Catherine Fletcher - The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance

Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe. Her previous books include The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de Medici and The Divorce of Henry VIII: The Untold Story. Catherine is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University and broadcasts regularly for the BBC.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Divorce of Henry VIII:

The Untold Story

The Black Prince of Florence:

The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de Medici

To my students

In the days before the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent de Medici there had been bad omens in Florence. A bolt of lightning had hit the cathedral dome. Two of the lions in the palace lion-house had been fighting. And when on the night of 8 April 1492 the first citizen of Florence and great patron of Renaissance arts and letters died at his hillside villa in Careggi, three miles to the citys north, there were the inevitable rumours of poison. A messenger rode overnight to bring the news to Rome, and to his son, Cardinal Giovanni de Medici.

By the time of Lorenzo, the Medici family had risen from wealthy merchants and leading oligarchs of the city of Florence to its de facto lords. Lorenzo had not matched his grandfathers skills in banking. The Medici bank fount of the familys wealth had suffered losses in the 1470s and 80s. Income from the Florentine state had therefore become ever more important in sustaining the family finances: or, to put it another way, the Medici had their hands in the till. Lorenzo left a fabulous collection of books and antiquities and a luxurious set of country villas, as well as a poetic legacy of his own, though he regretted, on his deathbed at the age of forty-three, that he had not seen his marvellous Greek and Latin library done. Looking back on his death some decades later, the Florentine statesman and historian Francesco Guicciardini would describe it as a grievous stroke to his country. Lorenzos reputation, prudence and genius had helped maintain a long and secure peace in Italy. He had kept in check the ambitions of King Ferdinand of Naples and Ludovico Sforza, regent of Milan.

This was at best rose-tinted and at worst entirely misleading: Lorenzo had his familys political interests at heart, and his quest to secure their own position had done damage to the peninsulas equilibrium. As part of that strategy, his daughter Maddalena had wed a nephew of Pope Innocent VIII, and his heir, Piero had been married to a Neapolitan heiress, Alfonsina Orsini. (Piero was soon to be known as the Unfortunate for his disastrous tenure at the head of the Medici and Florence; the closer the Medici came to dynastic power, the more they fell prey to that curse of dynasties, that the eldest son could not always be relied upon.) Lorenzos greatest coup, however, had been to obtain for his second son Giovanni a position as cardinal: this was in 1489, when Giovanni had been only thirteen. He was sixteen, now, at his fathers death.

Lorenzo had advised his son to live modestly in the sink of all iniquity that was Rome.

A handsome house and a well-ordered family will be preferable to a great retinue and a splendid residence [he wrote]. Your taste will be better shown in the acquisition of a few elegant remains of antiquity, or in the collecting of handsome books, and by your attendants being learned and well-bred rather than numerous.

Giovannis role as a cardinal was, of course, a religious one.

You are now devoted to God and the church: on which account you ought to aim at being a good ecclesiastic, and to show that you prefer the honour and state of the church and of the apostolic see to every other consideration. Nor, while you keep this in view, will it be difficult for you to favour your family and your native place [] observing, however, that you are always to prefer the interests of the church.

It is doubtful Lorenzo intended his son to take this advice literally, and he did not. Cardinal Giovannis nepotism would do no favours for a church in need of reform, though it proved the saving of his familys fortunes.

Italy at this time was entering a period of remarkable turbulence. Like the area we now know as Germany, the Italian peninsula of the late fifteenth century was not a unified country nor would it be until the latter half of the nineteenth century but was divided into multiple small states. The five largest of these were two republics, Venice and Florence, and three princely states: the kingdom of Naples, the duchy of Milan, and the Papal States, of which the pope was effectively the monarch, alongside his religious status as the vicar of Christ on earth. (The Italian kingdoms, duchies and marquisates all had a single hereditary ruler, the different titles indicating different degrees of grandeur.) The political balance between these states was already precarious, and the death of a second in the space of three months now threatened it further.

On 25 July 1492, Pope Innocent VIII died, Just a few months earlier he had presided over great celebrations in Rome. On Sunday 5 February, dressed in white vestments, he had made his way through constant, miserable rain from his apartments at the Vatican to the church of St James on Piazza Navona, centre of worship for Romes Spanish community. There, before bishops and cardinals, he had given thanks to God for the victory of the king and queen of Spain against the Muslim city of Granada. Since the year 711 the Moors, as Christians called them, had ruled large parts of the Iberian peninsula. Its history had been one of coexistence, sometimes tolerance, and often outbursts of persecution. In the early years political alliances had periodic crossed religious lines, but the Muslims had gradually been pushed back in what became known by their Christian rivals as the Reconquista or Reconquest of Spain. In the face of increasingly brutal tactics, King Boabdil Mohammed XII of Granada had tried compromise, working with the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile against rivals in his own family. It did not save him. On 2 January 1492, amid splendid but humiliating ceremony, he handed the keys to his city to the king and queen, ending more than seven centuries of Muslim rule in Western Europe.

For their commitment to the Christianisation of Spain and the conversion of people beyond Ferdinand and Isabella would be honoured with the title of the Catholic Monarchs. They had married in 1469 and after the deaths of Isabellas brother and half-brother had seen off a challenge to her throne from a niece. Among their instruments as they worked to build a new Spanish monarchy the most notorious was the Spanish Inquisition. Licensed by Innocents predecessor, Pope Sixtus IV, it had begun as a campaign against heresy. It had focused at first on Spains