Lorenzo de' Medici

Lorenzo de' Medici, called "the Magnificent", was the unofficial ruler of the Republic of Florence from 1469 until his death in 1492. Head of the banking family that dominated the city, he survived an assassination plot backed by the pope, worked to keep a balance of power among the Italian states, and supported many of the artists and scholars of the Florentine Renaissance.

Lorenzo was born in Florence on 1 January 1449, the grandson of Cosimo de' Medici, who had first combined leadership of the republic with control of the Medici Bank. His father Piero was an art collector and his mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, a poet who later became one of his advisers. Lorenzo was taught by the humanist Marsilio Ficino and learned Greek from John Argyropoulos. As a young man he hunted, jousted and was sent on diplomatic errands, including to Rome. Contemporaries described him as plain-featured, with a flattened nose and harsh voice, unlike his handsome younger brother Giuliano. In 1469 he married Clarice Orsini, from a Roman noble family, and later that year, at twenty, he took his father's place as the leading man in Florence.

Florence remained formally a republic. Like his grandfather, Lorenzo governed through allies placed on the city councils, through patronage and through marriage alliances. His reputation was stained when a dispute over newly found alum mines led Volterra to revolt; mercenaries sent to crush the rising sacked the town.

On 26 April 1478, during Mass in Florence Cathedral, conspirators linked to the rival Pazzi family and to Francesco Salviati, archbishop of Pisa, attacked the two brothers. Giuliano was stabbed to death; Lorenzo escaped with a wound. Salviati had the backing of Pope Sixtus IV. Florentine crowds took violent revenge, lynching the archbishop and several Pazzi. The pope then excommunicated Lorenzo, placed Florence under interdict and joined King Ferdinand I of Naples in a war against the city. With few allies, Lorenzo went to Naples in person and, after months as the king's guest and virtual captive, negotiated peace. The success let him strengthen his hold on Florence's government.

Afterwards Lorenzo tried to preserve peace among the main Italian powers, including the Papal States, and to stop the great powers, France and the Holy Roman Empire, from intervening in Italy. He kept good relations with the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, since trade with the Ottomans was valuable to Florence. Meanwhile the family bank declined, with several branches failing through bad loans, and he was accused of dipping into public funds.

Lorenzo commissioned relatively few works himself, but he helped artists such as Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio and Leonardo da Vinci win commissions, and he sent Florentine painters to decorate the Sistine Chapel as a gesture to the pope. The young Michelangelo joined his circle in 1489 and stayed at the Medici court until Lorenzo's death. He expanded the Medici library, had agents collect Greek manuscripts, and gathered philosophers such as Ficino, Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola. He also wrote poetry in Tuscan.

Lorenzo died at the family villa of Careggi on 8 April 1492. The preacher Savonarola, whom Lorenzo had helped bring to Florence, visited him at the end; a later rumour that the friar condemned him on his deathbed was refuted by the historian Roberto Ridolfi, and witnesses wrote that Lorenzo died peacefully. The peace among the Italian states that he had supported did not outlast him. In 1494 his son and heir Piero lost the family's position in Florence, as Italy slid into the Italian Wars. Another son, Giovanni, became Pope Leo X, and his nephew Giulio, whom he raised, became Pope Clement VII.

Our 1492 map shows the divided Italian peninsula in the year of his death.