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As the two stood with blades crossed, neither willing to give way, Lorenzo half shouted: ‘Why should you hate me so?’
He meant the question sincerely. He had always wished the best for Florence and her citizens. He did not understand the resentment others felt at the utterance of the name Medici.
‘For God,’ the priest said. His face was a mere hand’s breadth from his intended victim’s. Sweat ran down his pale forehead; his breath was hot upon Lorenzo’s cheek. His nose was long, narrow, aristocratic; he probably came from an old, respected family. ‘For the love of God!’ And he drew back his weapon so forcefully that Lorenzo staggered forwards, perilously close to the blade.
Before the opponent could shed more blood, Francesco Nori stepped in front of Lorenzo with his sword drawn. Other friends and supporters began to close in around the would-be assassins. Lorenzo became vaguely aware of the presence of Poliziano, of the aged and portly architect Michelozzo, of the family sculptor Verrochio, of his business associate Antonio Ridolfo, of the socialite Sigismondo della Stuffa. This crowd sealed him off from his attacker and began to press him towards the altar.
Lorenzo resisted. ‘Giuliano!’ he cried. ‘Brother, where are you?’
‘We will find and protect him. Now, go!’ Nori ordered, gesturing with his chin towards the altar, where the priests, in their alarm, had dropped the full chalice, staining the altar-cloth with wine.
Lorenzo hesitated.
‘Go!’ Nori shouted again. ‘They are headed here! Go past them, to the north sacristy!’
Lorenzo had no idea who they were, but he acted. Still clutching his sword, he hurdled over the low railing and leapt into the octagonal carved wooden structure that housed the choir. Cherubic boys shrieked as they scattered, their white robes flapping like the wings of startled birds.
Followed by his protectors, Lorenzo pushed his way through the flailing choir and staggered towards the great altar. The astringent smoke of frankincense mixed with the fragrance of spilt wine; two tall, heavy candelabra were ablaze. The priest and his two deacons now encircled the blubbering Riario protectively. Lorenzo blinked at them. The afterimage from the lit tapers left him near blinded, and in an instant of dizziness, he put his free hand to his neck; it came away bloodied.
Yet he willed himself, for Giuliano’s sake, not to faint. He could not permit himself a moment’s weakness – not until his brother was safe.
At the moment that Lorenzo ran north across the altar, Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Baroncelli were down in the sanctuary, pushing their way south, clearly unaware that they were missing their intended target.
Lorenzo stopped mid-stride to gape at them, causing collisions within his trailing entourage.
Baroncelli led the way, brandishing a long knife and shouting unintelligibly. Francesco was limping badly; his thigh was bloodied, his tunic spattered with crimson.
Lorenzo strained to see past those surrounding him, to look beyond the moving bodies below to the place where his brother had been standing, but his view was obstructed.
‘Giuliano!’ he screamed, with all the strength he possessed, praying he would be heard above the pandemonium. ‘Giuliano …! Where are you? Brother, speak to me!’
The crowd closed around him. ‘It’s all right,’ someone said, in a tone so dubious it failed to provoke the comfort it intended.
It was not all right that Giuliano should be missing. From the day of his father’s death, Lorenzo had cared for his brother with a love both fraternal and paternal.
‘Giuliano!’ Lorenzo screamed again. ‘Giuliano …!’
‘He is not there,’ a muffled voice replied. Thinking this meant that his brother had moved south to find him, Lorenzo turned back in that direction, where his friends still fought the assassins. The smaller priest with the shield had fled altogether, but the madman remained, though he was losing the battle with Marco. Giuliano was nowhere to be seen.
Discouraged, Lorenzo began to turn away, but the glint of swift-moving steel caught his eye and compelled him to look back.
The blade belonged to Bernardo Baroncelli. With a viciousness Lorenzo would never have dreamt him capable of, Baroncelli ran his long knife deep into the pit of Francesco Nori’s stomach. Nori’s eyes bulged as he stared down at the intrusion, and his lips formed a small, perfect o as he fell backwards, sliding off Baroncelli’s sword.
Lorenzo let go a sob. Poliziano and della Stuffa took his shoulders and pushed him away, across the altar and towards the infinitely tall doors of the sacristy. ‘Get Francesco!’ he begged them. ‘Someone bring Francesco. He is still alive, I know it!’
He tried again to turn, to call out for his brother, but this time his people would not let him slow their relentless march to the sacristy. Lorenzo felt a physical pain in his chest, a pressure so brutal he thought his heart would burst.
He had wounded Giuliano. He had hurt him in his most vulnerable moment, and when Giuliano had said, I love you, Lorenzo … Please don’t make me choose, Lorenzo had been cruel. Had turned him away, without help – the one thing he owed Giuliano most of all.
