in the popular favour as Piero. After he had administered the office of Gonfaloniere in the beginning of 1469, the dignity of knighthood was accorded to him by a public vote, and bestowed on him by Messer Tommaso Soderini. He went twice as ambassador to the Emperor Frederick III. After his tragical end, his widow, Maddalena Serristori, retired into the cloister of the Franciscan nuns of Monticelli, before the Porta Romana. Here also the veil was taken by Jacopo’s natural daughter Caterina, whose tutor had been a man who played a sad part in the tragedy of 1478. Caterina, after her death in 1490, was venerated as a saint. Of Antonio, a third son of Andrea, who died in 1459, there is not much to say; the three sons whom Cosa degli Alessandri bore him, Guglielmo, who married Bianca de’ Medici, Giovanni, whose wife was Beatrice Borromeo, and Francesco, will often be mentioned again.
In the year 1466, Bianca’s younger sister, Nannina, married Bernardo Rucellai. His family,[114] which has been supposed to come from Germany, was called Alamanno. They are first met with in the second half of the thirteenth century as members of the woollen guild, having risen to their position by industrial activity, as the name itself intimates; for Rucellai is nothing but a corruption of Oricellari, and at the present day one of the streets of a new part of Florence is called from the Latin name of the turnsole Oricella, or Roccella Tinctoria. The Florentine tradesman discovered in the East that the dye of this plant, treated with acids, gives a beautiful violet. The dyeing-works of Alamanno brought him and his descendants rich gain. His well-earned wealth was speedily followed by civic honours, and after 1302 a share in the highest offices of state. The fourteenth century witnessed the rise and fall of several of the Rucellai, till they attained the highest respect and great wealth at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Giovanni Rucellai, the grandson of a man who had played some part in the times of the Duke of Athens, was born in 1403. His mother, Caterina Pandolfini, a widow after three years of wedlock, brought the boy to Palla Strozzi, who assigned him a post in his bank, and grew so fond of him that he gave him his daughter Jacopa in marriage when he had attained the age of twenty-four. The events which expelled Palla and his sons did not leave his son-in-law unmolested. Though Giovanni Rucellai was not banished, he was excluded from all offices, and remained out of the administration up to the last days of Cosimo, when the latter deemed it advisable to procure adherents in the family he had until then oppressed. This did not, however, prevent him from increasing his wealth and making use of it for the general good, in which he was aided by the genius of Leon Battista Alberti. He completed the marble façade of Sta. Maria Novella, on which his name may still be read. He erected a chapel near the church of San Pancrazio, with an exact imitation in marble of the Saviour’s tomb, as measured and copied by his orders in Jerusalem. This is still to be seen, though the church has long been disused for Divine worship. His family palace, already mentioned, in the Via della Vigna Nuova, with the Loggia opposite, now unfortunately walled up, is the most graceful example of the transition style from the ancient severity of the immense freestone façade to the antiquated ornaments of the Renaissance. He and his son will be mentioned later. The latter was born in 1448, a few months before Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose grandfather, by becoming his sponsor, gave public expression to the reconciliation of the two families. Near relationship, however, could not make him feel attached to the family whose blood flowed in the veins of his children.
