Piero Soderini
Piero Soderini was the only Florentine ever elected head of the republic for life, gonfalonier of justice from 1502 until the Medici came back with a Spanish army in 1512, and his ten years were the ten in which Machiavelli was his secretary and organised his militia, Leonardo and Michelangelo were commissioned to paint the two walls of the council hall, Michelangelo's David was set up outside the palace, and Pisa, which had been in revolt since 1494, was starved back into obedience. He came from a family that had served the Medici and had been a friend of Piero de' Medici, and he was chosen precisely because he was a man of the middle, honest, cautious, without a faction and, as his enemies said, without much else. The republic that had thrown out the Medici and burned Savonarola had been governed by two-monthly signorie that could decide nothing, and in 1502, with Cesare Borgia on the border and the French protecting Florence for cash, the Great Council amended the constitution to give the office a permanent holder. He kept the French alliance, which was the city's only defence, paid the subsidies Louis XII demanded, and he let Machiavelli raise a militia of peasant infantry from the Florentine countryside in 1506 so that the city would not depend on mercenaries. That militia took Pisa in 1509. The great families, the Salviati, Strozzi and Ridolfi, thought the office had been given to a nobody and wanted the Medici back, and Soderini would not use the means to stop them that a harder man would have. When the Holy League turned on France in 1512 the Spanish viceroy marched on Florence to restore the Medici, sacked Prato on 29 August, and the militia ran. Soderini was arrested by a group of young aristocrats in the palace on the 31st, allowed to leave, and went into exile at Ragusa; Machiavelli, who lost his job with him, wrote an epigram sending him to limbo with the other babies. His brother the cardinal got him to Rome under Leo X, where he lived out his life and died in 1522. Guicciardini said he had ruined the republic by being unwilling to do wrong.
- Lived: 1450 CE – 1522 CE
- Nationality: Florentine
- Roles: statesman, head of state
