed, the Medici dominance over the city is especially seen in their control of Florentine foreign policy, despite Cosimo himself holding the office of Standard-bearer of Justice only three times. Pope Pius II said that “he knows all that goes on in Italy and most of the cities and princes take his advice.” This point is indeed proven in his arrangement of the Treaty of Lodi in 1454, effectively bringing all of Italy, although briefly, into peace.
Both to create symbols of his power and those of his generosity to the city of Florence, Cosimo was the first great Florentine patron of the arts. A Florentine in 1463 said that “Cosimo…builds now private homes, now sacred buildings, now monasteries inside and outside the city, at such expense that they seem equal to the magnificence of ancient kings and emperors.” This is indeed clear in his patronage of Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, Donatello, Lippi, Gozzoli, Ghiberti, and Fra Angelico. The propaganda of his patronage operation is seen in the frequent depiction of the Medici coat of arms and the family saints: Stephen, Damian, Lawrence and Cosmas, who, for example, are on top of the Martyr’s Door of the old Sacristy. The Florentine people could vividly see the power and enormous wealth that the Medici brought to their city, and through this propaganda, the Medici could hold onto this wealth and political power further (just as in the rebuilding of the Acropolis in Periclean Athens).
It is seen, then, that Cosimo, although certainly not officially being the despot or prince of Florence, held hegemony of the state; effectively controlling what a prince would, without actually being a prince himself. His wealth, and from this, his sway in government and political power, far surpassed that of any other, limited, private citizen, and therefore his leadership of Florence can be described, as Pope Pius II apparently has, as that of “a reigning prince”.
Ghost
[History] Cosimo de' Medici: a "Reigning Prince"?
- It's my smilie and I'll use it if I want to......
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