Thus was Piero de’ Medici’s family composed. Other connections of equal importance belonged to them. Foremost of all were the two Soderini, Niccolò and Tommaso.[115] Their ancestors are said to have been Counts of Gangalandi, and heads of the Ghibelline party, but they are found as a Florentine plebeian family in the second half of the twelfth century. They attained importance only 200 years later. Tommaso Soderini, like so many of his countrymen, spent a great part of his life in business matters at Papal Avignon, and returned in 1370 to his home, where, as a member of the magistracy of the Guelph party, he took so violent a part in the proscriptions, that in the insurrection of 1378 he was one of the first to have his house plundered and burnt. He went into exile to Tarascon, on the Rhône, but returning home after the victory of the oligarchy, he again attained to office and influence. In 1395, seven years before his death, he was Gonfaloniere. His two sons, Francesco and Lorenzo, went separate ways. Francesco, the son of Elisabetta Altoviti whom Tommaso had married after his return to Avignon, passed through the usual career of distinguished Florentines who attained to civic offices and embassies as soon as they reached the legal age. One of his missions took him to Mantua to celebrate the marriage of Ludovico Gonzaga with Barbara of Hohenzollern, the granddaughter of Frederick I., elector of Brandenburg. Like his father, he belonged to the party of the Albizzi, and had one of the daughters of Palla Strozzi as his wife. When Cosimo de’ Medici went into exile he was one of the magistracy of eight that escorted him to the frontiers. He was not expelled when the Medici gained the victory, but his influence was at an end, and he only became Podestà in towns of Umbria and Romagna, and for a time he lay in prison on suspicion of having shared in the movements of his partisans. Niccolò da Uzzano destined him to be the rector of his university, and Donatello has given us his portrait in one of the statues which are to be seen on the front of the bell-tower of Sta. Maria.[116] It is the figure standing next to the church called that of St. John the Baptist, and in its natural free bearing reminds one of the famous St. George of Or San Michele.
Lorenzo, Tommaso’s other son, passed through a stormy career. Born at Avignon, of a woman of Auvergne, he endeavoured to cover his want of legitimacy by the diplomas of a Count Palatine and of Gian Galeazzo Visconti. After having been enrolled by King Charles V. of France in an order of knighthood, and married in Florence to Ghilla Cambi, he conceived the unfortunate idea, after his father’s death, of proving the legality of his birth and his right to more wealth by means of forged documents. The severity, of the laws sentenced him to death, which he suffered in 1405. His two sons, Niccolò and Tommaso, born, the former in 1401, the latter in 1403, became eager partisans of Cosimo de’ Medici on the sole ground of hatred of their uncle, to whom they attributed a participation in the tragical end of their father, and who took the other side. Niccolò received the dignity of Gonfaloniere in 1451, Tommaso in 1449 and 1454. The latter, by far the most distinguished, filled various offices in the provincial towns at an early age; when thirty-five he sat in the magistracy of the Priori. By his marriage with Dianora Tornabuoni, Lucrezia’s sister, he was riveted to the Medicean interests, which no one supported with greater zeal and success, or with more statesmanlike ability. To no one did Piero or Lorenzo owe so much as to this man. We have already mentioned other families with whom the Medici were connected. Further mention will be made of them in the course of this history.
CHAPTER II.
LORENZO’S YOUTH. CONSPIRACY OF DIOTISALVI NERONI AND HIS COMPANIONS.
Lorenzo de’ Medici grew up. He was seventeen years old when his father sent him to Pisa to welcome Don Federigo of Aragon, King Ferrante’s younger son, who set out from Naples, March 18, 1465, and having received the golden rose at Rome, was on his way to Milan with the most brilliant suite, no less than six hundred horse, to escort to Naples Francesco Sforza’s intellectual and beautiful daughter Ippolita Maria, the bride of his elder brother, Alfonso, Duke of Calabria.[117] On April 17, Don Federigo entered Florence, accompanied by the Prince of Salerno, the Duke of Amalfi, the Bishop of Gaeta, and many other lords, and was received by the Signoria on the Ringhiera of the palace, after which he rode to Sta. Maria Novella, where the Papal lodgings were prepared for him, and where, entertained at the public cost, he stayed five days amid mutual expressions of politeness. The Prince, then only thirteen years old, wore mourning, with all his suite, in consequence of the death of the Queen his mother, which had happened shortly before.[118]
Florence had had much cause to complain of the Aragonese, even in later years, and had long remained true to her sympathies with Anjou; but Cosimo de’ Medici was too diplomatic not to see that the house of Spain had gained a firmer footing than that of France in southern Italy, and that peace was better secured by an alliance with the former, if the interests of the State made it possible. Cosimo always held fast to Francesco Sforza, even when he believed that he had cause of complaint against him; for Sforza, who had once encouraged his Florentine friend in the belief that after he was Duke of Milan he would aid him with his