THE THREE SONS OF LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT---
AND THE RETURN OF THE MEDICI

PIETRO GIOVANNI GIULIANO II

(1471-1503). (1475-1521). (1478-1516).

Having consolidated his fortune by attention to agriculture, Lorenzo left his son Pietro in a very comfortable position, but the latter soon embarked upon a career of pleasure and took little interest in the affairs of State. At the same time he was rather despotic in his views, and attempted to govern independently of the Signoria.

The death of Lorenzo had placed Ludovico Sforza, uncle of the nominally reigning Duke of Milan, in a very precarious position; he accordingly invited King Charles VIII. of France to interfere in Italian affairs, and the latter, entering Lombardy with upwards of thirty thousand soldiers, advanced upon the Tuscan frontier. Pietro de' Medici, remembering the brilliant part played by his grandfather under similar circumstances, imagined that he could achieve a like success, and accordingly, without consulting the Signoria, set forth, a self-appointed ambassador, to the French camp. Charles received him with much courtesy, but asked for some guarantee of his good faith, whereupon the weak-minded Pietro actually Ceded to him the fortresses of Sarzana, Sarzanello, Pietra Santa, Leghorn, Librafatta, and Pisa.

Great was the indignation in Florence when this ignoble transaction became known. The Signoria made no attempt to disguise their displeasure, while the people assembled beneath the balconies of the Medici Palace uttering loud complaints and threats. An accredited embassy, headed by Savonarola, was at once dispatched to Charles's camp, but even the eloquence of the fiery monk could not avail to undo the mischief. On their return to Florence Piero Capponi induced the people, to rise in revolt against the Medician tyranny. Pietro took flight, going first to Bologna, where Bentivoglio accorded him a very cool welcome, and from thence to Venice, where, his reception being likewise far from friendly, he deemed it safer to withdraw for a time at least, from society and lead as retired a life as possible.

On the 17th of November, 1494, the King entered Florence and took up his residence in the Medician palace. Negotiations were now opened, but Charles found his haughty demands resisted with so much spirit and determination by Capponi and Savonarola that he, judged it more prudent to modify them. An agreement was finally reached by which Florence undertook to pay a fine of 120,000 gold florins, 50,000 to be paid at once and the remaining 70,000 at an early date; and shortly afterwards the King withdrew with his forces.

It was upon this occasion that the Medici Palace was first sacked, the splendid collections formed by Cosimo, and added to by Piero and Lorenzo, being either destroyed or stolen.

After the departure of the French, Florence busied herself in establishing a new government, which, under the advice of Savonarola, took the form of a great council, composed of a thousand or more citizens.

The years that followed were stormy ones ; the city was torn by factions, the rival parties only uniting in a common desire to regain possession of Pisa. In 1497 Pietro de' Medici made an unsuccessful attempt to enter the city with an armed following. He subsequently took service under Louis XII., and was drowned by the upsetting of a boat loaded with artillery on the river Garigliano, together with some of the King's suite. He was only thirty-two years of age, and his wretched existence and miserable end are in striking contrast with the life and death of his father.

By the year 1502 affairs had reached such a pass in Florence that it was felt by all that some change was imperatively demanded, and in August of that year Pietro Soderini was appointed to the office of Gonfaloniere for life instead of two months, the usual term, his unblemished character and the fact of his having no children to awaken ambitious designs in his breast, being the reasons adduced for bestowing this important office upon him.

But that warlike Pontiff, Julius II., had other views for Florence, and exasperated at the manner in which the Republic had withheld any active assistance in his war with the French, and her refusal to depose Soderini and reinstate the Medici, he now determined to accomplish his ends by force. On the 21st of August, 1512, the alarming news reached Florence that the Viceroy Raymond de Cordova was advancing with a large army, and accompanied by the Medici. On the 29th he took Prato by assault, and there was a renewal of all the horrors of Brescia. News of this disaster reached Florence in the middle of the night. Soderini fled, an act that has been stigmatized by Machiavelli in four well-known lines. Ambassadors were dispatched to treat with the Viceroy and Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, and an agreement was entered into that Florence should pay a hundred and forty thousand ducats and admit the Medici "as private citizens " an airy subterfuge that probably deceived no one. By the middle of September Giuliano had assumed the conduct of affairs with as much assurance as though the right to govern were hereditary and Florence a fief of the Medici family, though he so far kept up an appearance of popular government as to go through the form of consulting the Balia, a council formed of forty-eight citizens, almost all of them creatures or clients of his own.

