drop when he had attained his end. Cosimo had more than anyone the conquest of Lucca at heart, for, unlike the Albizzi, who had enlarged the territory of the Republic by Pisa, he had nothing to show but trifling annexations by purchase, such as the Borgo San Sepolcro, in the valley of the Tiber, and he complained of the ingratitude of a man to whose grandeur he had so much contributed, though he still kept up a close connection with him.
The meeting with Federigo d’Aragona was afterwards of great use to Lorenzo; he met him again when he undertook a journey which led him to Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, and Milan. A letter addressed to him during this excursion is a proof of the interest which the gifted youth had long excited, even if we take into account the dependent position in which the writer stood towards the family. This was Luigi Pulci. The name of the author of the most celebrated heroic poem of the fifteenth century, which will be mentioned in the consideration of the literary movement, is inseparable from that of his constant patron and friend. Luigi Pulci belonged to a family of Provençal origin, which was ranked among the oldest in Florence, but did not rise, because when the popular element prevailed it was characterised as noble, and excluded from all share in public offices. A street was once named after the residence of the Pulci, which was pulled down in the sixteenth century when the Uffizi was built. Jacopo Pulci had by Brigida de’ Bardi three sons, of whom Luigi was the second: all three were poets, and had better success in poetry than in pecuniary affairs. Luigi was born on August 15, 1432, in Florence. He was still unmarried at the time now under consideration, and one of the confidants of the Medici, who employed him in various commissions. Piero’s wife was especially well-disposed towards him, and we shall find him later as her escort on a journey. ‘You have left us,’ he writes to Lorenzo, April 27, 1465, ‘so disconsolate at your departure that I do not know how to hold the pen to write this letter to you. Through Braccio, I am informed of your journey, and assume that you are now in Venice; and in order to begin my correspondence well, I inform you that I am lonely, forsaken, and sad without you. On the other hand, I rejoice in your journey, which seems to me a piece of good fortune for many reasons. You will see many remarkable things, which will delight your mind, superior, I consider, to all, with one only exception. What promotes your interests can only be a pleasure to me.’[119]
Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, Guglielmo de’ Pazzi, was his companion on this journey, which was connected with the marriage of Francesco Sforza’s daughter, who soon afterwards came through Tuscany on her wedding tour.
Piero de’ Medici wrote repeatedly to his son during this journey,[120] showing the utmost solicitude for his welfare, as well as that he should make a good figure among these princes and noble ladies. He sent him plate for festivals which the young man might be called upon to give. ‘Do not care for expense,’ he says; ‘think only of doing honour to your family. Think of making yourself alive, and of showing that you are a man and not a boy, and that henceforward you are capable of managing greater things. This journey is to you the touchstone of your future career.’ More than once Piero expressed a wish that Lorenzo and his companion should return before the arrival of the Milanese princes. ‘It seems necessary to me that you should leave Milan before the bridal train; for the Princess is to inhabit our house, and if you and Guglielmo were absent, I should be like a man without hands.’ On the afternoon of June 22, Donna Ippolita entered Florence, and was lodged in the Medicean house. Beside Don Federigo, she was accompanied by her two brothers, Filippo and Sforza Maria; suite and escort numbered 1000 horses; and all were maintained at the public cost during the passage through Florentine territory, while the Duchess herself enjoyed the princely hospitality of the most distinguished family in the city.[121]
At the beginning of March of the following year, Lorenzo went to Rome. Pope Pius II., in the midst of his preparations for the crusade, and in sight of the sea which was to bear his fleet and his allies to the Eastern coasts, had died at Ancona in the middle of August, 1464, a fortnight after Cosimo, and had been succeeded by the Venetian Pietro Barbo, under the name of Paul II. Pius’s death had put an end for the time to the crusade which he had been about to undertake with insufficient power. But the thought of it was kept alive, particularly in the Pontificate; and the progress of the Turks, who in Paul’s reign wrested the fortress of Negroponte from the Venetians, was so alarming that the preservation of peace in Italy, by which alone means of resistance could be hoped for, was most important for the Popes as well as the other rulers. In this respect Paul II. laboured in the most praiseworthy manner, at least during the first years of his reign, after he had disposed of the restless little dynasties in the neighbourhood of Rome.
Lorenzo was sent, ostensibly on business connected with some alum-works and the bank, directed by his maternal uncle, Giovanni Tornabuoni, to Rome, where he was honourably received by the Pope, the court, and numerous friends of the family. But Piero had doubtless the intention of making him personally acquainted with the customs and life of a city which was of the utmost importance for Florence and the Medicean family, and where Cosimo had always striven to preserve an influence. He had scarcely arrived there when an event happened which attracted the attention of all Italy, and the Medici in particular. On March 8, 1466, Francesco Sforza died, after a long illness, at the age of sixty-six. He had attained by craft and violence the throne which he maintained bravely, and developed capacities of government hitherto unknown at Milan.
The last and most successful of the great condottieri of Italy, he laid down arms in order to exercise the arts of peace for the last twelve years of his life. In later times Machiavelli, who witnessed the swift and sad change in Lombardy under one of the sons and the grandsons of the first Sforza, said, in his reflections on Titus Livius, that nothing, however great and important it might be, could give Milan or Naples their freedom, because all their limbs were decayed; the reproach of having made them so belongs far less to Francesco than to the Visconti, for his government healed many wounds, opened many resources, and restored peace to the land, to which it had long been unknown. As at the Duke’s death his eldest son, Galeazzo Maria, was absent in France, where he had been sent with a body of troops to assist King Louis XI. in the civil war which had broken out soon after his accession to the throne, the widowed Duchess Bianca Maria seized the reins of government with a firm hand, assured herself of the consent of the most eminent men of the State, and prepared a festal reception and peaceful accession to power for her son, who entered Milan on the 20th of the same month.
It was necessary to induce the Italian princes to recognise Sforza, in opposition to certain other claims, especially those of the house of Savoy, and Piero de’ Medici was very active in this matter. On March 15 he wrote to Lorenzo[122] in Rome, who was soon able to give reassuring news with regard to the Pope’s inclinations. He had himself applied to the latter immediately after receiving the news. Venice, however little affection she might feel for Sforza, was too much threatened in the Levant not to wish for peace in Italy; King Ferrante was related to the Milanese house. Thus it was not difficult to obtain the recognition of Galeazzo Maria everywhere, and although the Emperor Frederick III., who came again to Italy two years later, ignored the new duke, as well as his father, this was of small importance, from the political weakness of the temporal head of Christendom. That the French King, to whom the Republic wrote on April 3 to express sorrow at the loss of Francesco Sforza, ‘so great a prince and friend, so rare a master of peace and war, so high an honour to the Italian name,’ would share the same opinion, was to be foreseen, although his cousin, Duke Charles of Orleans, never resigned the hereditary claims of his mother, Valentina Visconti, on Milan. In fact, Louis answered on the 18th of the same month from Orleans, promising to interfere himself if it should be necessary.[123] Piero’s letters to his son, eighteen years old, showed sufficiently how he trusted to his insight and wisdom. Soon events were to happen at home which would test these qualities of the youth severely.
The last years of Cosimo’s life had shown how hard it was for him to maintain the supremacy over his party in Florence. The people had grown too rich and powerful. Cosimo had himself much contributed to it by his fear of putting himself forward; his prudent reserve had gone too far. He had long foreseen that his son would not be in a position to master and guide the contending elements, but precisely the measures he took to meet the danger brought it nearer. Those in whom he trusted, from the conviction that as they had grown rich with him, and mostly through him, they would hold to his family, did not respond to this confidence. However different their motives might be, in a city where so many special