Soderini, a patriot, indignant at the slow enslavement of his country, joined them.  At first they strove to undermine the credit of the Medici with the Florentines by inducing Piero to call in the moneys placed at interest by his father in the hands of private citizens.  This act was unpopular; but it did not suffice to move a revolution.  To proceed by constitutional measures against the Medici was judged impolitic.  Therefore the conspirators decided to take, if possible, Piero’s life.  The plot failed, chiefly owing to the coolness and the cunning of the young Lorenzo, Piero’s eldest son.  Public sympathy was strongly excited against the aggressors.  Neroni, Acciaiuoli, and Soderini were exiled.  Pitti was allowed to stay, dishonoured, powerless, and penniless, in Florence.  Meanwhile, the failure of their foes had only served to strengthen the position of the Medici.  The ladder had saved them the trouble of kicking it down.

The congratulations addressed on this occasion to Piero and Lorenzo by the ruling powers of Italy show that the Medici were already regarded as princes outside Florence.  Lorenzo and Giuliano, the two sons of Piero, travelled abroad to the Courts of Milan and Ferrara with the style and state of more than simple citizens.  At home they occupied the first place on all occasions of public ceremony, receiving royal visitors on terms of equality, and performing the hospitalities of the republic like men who had been born to represent its dignities.  Lorenzo’s marriage to Clarice Orsini, of the noble Roman house, was another sign that the Medici were advancing on the way toward despotism.  Cosimo had avoided foreign alliances for his children.  His descendants now judged themselves firmly planted enough to risk the odium of a princely match for the sake of the support outside the city they might win.

XII

Piero de’ Medici died in December 1469.  His son Lorenzo was then barely twenty-two years of age.  The chiefs of the Medicean party, all-powerful in the State, held a council, in which they resolved to place him in the same position as his father and grandfather.  This resolve seems to have been formed after mature deliberation, on the ground that the existing conditions of Italian politics rendered it impossible to conduct the government without a presidential head.  Florence, though still a democracy, required a permanent chief to treat on an equality with the princes of the leading cities.  Here we may note the prudence of Cosimo’s foreign policy.  When he helped to establish despots in Milan and Bologna he was rendering the presidency of his own family in Florence necessary.

Lorenzo, having received this invitation, called attention to his youth and inexperience.  Yet he did not refuse it; and, after a graceful display of diffidence, he accepted the charge, entering thus upon that famous political career, in the course of which he not only established and maintained a balance of power in Italy, with Florence for the central city, but also contrived to remodel the government of the republic in the interest of his own family and to strengthen the Medici by relations with the Papal See.