On the death of Julius II. Giovanni de' Medici was elected Pope under the title of Leo X., and Giuliano removed to Rome, where he was made Gonfaloniere of the Church and Captain-General of the Papal forces, leaving his nephew, Lorenzo, son of Pietro, to govern Florence.

Giuliano de' Medici had married, a year before his death, Philiberta, the sister of Philibert and Charles, Dukes of Savoy, but he left no issue by her, though he was known to have had one illegitimate son, Cardinal Hippolytus, of whom several portraits by Titian are still extant.

Giuliano had received from Frangois I. the duchy of Nemours, which at his death reverted to the French crown. He was not an unworthy representative of the Medici as regarded cultivation and intellect, and when in exile at the Court of Urbino he availed himself of the opportunity to establish an intimacy with the brilliant residents in the Montefeltro capital. The celebrated Cardinal Bembo introduces him as one of the speakers in his dialogues on the idiom of Tuscany. He died of fever, only seven-and-twenty years of age, on the 17th of May, 1516, in the abbey of the canons of Fiesole, which was built by his ancestor, and to which he asked to be carried when taken ill. His remains rest in the new sacristy of San Lorenzo, and he has been immortalized in marble by one of Michael Angelo's greatest works.

LORENZO II., DUKE OF URBINO. (1492-1519.)

Pietro, drowned as mentioned above, in the Garigliano, had married Alfonsina di Roberto Orsini, and left a son named Lorenzo, who is known in history by the title of Duke of Urbino, but he, like his uncle Giuliano and most of the Medici family, died very, young, being only seven-and-twenty. It has already been said that Giovanni, brother of Pietro, and a son, like him, of Lorenzo the Magnificent, had been elected Pope with the title of Leo X., and it was he who carried the cultivated tastes and the splendor of his family to Rome, and who gave his name to the century in which he lived, as his ancestors had in their day done in Tuscany. While he strengthened the influence of his family at Florence, Leo X. made Rome the centre of Italian politics. Having seized the duchy of Urbino, he invested the sovereignty of it in his nephew Lorenzo by a Papal Bull. This nephew was not deficient in courage nor in spirit, but his overweening pride and arrogance had excited the ill-will of the Florentines, while his claim to the throne which had been given him was from the outset disputed by Francesco della, Rovere, the rightful prince.

He died young, leaving by his wife, Madeleine Jean de la Tour, daughter of the Count of Auvergne and of Boulogne-in-Picardy, no male heir, but a daughter, the sole legitimate descendant besides the Pope, of the elder branch of the Medici, who became Queen of France. This was Catherine de' Medici, wife of Henri II. and mother of three French kings and of a Queen of Spain.

The death of Lorenzo without a male heir led to a great revolution in the history of Florence. The elder branch of the Medici was practically extinct, the two other branches were very jealous of each other, and all the ambitious projects which Leo X. had formed for his family seemed destined to be brought to nought. There remained, however, three illegitimate Medici of the branch of Cosimo the Elder. First there was Giulio, the natural son of Giuliano murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy ; then Hippolytus, natural son of Giuliano, Due de Nemours ; and Alexander, who was a son either of Lorenzo II. or of Giulio.

All three were destined to be famous, and they might all have claimed the succession, for we know that illegitimacy was not regarded in the fifteenth or sixteenth century as a bar to a throne. The first, Giulio, became Pope Clement VII.; the second, Hippolytus, rose to the purple ; and Alexander was the first Duke of Florence.

It is singular that Michael Angelo should have immortalized by his genius the two least distinguished of the Medici, for while the graves of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Cosimo the Elder are merely covered with slabs upon which their names are graven, the Dukes of Urbino and Nemours sleep their last sleep in tombs erected by the great artist.