Lorenzo de' Medici
Lorenzo de' Medici governed Florence for twenty-three years without holding an office, survived a murder in the cathedral that killed his brother, kept the peace of Italy by letters and bribes, ruined the family bank, and paid for enough of the Renaissance to be called the Magnificent. He was born in 1449, the grandson of Cosimo, who had run the republic from behind its constitution since 1434, and was raised for it: tutored by the humanists, sent on embassies at seventeen, married in 1469 to a Roman Orsini for the alliance. His father Piero died that year and the leading citizens asked him, at twenty, to take the same care of the city his father and grandfather had, which he did through a council he packed, the electoral purses he controlled, and the money he lent. In April 1478 the Pazzi, a rival bank with the pope behind them, attacked the brothers at Mass in the Duomo; Giuliano was stabbed nineteen times and Lorenzo fought his way into the sacristy. The city hanged the conspirators from the windows of the Palazzo Vecchio, including an archbishop in his vestments, and Sixtus IV excommunicated Florence and sent Naples against it. In December 1479 Lorenzo sailed alone to Naples, put himself in the hands of King Ferrante for three months, and came back with a peace, which made him the arbiter of the Italian balance for the rest of his life. He was the manager of the league of Lodi after that, the man the other states wrote to. The bank, which he neglected, lost its branches at Bruges, London and Lyon and he covered the losses from public funds. He wrote carnival songs and sonnets in Tuscan that are still read, kept Poliziano and Pico and Ficino at his table, and put the boy Michelangelo in his household. He died at the villa of Careggi in April 1492 at forty-three, of the gout that killed the family, with Savonarola at his bedside or not, according to which account one reads. His son Piero lost the city in two years.
- Lived: 1449 CE – 1492 CE
- Nationality: Florentine
- Roles: statesman, banker, poet, patron