How could he explain to the others that he could never leave his younger brother behind? How could he explain the responsibility he felt for Giuliano, who had lost his father so young and had always looked to Lorenzo for guidance? How could he explain the promise he had made to his father on the latter’s deathbed? They were all too concerned with the safety of Lorenzo il Magnifico, whom they considered to be the greatest man in Florence, but they were wrong, all of them.
Lorenzo was pushed behind the thick, heavy doors of the sacristy. They slammed shut after someone ventured out to fetch the wounded Nori.
Inside, the airless, windowless chamber smelled of sacrificial wine and the dust that had settled on the priests’ vestments. Lorenzo grabbed each man who had pushed him to safety; he studied each face, and was each time disappointed. The greatest man in Florence was not here.
He thought of Baroncelli’s great curving knife and of the bright blood on Francesco de’ Pazzi’s and tunic. The images propelled him to move for the doors, with the intention of flinging them open and going back to rescue his brother. But della Stuffa sensed his intention, and immediately pressed his body against the exit. Old Michelozzo joined him, then Antonio Ridolfo; the weight of the three men held the doors fast shut. Lorenzo was pushed to the outer edge of the engraved brass. There was a grimness in their expressions, an unspoken, unspeakable knowledge that Lorenzo could not and would not accept.
Hysterically, he pounded on the cold brass until his fists ached – and then he continued to pound until they bled. The scholar Angelo Poliziano struggled to wrap a piece of wool, torn from his own mantle, around the bleeding cut on Lorenzo’s neck. Lorenzo tried to push the distraction away, but Poliziano persisted until the wound was bound tight.
All the while, Lorenzo did not cease his frantic efforts. ‘My brother!’ he cried shrilly, and would not be moved by those who came to comfort him, would not be stilled or quieted. ‘I must go and find him! My brother! Where is my brother …?’
VII (#u0eb3daf6-12f5-5027-8037-80ba45b51d56)
As he stood beside Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli in the Duomo, Giuliano’s head was bowed. He was not a man who usually prayed: he had long ago come to the conclusion that religion was the invention of men, and that there could be no certainty when it came to the question of God. Unfortunately, the Church’s earthly power demanded that he keep up appearances, show the required reverence, make the required gestures.
But this morning, his desperation provoked him to speak silently to God, should He be there to listen. Giuliano silently confessed that over the years, he had been callous towards his lovers. He had abused his physical handsomeness and used it to dally with their affections; he had taken their adoration for granted and often dismissed them thoughtlessly. Now he was filled with remorse; he saw clearly the divine irony in the fact that he now had to suffer to have the one he truly loved. Even worse, his love caused her suffering.
He asked that God soften Lorenzo’s heart, or the Pope’s, or do whatever was necessary so that her misery might end.
God answered his prayer in unexpected fashion. The subtlest sound of metal sliding against leather made him glance upwards.
To his right, Baroncelli finished withdrawing his knife from its sheath, and by the time Giuliano had turned his head to stare at the weapon in amazement, Baroncelli was ready to strike.
The act occurred too swiftly for Giuliano to be frightened.
Instinctively, he backed away. A body pressed into him, so firm and so fast, there could be no doubt its owner was part of the conspiracy. Giuliano glimpsed a man dressed in the robes of a penitent – and then gasped at the cold, burning sensation of steel sliding into his back, into his right kidney.
He had been terribly wounded. He was surrounded by assassins, and was about to die.
The realizations did not distress him as much as the fact that he was trapped and unable to warn Lorenzo. Surely his brother would be the next target.
‘Lorenzo,’ he said emphatically, as Baroncelli’s knife came flashing down, the blade reflecting a hundred tiny flames from the candles on the altar. But his utterance was drowned out by Baroncelli’s panicked, nonsensical cry: ‘Here, traitor!’
The blow caught Giuliano between his uppermost pair of ribs. There came the dull crack of bone, and a second spasm of pain so intense, so impossible, it left him breathless.
Baroncelli’s clean-shaven face, so close to Giuliano’s own, was gleaming with sweat. He grunted with effort as he withdrew the knife from Giuliano’s chest; it came out whistling. Giuliano fought to draw another breath, to call out Lorenzo’s name again; it came out less audible than a whisper.
In the space of a heartbeat, Giuliano remembered with exquisite clarity an incident from childhood: at age six, he had gone with Lorenzo and two of his older sisters, Nannina and Bianca, for a picnic on the shores of the Arno. Attended by a Circassian slave woman, they had travelled by carriage across the Ponte Vecchio, the bridge built a millennium before by the Romans. Nannina had been captivated by the goldsmiths’ shops that lined the bridge; soon to be married, she was already interested in womanly things.
