erected to the deceased stands in the baptistery; the reclining figure was cast in bronze by Donatello, and in the marble portions Michelozzo assisted. ‘Johannes quondam Papa XXIII.’ says the significant inscription.[56]
Their friendship with the late Pope did not prevent the Medici from coming to a good understanding with the new one. The mark of favour to Giovanni di Bicci already mentioned tells of friendly relations even at a time when Martin V. was not well disposed towards the city, on account of disagreeable occurrences during his residence in Florence in 1420. We have seen how Cosimo accompanied John XXIII. to Constance, where, in the words of a contemporary, the whole world was assembled. On the flight of his patron he left the town in disguise, and resided for some time in Germany and France, till he returned home after about two years’ absence. In 1426, having been entrusted with embassies in Milan, Lucca, and Bologna, he stayed for some months in Rome, employed in State affairs at the time that the tedious strife with Filippo Maria Visconti had, by the conquest of Brescia, taken a favourable turn for the allied Florentines and Venetians; and it was important to persuade the Pope to act as umpire, since all parties, and especially the Florentines, longed for peace. This peace was actually signed at Venice on December 30, the Bishop of Bologna, the excellent Niccolò Albergati, representing Martin V.; and when the duke broke the treaty, which had only just been concluded, new and heavy misfortunes in arms forced him to appeal to the same mediation which he had so lately scorned. But it was only in the spring of 1428 that terms were agreed upon advantageous to Venice, which retained Brescia, but offered no compensation to the Florentines for their enormous expenses, thus justifying the prudence of old Giovanni di Bicci, who had counselled against the war. In gratitude to the Pope for his support, the Florentines, in 1427, bestowed the freedom of their city on his relations, the Colonna family.
At the death of his father, Cosimo was forty years old. In all business, public as well as private, he had proved himself skilful, active, and prudent. All who did not belong to the party which guided affairs since 1380 regarded him as their natural leader. The number of these opponents of the ruling faction was great, not only among the people—in whom more or less indistinct hereditary traditions were instinctively hostile to a government which had now existed for fifty years, and which, though it originated with the people, had from the first been tinctured with the character of an oligarchy—but also among the higher classes, many of whom were considerably oppressed by this faction. Giovanni di Bicci had always avoided appearing as the actual head of a party, perhaps from prudence, perhaps also for fear of exposing himself to the risk of catastrophes such as he had experienced in his youth. It was to be proved whether his son shared this feeling, and Cosimo’s behaviour hitherto implied that he did. It was a question, however, whether the oligarchy would find it advisable to suffer a man beside them whose reputation and wealth daily increased, and who, even without wishing it, must be dangerous to them if misfortune or blunder should arouse discontent. Since the death of Maso degli Albizzi, his son Rinaldo, Niccolò da Uzzano, and Palla Strozzi stood at the head of the party.
The Albizzi, who, as we have said, derived their origin from Arezzo, were at first of the Ghibelline faction, and appeared in Florence about the middle of the thirteenth century. They soon obtained repute among the plebeian families. From 1282 ninety-eight of their family sat in the magistracy of the priors, and fourteen attained to the office of Venner or Gonfalonier. Piero son of Filippo, the first Gonfalonier, was he who in a short time raised the authority of his family above that of all others. He led an active life at a time when the republic claimed much of the time and pecuniary means of the principal citizens, but in return afforded them opportunities of satisfying their ambition, and attaining to a height of power which might become dangerous to the commonwealth. He had repeatedly been charged with embassies to princes and republics; had been present at coronations; concluded treaties, among them those with the plundering mercenary bands, and with Bernabò Visconti; had been sent with congratulatory messages, as in 1367, when Pope Urban V., summoned by all the Italian patriots, returned from Avignon to Rome, unfortunately only for a time. Jealousy of his rising authority induced the heads of the Ricci, a rival family to his own, and their friends, to propose the exclusion from office of all such as were suspected of Guelphism. This measure was directed principally against the Albizzi; but Piero, cleverer than his opponents, helped to carry it through, while they had counted on his opposition. He knew how to make use of them. In 1357, being chosen president of the tribunal entrusted with this political inquisition of the Parte Guelfa, it was he who, with his friends, began that proscription which united all power in the city and government in his hands and those of his adherents, but also created that unendurable condition of affairs against which the rebellion of 1378 broke out. In the following year Piero, banished at first from Florence, having returned to one of his estates, fell a victim to the summary justice executed by the aristocratic leaders of the mob. A false accusation brought him to the scaffold; at a time when no law was respected, he paid the penalty of having himself made the laws subservient to political ends.
