The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded - Hardcover

Simonetta, Marcello

 
9780385524681: The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385524684 ISBN 13: 9780385524681
Verlag: Doubleday, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

A brutal murder, a nefarious plot, a coded letter. After five hundred years, the most notorious mystery of the Renaissance is finally solved.

The Italian Renaissance is remembered as much for intrigue as it is for art, with papal politics and infighting among Italy’s many city-states providing the grist for Machiavelli’s classic work on take-no-prisoners politics, The Prince. The attempted assassination of the Medici brothers in the Duomo in Florence in 1478 is one of the best-known examples of the machinations endemic to the age. While the assailants were the Medici’s rivals, the Pazzi family, questions have always lingered about who really orchestrated the attack, which has come to be known as the Pazzi Conspiracy.

More than five hundred years later, Marcello Simonetta, working in a private archive in Italy, stumbled upon a coded letter written by Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, to Pope Sixtus IV. Using a codebook written by his own ancestor to crack its secrets, Simonetta unearthed proof of an all-out power grab by the Pope for control of Florence. Montefeltro, long believed to be a close friend of Lorenzo de Medici, was in fact conspiring with the Pope to unseat the Medici and put the more malleable Pazzi in their place.

In The Montefeltro Conspiracy, Simonetta unravels this plot, showing not only how the plot came together but how its failure (only one of the Medici brothers, Giuliano, was killed; Lorenzo survived) changed the course of Italian and papal history for generations. In the course of his gripping narrative, we encounter the period’s most colorful characters, relive its tumultuous politics, and discover that two famous paintings, including one in the Sistine Chapel, contain the Medici’s astounding revenge.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARCELLO SIMONETTA, Ph. D., received his doctorate in Renaissance Studies from Yale and has taught at Wesleyan University. He has been featured on The History Channel, and in 2007 he curated an exhibition on Federico da Montefeltro’s library at the Morgan Library & Museum. He lives in New York.

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1
MILAN IS FOR MURDER


In the first half of the fifteenth century Milan was ruled by the Visconti, and only after 1450 by the Sforza. The Visconti had been the most aggressive enemies of Florence. In the heated Florentine pamphlets that were circulating during the early 1400s, attacks on Florence became synonymous with attacks on freedom and on the "Florentine way of life," while the Visconti were rightly portrayed as cruel tyrants. When the condottiere Francesco Sforza suddenly became Duke of Milan and struck the Peace of Lodi (1454), the golden age of the Renaissance started in earnest. Francesco offered military protection to his longtime friend Cosimo de' Medici in exchange for financial support. The solid alliance between Milan and the Medici formed an axis of relative stability within the restless Italian peninsula and enhanced patronage of the arts and letters, sparking an explosion of artistic creativity and humanistic culture.

Under the founder of the Sforza dynasty Milan maintained power and gained wealth and respect. But Francesco's son, Galeazzo Maria, inherited more of the capriciousness of the Visconti from his mother than he did the wisdom of the Sforza from his father. As court poet Antonio Cornazzano eloquently wrote in his Art of Ruling:


Oh how many times the good Duke Francesco
Reproached a son who is no longer
For his crude and violent acts.
"The soul of Duke Giovanni has landed upon you:
It is deep within your bowels!"
He yelled, and so his prophecy came to pass.
Learn from the foul acts of Duke Giovanni
Who fed his dogs with living men
For any other sport bored him.
He met his end in San Gottardo, in the sacred temple,
Slaughtered by his most faithful servants
And such is the fate of any cruel man.


A COLD AWAKENING
MILAN, DECEMBER 26, 1476

On the day they were going to kill him, Galeazzo Maria Sforza was due to appear at the High Mass for the feast of St. Stephen. It was the anniversary of the death of the first Christian martyr and the Duke of Milan wanted to celebrate the occasion with appropriate pomp. He tried on a decorative breastplate but thought it made him look too fat. Instead he chose a rich suit of crimson wool lined with sable. On his left leg he wore a dark red stocking and on the right, a white one. These were the Sforza colors. As he dressed his athletic, hairless body (he liked to be shaved in the ancient Roman manner) in his bedroom within the mighty walls of the Sforza castle, the flames in the large fireplace were still turning the Christmas log, il Ciocco, to ashes.

