They came for Giuliano de’ Medici under the guise of friendship. It was imperative that he attend the mass: his absence threatened a design in which his death occupied a strictly calculated place. In the account Machiavelli devoted to the conspiracy, Francesco de’ Pazzi banters with him, walks beside him, and goes so far as to press him in his arms to ascertain, beneath his garments, the possible presence of a cuirass. An affectionate embrace thus served as the final verification of a murder. Shortly thereafter, on 26 April 1478, Giuliano was struck down in the cathedral of Florence; his brother Lorenzo, though likewise assailed, remained alive. That single disparity was to decide the destiny of an entire city.
Two Deaths Had Been Foreseen
The Pazzi were not obscure men seeking in a sudden stroke of violence the fortune they lacked. Their house commanded wealth, credit, and an ancient name. What they could ill endure was to see the Medici dispense public honours and sway the councils of a republic that still preserved its magistrates. Even their alliance by marriage had mollified nothing: Bianca de’ Medici had wed Guglielmo de’ Pazzi. It had been hoped to unite two dynasties; it had merely brought two jealous sensibilities into closer friction.
Machiavelli recounts the exclusions, the slights, and an inheritance dispute in which the Pazzi perceived the hand of their rivals. He demonstrates as well how intimately this Florentine feud became entangled with foreign interests. In Rome, Francesco de’ Pazzi consorted with Girolamo Riario; the Archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, nursed his own grievances against the Medici. The plot took shape within this web of private reckonings and statecraft. It did not suffice to avenge oneself upon a single man. To overthrow the ascendancy of the family, both brothers had to be destroyed.
The undertaking therefore required several coordinated operations: to slay Lorenzo and Giuliano, to seize the Palazzo della Signoria, to secure the submission of the magistrates or compel it by force, and then to persuade Florence that her ancient liberty had been restored. The conspirators counted upon external aid. The complicity of Pope Sixtus IV in the design to depose the Medici does not permit one to convert every intention ascribed to him into an equally proven instruction to murder. Yet, for those embarked upon the plot, the prospect of such exalted patronage rendered the venture far less desperate.
They first sought an occasion where the brothers would be assembled together. A banquet offered the advantage of prearranged seating. Yet Giuliano failed to attend a first gathering; another scheme miscarried. As the circle of the initiated widened, delay became perilous. Every fresh confidant was at once a potential ally and a potential denunciation. The conspirators ultimately fixed upon Sunday service: the visit of the youthful Cardinal Raffaele Riario afforded them the pretext to approach the Medici amidst a dense congregation.
Scruples Came Too Late
Giovanni Battista da Montesecco, a mercenary captain solicited to strike Lorenzo down, refused to execute an assassination within a church. Machiavelli records this refusal without reducing its motives solely to piety: Montesecco’s prior relations with Lorenzo may well have stayed his hand. Be that as it may, other instruments had to be found. Two ecclesiastics, Antonio da Volterra and Stefano, accepted the office from which the soldier recoiled. Such an appointment might well grieve a moralist; it by no means guaranteed the competence of the substitutes.
The signal was to be bound to the solemn progress of the mass. At the selfsame moment, Salviati was to reach the Palazzo. The strength of the design lay in its simultaneity; its weakness was identical. It required that each band succeed without yet knowing the outcome of the others. Giuliano, escorted to the church by those who were about to kill him, stepped into an apparatus of whose existence he knew nothing. Around him, the faithful followed the liturgy; the conspirators waited upon a designated second.
Bernardo Bandini dealt the first blow to Giuliano. Francesco de’ Pazzi then threw himself upon the youth with such ferocity that he wounded himself in the leg. Lorenzo was struck in the neck, yet managed to defend himself and gain the sanctuary of the sacristy alongside his companions. Francesco Nori likewise perished in the onslaught. A bolted door soon stood between the assassins and the surviving brother; that slender material barrier now weighed heavier than all the arrangements contrived between Rome and Florence.
Within the cathedral, none possessed a comprehensive view of the catastrophe. The cardinal, who had served as the pretext for the assembly, remained beside the altar, where the clergy shielded him. Men fled; others sought their kin or scrambled for shelter. The divine office had just been sundered by a political murder; yet, for the terrified multitude, there was first and foremost blood spilled in a sanctuary where none had expected to fight for his life.
The Doors of the Palazzo
Meanwhile, Salviati sought audience with the Gonfaloniere, Cesare Petrucci, under the pretext of delivering a papal communication. He had brought an armed retinue, including Perugian exiles to whom a facilitated return had been promised. A portion of his troop remained below; another mounted to the upper chambers. In Machiavelli’s narrative, several found themselves locked within the chancery, whose door could not be reopened without a key. The very citadel the conspirators meant to capture began by imprisoning their own force.
Petrucci took suspicion of the archbishop. He shouted for aid; the magistrates seized whatever weapons lay to hand. The enterprise degenerated into a melee through the halls and staircases. The men who held the entry could no longer secure mastery of the floors above. Instead of a government surrendered to the plotters, there were two camps within the same palace, followed by instantaneous retribution. Salviati and several of his confederates were hanged from the high windows. That day afforded them no leisure for an ordinary trial.
Francesco de’ Pazzi, prevented by his wound from mounting a horse, had retreated to his house. Jacopo made one last effort to raise Florence. He rode into the piazza with armed retainers, crying the names of the people and of liberty. The city did not answer as he had anticipated. Lorenzo lived; his partisans were mustering; threats issued from the Palazzo. The very watchwords intended to inaugurate a new commonwealth produced only a desperate, futile sortie.
Then began the flight. Jacopo fled Florence and was taken. Francesco, seized in his bed, was dragged to the Palazzo and hanged. The hunt consumed the confederates, but also an entire lineage whose very name became an indictment. Machiavelli himself underscores the fate of Renato de’ Pazzi, whom he depicts as having opposed the conspiracy, yet who was swept into the general condemnation. Vengeance had ceased to inquire what exact part each man had taken in the assault.
After the Blood, the Inquisitions
Not all perished in the initial fury. Montesecco was subjected to prolonged interrogation before facing the headsman’s axe. Guglielmo, Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, escaped death only to suffer banishment; other kin were consigned to the dungeons. Bandini had succeeded in fleeing. Judicial pursuits and examinations followed upon the hurried executions, without undoing what had made them possible: the state had survived in the person of Lorenzo, and his adversaries possessed no further means to withstand him.
Even Jacopo’s corpse found no rest. Machiavellian chronicles record his exhumation, the indignities visited upon the cadaver, and its final consignment to the Arno. The chastisement reached out to the dead, as though the extinction of the man were insufficient to efface his name. This fury did not restore Giuliano to his house. His obsequies were solemnised in a Florence where the grief of the one faction mingled with the outrages visited upon the other.
Nor did the conspiracy put an end to the Italian quarrels. War against Florence ensued; temporal arms and spiritual censures prolonged the strife. Lorenzo, whom they had sought to sweep from the stage in a matter of seconds, emerged from the ordeal indispensable to his adherents. His brother was lost, but his authority had gathered from the peril an unprecedented strength. The conspirators had imagined that after two deaths Florence would be theirs. They had obtained but one, and that half-measure of success had cost them everything.