Kampf um Florenz–Die Medici im Exil (1494–1512) (review)

Many years ago, there was a delightful friend, all energy and projects, who would visit my roommates and me in our college dormitory. She carried a very heavy bookbag, which, after climbing four flights of stairs, she would drop on the floor with a thud. In the bag there figured most prominently a thick biology text that she was always promising to read. One day, we played a prank on her and placed a brick at the bottom of her bookbag. Imagine her surprise one week later when we emptied the bag and revealed the brick. When Götz-Rüdiger Tewes’s new book—nearly 1200 pages in German—arrived, this reviewer’s first thought was that a similar if not identical trick was being played on him by the editors of The Catholic Historical Review. All’s well that ends well. The friend did read her biology book, and this admirable book by Tewes was a pleasure to read.

Florence in the period from 1494 to 1512, when the Medici family was in exile and a republican regime known as the governo popolare was in control, has long been the subject of intense scrutiny, especially by scholars interested in Savonarola and Machiavelli. Tewes tells the story of this period again, but this time from the point of view of the exiled Medici and their partisans in Florence, whose story is reconstructed in exacting detail on the basis of a great deal of new evidence that Tewes has assembled and analyzed with great care. He situates his work within the field of historical network study, but his is an unusual case. Other Florentine historians have looked at the network as a tool of social advancement, as a means of preserving class dominance, as a way of controlling territory, as an instrument for seizing political power, or as a way extending influence abroad. The emphasis has been on how growing networks advanced the interests of those who belonged to them. Tewes instead studies a network that shrunk and adapted defensively during a prolonged crisis. This is not an expansive Facebook-style story, but it is no less interesting.

The broad network that was established by Cosimo de’ Medici in the 1420s and 1430s did not disappear after the political disaster of 1494, but in great part it became dormant. Most former partisans participated in the restored republic, whereas only a few key Florentine players remained secretly active in the Medici network, whose principals (Piero, Cardinal Giovanni, and Giuliano) continued to move freely about the Italian pensinsula. Crucial to the survival of the principals as political actors was the preservation of their wealth. Notwithstanding repeated “clawback” efforts by the Florentine government, the Medici continued to command resources that were substantial enough to influence the policy of successive popes and the king of France.

To the final chapters of Raymond de Roover’s classic study, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank (Cambridge, MA, 1963), Tewes offers a powerful corrective. De Roover described Lorenzo the Magnificent, who was in charge from 1469 to 1492, as financially inept, bringing about the collapse of the Medici bank. On the contrary, Tewes shows how during the War of the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478–80, when there was good likelihood that Florence would lose the war and the Medici would be forced out of Florence, a financially astute Lorenzo transferred most of the holdings of the Medici bank to another entity, the Bartolini family bank. Lorenzo used the Bartolini bank as a front for Medici business and a vehicle for preserving his wealth in the event of political catastrophe. He also enriched it by using it as a conduit for state funds. The result was a durable and flourishing enterprise in service to the Medici but directed by the Bartolini, one of whom happened to be director of the Florentine Mint.

The extent of Medici participation in...