Lorenzo had been restless and glum. He had just begun to take on Medici responsibilities; the year before, he had begun receiving letters asking for his patronage, and their father, Piero, had already sent his eldest son to Milan and Rome on politically-motivated trips. He was a homely boy, with wide-set slanting eyes, a jutting jaw, and soft brown hair that fell in neatly-trimmed fringe across a pale, low forehead; yet the sensitive intelligence that shone in those eyes made him oddly attractive.
They made their way to the pastoral neighbourhood of Santo Spirito. Giuliano recalled tall trees, and a sweeping grass lawn that sloped down to the placid river. There, the slave woman set a linen cloth on the ground and brought out food for the children. It was late spring: warm with a few lazy clouds, though the day before it had rained. The River Arno was quicksilver when the sun struck it, leaden when it did not.
Lorenzo’s sullenness that day had made Giuliano sad. It seemed to him that their father was too intent on making Lorenzo an adult before his time. So, to make him laugh, Giuliano had run down to the riverbank, gleefully ignoring the slave’s outraged threats, and stomped, splashing, into the water fully clothed.
His antics worked; Lorenzo followed him in laughing, tunic, mantle, slippers and all. By this time, Nannina, Bianca, and the slave were all shouting their disapproval. Lorenzo ignored them. He was a strong swimmer, and soon made his way quite a distance from the shore, then dove beneath the waters.
Giuliano followed tentatively, but being younger, fell behind. He watched as Lorenzo took a great gulp of air and disappeared beneath the grey surface. When he did not reappear immediately, Giuliano treaded water and laughed, expecting his brother to swim beneath him and grasp his foot at any moment.
Seconds passed. Giuliano’s laughter turned to silence, then fear – then he began calling for his brother. On the shore, the women – unable to enter the water, because of their heavy skirts – began to cry out in panic.
Giuliano was only a child. He had not yet overcome his fear of diving beneath the water, yet love for his brother drove him to suck in a deep breath and submerge himself. The silence there astonished him; he opened his eyes and peered in the direction where Lorenzo had been.
The river was muddy from the previous day’s rains; Giuliano’s eyes stung as he searched. He could see nothing but a large, irregular dark shape some distance away from him, deep beneath the waters. It was not human – not Lorenzo – but it was all that was visible, and instinct told him to approach it. He surfaced, drew in more air, then compelled himself to dive down again: there, the length of three tall men beneath the surface, lay the craggy limbs of a fallen tree.
Giuliano’s lungs burned; yet his sense that Lorenzo was nearby made him push, with arms and legs, against the quiet water. With a final, painful burst, he reached the sunken branches and pressed a palm against the slick surface of the trunk.
At once, he grew remarkably dizzy, and heard a rushing in his ears; he shut his eyes and opened his mouth, gasping for air. There was none to be had, and so he drank in the foul Arno. He retched it up at once, then reflex forced him to gulp in more.
Giuliano was drowning.
Though a child, he understood clearly that he was dying. The realization prompted him to open his eyes, to capture a last glimpse of earth that he might take with him to Heaven.
At that instant, a cloud moved overhead, permitting a shaft of sunlight to pierce the river, so thoroughly that it caused the silt suspended in the water to glitter, and illumined the area directly before Giuliano’s eyes.
Staring back at him, an arm’s length away, was the drowning Lorenzo. His tunic and mantle had been caught on an errant branch, and he had twisted himself about in a mad effort to be free.
Both brothers should have died then. But Giuliano had prayed, with a child’s guilelessness: God, let me save my brother.
Impossibly, he had pulled the tangled clothing loose from the branch.
Impossibly, the freed Lorenzo had seized Giuliano’s hands, and pulled the two of them up to the surface.
From there, Giuliano’s memory became more blurred. He only remembered snippets: of himself vomiting on the grassy shore while the slave woman pounded his back, of Lorenzo wet and shivering, wrapped in picnic linens; of voices calling out: Brother, speak to me! Of Lorenzo in the carriage on the ride home, furious, fighting tears: Don’t ever risk yourself for me! You almost died! Father would never forgive me …! But the unspoken message was louder: Lorenzo would never forgive himself.
In the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli lifted his knife to deal Giuliano another blow.
Dear God, Giuliano prayed, with the sincerity of a child. Let me rescue my brother.
With strength he did not have, he then pushed backwards against his first attacker, causing the man to step onto the hem of his garment and fall, tangled in his robes.
Time slowed then for Giuliano, just as it had that day in the Arno. Despite his lethargy, he willed himself to do the impossible and create a barrier between the attackers and Lorenzo. If he was unable to cry out a warning to his brother, he could at least slow the murderers down.