The family retired into exile; their houses were plundered and burnt. One of the branches, in a quarrel with relations, had discarded the name and altered the coat of arms, and flourishes still under the name of the Alessandri. The reaction of the year 1381 brought the exiles back, and they were soon more powerful than ever. Maso (Tommaso), Piero’s nephew, had been first banished to Barletta, on the Apulian coast, and then made a ‘Grande,’ i.e. disqualified for holding communal offices. He now attained almost dictatorial power, and exercised it with political insight, and a consistency which essentially aided in raising the republic to that height of power and repute on which it remained thenceforward, and long after his own faction was destroyed, till the revolution in Italian affairs at the end of the fifteenth century. If he acted intolerantly in home affairs; if proscriptions did not cease, and the prosecution of the Alberti, who were concerned in the insurrection of 1378 and in the execution of Piero degli Albizzi, showed cruelty in the enactment which commanded their houses to be razed to the ground, their coats of arms to be destroyed, and their property confiscated; a law that punished alliances by marriage and commercial transactions with them, extended even to their posterity;[57] it is less the fault of the man than of the spirit which had prevailed in the republics for centuries, and which led even the most discerning to make the commonwealth ever subservient to party policy, and to look upon their own faction as the State. Embassies to Gian Galeazzo Visconti, to King Rupert of the Palatinate, Pope Gregory XII., &c., alternated for Maso with a continuous series of the most important offices. Even when he was out of office, nothing was done without him. When the republic manfully resisted the progress of Gian Galeazzo in Central Italy, enlarged and secured her own territory by the conquest of Pisa, actively contributed to ecclesiastical union, and brought the dangerous war with King Ladislaus to a successful end, it was all really due to Albizzi. He was a rich man; the street outside the oldest district of the town, still named after his family, was almost entirely occupied by their houses and those of the Pazzi; and in our time, the palace belonging to his descendants, as well as that of the Alessandri, the half-ruined tower, the walled-up loggia, the passage to the market of San Piero, with the portico of the demolished church built by a descendant of Maso, remind us of the brilliant days of the family, whose coat of arms is still to be seen on the buildings—two concentric golden circles on a black field, and above it on a silver field the cross of the German order granted to Maso. In the lower valley of the Arno, on the right bank of the river, where a low range of hills stretches between the Lake of Bientina, reaching to the foot of the mountains of Pisa, and the green level of the marshes of Fucecchio, lies the large Villa Montefalcone, which came into the possession of the family in the second half of the fourteenth century. It was formerly a castle (destroyed by Castruccio) with a splendid view over the valley, strewn with villages lying mostly on low hills, and the beautiful wooded heights of Monte Albano, behind which the fertile Pistojan plain joined the Florentine valley of the Arno, which, while more varied, rivalled it in fertility.
Maso degli Albizzi died in 1417, aged seventy-four. His eldest son, Rinaldo, was the heir to his position in the Senate. He was a boy eight years of age when his relations fell in the tumult of Ciompi, had grown up in the traditions of his house, and from the year 1399 was active in affairs of State. No citizen was employed so much as he in embassies and commissions of all kinds. We meet with him in great and small matters; for the statesmen of the free city as little thought of declining small matters, as the greatest artists thought it beneath their dignity