The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici by Christopher Hibbert

members supporting the proposal that Cosimo should be beheaded, others arguing that banishment would be punishment enough, one or two suggesting that the prisoner ought to be released. It was clear that many members of the
Balìa
were reluctant to go to the extremes advocated by the Albizzi not only for fear of the violent disapproval of those thousands of Florentines who, though for the moment intimidated, still looked to the Medici as their champions, but also because his arrest had already called forth strong protests from abroad. The Marquis of Ferrara, a customer of the Medici bank, had intervened on Cosimo’s behalf. The Venetian Republic, also financially indebted to him, had immediately dispatched three ambassadors to Florence who did allin their power to secure his release; and if, after a heated talk with Rinaldo, they failed to do so, their arrival in Florence, as Cosimo said himself, had ‘a great effect on those who were in favour of executing’ him. Rinaldo also had a visit from Cosimo’s old friend, Ambrogio Traversari, Vicar-General of the Camaldolite Order, and supposedly the representative of an even more influential customer of the Medici bank, Eugenius IV, the austere son of a Venetian merchant, who had succeeded Martin V as Pope two years before. By this time Rinaldo had succeeded in bringing a charge of treason against Cosimo by having two of his supporters tortured on the rack. One of these, Niccolò Tinucci, a celebrated notary and occasional poet, had been forced by the city rackmaster to confess that Cosimo had intended to enlist foreign help in bringing about a revolution in the city. Neither Traversari nor the Venetian ambassadors believed in this confession; nor did most of the citizens of Florence. Rinaldo, indeed, was gradually being forced to conclude that he would have to be content with a sentence of banishment rather than the death penalty which his henchman Francesco Filelfo was so insistently demanding.
    In his cell in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria, Cosimo had been allowed to see a few selected visitors, in addition to Ambrogio Traversari. He had also been permitted to have his meals brought over from the Palazzo Bardi as he was afraid of being poisoned. But the greatest care was taken to ensure that he neither received nor gave any messages, and that no communications passed between him and his bank: an official watched over the cooking, carrying and serving of his food, while a guard remained within earshot when he was talking to his visitors. But the guard, Federigo Malavolti, was sympa-pathetic: messages
did
pass out of the cell, and bribes
were
offered and accepted. The
Gonfaloniere
himself, the impecunious Bernardo Gua-dagni, readily pocketed a thousand florins as soon as they were offered to him – he was a feeble fellow, Cosimo afterwards commented derisively, as he could have had ten thousand or more if he had asked for them. Anyway, in return for the relatively modest bribe, Gua-dagni announced that he had suddenly been taken so ill that he could no longer participate in the council’s deliberations; he delegated hisvote to another
Priore
, Mariotto Baldovinetti, who, equally impecunious, had also received a bribe from the Medici coffers.
    As well as having to contend with former supporters who had now been suborned, with powerful foreign customers of the Medici bank, with faithful friends of the Medici family who were growing more outspoken every day, and with the gradual desertion of such influential moderates as Palla Strozzi, the Albizzi had also to face the possibility of an armed uprising. For as soon as he heard of the arrest, Cosimo’s brother, Lorenzo, and various other members of the family had rushed out to the Mugello to raise troops to release him. At the same time preparations had been made to assemble a small army of Medici adherents at Cafaggiolo; and the
condottiere
, Niccolò da Tolen-tino, believed to have received money through Cosimo’s