Cosimo de' Medici
Cosimo de' Medici was a banker whom the Florentine republic exiled in 1433 and recalled in 1434, and for the thirty years after that he governed the city without ever holding an office for more than the two months the constitution allowed anyone. He was born in 1389, the son of Giovanni di Bicci, who had built the bank and the family's connection to the papacy, and he ran it as a network of branches from London to Rome that lent to popes, kings and the Florentine treasury, and that made him, by the 1430s, the richest man in Italy. The Albizzi faction that governed had him arrested that September on a charge of seeking to rise above a citizen, and could not agree to kill him; he went to Venice, the bank went with him, and a year later a new signoria called him home and exiled his enemies instead. What he built then was a way of governing a republic without changing its laws. The councils that chose the office-holders were packed by emergency commissions renewed for decades, the tax assessments punished the wrong families, and the men in the palace were his friends. Abroad he broke with Venice and backed the condottiere Francesco Sforza's seizure of Milan in 1450, and the two of them negotiated the Peace of Lodi in 1454 that gave Italy forty years of balance. He paid for a great deal of what is now called the Florentine Renaissance: Brunelleschi's San Lorenzo, Michelozzo's palace on the Via Larga and the convent of San Marco, Donatello's bronze David in his courtyard, the first public library in Europe, and the young Marsilio Ficino, whom he set to translating Plato. He dressed plainly, quoted the Gospel, and told the man who wanted to know how to keep the state that two yards of rose-coloured cloth made a citizen. He died at Careggi in August 1464, and the city inscribed Pater Patriae on his tomb, the title Rome had given Cicero. His grandson Lorenzo inherited the method.
- Lived: 1389 CE – 1464 CE
- Nationality: Florentine
- Roles: statesman, banker, patron
