First Among Equals
A Novel Based on the Life of Cosimo de Medici
Francesco Massaccesi
Contents
Foreword
First and foremost, Mentor was a person. We tend to think of the word mentor as a noun (a mentor) or a verb (to mentor), but there is a very human dimension embedded in the term. Mentor appears in Homers Odyssey as the old friend entrusted to care for Odysseuss household and his son Telemachus during the Trojan War. When years pass and Telemachus sets out to search for his missing father, the goddess Athena assumes the form of Mentor to accompany him. The human being welcomes a human form for counsel. From its very origins, becoming a mentor is a transcendent act; it carries with it something of the holy.
The Barbera Foundations Mentoris Project sets out on an Athena-like mission: We hope the books that form this series will be an inspiration to all those who are seekers, to those of the twenty-first century who are on their own odysseys, trying to find enduring principles that will guide them to a spiritual home. The stories that comprise the series are all deeply human. These books dramatize the lives of great Italians and Italian-Americans whose stories bridge the ancient and the modern, taking many forms, just as Athena did, but always holding up a light for those living today.
Whether in novel form or traditional biography, these books plumb the individual characters of our heroes journeys. The power of storytelling has always been to envelop the reader in a vivid and continuous dream, and to forge a link with the subject. Our goal is for that link to guide the reader home with a new inspiration.
What is a mentor? A guide, a moral compass, an inspiration. A friend who points you toward true north. We hope that the Mentoris Project will become that friend, and it will help us all transcend our daily lives with something that can only be called holy.
Robert J. Barbera, President, Barbera Foundation
Ken LaZebnik, Editor, The Mentoris Project
Legends and Legacies
T he Mugello valley had never been so beautiful.
Catching his reflection in the freezing cold waters of the stream where he had stopped to wash his face, Charlemagne paused and then looked up to take in the landscape around himthis place in the Tuscan countryside seemed suspended in a state of enchanted beauty.
The blissful nature of the Mugello contradicted its very name, for that tangible angle of Eden had been named after its first conquerors, the fierce and aggressive tribe of the Magelli, who, after moving from their original area in the Liguria region, had landed in Tuscany after many peregrinations and battles.
But Charlemagne ignored this.
What did matter to him during those fleeting moments so far removed from his courtly life, his duties, and his power was to be free to ride his horse along the interminable woods and the banks of the Sieve River, to admire fully the riches of that fertile land.
Like many before him, Charlemagne had discovered that the wide Mugello valley was the ideal place to hunt. It was a reserve fit for princes, noblemen, and even emperors with a bored but impetuous disposition.
While being a guest of the noble Ubaldini family, who had command over the Mugello fief, Charlemagne prepared himself to hunt deer accompanied by a handful of loyal men chosen amongst the inhabitants of the area.
However, early on that fateful day, the Emperor Charlemagne had unexpectedly fallen ill; it was a sudden ailment that some judged to be pneumonia, while others thought it could be rheumatic fever or an infection.
Whatever the cause of illness, Charlemagne was dying in one of the most beautiful places he had ever set his eyes upon.
Only one man, a local mugellano of a charitable nature and versed in the medical arts, had understood that it was crucial to intervene without further ado. He saw Charlemagne not simply as a great man who had been made emperor by the grace of God, but also as a human being who was fighting fiercely for his life.
That man carried with him a set of small metal cups for practicing the medical art of bloodletting, an ancient technique used by doctors and surgeons for more than two thousand years to remove the bad blood from the patients body.
The metal cups, similar to small balls, were applied on the emperors body; he quickly recovered from his illness, almost as if touched by divine intervention.
Full of gratitude, Charlemagne conceded to that skilled and generous man the highest possible honorhe gave him and his family a name and a coat of arms inspired by his medical knowledge that would resonate for centuries to come.
That man of medicine was our ancestor. Even though we dont know much about him, thanks to his charitable soul our family is proud to bear the name Medici. Even today, we bear the red cups on our emblem to remember him and the future he created for our whole family.
Is this true, Grandfather?
Every story, as fictitious as it may sound or even be, has something that we can take and make some good from. Its your choice what youre going to take from what Ive just told you. Its up to you to be wise.
The time is a Florentine summer in the year 1460. The place is the Medici home on the Via Larga, a building so modern and perfectly structured that all Tuscan palaces of a certain importance built at the time used it as their model.
The aging Cosimo de Medici, banker, patron of the arts, intellectual, and de facto ruler of Florence, the first among equals, was spending his afternoon there in the company of his grandson Lorenzo.
The young boy was a child, yet in a few years he would gain the nickname of Magnificent and be known as one of the main personalities of the Italian Renaissance.
The story Cosimo narrated was probably just a legend. Each story is born of something, be it myth or reality, and the truth about the origins of the Medici family wasand still isa mystery, lost in the fog of time.
The tale of the metal cups was considered by some a derogatory joke spread about by the French court, and it was, in any case, only one of many hypotheses and legends connected with the familys name and shield.
You see, Lorenzo, the origins of our family arent as ancient as those of Florence, but theyre equally, if not more, mysterious.
Cosimo could have never guessed that the true origin of the Medici family name and shield would remain a point of contention among later historians, who, just like the scholars who preceded them over the centuries, would ponder over it with the most disparate theories.
According to the supporters of the medical theory, one piece of evidence was the choice of the two patron saints of the family, Cosmas and Damian, medics and thaumaturges who helped the poor and the needy. Other historians regarded the choice of the two patron saints as dictated exclusively by the similarity between their profession and the familys surname, and by the assonance between the Cosimo and Cosmas names.
For some, the balls represented bitter oranges that the Medici traded with the Orient and a large part of Italy. Others saw in them the symbol of the weights merchants employed to measure goods and coins. And yet others believed they were an alternative representation of the shield of the corporation of which the family was part.