Bernardino Corio, who at the time was a cameriere di camera, or servant of the bedchamber, an eyewitness to and chronicler of these events, informs us that ever since a mysterious fire had burned a part of his bedroom earlier that month, the duke had become superstitious; he had had an instincto, or an inkling, that it was not a good idea for him to come to Milan (the duke spent much of his time away from the city, at one of his many countryside villas or on hunting expeditions). His fears had been reinforced by an incident that had occurred shortly after the fire. One day, while riding in the fields near the village of Abbiategrasso, he saw three crows flying slowly over his head. The duke had taken this to be a bad omen, and shot twice at the birds with his crossbow. Putting his hand firmly on the saddle, he had declared that he would not return to town.

He soon had changed his mind. For Galeazzo loved his choir and, with the feast day festivities approaching, he looked forward to the music that would be performed by his thirty northern European singers, whom he paid handsomely for their service. But upon returning to Milan a few days after seeing the three crows, he found himself surrounded by the resentful glares of the feudal lords and courtiers who had come to pay their respects: they were annoyed not to have been offered any of the usual money or gifts for Christmas.

The duke nonetheless had made his way to the castle. Under the red ceiling of the Camera delle Colombe, the duke gave a speech to his courtiers on the Sforza fortunes. Even if he were not a signore, a titled duke, he claimed, he would have known how to live magnificently. The thirty-two-year-old duke said he wished his father, Francesco, were still alive to see how well he and his brothers were doing. The Sforza dynasty, he boasted, would continue for centuries, blessed as it was with scores of male relatives, both legitimate and otherwise. He even applauded his illegitimate daughters, two of whom were by then betrothed to powerful lords.

Bearing plentiful offspring, in fact, was one of the ways in which power was consolidated in the Renaissance. Galeazzo's father, Francesco Sforza, was said to have fathered no less than thirty-five children, only ten of whom were legitimate. The "virtuous" Francesco, as NiccolÜ Machiavelli dubbed him in The Prince, had raised himself up from the hard life of a condottiere to the heights of the richest duchy in Italy. When Francesco died in 1466, his eldest son, Galeazzo, had inherited the power that the "prince by virtue" had so painstakingly acquired, but Galeazzo had not been very good at preserving either power or virtue. The new duke was reviled by most of his subjects for a whole host of sins. Unable to restrain his violent sexual appetites, he made the most attractive women of the duchy his prey, and occasionally even visited convents at night in order to terrorize, and possibly rape, nuns.

While celebrating the good fortunes of his family members, he did not refer specifically to his two younger brothers, Sforza Maria and Ludovico, who had been exiled to France. In June 1476, these two troublemakers had been involved in a foiled attempt to kill the duke and replace him. Indeed, Galeazzo's egomaniacal style had made many people unhappy--and not only members of his close family circle.


***

After delivering his speech in the Camera delle Colombe, the duke had been unusually quiet and did not pursue his usual leisure activities on Christmas day, such as a tennis game in the indoor court especially built for him or a hunting expedition with falconry. He also avoided his wife, Duchess Bona of Savoy, who slept in a separate room. That morning of the twenty-sixth of December, the duchess got up very late, for, according to Corio, she had had horrible nightmares. Since their marriage eight years before she had gained a lot of weight. By now Galeazzo had lost any interest in sharing his bed with her. He had satisfied his vigorous appetites elsewhere. He had spent most of his adult life restlessly wandering throughout the Italian peninsula, hunting not only women but also animals and boys, and sometimes playing soldier and visiting his allies, especially the affluent Florentines.

Galeazzo had first visited Florence in 1459, when he was fifteen. He was then the Count of Pavia and his father, Francesco, the Duke of Milan. Francesco, a strong ally of Cosimo de' Medici, wanted to pay homage to the Florentine banker and leader who had been a staunch financial supporter of his family fortunes. "All the ink in Tuscany," as Galeazzo wrote to his father in Milan, could not describe the opulence of the crowds cheering their guest loudly on the streets, framed by the harmony of the buildings--the outstanding Duomo or the austere Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of government, with its characteristically threatening tower. "Florence is paradise on earth," he wrote in a daze of admiration.

Since then, the young Sforza had struggled to outshine his Medici allies in matters such as taste and fashion, in which they were universally considered arbiters and masters. Galeazzo, under...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385524684
ISBN 13 
9780385524681
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
251
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