Then he heard Lorenzo’s voice. Giuliano! Brother, speak to me! He could not have said whether it came from within the Duomo, or whether he heard an echo from childhood, the voice of an eleven-year-old boy calling from the banks of a river. He wanted to tell his brother to run, but he could not speak. Struggling to draw a breath, he choked on warm liquid.
Baroncelli tried to edge by him; but Giuliano stumbled intentionally into his path. Francesco de’ Pazzi pushed past them both, the sight of blood stirring him into a frenzy; his small black eyes sparkled as his wiry body shook with hatred. Raising his dagger – a long blade, almost as slender and keen as a stiletto – he too, tried to move beyond Baroncelli’s victim, but Giuliano would not let him pass.
Giuliano opened his mouth to an anguished wheeze, meaning to scream instead, You will never get near my brother. I will die first, but you will never lay a hand on Lorenzo.
Francesco simply snarled something unintelligible and moved to strike the young man.
Weaponless, Giuliano raised a defensive hand and the knife pierced his palm and forearm; but compared to the agony in his chest and in his back, these fresh wounds were no worse than the sting of an insect. Taking a step towards Francesco, towards Baroncelli, he forced them backwards, and gave Lorenzo time to flee.
Francesco, a vicious little man, let loose a torrent of all the rage, all the enmity that his family felt towards the Medici. Each phrase he uttered was punctuated by a further blow of his dagger.
‘Sons of whores, all of you! Your father betrayed my father’s trust …’
Giuliano felt a deep, piercing bite in his shoulder, then in his upper arm. He could not keep it raised, so he let it fall, limply, to his blood-soaked side.
‘Your brother has done everything possible to keep us out of the Signoria.’
Harsher wounds were dealt now upon Giuliano’s chest, his neck, followed by a dozen blows to his torso. Francesco was a madman. His hand and blade pummelled Giuliano so swiftly that the two were enveloped in crimson spray. His movements were so wild and careless, he even pierced his own thigh, shrieking loudly as his blood mingled with his enemy’s. Pain fuelled Francesco’s fury as he continued to strike.
Spoken ill of us to His Holiness.
Insulted our family.
Stolen the city.
Such calumny against his brother should have incited Giuliano’s anger, but he had found a place where his emotions were still.
The waters inside the cathedral were murky with blood; he could barely see the wavering images of his attackers against the backdrop of scrambling bodies. Baroncelli and Francesco were shouting. Giuliano saw their mouths agape. The glint of wielded steel was dulled by the muddy Arno, and he could hear nothing. In the river, all was silent.
A shaft of sunlight streamed in from the open door leading north to the Via de’ Servi. Giuliano stepped towards it, intent on looking for Lorenzo, but the current pulled strongly on him, and it was hard to walk through the swirling water.
Just beyond his reach, the raven-haired Anna wept and wrung her hands, mourning the children they might have had; her love tugs at him. But it is Lorenzo who has the final hold on his heart. Lorenzo, whose heart will break when he finds his younger sibling. It is Giuliano’s greatest regret.
‘Brother.’ Giuliano’s lips merely formed the word as he sank to his knees.
Lorenzo sits on the banks of the Arno, clutching a blanket round his shoulders. He is soaked through and shivering, but he is alive.
Relieved, Giuliano lets go of a shallow sigh – all the air that remains in his lungs – then sinks to where the waters are deepest and black.
VIII (#u0eb3daf6-12f5-5027-8037-80ba45b51d56)
26 April 1478
To the Priors of Milan
My most illustrious lords,
My brother Giuliano has been murdered and my government is in the gravest danger. It is now time, my lords, to aid your servant Lorenzo. Send as many soldiers as you can with all speed so that they will be the shield and safety of my state, as always.
Your servant
Lorenzo de’ Medici
December 28, 1478 (#u0eb3daf6-12f5-5027-8037-80ba45b51d56)
IX (#ulink_28e14920-45a5-5a00-b438-b5038574c57f)
Bernardo Baroncelli rode kneeling in a small horse-drawn cart to his doom.
Before him, in the vast Piazza della Signoria, loomed the great, implacable Palazzo, the seat of Florence’s government and the heart of her justice. Topped by battlements, the fortress was an imposing, almost windowless rectangle, with a slender campanile tower at one corner. Only an hour before he was led to the cart, Baroncelli had heard its bell tolling, low and dolorous, summoning witnesses to the spectacle.
In the morning gloom, the Palazzo’s pale stone façade appeared grey against the darkening clouds. Before the building, rising out of a colourful assembly of Florence’s rich and poor, stood a hastily-built scaffolding, and the gallows.
The weather had turned bitterly cold; Baroncelli’s final breaths hung before him as mist. The top of his cloak gaped open, but he could not pull it closed, for his hands were bound behind his back.
