Pazzi
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The Pazzi family were Tuscan nobles who had become bankers in Florence in the 14th century. They are now best known for the "Pazzi conspiracy" to assassinate Lorenzo de' Medici, which was realized April 26, 1478. Lesser rivals of the Medici, the Pazzi were caught up in a conspiracy to replace the Medici as de facto rulers of Tuscany with Girolamo Riario, a nephew of Francesco della Rovere, who was reigning as Pope Sixtus IV. Power politics, often ruthless in the Italian Renaissance, were the main motive. Andrea dei Pazzi was also the patron for Brunelleschi's chapter house for the Franciscan community at Florence's Santa Maria Novella church, often known as the Pazzi Chapel.
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The Conspiracy
The Pazzi family were not the instigators. The Salviati, Papal bankers in Florence, were at the center of the Florentine conspirators. Sixtus was an enemy of the Medici. He had purchased the lordship of Imola, a stronghold on the border between papal and Tuscan territory that Lorenzo wanted for Florence. The purchase was financed by the Pazzi bank, even though Francesco dei Pazzi had promised Lorenzo they would not aid the pope. As a reward, Sixtus granted the Pazzi a monopoly at the alum mines at Tolfa— alum being an essential mordant in dyeing in the textile trade that was central to the Florentine economy— and he assigned to the Pazzi bank lucrative rights to manage papal revenues. Sixtus appointed his nephew Girolamo Riario as the new governor of Imola, and Francesco Salviati as archbishop of Pisa, a city that was a former commercial rival but now subject to Florence. Lorenzo ordered Pisa to exclude Salviati from his see.
Salviati and Francesco de' Pazzi put together a plan to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici. Riario himself remained in Rome. The plan was widely known: the pope was reported to have said "I support it— as long as no one is killed." In 2004, an encrypted letter in the archives of the Ubaldini family was discovered by Marcello Simonetta, a historian at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, United States and decoded. It revealed that Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, a condottiere for the Papacy who was deeply embroiled in the conspiracy, committed himself to position 600 troops outside Florence, waiting for the moment.
On April 26, during High Mass at the Duomo, Giuliano de' Medici was stabbed by a gang that included a priest, and bled to death on the cathedral floor, while his brother Lorenzo escaped with a wound, locked safely in the sacristy by the humanist Poliziano. A coordinated attempt to capture the Gonfaloniere and Signoria was thwarted when the archbishop and the head of the Salviati clan were trapped in a room whose doors had a hidden latch. The coup d'etat failed. The enraged Florentines seized and killed the conspirators. Jacopo de' Pazzi was tossed from a window, finished off by the mob, and dragged naked through the streets and thrown into the Arno River. The Pazzi family were stripped of their possessions in Florence, every vestige of their name effaced. Salviati, though he was an archbishop, was hanged on the walls of the Palazzo della Signoria. Although Lorenzo appealed to the crowd not to exact summary justice, many of the conspirators, as well as many people accused of being conspirators, were also killed. Lorenzo did manage to save the nephew of Sixtus IV, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, who was almost certainly an innocent dupe of the plotters, as well as two relatives of plotters. The main conspirators were hunted down all over Italy, but a wider retribution of Lorenzo, including hundreds of killings, is a myth.
In the actual aftermath of the so-called "Pazzi" conspiracy, the Della Rovere Pope placed Florence under interdict, forbidding mass and communion, for the execution of the Salviati archbishop. Sixtus enlisted the traditional papal military arm, the King of Naples, Ferrante, to attack Florence. With no help coming from Florence's traditional allies in Bologna and Milan, only skillful personal diplomacy by Lorenzo himself saved the day. He sailed to Naples and put himself in the hands of Ferrante, who held him captive for three months before releasing him with gifts. Lorenzo's courage and his Machiavellian realpolitik showed Ferrante how the pope would turn against him if he were too successful in the north.
The Pazzi Chapel
On another level, perhaps the greater mark on history left by the Pazzi is the Pazzi Chapel built under the direction of Filippo Brunelleschi in a discreet cloister of the Franciscan preaching church, Santa Croce in Florence. After some early agreements, the chapel was begun in 1442. It is one of the incunabula of Renaissance architecture, severely restrained, made of the gray stone called pietra serena and white plaster, unrelieved by color. A hemispherical dome (completed after Brunelleschi's death following his plans) caps a cubical sacristy for the Franciscan church: within it the Pazzi family were permitted to bury their dead.
After the conspiracy, the Pazzi were rehabilitated and returned to Florence. A saint was to arise from among the family, the ecstatic Carmelite nun Saint Maria Magdalena de' Pazzi (1566-1607).
Pazzi in fiction
Two members of the Pazzi family are placed in Hell in Dante's Inferno, both in the circle of the traitors. However, the Comedy was written nearly 200 years before the Pazzi Conspiracy.
Rinaldo Pazzi is a modern-day Florentine police detective in the Hannibal movie of the Hannibal Lecter series. He is murdered by Lecter who disembowels him, and then hangs him from the balcony of the Palazzo della Signoria, just as his famous "ancestor" was.
A fictionalized version of the Pazzi conspiracy was the basis for the DC Comics Elseworlds story "Black Masterpiece", in Batman Annual #18, which features a Renaissance-era Batman and Leonardo da Vinci.
External links
- Niccolò Machiavelli, History of Florence (http://www.online-literature.com/machiavelli/florence_italy/52/): chapter 52: the Pazzi conspiracy, told by a great contemporary historian in brilliant detail. One of the classics of historical writing.
- Tim Parks' review of Lauro Martines, April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici (http://afr.com/review/2003/05/02/FFXPQGTM5FD.html): a sketch of the subtleties and contradictions in the background to the "Pazzi conspiracy"
- Italy's Medici Murder Plot Solved (http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20040223/medici_print.html): discusses a recently discovered piece of evidence showing the scale of the conspiracy
- Great Buildings on-line (http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Pazzi_Chapel.html): Pazzi Chapel
- Pazzi Chapel (http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/orion/eng/hst/renais/pazzi.html): Brief description, with clear and evocative photos