Lettere, 1486-1487 (review)

The flow of Lorenzo de' Medici's letters from the printing press has regained momentum. Following hot on the heels of volumes 8–9, edited by Humphrey Butters, we now welcome the first of two volumes edited by Melissa Bullard, consisting of ninety-seven letters written at a crucial turning-point in Lorenzo's life in 1486–87. The betrothal of one of his daughters to Pope Innocent VIII's son in 1487, followed two years later by his son Giovanni's youthful elevation to the cardinalate, transformed Lorenzo's (and Florence's) position in Italy. From being a relatively junior player in the political game, Lorenzo now enjoyed new importance as a mediator between its major powers, not only between the two "mortal enemies," the pope and the King of Naples, but also between them and the wild card in Italy, Lodovico il Moro, illegitimate Duke of Milan.

The fascination of the present volume of his Letters lies in the way it charts this transformation, which takes place almost before our eyes in the diplomatic letters exchanged between Lorenzo and complicit Florentine ambassadors abroad. We can already see the impact of his new familial relationship with the pope on diplomatic realignments within Italy and on Florence's new military confidence (in regaining Sarzana and Serezzana). For its crowning success, a Medici cardinalate, we must await future volumes. For now, Giovanni has to be content with grants of two major benefices from the pope while Lorenzo dissembles his full ambition for his son: "As for messer Giovanni," he wrote to the Florentine ambassador in Rome in July 1487, "it doesn't seem the time to talk of it; better to keep the pope well-disposed and wait for the right moment — indeed, his age makes it quite unsuitable to talk about it now" (418). Nevertheless both men already knew what the endgame was; and so, to avoid "losing a great chance" (the informative footnote tells us), the ambassador couldn't forbear bringing up Giovanni's name in his discussions with Innocent, only to be told that at twelve, Giovanni was too young but might be considered in a year or two, as indeed he was (418).

We are lucky to have Melissa Bullard as our guide through the thickets of diplomacy. She has already published a volume of wide-ranging studies on Lorenzo (Lorenzo de' Medici: Image and Anxiety, Politics and Finance, 1994), where her essay on "The Language of Diplomacy" prepares us for the guile (arte), deception (inganno), and the double bluff that is played out in the letters and reports transcribed here. Her expertise in this material and sensitivity to its nuances enables her to keep the narrative running without oversimplifying the intricate diplomacy of the period, which she describes through the full ambassadorial reports transcribed in footnotes to the letters — supplying us, in effect, with a new diplomatic history of these years (as earlier editors have done before her).

As Bullard says in her essay, these reports are "notoriously comprehensive and lengthy" (95) and indispensable though they are to the edition and to understanding Lorenzo — his rages and anger, as well as his politics — they are not an easy read in the dense, small-print footnotes that are suspended from the text like billowing sheets from a thin washing-line (eg. 17–27). Could more of them be included in the larger-print commentary that prefaces the letters, making both them and the letters themselves easier to read as consecutive narratives? A more hidden danger of this comprehensivity is that we may forget that we are still viewing events primarily through the lens of Lorenzo's letters. The two recurrent themes in this volume — Lorenzo's strategies in Rome and his determined recovery for Florence of its lost northwest frontier posts — already seem to substantiate Guicciardini's later portrait of Lorenzo the power broker...